March 13–15, 1965
ON Saturday, March 13, President Johnson prepared for Wallace first by consulting his Secretary of Defense about the heavy pressure from the lobbying clergy to dispatch U.S. soldiers to Alabama. “They all say, ‘we want troops,’” Johnson told McNamara. But troops, he said, really meant sending “some young boy who’s just been drafted or joined in,” and who lacked the ability to handle prosecutions or complex racial entanglements. “Troops don’t do any of that, and we don’t know that we’ve got enough troops but what he [Wallace] could match them if he just called in everybody that he could get.” Johnson added that Katzenbach had “thirty-three lawyers” working on the legal ramifications of using troops in Selma, “all of whom are in this field, and all of them recommend against it.”
McNamara concurred. “Beyond all the arguments you’ve given, Mr. President, Selma is just one point,” he said. “You have Mississippi, Louisiana, and the rest of Alabama to take care of. You got this bill coming up next week, and troops leave a bitter taste in the mouths of all the people that are in those three states, and in the mouths of all the senators.”
As applied to Vietnam as well as Selma, these were profound, treacherous distinctions of politics and war. Johnson also leaned against sending civilian U.S. marshals to Selma, which was the option that Martin Luther King strongly preferred. King saw the enforcement mission of marshals as corrective and constructive—treating violent segregationists as errant fellow citizens, with rights—whereas the military mission of soldiers tended to dehumanize opponents into enemies. For King, even armed marshals were easier to square with nonviolence than soldiers, but Johnson worked from practical experience rather than abstraction. Behind the myth of Wyatt Earp, he saw the typical U.S. marshal as a patronage hack with very little training. “He’s just a fellow that carried some senator’s suitcase,” the President told McNamara, “and there are just a hundred or so of ’em in the whole United States.”
Johnson wanted to rely on seasoned FBI agents as long as possible. DeLoach, his FBI liaison officer, had promised him that the Bureau would bring evidence to prosecute a hundred of the troopers who had run roughshod over the marchers on Sunday. “While this FBI man was getting his head beat in with a club, he was taking pictures…and he got them all on their horses,” the President told McNamara. “We can’t identify ’em with gas masks on, but we’ve got their horses, and we’re identifying the horses they rode.” McNamara expressed no reservations about such a fantastic stalling yarn, which the Bureau would discard when pressure eased, and if he detected a rare gullibility in Johnson he refrained from saying so. Instead, he assured the President that he had troop units on alert for rapid deployment, and endorsed Johnson’s reluctance to use them in a political crisis. “If we did anything wrong in the past two or three years on this,” said McNamara of previous crises in Birmingham and at Ole Miss, “it was to introduce troops too early, and they escalate to a higher level of violence.”*
With Governor Wallace waiting in the Cabinet Room, Johnson summoned Attorney General Katzenbach alone into his private bathroom while he sat on the toilet. This was Katzenbach’s first exposure to a legendary Johnsonian practice, which power analysts interpreted as a submission drill for squeamish aides such as McGeorge Bundy. To Katzenbach, who may have been eligible for such treatment himself as an Ivy Leaguer, Johnson’s manner seemed wholly one of raw urgency about Wallace, stripped of pretense. “What should I ask him to do?” Johnson demanded.
Katzenbach stammered. “I don’t know,” he said. “What do you want him to do?”
“Write down six things for me,” Johnson commanded—make a list, put numbers on it. “I don’t give a damn how outrageous they are,” he said.
Katzenbach found a pad in the Oval Office. The President glanced at the hastily composed list when he emerged minutes later, then pocketed it on the way to greet the Wallace entourage. There he remarked effusively on Lady Bird’s Alabama roots and made a point of introducing the renowned Secret Service agent Rufus Youngblood as a native Georgian, which reminded him to send for an agent born in Alabama. He grandly announced that George Wallace had at least one thing in common with Martin Luther King, namely, that they were the only two people cheeky enough to ask him for an appointment and notify the press before the request reached the White House, which King had done on leaving the Selma jail in February. Bantering about Southern manners and a President’s prerogatives, he waved off Wallace’s apologies with assurances that he was glad to see him. The summoned Secret Service agent arrived, whereupon Johnson beamed, “Lem, I want to introduce you to your governor.”
The President soon invited Wallace and one aide to retire privately with him and Katzenbach. He guided the diminutive Wallace to sink low in one of the cushioned sofas in the Oval Office, then pulled his favorite rocking chair close enough to rub knees as he towered over his guest. “Well, governor,” said Johnson, “you wanted to see me?”
Wallace defined the problem as malcontent demonstrators trained in Moscow or New York. “You cannot deal with street revolutionaries,” he said. “You can never satisfy them. First it’s a front seat on the bus. Next it’s a takeover of parks. Then it’s public schools. Then it’s voting rights. Then it’s jobs. Then it’s distribution of wealth without work.” For fifteen minutes, he described the hardships created by subersive demonstrators for Alabama and Washington alike, then exhorted President Johnson to join with him in a dutiful alliance to restore public order. “Finally, Mr. President, I’d like to thank you for the opportunity to let me come here,” Wallace concluded, with comments about the White House and other national symbols that bordered on awe.
Johnson never took his eye off Wallace. His accent thickened as he expressed his own distaste for demonstrations, to the point that Wallace’s aide later claimed he said “nigger” outright instead of the drawled Southern “nigra.” “Those goddam nigras have kept my daughters awake every night with their screaming and hollering,” said Johnson, then slowly shifted from the faults of the demonstrators to their grievances. “You can’t stop a fever by putting an icepack on your head,” he told Wallace, and brutality was no good to “get at the cause” of the fever, of course. “I know you’re like me, not approving of brutality,” said Johnson. He brushed off Wallace’s quibbles about the word “brutality” by snapping his fingers for photographs of the violence on Pettus Bridge. Johnson secured a numb agreement that brutality injured the United States even if Wallace qualified the cause of it, then mused sadly about how the governor strayed so far from his progressive record in public service. “Why are you off on this black thing?” he asked. “You ought to be down there calling for help for Aunt Susie in the nursing home.”
The President soared off into New Deal memories of hooking up the first electricity in hardscrabble rural Texas so families at last could see at night and farmers could live past forty and farm women could iron clothes without first heating a metal slab in the fire. He rhapsodized on his plans to establish Medicare and attack hopelessness in Appalachia. He said Wallace could do a lot to educate the poor of both races in Alabama—“Your president will help you”—if he would stop harkening back to 1865 and look instead to his legacy for 2065. “What do you want left when you die?” Johnson intoned. “Do you want a great big marble monument that reads, ‘George Wallace—He Built,’ or do you want a little piece of scrawny pine board that reads, ‘George Wallace—He Hated’?”
Seymore Trammell loyally intervened to say his boss had come there to discuss the growing menace of Communist demonstrations, but he failed to relieve Wallace from the grip of LBJ’s treatment. The President slowly turned and “looked at me like I was some kind of dog mess,” Trammell recalled, then handed him a pencil from the coffee table. “Here, take notes,” Johnson ordered. Picking the most far-fetched item from Katzenbach’s list, he offered Wallace a suggestion to “turn off those demonstrations in a minute” by announcing his commitment to desegregate all of Alabama’s public schools: “You and I go out there right now in front of those television cameras.”
Wallace looked stricken. On the defensive about his tombstone, he parried the notion by saying that he lacked the power to do so under Alabama law.
Johnson sparred with Wallace through the items on Katzenbach’s list: a pledge of obedience for federal court orders, a commitment to law enforcement without brutality, a declaration of support for the protected right of peaceful assembly, and a call for biracial meetings between Alabama whites and Negroes. “Are you getting this down?” he prodded Trammell, and finally suggested that Wallace simply affirm the principle of universal suffrage.
Wallace replied that everybody in Alabama could vote already if they were registered. In that case, Johnson pressed, say everybody including nigras could be registered. “I don’t have that power, Mr. President,” said Wallace. “Under Alabama law it belongs to the county registrars.”
“Don’t you shit me, George Wallace,” Johnson said sternly. Then he grinned slyly to register a sore point from the 1964 election: “You had the power to keep the President of the United States off the [Alabama] ballot. Surely you have the power to tell a few poor county registrars what to do.”
They emerged after three hours and fifteen minutes to tell a crush of reporters outside the West Wing lobby that they had enjoyed a frank exchange of views. Wallace called the President “a great gentleman, as always,” and then departed, confiding glumly to assistants on his homeward flight that “when the President works on you, there’s not a lot you can do.” White House aides, by contrast, shelved contingency plans to contain an ugly scene if “the meeting has gone badly,” and later recorded that Johnson’s performance left Wallace “sort of cowed and pliable—of course, it didn’t last more than two days.” Johnson himself gobbled a bowl of soup before announcing outdoors at his thirty-eighth press conference that he would submit voting rights legislation next week. Asked what he had told Wallace, he revealed the last three suggestions from Katzenbach: “First, I urged that the Governor publicly declare his support for universal suffrage.” Asked why he had waited a week to respond publicly to Sunday’s violence, Johnson asserted that he had received a suitable proposal only hours earlier. “I have plotted my course,” he said. From the Rose Garden, the freedom chants of a thousand pickets still could be heard beyond the Pennsylvania Avenue gates.
A SMALL airplane identified as the “Confederate Air Force” buzzed low over Selma’s blockaded vigil on its fifth continuous day, dropping leaflets that advised white citizens to fire local Negroes—“an unemployed agitator ceases to agitate”—and to support a defense fund for the alleged murderers of James Reeb. Morale suffered on both sides of the line below. Bands of frustrated demonstrators slipped around Wilson Baker’s front ranks toward the courthouse, only to need rescuing by Baker himself from more hostile whites lurking in the rear. Uniformed officers occasionally weakened under the prolonged barrage of nonviolent freedom songs that were personalized for them at close quarters—“I love badge number forty-seven…” Some answered questions about hobbies and trivia, or even expressed confusion about their duty, and a few commanders reportedly asked to have their men relieved by the Alabama National Guard. Sheriff Clark rallied his possemen and Lingo’s troopers to block the first surge of a march to honor Reeb on March 14, but he relented under a truce with Baker to allow small parties through the lines for the limited purpose of attending Sunday worship downtown. Two fresh acquaintances from the vigil arranged to meet at the doorstep of First Presbyterian, where ushers turned them away because one was a Negro. At Central Baptist, much of the large congregation evacuated or avoided the sanctuary until the deacons safely refused several racially mixed groups.
At St. Paul’s Episcopal, Rev. Frank Mathews missed his own service because of an ulcerous stomach that was aggravated by the expected arrival of twenty aspiring worshipers from the “Berlin Wall,” led by collared clergy. When Rev. John Morris and others had provided a courtesy notice of their intention, Mathews responded by asking whether they thought it would be Christian to bring guests with measles. In his absence, the awkward debate about an appropriate analogy for multiracial worship resumed in confrontation on the church steps. Seminarian Jonathan Daniels acknowledged the frayed nerves all around as signs of genuine spiritual conflict, but theological issues were so urgent to him that he frankly expressed worry about how the leaders of St. Paul’s could hope to secure any standing within Episcopal canon law or any personal comfort from the deeper imperatives of faith.
For Judith Upham, the only other Boston seminarian who had remained all week in Selma, distress focused more on the tactical disadvantage of having within their group some local people in dirty blue jeans who displayed little respect for Episcopal tradition. She was embarrassed by her own wish that all the Negroes among them could be like the impeccably educated Ivanhoe Donaldson of SNCC, who had been raised Anglican in Jamaica. Finally, the phalanx of ushers and vestrymen from St. Paul’s concocted a “nonracial” policy to admit all the clergy but none of the laymen, including Donaldson. Those blockaded on the church steps retreated to Brown Chapel rather than submit to the mandated division. Three regular members of St. Paul’s walked out of the delayed service to protest the refusal of worship, opening battle within a congregation that included many of Selma’s most prominent citizens.
At St. Mark’s Episcopal in Washington, Rev. William Baxter preached about his own Selma journey to a congregation that included the Johnson and Humphrey families, as observances spilled widely to mark the week since Pettus Bridge. From San Jose, California, and Beloit, Wisconsin, marchers set off on fifty-mile treks to honor the impeded course from Selma to Montgomery. Twenty-seven ministers conducted a service of reconciliation at the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, and a thousand people in New Orleans marched through hostile crowds to advocate voting rights. In Massachusetts, twenty thousand attended a “Rally for Freedom” on Boston Common, while opponents burned a ten-foot cross in the fabled revolutionary town of Lexington. A relay of eighteen freedom runners left from New York’s George Washington Bridge bound for Washington, and nuns from the Sisters of Charity, in military formation and Puritan-style habits, joined a procession of 15,000 through Harlem to hear addresses by John Lewis, James Forman, and Bayard Rustin. From All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, where James Reeb had served as assistant pastor until 1964, the morning service emptied into a spontaneous march down Sixteenth Street that gathered another crowd of 15,000 into Lafayette Park for speakers, including Fannie Lou Hamer of Mississippi. “Her plump face shining in the sun,” reported the normally staid New York Times, “she shouted in her mighty voice: ‘It’s time now to stop begging them for what should have been done one hundred years ago. We have stood up on our feet, and God knows we’re on our way!’”
Noise from Lafayette Park filtered across the street into the Cabinet Room where President Johnson convened seven congressional leaders Sunday afternoon. “You made the White House fireproof but not soundproof,” he observed wryly in the midst of a sober prediction that more would die like Reeb until the government secured the right to register and vote for all citizens “except those in mental institutions.” Senate leaders Mike Mansfield and Everett Dirksen each pressed Johnson not to seem panicky in the face of demonstrations. “This is a deliberate government,” said Dirksen. “Don’t let those people say, ‘we scared him into it.’” Perhaps by prearrangement, House leaders argued that a presidential address to the nation would instill relief rather than panic. “I think it would help,” said Majority Leader Carl Albert of Oklahoma, and Speaker John McCormack invited Johnson to address a joint session of Congress. They fixed Tuesday evening as the earliest practicable time for the President to put his proposals into speech form, but Attorney General Katzenbach allowed that the “unpredictable” King might try to resume the march from Selma earlier the same day. To preclude being upstaged, the leaders resolved to advance the date to Monday—the next evening. Bill Moyers called in emergency help from church leader Robert Spike as well as political strategist Louis Martin, the former publisher of Negro newspapers who worked for Democratic presidents since FDR. Johnson commandeered writers to work through Sunday night, including Horace Busby, author of Johnson’s treasured 1963 civil rights speech at Gettysburg. Busby dismissed the Justice Department draft as “junk,” but the weekend rewrites fared so poorly that the President yanked in a startled new speechwriter, Richard Goodwin, to begin Monday morning from a blank page.
THAT MARCH 15, as the third calendar Monday of the month, was a day specified in Alabama law for voter registration. At the Lowndes County seat in Hayneville, where surprised officials simply had told Negro aspirants to go away two weeks earlier, registrar Carl Golson consulted widely to prepare this time. He no longer required applicants to produce a testament of character from a current voter, because this custom, as applied selectively to Negroes, was deemed a legal albatross with the Justice Department and the newspapers now in an uproar over voting—especially for a county where no Negro had been registered for at least sixty years. Like the registrars of neighboring counties such as Wilcox, Golson balanced this concession with a special new arrangement for Negro applicants. When more than twenty did present themselves that morning a second time—all from the pioneer thirty-seven who had signed their names to the sheet on March 1—Golson redirected them to line up on a side street about two hundred yards from the courthouse, outside the old county jail.
None of the applicants had ever been inside the long-abandoned relic of local punishment. A scouting trip by John Hulett and Frank Miles turned up no booby traps or obvious signs of ambush, but did little to calm apprehensions. Just inside the front door, to the left, the old indoor gallows stood with a rope slung over the yardarm. Jesse “Note” Favors reported that a deputy sheriff mused to him, “I wonder if that old thing still works.” Mattie Lee Moorer noticed items other than the rope that seemed to be freshly placed props of crude but resonant intimidation: a shotgun leaned against the wall, a pint of unlabeled whiskey on a bare table in the cellblock. A news photographer later captured the registrar administering a test to a lone applicant at this table beneath the glare of three naked light bulbs. Sidney Logan, who had ventured alone on Tuesday to witness the “turnaround” march in Selma, stayed on outside as a reassuring presence for those obliged to wait under the gaze of passersby. Of the seventeen who completed the registration test by the end of the day, Logan would be rejected weeks later along with fourteen others, and two—John Hulett and the blind preacher, John C. Lawson—would become the first registered Negroes since the reign of England’s Queen Victoria. These numbers were a pittance, and very likely a strategic move by county officials to remove the stigma of absolute racial exclusion. In Lowndes County, however, even the fifteen who persevered to failure vindicated Sidney Logan’s scouting report from Selma that wonders must be afoot.
CAREFULLY REMOVED from his public schedule that Monday, President Johnson convened the Joint Chiefs and his top national security officials to hear the report of a ten-day, “final” diagnostic mission to Vietnam. Army General Harold K. “Johnny” Johnson, a survivor of the Bataan Death March and three years in a Japanese POW camp, exceeded his own reputation for tough-minded realism by predicting that it would take 500,000 U.S. soldiers five years to “arrest the deterioration” in the military situation. As the President’s chosen leader for the on-site review, he recommended a twenty-one-point program featuring large, immediate troop deployments to forestall what National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy now secretly called the Vietcong’s “current expectation of early victory.” Assistant Defense Secretary John McNaughton, who had accompanied the delegation as McNamara’s chief strategic thinker on Vietnam, was equally candid in his top secret apportionment of U.S. war motives: “70% to avoid a humiliating defeat…20% to keep SVN [South Vietnam] (and then adjacent territory) from Chinese hands, 10% to permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life.”
The report stunned the assembled commanders in the White House. Even McNamara, who had recommended the mission in order to solidify official support for gradual troop deployments, professed shock to hear the accepted difficulties projected into large, blunt numbers, and the President blanched at the implications of such a war. He warned thunderously against leaks of the sensitive material, then lashed out as though there must be a way to change the projections rather than fulfill them. “Kill more Vietcong,” he ordered the Joint Chiefs.
President Johnson dismissed the military conclave to keep a Monday afternoon appointment with columnist Walter Lippmann, who represented the opposite pole of his Vietnam predicament. Lippmann was warning in print that military escalation was leading to unnecessary, avoidable disaster: “The reappraisal of our present policy is necessary, I submit, because the policy is not working and will not work.” Over lunch with President and Mrs. Johnson in the White House residence, and then alone with Johnson in the Oval Office, the nation’s foremost public intellectual pressed for national debate about Vietnam to prepare the public for a political compromise. “Your policy is all stick and no carrot, Mr. President,” said Lippmann. “You’re bombing them without offering any incentive for them to stop fighting.” Johnson replied genuinely that he loathed the war and would do almost anything to escape it, but said the Vietnamese Communists were offering him no carrots either, short of a reciprocal invitation to leave.
The two men argued for competing versions of a middle course in Vietnam—contained war versus negotiated settlement—both of which rested on wishful thinking or fiction. Lippmann probably guessed this, and Johnson certainly knew so from the consistently grim assessments within his own government. Nevertheless, the President favored either course over his actual choice between major war and collapse of the American position. He was keenly aware that Lippman himself publicly ruled out American withdrawal from Vietnam,* which only reinforced Johnson’s political instinct that no President could risk “unmanly” surrender. Honesty about Vietnam would touch off a war stampede and upheaval over blame for weakness, Johnson figured, along with dissent against the notion that humiliation could justify war. He resolved instead to contain political division separately from the conflict itself, using secrecy as a first defense.
Privately, Johnson railed against Lippmann’s call for open national debate (“He doesn’t understand that I’m debatin’ it every night,” Johnson told Moyers). In person, he presented himself to Lippmann as a reluctant warrior seeking to win in Vietnam by the minimal application of violence, and he entertained belief that Lippmann’s suggested “peace initiative” might yield a surprise settlement. The President buzzed McGeorge Bundy: “Mac, I’ve got Walter Lippmann over here, and he says we’re not doing the right thing. Maybe he’s right.” Lippmann was elated by the positive reception, which relieved his anxiety about being ostracized after decades of access to Presidents.
President Johnson reverted briefly to his domestic crisis. Hours before the address to Congress, pages of a new draft were spilling one by one from the office where speechwriter Richard Goodwin had locked himself from the frantic attentions of presidential aides—chiefly Moyers, Katzenbach, and Jack Valenti, with supporting experts and ad hoc advisers. Somewhat to their chagrin, Johnson had insisted upon Goodwin as his last-minute substitute even though he was an urbane Kennedy holdover of the pedigree the President often disparaged as “a Harvard,” known for his dialectical encounter with Cuban revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara and starkly ill-suited to the Texas folkways that Johnson applied to politics. Still, after seeing Lippmann, the President lobbed a hand grenade into the speech stew by buzzing Goodwin ex cathedra with a story from his formative experience as a teacher of young Mexican-Americans in Cotulla, Texas. “I just wanted to remind you,” he signed off abruptly. Johnson saw in Goodwin an outsider with a gift for words, fit for the task of quick-mixing a bubble of presidential memory into the framework of Negro voting rights. “A liberal Jew,” he lectured Valenti, “has his hand on the pulse of America.”
BACK FROM weekend speeches in Chicago, a conflicted Martin Luther King hesitated too long in Judge Frank Johnson’s courtroom to address the James Reeb memorial service at two o’clock Monday afternoon. If he went to Selma, he could not make it back to Montgomery in time to catch a flight to Washington for the joint session of Congress that night. Since White House operators had tracked him down with President Johnson’s personal invitation, some around King argued that his first obligation was to be visible in the House chamber as an emissary of the voting rights movement. To go to Washington, however, King must renege on commitments not only in Selma but also in Montgomery, where he remained a witness under subpoena. On this fourth day of hearings, Major Cloud defended the conduct of his troopers on March 7 (“I never saw any violence,” he testified), and one of Sheriff Clark’s deputies disclosed in passing that two of those charged in the Reeb murder were the men who had tried the carburetor smokescreen three days earlier during the march of white Alabamians. Even this small surprise, linking a sinister event with antecedents that had seemed silly, was a reminder of what King called the “tiptoe stance” in the psychology of minorities. Uncertainty recommended that he take nothing for granted, including Judge Johnson’s decision on the legal status of the suspended march from Selma. Finishing that quest was now the movement’s test of its competence as well as its cause, and by this light King’s first duty was to tend to the plaintiff’s case through expected completion on Tuesday.
He lingered in Montgomery also to keep internal rifts from exploding in the press. So troubled was King that he solicited from Clarence Jones what arrived just then as a fourteen-page telegram defending him from charges “in some quarters” that he had “worked with the federal government to bottle up the militancy and indignation of Negroes.” Tuesday’s mysterious “turnaround” march intensified King’s vulnerability to the usual organizational frictions, in part because so many parties had reason to ascribe unflattering motives to him. Federal officials were straining to create for themselves a facade of sovereign control by suggesting that they had throttled King to broker peace. SNCC leaders encouraged the notion that King had connived his way into safe retreat, abandoning to them the trust of the long-suffering people, and reporters were drawn to saucy interpretations that put King under the condescension of his young allies for chessboard deal-making with Johnson and Wallace. Jones’s defense was sophisticated but necessarily defensive, and King set it aside to tend higher priorities. Habitually late, he declined the President’s invitation, secured an excused absence from Judge Johnson, and sent word to extend the Reeb memorial until he could get to Selma with a eulogy after all.
By four o’clock, recorded a member of King’s staff, the crowd in Brown Chapel “got tired and even a little hostile.” There had been futile attempts since dawn to circumvent the six-day blockade at the invisible wall, where internecine tensions among the segregationists were reaching the brink of open fisticuffs between Wilson Baker and Sheriff Clark over the latter’s refusal to permit a token, pressure-relieving march to the courthouse. Inside, the afternoon service heated with the overflow crowd, which spilled from the aisles into window casements, then over the balcony railings and camera equipment.
With pilgrim travelers far outnumbering local veterans a week after King’s mass invitation, spoken tributes recognized a swelling bank of dignitaries—presiding Bishop John Hines of the Episcopal Church, United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther, several members of Congress, more than a hundred Roman Catholic priests and nuns of different orders, and Archbishop Iakovos, Greek Orthodox Primate for North and South America, who wore a flowing black cassock and carried a gold-tipped pastoral staff. In 1959, Iakovos alone had represented the Eastern hierarchy at its first direct Vatican contact in nine hundred years, opening ecumenical discussion with Pope John XXIII toward removal of the mutual excommunications that had stood between Rome and Istanbul since the year 1054. Here, however, the Archbishop ventured on his own against the advice of his clergy and staff, who worried correctly that he would be called traitor to the quest of marginalized Greeks for full acceptance as Americans. Not a single member of the Orthodox community would appear for scheduled events at his next stop, and Iakovos would find himself alone in a Charleston hotel room, stripped of accustomed pomp, telling hostile callers nationwide that he was compelled to Selma by formative memories of Greek suffering on his native Adriatic islands, under harsh occupation by the Ottoman Turks.
Between hymns at Brown Chapel, one bored reporter counted seven of eighteen bare bulbs burned out from the cross made of lights on the pulpit wall behind Iakovos, and murmurs of disapproval ran through the crowd over the effusions of speech and prayer. “I found myself greatly agitated and sometimes furiously angry at the behavior of my white colleagues,” wrote a clergyman from New York. Most speakers gloried in the footsteps of James Reeb’s martyrdom. Some abased themselves before the lifetime sacrifice of the local movement, or confessed that they had just learned of Jimmie Lee Jackson, and others winced to hear local Negroes lionized in theological language by strangers who were unsure how to say hello to them in the same pew. Long overdue, a clamor from outside finally announced King’s arrival, and relief whipped through the weary crowd. “It suddenly seemed right,” the New Yorker decided, “that we should all be there.”
KING IMPROVISED, reaching first to salute Reeb with the lines from Romeo and Juliet that Robert Kennedy famously had quoted (“And if he should die/Take his body, and cut it into little stars…”) for his assassinated brother. “James Reeb was martyred in the Judeo-Christian faith that all men are brothers,” added King. “His death was the result of a sensitive religious spirit. His crime was that he dared to live his faith.” He joined Reeb’s name to predecessors from the movement, summoning up language from his own eulogies back to the funeral of the Birmingham girls bombed in church. Looking beyond the killers as a few “sick, misguided” men, King repeated a question he had asked “a few days ago when we funeralized James Jackson”: what could sustain such anonymous hatred? “When we move from the who to the what,” he said, “the blame is wide and the responsibility grows.” To a Brown Chapel half-filled with prominent clergy, King still began his roll call of shame with indifferent religious leaders and irrelevant churches that kept “silent behind the safe security of stained glass windows.” As in Birmingham, he went on to indict the demagoguery and brutality of local officials, the “timidity” of the federal government, and the broad apathy of citizens who nominally owned the country. “Yes,” said King, “he was murdered even by the cowardice of every Negro who tacitly accepts the evil of segregation.”
He pulled back to soft consolation. “I know our hearts, all the sympathy we can muster, go out to Mrs. Reeb and the children,” said King. He called up words from his most shattered moments—“At times, life is hard, as hard as crucible steel”—and cited in ecumenical language “the great affirmations of religion, which tell us that death is not the end.”
To lift up a vision of justice “one day,” when “our nation will realize its true heroes,” King drew upon memories etched in his speeches since the Montgomery bus boycott. He pictured first among future honorees the “old, oppressed, battered Negro women,” symbolized by the steadfast walker Mother Pollard, “who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness, ‘My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.’” From his awakening tributes to the breakthrough sit-ins and Freedom Rides, he saluted the discipline of nonviolent youth—“faceless, honest, relentless young people, black and white, who have temporarily left behind the temples of learning to storm the barricades of violence.” For the first time, he included in his pantheon the “ministers of the gospel, priests, rabbis, and nuns, who are willing to march for freedom, to go to jail for conscience’s sake.” From the cry of hope in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, he foresaw again a broad, healing realization that all these vexing protesters “in reality” stood for “the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, thereby carrying our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy.” From the perorations that defined his public voice, King rolled out citations from prophets and patriots to extol a fused source for justice—sacred and secular, equal souls and equal votes—ending this time with Isaiah and Jefferson: “‘Every valley shall be exalted…and all flesh shall see it together.’ We must work to make the Declaration of Independence real in our everyday lives.”
He claimed only a glimpse of sweetness beyond an age of pangs. “Out of the wombs of a frail world,” said King, “new systems of equality and justice are being born.” There were seeds of hope for “the shirtless and barefoot people” of a shrinking globe, he said, borrowing from his Nobel Prize lecture of December. “Here and there an individual or group dares to love…. Therefore, I am not yet discouraged about the future…. So we thank God for the life of James Reeb,” King said. “We thank God for his goodness.” As he finished, Sheriff Clark received mortifying news on the sidewalk outside with Wilson Baker, Hosea Williams, and James Bevel, after which Baker removed the wooden barricades across Sylvan Street. Four minutes later, Ralph Abernathy rushed behind King into the pulpit to announce that U.S. District Judge Daniel Thomas of Mobile had ordered Clark to permit a limited march to the courthouse—now! “Grown men wept at the wonder of the moment,” recorded a participant, as days of complex machinations by LeRoy Collins and others seemed to answer King’s eulogy. Crowds surged toward the church doors, sweeping King and the distinctive Greek Archbishop from handshake recognition that they had met briefly in Geneva after the bus boycott, on King’s first trip abroad. Iakovos wore a frozen look. A small Negro girl took him by the hand and said not to worry.
A march of some 3,500 people stepped off at 5:08 P.M., breaking confinement that had introduced people of the local movement to relays of incoming clergy through six days of rain, bullets, tedium, and song. For holdovers such as Boston seminarians Judith Upham and Jonathan Daniels, the unplanned boot camp in nonviolence made this hard-won release more impressive than the fresh fear of Tuesday, even though the lines made no attempt to cross Pettus Bridge. Sheriff Clark locked the courthouse to guard his bastion of local power; behind windows, his five children watched the twenty-minute memorial ceremony for voting rights martyrs on the steps below. A photographer captured the extraordinary assembly with a shot destined for the next cover of Life magazine. At dusk, with the recessional fading back toward Brown Chapel, a hand emerged just long enough to remove a mourning wreath King had left in the courthouse doorway.