March 17–20, 1965
JUDGE Johnson advised stunned lawyers for Alabama that they could catch a plane to New Orleans within the hour to seek an emergency stay in the Fifth Circuit. He assumed rightly that they would hurry, because his order prescribed a window of little more than a week to complete the fifty-mile march. Rushing just as hard to get started, King fixed Sunday for the third attempt to cross Pettus Bridge. This allowed movement workers only three days to improvise bivouac logistics along Highway 80.
On Thursday, as Governor Wallace’s lawyers argued their appeal to block them, the U.S. Senate debated and passed an extraordinary resolution to send the day-old voting rights bill to the Judiciary Committee with instructions to report it back for floor action no later than April 9, the hundredth anniversary of Appomattox. “I am opposed to every word and every line in the bill,” declared Judiciary chairman James Eastland of Mississippi, protesting the usurpation of his traditional prerogative to set the timetable for legislation. Against him rose the leadership of both parties, with Vice President Humphrey formally presiding and many senators praising the Selma demonstrators for steadfast commitment to democratic principles. “As American citizens, they have faith in America,” said Republican John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, “and we must sustain that faith.” Only thirteen senators voted against the resolution, including one—Republican Margaret Chase Smith of Maine—who opposed sending the bill to committee even for three weeks.
A Soviet cosmonaut burst into news bulletins as the first human to walk in space. “I didn’t experience fear,” Colonel Alexei Leonov said on reentry to his orbiting spacecraft, Voshkod 2, “only a sense of infinite expanse and depth of the universe.” At the White House, once a graceful response was framed for the latest setback in the space race, Johnson delegated to his confidential go-between Buford Ellington the task of securing from Governor Wallace a commitment to protect the Selma march as ordered by the court, but Attorney General Katzenbach soon interrupted with bad news from Ellington that the elusive Wallace was asking for help. With Deputy Defense Secretary Cyrus Vance, who was preparing U.S. troop deployments in case Alabama balked altogether, Katzenbach and Ellington coached Johnson for a showdown phone call calculated to draw upon his mesmerizing personal dominance of Wallace on Saturday.
The governor came on the line at full gallop against marchers “pourin’ in from all over the country…nuns and priests, and got hundreds of bearded beatniks in front of my capitol now.” Just two days ago, he said, “it was James Forman suggesting in front of all the nuns and priests that if they, anybody went in the café and they wouldn’t serve ’em, to kick the fuckin’ legs of the tables off…that kind of intemperate remarks, and inflames people, you know…and I’m gonna do everything that I can, but now, all I want to say quite frankly is that they’ve been stirred up by a lot of things, and I know you don’t want anything to happen that looks like a revolution, but if these people keep pouring in here…why, it’s gonna take you, it’s gonna take everybody in the country to stop something.”
President Johnson worked in a calming volley of words about cooperating peacefully with the march as ordered by the court. “Let’s get it over as soon as we can,” he said. “And let’s don’t, uh, when you talk about a revolution, that uh, that really, that really upsets us all.”
Wallace made sure Johnson knew he meant polar threats from two kinds of revolutionaries: outsiders who pressed for the Negro vote by “wantin’ the federal government to take the state over,” and Alabamians on his side who wanted to annul federal authority on issues touching race. “Of course, if I was a revolutionary, I probably could invite a quarter of a million people to come help us,” he said. “But of course I don’t want anything like that at all. I don’t want people to get hurt.”
“I know,” Johnson said.
The President seemed chastened by the blunt talk of revolution, and Wallace resumed the offensive with tales of white Alabama as victim rather than oppressor, suffering nearly unbearable cases of interracial flirting. “A Negro priest yesterday asked all the patrolmen what their wives were doing,” he told Johnson. “Uh, reckon some of their friends could have dates with their wives, you know, tryin’ to provoke ’em, those kind of things, you know, and we’re tellin’ ’em just take all that stuff.” The marching and agitating in Selma had been getting worse for eight weeks, Wallace complained, rushing hotly to warn again that “if this matter continues on and on and on…if they’re gonna just stay in this state eight weeks and congregate fifty thousand strong a day, then uh, we’re going to have a revolution.” He checked himself. “Well, I don’t mean that, as you say, [to] use the word ‘revolution,’” he said. “We just gonna have trouble.”
Johnson pleaded several times for Wallace to call out the Alabama Guard so the federal government would not have to intrude, but Wallace parried with a steady refrain. “Here’s what I’ll do,” he said. “I will, we’re gonna keep close touch with the situation.”
The President brought Katzenbach, then Ellington, on the phone to push in tandem for a more definitive commitment. “George, are you by yourself?” asked Ellington, suspecting that Wallace might not want political colleagues to hear him pledge to protect race mixers under federal pressure.
When Wallace parried again, Johnson tried an edge of disgust. “You don’t need to talk to me any more,” he announced, saying he had a Treasury nomination to finish before he flew home to Texas that afternoon. “I thought Governor Ellington and y’all had kind of, had a, uh a meeting of the minds on it,” he added in a plaintive tone.
“Well, we’ll have a meeting of the minds, Mr. President,” said Wallace, giving ground. “I’ll do whatever it takes. If it takes ten thousand Guardsmen, we’ll have them. I’ll use—do whatever is necessary. And I won’t uh, wait too late. Of course, you know—”
“That’s okay,” said Johnson, pouncing. “That’s good. And you keep in touch with Buford.” Wallace signed off with two hours left to prepare an address to the Alabama legislature.
IN MONTGOMERY, legislative leaders escorted Governor Wallace into the House chamber precisely on cue for live statewide television at 6:30 P.M. His speech needed only sixteen minutes to draw from many wells of emotional resistance, beginning with ridicule. He read a long list of mobile support equipment already requested by the Selma organizers, including nine three-hundred-gallon water trailers and two rubbish trucks, then denounced the marchers as a mob. “And it is upon these people, and upon their anarchy,” said Wallace, “that a federal judge, presiding over a mock court, places a stamp of approval.” Nurtured by the “collectivist press,” they served a “foreign philosophy” that aimed to “take all police powers unto the central government,” he declared. “And sadly, the Negroes used as tools in this traditional type of Communist street warfare have no conception of the misery and slavery they are bringing to their children.”
Wallace turned from “words of alarm, not that I have anything against proper alarm,” to the poignant retreat of the Lost Cause. “I do not ask you for cowardice,” he said, “but I ask you for restraint in the same tradition that our outnumbered forefathers followed.” He urged Alabamians to “exercise that superior discipline that is yours,” obey the order “though it be galling,” and leave the march alone. “Please stay home,” he pleaded. “Let’s have peace.” He presented scornful forbearance as the utmost patriotic sacrifice, but he could not bring himself to allow protection by any Alabama authority. “The federal courts have created this matter,” he declared, and therefore he would call on Washington to “provide for the safety and welfare of the so-called demonstrators.” Thunderous cheers answered his concluding appeal—“I have kept faith with you…”—for voters to stand behind the people’s governor. The Montgomery Advertiser recorded that “several women in the audience were in tears.” Friday’s Birmingham News proclaimed, “Wallace Has Finest Hour.”
Flashes from Montgomery kept the Marine helicopter stalled on the White House lawn. “I’ve been leavin’ since 3:30, messing with that son of a bitch,” President Johnson fumed to Buford Ellington after nine o’clock Thursday night, “and he is absolutely treacherous.”
Ellington vowed never to speak to Wallace again. “Well, you know I told you—”
The President interrupted to quote from the speech. “I’m, I’m not going to be double-crossed this way,” he told Ellington. “I’m gonna issue a statement here that kinda burns his tail.”
Wallace struck first. Johnson called Attorney General Katzenbach at ten, sputtering with frustration that he had been about to summon reporters when “in comes this goddam wire” asking the President to police the march with five thousand civilian federal workers, such as marshals and prison guards.
The request was “ridiculous,” said Katzenbach, “as Governor Wallace knows perfectly well,” but the maneuver neatly sidestepped all National Guard options as political poison in Alabama. If Wallace called out the Guard himself, he would assume defense of Negroes he demonized to popular acclaim; if he refused, he would invite federal command and with it blame for surrender. If Johnson now suggested that Wallace was “reneging” on his commitment to use the Guard as necessary, the governor would simply reply that he preferred civilians. “That’s what he’ll say,” Katzenbach predicted. He advised Johnson to scrap his statement of rebuke and compose a straightforward reply: that federal civilian employees were unprepared and unsuited for the emergency, being scattered in assorted agencies nationwide, whereas the ten thousand members of the Alabama National Guard were on hand, “trained and equipped for this purpose.”
“Uh, and if he won’t call them out, we will,” the President suggested.
“And uh, if he’s unable to maintain law, we will,” Katzenbach added.
Johnson shouted for his secretary Marie Fehmer to get on the line for dictation that bounced back and forth for ten minutes before he took off for Andrews Air Force Base. He called the FBI from the plane “in a highly agitated condition about the situation in Alabama,” Director Hoover advised his executives, and the President reached the LBJ Ranch before two o’clock Friday morning.
FOR KING, Wallace’s speech was background radio news in a long night of related collisions. With the victory of Judge Johnson’s order, pressure spiked on many fronts, including where to camp Sunday on the first night out of Selma. No sooner did a volunteer at last offer a farm near the highway than Dallas County officials rushed James Minter to court with an ironclad argument that Anderson Watts was merely his sharecropper of twenty years and could not grant such permission. The Selma courthouse swarmed with word of imminent suits by the city and the local bus company to collect massive damages from Negro leaders over the economic effect of demonstrations. Familiar signs of spite hollowed optimism among movement veterans who had learned to be wary on the brink of hard-won public success. Retaliatory violence had charred celebrations consistently in the past, with bombs detonated soon after the bus boycott, sit-ins, Birmingham campaign, and March on Washington.
The usual infighting rubbed so raw as to provoke a rare eruption of temper from King, against SNCC’s Willie Ricks in Montgomery. With James Forman, Ricks had organized student pickets that held ground outside the capitol for several hours Thursday, menaced by a larger “Niggers Go Home” counterdemonstration of whites. When police arrested eighty-four of the students for sitting down on the sidewalk, three hundred new demonstrators—mostly travelers on their way to Selma—marched to the courthouse to denounce the jailing as a violation of the new protest agreement. At midnight, the most persistent thirty-six were jailed themselves, joining the others, and arguments seethed into the morning over the priority of this crisis.
What upset King was a passing encounter with three female students from Alabama State who wore helmets from the huge batch that Forman had imported for SNCC’s “second front” campaign. When he complimented the distinctive look, one of them replied, “You need one.” Another added, “You better get you one.”
King stopped. “Willie Ricks told you to say that,” he said. When he pressed the students to confirm his guess, they ran off instead to Ricks, whom they knew, saying King was a paranoid celebrity who thought Ricks controlled his fate.
Hours later, King spotted Ricks on a fringe of the marathon strategy session. “Come here, son,” he said, pulling him close. “I’ve been out here fighting a long time, and I know what I’m doing. You can’t hurt me.” His tone hushed the room. King preached that Cain had killed Abel but Ricks couldn’t hurt him. “Remember that,” he said. “I was Martin Luther King before you were Willie Ricks, and I’ll be Martin Luther King long after you’re gone.”
Ricks stood silent as King “went off on me,” but his SNCC colleagues lit into King’s surrogates. Forman accused Andrew Young of undermining SNCC’s militancy in order to please Washington. He said King’s SCLC staff sacrificed integrity even to get creature comforts for the march, such as port-o-potties and walkie-talkies. “I’ve known people who sold out for a car or money,” he shouted, “but never for toilets!”
“Jim, why don’t you just tell everybody that you hate Dr. King?” Young retorted. He said Forman was consistent only in branding King wrong.
Most observers recoiled from the disputes, but King’s host in Montgomery tried to reassume his role from the bus boycott as volunteer “bodyguard.” Richmond Smiley, whose family included trustees who had shut off the water and electricity to drive Forman’s demonstrators from Dexter church, was appalled to watch young rowdies berate his old pastor. He offered more than once to bounce them from his house, but King checked him, having recovered his amiable thick skin under fire. “No, that’s not the way,” he said as he held mostly aloof, intervening to let the clashes play out. At dawn, with Forman departed after a halfhearted truce rendition of “We Shall Overcome,” King addressed his own staff and friends. “Well brothers, if there’s going to be a divorce, SNCC will have to initiate it,” he announced. “And if they do, I’ll be just like Rockefeller’s wife when she discovered that Happy* was pregnant.” He paused for effect, then added, “I’ll not say a word.” His primly comic allusion relieved stress with a splash of laughter.
On Friday in New York, while monitoring wiretaps on civil rights advisers, FBI agents overheard Bayard Rustin urge King to renounce SNCC publicly as a political liability. King deflected. Rustin believed from personal experience that King avoided personal conflict, especially severances and goodbyes, out of weakness. King saw it differently, arguing that he was bound to SNCC by necessity and principle. With his own small staff crushed by an avalanche of assignments, he saw the SNCC veterans as a unique human resource—intrepid, task-oriented loners, accustomed to the threat of violence and qualified to create instant miracles everywhere from crowd control to tent construction. Through Hosea Williams, he assigned much of the logistics and communication over the fifty-four miles to SNCC’s Ivanhoe Donaldson. Having survived many jailings and one threat of death from an irate Mississippi officer with a pistol to his head, Donaldson could disregard the scorn of some SNCC colleagues for “the Reverend’s show.” He had skipped the March on Washington and now claimed indulgence to be in the middle of a gigantic movement event. “Everybody’s entitled to one in a lifetime,” he joked.
Donaldson pitched into the chaos of Selma, where crowds jostled journalists, camping supplies littered church basements, and farm pickups needed to be commandeered into a truck transport system. For a celebrity concert that Harry Belafonte planned near Montgomery on the last night of the march, he began figuring how to rig an outdoor soundstage out of stacked coffin crates from Selma’s Negro funeral homes. Donaldson and SNCC’s Frank Soracco undertook the delicate assignment of winnowing the aspiring marchers to comply with Judge Johnson’s order, which specified that unlimited hosts at the beginning and end of the five-day trek must be constricted to three hundred designated marchers for the middle passage through Lowndes County, where Highway 80 narrowed to two lanes. This requirement posed logistical nightmares for the thousands who must confine themselves to one segment of the march, or suspend participation for several days in hostile country, and the choice of each coveted spot among the “elite” three hundred put Donaldson and Soracco into Solomon’s hot seat. They organized a census to gather information on physical fitness and movement service, then weighed competing claims among local Negroes and eminent visitors alike. They selected Rev. F. Goldthwaite Sherrill of Ipswich, Massachusetts, to represent Episcopalians, for instance, and reserved 250 places for Alabamians who had marched on or before Bloody Sunday.
King’s trust in two SNCC workers to compile the sensitive roster muted widespread rumors of estrangement. “Arguments take place in any family,” Donaldson told reporters. “They don’t mean disunity.” He complained that the press was “confusing people who want to support both organizations.” A syndicated column by Rowland Evans and Robert Novak on Thursday lumped John Lewis with James Forman as “two hotheaded extremists” who had imposed their will upon King. By agreeing to resume the Selma march, the column charged, King had “capitulated,” “abdicated,” and “knuckled under” to a SNCC group “substantially infiltrated by beatnik left-wing revolutionaries, and—worst of all—by Communists.” For King, the only grain of truth in the attack was that he did consider some recent SNCC demonstrations to be expressions of rivalry and rage, without constructive purpose. He had vented privately to colleagues that the students lacked a sense of “political timing” and maneuvered selfishly to “get a martyr” for SNCC in Alabama, but he resisted advice to rebuke them publicly. In essence, King worried that some SNCC leaders were falling away from nonviolence—from its disciplined commitment to rise above human proclivities to denigrate and separate, strike back, demonize, and incite—but he could not say so without betraying nonviolence himself. Instead, he told Rustin and others that he would work hard to communicate with SNCC leaders “sufficiently to neutralize their anxieties.” King acknowledged that stinging impatience with him had contributed to historic, creative sacrifice by students, notably the sit-ins and Freedom Rides, and he knew their attitudes toward Selma were varied and volatile. Forman, for all his bluster, agreed to suspend demonstrations in Montgomery until the march was over.
STOKELY CARMICHAEL returned to Alabama from his “two-day nervous breakdown” with a novel remedy in mind. His experimental motto was “use King,” in contrast with what he called James Forman’s “fight King,” and various other stances within SNCC such as “ignore King” (Silas Norman), “be King” (John Lewis), and “cooperate selectively with King” (Ivanhoe Donaldson). To challenge King’s appeal for mass mobilization was futile and destructive, Carmichael decided, but he thought SNCC workers might harness the popular response for their own grassroots work. On Friday, he drove into the wilds with a stack of leaflets for the upcoming march. He took along Bob Mants, who was just back from a wrenching journey home to tell his parents that he was intact after Bloody Sunday but must drop out of Morehouse College to rejoin SNCC. Outside the all-Negro Lowndes County Training School, Carmichael and Mants waved leaflets and SNCC buttons at departing students who avoided them. One student bus driver furtively signaled interest before principal R. R. Pierce expelled the visitors with notice that he had called police. Deputy Sheriff “Lux” Johnson overtook Carmichael and Mants less than two miles away and ordered them back for investigation at the school, where a state trooper already waited with the overwrought Pierce. Students and teachers gawked from a distance as Carmichael pulled the receiver cord of a CB radio from his Mississippi SNCC car and transmitted his location and ETA in brisk radio jargon.
Two teachers soon carefully followed the departing caravan to find out whether the deputy and the trooper really would let the intruders go free. Seventeen-year-old John Jackson, expecting correctly that he would lose his job as bus driver, sped home with leaflet evidence that Martin Luther King was coming to Lowndes County whether people believed it or not, as promised by these “Freedom Riders” who had appeared in a stick-shift Plymouth with a long whip antenna. His parents, Matthew and Emma Jackson, slipped away that night to discuss providential signs on a word-of-mouth summons from William Cosby. Since Cosby was considered exposed already by the visit to his store of “Joshua’s scouts” (Andrew Young and James Bevel) nearly a month ago, they gathered first at the home of Frank Haralson to settle upon the safest spot, free of vulnerable mortgage and secluded from known stooges. Rocena Haralson stayed behind to feed those who decided not to walk or drive across the way to the Haralson country store for the county’s first political meeting of Negroes.
Nearly thirty people, most of whom had tried to register Monday at the old jail, organized themselves as the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights (LCCMHR). The name, adapted from Fred Shuttlesworth’s group in Birmingham, was suggested by John Hulett, who accepted the lead role with open trepidation—partly to honor the goodbye plea of his pastor, Lorenzo Harrison, in flight from the local Klan. As secretary the founders chose Lillian McGill, who had met King during the bus boycott while working as a maid in Montgomery. Her father, Elzie, a railroad worker, was elected treasurer. Farmer Charles Smith of Calhoun served as vice chairman and chief orator, reciting scripture from his locally celebrated memory. A teacher in 1930 had begged him to take his gift for literature beyond the heights of eight grade, but Smith had turned away from impractical academics to marry Ella Mae, who had since borne them nine children.
Carmichael and Mants crept out of Lowndes County with eyes fixed on cruisers in the rearview mirror, fighting cocky mirth as well as fear. Mants brimmed with admiration for Carmichael’s quick-witted fake transmission, from well out of range, which may have puffed them up as aliens best left alone. They found Selma so overrun with early arrivals from the North that King’s own staff allowed demonstrations of restless enthusiasm. Some three hundred new visitors, arrested for picketing Mayor Smitherman’s home, refused release and insisted on being confined at the Negro Community Center, albeit with some exits unlocked. Jammed together, strangers acquainted themselves by ecumenical exchange that wore on until one New Yorker “almost began to feel up to my ears with the religion, with the intense religion bit.” Some overnight prisoners tried folk dancing. “This is stupid,” said their reluctant jailer, Wilson Baker, who groused to reporters that “at least we had good music when the Negroes were demonstrating.”
OTHER MARCH volunteers more than filled the Friday mass meeting at Brown Chapel. “No white churchman is going to be free until you’re free,” declared Rev. C. Kilmer Myers, suffragan Bishop of Michigan, who was called briefly to the pulpit along with a second Episcopal bishop, George Millard of San Francisco. Rev. F. D. Reese of Selma proclaimed applications still open for three hundred stalwarts “with good hearts, good feet, good minds, people who are willing to go all the way” to Montgomery. He announced that provisions, protections, and campsites all remained in doubt: “we might sleep on the highway, I don’t know.” Reese called the movement a jumbled leap beyond full grasp—“you will never know what it means”—but envisioned a universal grandchild looking back some day on Selma, “trying to find a channel through which he can direct his own life,” and “something within him would say, ‘You’ve got to go.’”
James Bevel followed with a featured address that mingled Selma history with provocative skeins of entertainment. He described a staff journey for King into Rochester, New York, after racial disturbances the previous summer, and being asked “what’s wrong with Negroes—they’ve gone crazy all over the country? And I said, ‘Do you know Negroes?’ They said, ‘Oh, yeah, we know our Negroes.’ ‘What Negroes do you know?’” To much laughter, Bevel recounted efforts to educate white city fathers about race by taking Kodak executives “down on the corner with me” to listen to a local jukebox: “I can’t get no sleep, and it’s crowded on the street / I got to move, I got to find myself a quieter place.” Bevel quoted the soul tune by Garnet Mimms & the Enchanters, then recalled in Brown Chapel, “I said, ‘Do you hear what he’s saying? If you listen to him sing in the spring time, he’ll tell you what he’s gonna do in the summer.’” He preached seriously for a time on the danger of another “letdown” period in history, as after the Civil War. “You cannot legislate deals and go home without dealing with sicknesses in society,” Bevel shouted. Something was wrong when Sheriff Clark “will take two or three hundred Negro children and run ’em down the highway for six miles and leave ’em in the country,” or when sight of a pastor like James Reeb enraged a community to homicide. “Unless we profoundly address ourselves to the hate in the white community,” he added, a voting rights bill “won’t have any meaning. So we have a job to do. I’m gonna do my job.” He turned to Bishop Myers on the podium. “I’m gonna give you a suggestion, bishop,” said Bevel. “Call your missionaries from Africa.” Above startled laughter, he called out impishly, “Lots of people in Africa are killing folks, but at least when they kill somebody, they’re trying to get a meal! Sheriff Clark, he doesn’t need a meal.”
King stayed away from the mass meeting to battle arrangements for the ordeal just ahead. Through Andrew Young, he sent an urgent request for Rabbi Abraham Heschel to join the first day’s exodus. “By all means,” Heschel replied from New York, “but I have a problem with Shabbat.” Orthodox Jewish practice banned regular activities including travel until the close of sabbath at dusk on Saturday, which made it impossible to reach Selma in time. Conflict gnawed at Heschel, the scion of a long line of Hasidic rebbes from Poland, who had fled Europe ahead of Nazi persecution. Across the chasm between their respective backgrounds, he and King had found seeds of a surprising bond at a historic Chicago conference on religion and race in 1963, when they brought almost interchangeable sermons on the claims of prophetic justice. Each had railed against a national religious climate of resigned, trivial piety, prodding some two thousand eminent clergy to inflict healing discomfort on the world’s racial divisions. “To act in the spirit of religion is to unite what lies apart,” Heschel had proclaimed, “to remember that humanity as a whole is God’s beloved child.” Now that a flood of response at last descended upon Selma, Heschel consulted fellow authorities about Talmudic exceptions for saving and risking lives, and whether dire circumstances might permit a person of frail health to modify strict Shabbat prohibitions by substitute ritual, such as pushing elevator buttons with the point of an elbow.
HELICOPTERS AND motorcades shuttled a sleep-deprived President Johnson to visit friends at five different ranches on his first day home in Texas. From Washington, aides bombarded him in transit with pressure to initiate troop movements in Alabama Friday night. Against Johnson’s political desire to conceal or delay all moves until his own press announcement on Saturday, Pentagon commanders warned that the advance concentration of Army transport planes was “likely to leak some time during the night anyway,” and government lawyers advised that his formal signature must precede even preliminary notice to call out the Alabama National Guard. “Cy Vance strongly—repeat: strongly—insists he needs full day tomorrow in order to mesh Guard with regular Army,” Bill Moyers cabled. The President, giving in, flew from Judge A. W. Moursund’s late supper to work on documents amassed at the LBJ Ranch.
Johnson signed the two necessary orders at 1:28 and 1:30 A.M. Saturday, resting on precedent dating back to George Washington’s suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion in 1792, and veterans beneath Alabama flight paths soon recognized the loud drone of C-130 aircraft. Sixty-eight of them landed through the night at either end of the march route—the 720th MP Battalion at Craig Air Force Base just outside Selma, from Fort Hood, Texas, and the 503rd MP Battalion at Maxwell Air Force Base near Montgomery, from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The President retired at three o’clock and was awakened at 6:34 to prepare for his morning press conference. Outdoors, with Lady Bird sitting nearby under a shawl, he declared it an “unwelcome duty” to assume any part of a state’s responsibility for public order. He said nearly four thousand assorted soldiers would be ready by Sunday, along with two field hospitals he hoped would not be needed. “Over the next several days the eyes of the nation will be upon Alabama,” said Johnson, “and the eyes of the world will be on America.” He invoked Lincoln’s confidence that Americans would be “touched by the better angels of our nature.”
IN SELMA, nearly two hundred clergy formed at midday on Saturday for what Bishop Myers of Michigan called “somewhat of a family quarrel” among the nation’s Episcopalians. They walked one block toward St. Paul’s Church before a police blockade stopped them and Wilson Baker announced that Bishop C. C. J. Carpenter of Alabama refused permission for visiting bishops to hold Communion service at any altar within his diocese. He waved off their explanations of canon law. “Don’t talk to me,” he said. “I’m not the bishop. I’m not even an Episcopalian.” Besides, Baker added, he could not “for your own sake” let a march venture near the hostile possemen downtown.
The columns turned back to Brown Chapel, where the bishops conducted Communion services on the sidewalk with vessels borrowed from an Episcopal mission for Negroes in Birmingham. The rhythmic chants of their liturgy echoed among charged sounds and spectacles against the grain of normalcy, like a New Orleans funeral. Local children spurred clergymen in piggyback rides on the playground. A one-legged man on crutches stared from the church steps, wearing a yarmulke. Twenty-four portable toilets sat on a row of flatbed trucks parked on the street. Someone announced that homemade sausages and fifty more sandwiches were ready from the volunteer cooks inside, where Viola Liuzzo processed newcomers at one of the welcome tables less than a day after her own arrival from Wayne State. Army Specialist E-4 Hank Thomas wandered carefully in civilian clothes, avoiding recognition. A charter member of SNCC—one of the thirteen original Freedom Riders, Stokely Carmichael’s cellmate nearly four years ago at Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Penitentiary—Thomas did not want to explain to nonviolent comrades why he had accepted Army conscription, even as a medic, nor admit to any stray military officer that he had slipped his pass from Fort Benning for one last taste of the movement before shipping out to Asia with the First Air Cavalry.
“By late Saturday,” wrote march participant and historian Charles Fager, “green army jeeps had begun rolling through Selma, dropping off soldiers carrying rifles tipped with fixed bayonets at street corners along the route to the armory.” Behind them came Alabama National Guard vehicles with “U.S.” painted freshly on the sides to advertise federalized command. A New York Times correspondent found the atmosphere among the soldiers “not particularly tense.” Festive hymns pulsed from Brown Chapel, where both Bevel and Diane Nash were to give evening speeches, but one Boston College student walked alone into segregationist ambush from an alley: beaten to the ground, yanked up by his hair, sliced on the right cheek with a razor blade.
FBI agents reported the Leo Haley incident (“required three stitches”) to Washington among threats and warnings outside the usual conduits. A secretary at the Justice Department, then a lawyer, each reported an anonymous caller who said he owned a small plane and would “get that damn nigger Martin Luther King” from the air. Director Hoover, immensely relieved that military units had drawn the exposed security duties, pitched his Bureau with compensatory enthusiasm into intelligence work behind the lines. “Immediately contact airlines, railroads, bus lines, informants, contacts in Negro and other organizations,” he ordered, and a response “from all of our field offices” advised on Saturday that “a total of 1,856 persons are already in Selma or actually have departed and are en route.” They included ten priests from Connecticut and thirty-five Southern Methodist University students on a Greyhound bus from Dallas. Another sixty-three groups “totaling 1,011 in number” were said to be getting ready. Behind these absurd specifics—a standard FBI requirement in case Hoover wanted to assume a precisely omniscient pose—the report hedged with confidential sources estimating thousands “on standby” or coming “on their own.”
A more comprehensive, fourteen-page FBI analysis prepared Director Hoover for Saturday night’s annual Gridiron Club dinner. Assistant Director DeLoach summarized the Bureau’s massive file of suspicious “Connections and Affiliations” on the part of NAACP director Roy Wilkins, dating back to the 1930s—clippings from the Communist Party’s Daily Worker newspaper quoting him against colonialism and for the Scottsboro Boys, informants who branded Wilkins an outright Communist or follower of a “Communist line,” an agent who overheard him remark in 1944 that Japanese immigrants had been “the best truck farmers in America.” Still, DeLoach reported that Wilkins had been reliably anti-Communist during the Cold War, and, most important, had praised the Director without fail. Thus briefed, dressed formally in the required white tie and tails, Hoover accepted his assigned seat next to Wilkins for the capital’s stag ritual of political satire. They joined Vice President Humphrey, the entire Cabinet, four Supreme Court Justices, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, nearly a hundred members of Congress, and assorted celebrity guests including rookie pro quarterback Joe Namath—leaving one seat conspicuously empty in the Statler Hilton ballroom.
News stories speculated that President Johnson, ever sensitive to caricature, had contrived his Texas retreat expressly to avoid the obligation to smile through the merciless barbs reserved for the chief executive on Gridiron Club night. Members of the Washington press corps lampooned all powers in a spirited musical revue. One reporter impersonated Secretary McNamara in rimless glasses and hair slicked back perfectly like his facts, singing to the tune of “Heat Wave”:
We’re havin’ a small war, a hole in the wall war
The Buddhists are risin’, it isn’t surprisin’
The natives will say they can can Khanh
We’re fightin’ ’round Saigon, wish bygones were bygone
And though we can fight there, displaying our might there
They certainly could can Khanh
Freshman senator Robert Kennedy watched himself struggle as an elfin schoolboy to master the shift in national diction since his brother’s assassination. “Today, ah’m all the way with LBJ,” his character drawled with Bostonian vowels that diminished until a Senate tutor exclaimed, “Ah thank he’s got it,” and the whole cast broke into an LBJ fandango to the tune of “The Rain in Spain.”
THERE WERE no skits about the Selma influx of Negroes and clergy, which resisted humanizing parody more than Vietnam or Dallas. Outsiders to the movement remained inhibited, uninformed, and sullen to such extremes that the South’s largest newspaper literally struck itself dumb. By sudden corporate edict, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution resolved to boycott the final march in Alabama notwithstanding the proud regional credo on its front page: “Covers Dixie Like the Dew.” Top editors Ralph McGill and Eugene Patterson nursed glasses of whiskey in Atlanta, glumly stupefied that they were forbidden to send even one reporter to join the legions of worldwide press. They dismissed as a smokescreen the fluctuating rationale for the order—worries about libel suits, admonishments to hold back until newsworthy violence occurred.
“Gene, let’s go over and catch the bus down to Selma,” said McGill. He proposed to sneak off that night and write dispatches as though they were front-line reporters again.
Patterson restrained his illustrious mentor, who, since becoming editor of the Constitution in 1938, had wrestled with the race issue in prize-winning columns—sometimes accepting segregation in the hope of moderate reform, sometimes chafing against acquiescence as “the most melancholy aspect” of Southern life. “Pappy, that would be an open rebellion,” Patterson warned. They would have to resign if they could not get stories into their own newspaper, he said, and likely be fired if they could, especially since many of their reporters already knew of the ban on coverage of the march.
To his later regret, Patterson talked them out of rash defiance. They ached instead for the biggest Southern story of their lifetime, which portended a wholly different order with some five million newly enfranchised voters, and consoled themselves with visions of the runaway assignment. “Damn, it would be fun,” said McGill.