March 15, 1965
IN Montgomery, Stokely Carmichael reported Monday afternoon over the SNCC WATS line that police “with guns” tried to raid the Ben Moore Hotel, where James Forman had set up temporary headquarters. Assured by the manager that the Negro establishment had warded off the assault, Carmichael returned to his fifth-floor outpost to observe SNCC colleagues moving nearly three hundred demonstrators from the nearby campus of Alabama State University, where faculty and deans vainly pleaded and shrieked to dissuade them, past the hotel toward the Alabama capitol ten blocks away. Forman intended to establish a beachhead there, leapfrogging the stalled campaign out of Selma, for more aggressive “second front” forays to demand the attention of Governor Wallace. From his window, Carmichael saw police units with cavalry detachments of sheriff’s deputies move slowly from distant points to seal off the march. He rushed downstairs to sound a warning, only to find the hotel doors chain-locked from the outside. He banged helplessly against the exits, then ran back upstairs to watch the converging police repulse the march in the streets below. Skirmishes broke out along the fringes. Horses reared, and officers swung long-handled truncheons.
In the aftermath, SNCC colleagues came upon Carmichael standing dazed on the sidewalk. He said they should have seen this coming. “This is you,” he accused Cleveland Sellers, a friend and fellow project director in Mississippi. He could not, or would not, explain himself beyond saying, “Et tu, Brute?” with a vacant cast to his normally infectious grin. Sellers, Willie Ricks, and others knew Carmichael had been troubled since his duels with Bevel inside the besieged Dexter Avenue church. Discounting a remote chance that he was “possuming” to fool them, they recognized signs of the nervous breakdown that had afflicted SNCC workers with far less stress than Carmichael’s five years and two dozen trips to jail. Either way, they knew from previous triage to get him swiftly out of town.
Couriers managed to notify Forman a few blocks from the Ben Moore Hotel, where his demonstration settled in a standoff that lasted into Monday evening. Huddled with companions against buildings on a dark street, surrounded by police and the mounted deputies, Forman had scrounged a transistor radio that scratchily could receive President Johnson’s address to Congress, but he labored to disseminate his own small news without benefit of eyewitness reporters. Gathering sketchy details of a dozen injuries nearby (“Melzetta Poole, 19, Alabama State, hit in head…Eric Stern, U. of Pitt., possible broken jaw…Fran Lipton, U. of Michigan, horse kicked her…Rev. Gerald Witt, 28, Huntington, Pa….”), he found substitutes for Carmichael’s role of calling them through SNCC’s communications department in Atlanta to be offered as balancing grist for the official version that otherwise appeared baldly in many newspapers: “300 Negro demonstrators blocking an ambulance…throwing stones, bricks and bottles at the deputies, none of whom was hurt seriously…violent demonstration about six blocks from the state Capitol.” Carmichael himself went numbly but willingly to the Montgomery airport with escorts, headed for the usual therapy of a speaking tour in safe cities. Not for the first time, however, the contrast of bustling normalcy at an airport concourse—travelers with golf clubs, families embracing at the gate—ate through the wounded psyche of a veteran SNCC worker, and Carmichael collapsed on the floor before an astonished police officer. He writhed and screamed beneath friends who sat on him until he was subdued enough to board an airplane for California.
LADY BIRD Johnson stoically watched her husband flay the pale aides who raced between typewriters carrying pieces of his speech. With a motorcade waiting to transport him to the Capitol for the nine o’clock address, the President berated a distant secretary for typing slowly with “fourteen goddam wooden fingers,” and accused Jack Valenti and Bill Moyers of garbling his clearly stated revisions. “Every goddam body around here thinks he’s smarter than I am!” he grumbled. When Valenti bared his chest to announce that previous additions already pushed the end of the speech too late to make the TelePrompTer screen in the well of the House, the notoriously sensitive Johnson raved to the doorway against a host of betrayals he saw conspiring to accentuate his cornpone look and ponderous delivery. He composed himself swiftly, however, so that Richard Goodwin—waiting with a speechwriter’s rare invitation to ride along, freshly shaved but bleary from the day’s crash composition—heard no sound from the arriving sphinx who exuded and commanded silence in the presidential limousine.
President Johnson’s concentration sank into script changes that lengthened Goodwin’s draft. There was a new section on the provisions of his voting rights bill, for instance, along with words of disapproval for protesters who “holler fire in a crowded theater” or “block public thoroughfares to traffic.” Changing his mind, Johnson struck the latter paragraph to avoid misimpression that marginal annoyance reflected his true feeling. Elsewhere, his editing added words and compounded metaphors. Where Goodwin exhorted Americans to “look within our own communities, and our own hearts, and root out injustice there,” the final version substituted: “let each of us look within our own hearts and our own communities, and let each of us put our shoulder to the wheel to root out injustice wherever it exists.” More substantively, Johnson had deleted a sentence that succinctly joined two causes. To advance freedom, wrote Goodwin, “Americans are risking their lives today in Vietnam—and in Selma.” This direct parallel thrust Vietnam as a twin issue that invited questions, such as why the lives risked should be soldiers in one instance, nonviolent Negroes and clergy in the other. Instead, Johnson’s team composed a safer general call to “rally now together” in the spirit of common sacrifice, citing traditions of patriotic duty to which “the South made its contribution of honor and gallantry no less than any other region.”
At the Capitol, which buzzed more expectantly than usual over a boycott by the entire Mississippi and Virginia delegations along with scattered representatives from other Southern states, the congressional leadership greeted the President as always in the Speaker’s chambers, while Mrs. Johnson went to a reserved box in the packed gallery with her daughter Lynda and guests including USIA director Carl Rowan, former Southern governors Buford Ellington and LeRoy Collins, Robert Spike among four prominent clergy from the vigil in Selma, and FBI director Hoover as the featured trophy on her front row. The President himself, heralded into the House for handshakes down the aisle past Cabinet officers and Supreme Court Justices, on through the ritual standing ovations, stood quiet again with his text at the lectern, before the assembled branches of government and his largest television audience—some seventy million viewers.
“I SPEAK tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy,” he began slowly.
“I urge every member of both parties, Americans of all religions and of all colors, from every section of this country, to join me in that cause.
“At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.
“There, long-suffering men and women peacefully protested the denial of their rights as Americans. Many were brutally assaulted. One good man, a man of God, was killed.
“There is no cause for pride in what has happened in Selma. There is no cause for self-satisfaction in the long denial of equal rights of millions of Americans.
“But there is cause for hope and for faith in our democracy in what is happening here tonight.
“For the cries of pain, and the hymns and protests of oppressed people, have summoned into convocation all the majesty of this great government of the greatest nation on earth.”
Only a hush greeted the natural pause. The lyrical opening, which followed Goodwin’s first draft almost to the word, sucked away the whole range of normal response from a chamber that seemed stunned and on edge, as though mesmerized to witness the gangling, slow-tongued President leaping suddenly to a rhetorical high wire without a net. Johnson, having claimed for Selma a place among historic moments, and pronounced it a test of free government itself, fastened both the moment and the test to the core of the nation’s only story. “Rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself,” he said. “Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, or our welfare or our security, but rather to the values and purpose and the meaning of our beloved nation.
“The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. And should we defeat every enemy, and should we double our wealth and conquer the stars and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation.
“For with a country as with a person, ‘What is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’”
Into this pause fell a first lone clap, which spread through the House in tentative applause. Uncommonly, Johnson had pulled off the cadences of Lincoln and the intimacy of a quotation from St. Mark. For that alone he earned credit, and he proceeded to ground the spiritual lilt in the secular base of American ideology. “This was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose,” he said. “The great phrases of that purpose still sound in every American heart, North and South: ‘All men are created equal,’ ‘government by consent of the governed,’ ‘give me liberty or give me death…’” Johnson defined his issue by the commitment to freedom, above any dodging confinement of section or race. “There is no Negro problem,” he said, “there is only an American problem, and we are met here tonight as Americans…to solve that problem.”
The address marched steadily through history into the thicket of modern politics. Johnson decried the “harsh fact” that “men and women are kept from voting simply because they are Negroes.” He told plain stories to illustrate. “No law that we now have on the books—and I have helped to put three of them there*—can ensure the right to vote when local officials are determined to deny it,” he asserted, then outlined his new bill to “strike down restrictions to voting in all elections—federal, state, and local—which have been used to deny Negroes the right to vote.” To confront the issue of federalism, he offered defenders of states’ rights a simple way to nullify the brunt of enforcement: “Open your polling places to all of your people. Allow men and women to register and vote whatever the color of their skin. Extend the rights of citizenship to every citizen of this land.” But he pledged no more to defer the nation’s constitutional mandate where states historically condoned tyranny. “We have already waited a hundred years and more,” President Johnson declared, “and the time for waiting is gone.”
The senior House Democrat, the seventy-seven-year-old Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn, rose to his feet and a standing ovation spread in waves with the conviction that Johnson was committing hard mechanics of government to his beguiling patriotic music. Above isolated cheers, the noise hung long enough that network cameras slowly panned to broadcast what the New York Times called “remarkable views of the reaction of Congress”: Celler clapping with hands high above his head, Senator Mike Mansfield visibly shaking with emotion, Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina “sitting with arms folded in massive disapproval.” For White House aide Jack Valenti, waiting desperately with a stopwatch, the panning cameras posed one of two threats of searing disgrace.
When couriers arrived with TelePrompTer tape composed from the only copy of revisions after page twelve, Valenti beseeched cameramen by whisper to focus closely on the podium, then crept unpictured through the well of the House to feed the tape into the TelePrompTer before the President ran naked off his partial text.
The vote was essential to the “far larger movement” of American Negroes to “secure for themselves the full blessings of American life,” Johnson resumed. “Their cause must be our cause, too,” he said slowly, placing his hands on the lectern. “Because it is not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And—we—shall—overcome.”
No one stood. Applause battled disbelief and renewed astonishment to hear such words from the first Southern President in a century. When it registered that Johnson with unmistakable intent had adopted the signature phrase of Negro protest, a Southern representative on the floor quietly muttered, “Goddam,” and fell numb. To friends in the U.S. Senate, Richard Russell sadly pronounced his dear friend and protege “a turncoat if there ever was one.” Watching in Selma, Mayor Joseph Smitherman recoiled as from “a dagger in your heart.” Still puzzled later, he said, “You know, the South is very patriotic, but it just destroyed everything you’d been fighting for.” Blocks away from Smitherman on Lapsley Street, pandemonium erupted in the living room of Sullivan and Jean Jackson, where colleagues of Martin Luther King stared at Johnson’s image and shouted to each other, “Can you believe he said that?”
King himself, from an armchair drawn close to the Jackson television, wordlessly occupied a charged space apart. The address for him already was more than an answered prayer. Not only did Johnson embrace the fused spiritual and patriotic grounding of the nonviolent movement, but he committed the national government to vindicate its long-suffering promise of equal citizenship. A tear rolled down King’s cheek.
He watched the President lift up by adaptation more themes of his message for and from the movement. “The real hero of this struggle is the American Negro,” Johnson told his audience. “And who among us can say that we would have made the same progress were it not for his persistent bravery, and his faith in American democracy?” His address in the House chamber burst through resistance to applause as Johnson raised the stakes still higher. “The time of justice has now come,” he declared. “And when it does, I think that day will brighten the lives of every American. For Negroes are not the only victims.” He told the story he had urged on Goodwin only hours before, of his first job teaching Mexican-American children of Cotulla, Texas. “My students were poor, and they often came to class without breakfast, hungry,” said the President. “And they knew even in their youth that pain of prejudice. They never seemed to know why people disliked them. But they knew it was so…
“Somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child.
“I never thought then in 1928 that I would be standing here in 1965…that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students, and to help people like them all over this country. But now I do have that chance, and I let you in on a secret: I—mean—to—use—it.”
A second standing ovation answered the peek behind the veneer of Johnson as oil-state politician. Its personal revelation added consistency to the surprise force of the voting rights address, and tumultuous acclaim engulfed the President’s exit from the House floor. “Manny, I want you to start hearings tonight,” he shouted to Celler through a sea of outstretched arms. Beaming, electrified, he waved off the Judiciary chairman’s abashed reply that the voting rights bill—not yet introduced—was rushed for next week. “This week,” said Johnson. “And hold night sessions, too.”
Noise collapsed to quiet adrenaline in the presidential limousine. No one spoke for blocks. “Jack, how did I do?” the President finally asked. Goodwin and Moyers shrank from the enormity of the question, but Valenti was ready with stabilizing facts of the White House trade: thirty-six interruptions for applause consuming eight minutes, forty seconds; total delivery time, forty-five minutes, twenty seconds.