March 21–24, 1965
FRED Calhoun, parish custodian at Our Lady of the Universe, picked up a presumed box of trash and heard it ticking. He set the box carefully on the ground and hurried inside to early Sunday mass. Father Edward Foster appealed for calm. Catholic discipline did not permit mass to be abandoned once begun, he said, and besides, Negroes were accustomed to bombs on Dynamite Hill. Foster led a procession outside to complete the service on a portable altar, while Birmingham police relayed an emergency appeal to U.S. Army units on alert for the Selma march. By the time a demolition team arrived from the Third Army’s 142nd Ordnance Detachment (Explosives Disposal) at Fort McClellan, two more ticking green boxes were discovered nearby—one at a mortuary owned by A. G. Gaston, whose motel had been bombed while hosting King and his staff in 1963, another at the home of attorney Arthur Shores, which had been bombed twice during that campaign to break segregation. Master Sergeant Marvin Byron and Specialist 6 Robert Presley manually disarmed the first bomb of fifty-eight sticks of dynamite (forty whole, eighteen partial) set to go off at noon, and then, observed a New York Times correspondent from a distance, “dashed up the hill to Mr. Shores’s house.”
Alarms from Birmingham flashed through temporary command posts in Selma and Montgomery over special hotlines into the Pentagon War Room. Bulletins by other channels heightened morning chaos in the Selma home where Wilson Baker himself more than once crawled under the floor joists to check for threatened bombs. Jean Jackson coped by turning out specialized breakfasts from her kitchen—eggs sunny-side-up for King, with the yolks semigooey and the whites firmly “together,” as he put it, no toast or bacon for the bearded rabbi on the front sofa, only crackers and an egg poached separately in a clean pan. Nobel Laureate Ralph Bunche, whose stomach condition was aggravated by nerves, received cottage cheese and scrambled eggs without salt. Jackson stepped over sleepers, including a doctor posted outside her small “VIP” bedroom, amid subdued and exotic pandemonium. Abraham Heschel, the rabbi, made a space at a window for morning prayers in Hebrew; a bishop prayed nearby in another language, probably Latin. A blanket, a pipe, and trademark orange peelings marked the spot where James Forman had slept under the dining room table. King made teasing estimates about how long Ralph Abernathy’s imminent “grand entrance” would monopolize the bathroom, which drove Bevel to retrieve his pillow from the tub. Staff members and government officials pushed inside among long-lost friends.
FBI agents recorded that King’s party reached the crowds outside Brown Chapel at 10:58 A.M. Selma time, already late. Burke Marshall, retired from the Justice Department but present as President Johnson’s personal emissary, radioed estimates that the march would be delayed at least another hour pending arrival of expected dignitaries and an overdue charter plane from Germany. At First Baptist, doctors completed medical exams on the three hundred people chosen to make the extended march. On the steps of Brown Chapel, clergy of varied traditions used megaphones to deliver a series of homilies—Heschel from the Hebrew scriptures. A high delegation of Episcopalians returned from St. Paul’s, rebuffed again by churchmen who defended with dogged scholasticism a vestry policy of open worship for “all but Negro laity.” A delegation of Hawaiians arrived waving aloft a huge banner—“Hawaii Knows Integration Works”—and distributing garlands of traditional leis. King wore one around his neck as he knelt to pose with two of his favorite marching third-graders, Sheyann Webb and her friend Rachel West, after they led a freedom song.
At 12:15 P.M., Attorney General Katzenbach funneled to the White House a disagreement between Army intelligence, which predicted that the march “will be moving out” before one o’clock, and his own Justice Department officials, who agreed with Hoover’s FBI that it would take longer, maybe ruinously past two, which would make it impossible to reach camp before dark. A correspondent for The New Yorker noted marchers talking wryly among themselves about the movement’s own private time zone called “C. P. T., Colored People Time.” Nevertheless, Bevel and Andrew Young dressed the billowing front ranks into columns roughly of six, marshals in armbands squeezed the formation half a mile back down Sylvan Street, and the whole contraption lurched forward at 12:46 P.M. Photographers took portraits from the back rails of an open truck moving slowly in advance. Camera crews carried enough spare film to support a continuous shot of the leaders, as it was already a whispered joke that the networks would fire anyone who missed impact footage of a sniper’s shot. Ivanhoe Donaldson posted a moving shield of volunteer marshals slightly ahead of King on both flanks, without his permission, to minimize direct sight lines.
With nineteen jeeps and four military trucks in rear escort, and two helicopters hovering above, the march of three thousand followed the usual short route downtown. Hostile males among the spectators were quieter than at previous demonstrations, more inclined to heckle from their cars. One in a red roadster played “Dixie” at full volume, as broadcast just then by a cooperative radio station. Another aired a sarcastic “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” over four loudspeakers. Demonstrative females seemed comparatively undaunted by the intervening rows of Army MPs. Two matrons in their fifties shouted to each other in mock discovery: “You ever seen a white nigger?” “Look at the white niggers!” A well-dressed woman got out of her Chrysler at an intersection, stalked forward, stuck out her tongue decisively, then drove off. A mother with two small children led a chorus of inquisition about the sexual appetites of female marchers. What nuns in particular “heard concerning their chastity out of the mouths of the white women of Alabama,” wrote two observers for The Saturday Evening Post, “cannot be transmitted in public print.”
More esoteric dissent shunned the great sendoff. Famously within the movement, Silas Norman shellacked the floor of the Selma SNCC office. Consistent with his promise not to lapse again from SNCC’s debated consensus weeks earlier—that the proposed march to Montgomery was a pointless captive of King’s showboat national politics—Norman never would claim a place in historic commemorations decades later, and this day he tended chores in studied disregard for the tumult passing by the window outside. Well up ahead, at a rump press conference on the courthouse steps, Sheriff Clark pointed out John Doar with his predecessor Burke Marshall alongside the approaching front ranks. “The federal government has given them everything they wanted,” Clark said morosely, to dispirited assent from fifty shelved possemen in the background.
THE LINES turned left at Broad Street, away from Sheriff Clark and up Pettus Bridge for the third time since March 7. At the crest in full uniform waited Brigadier General Henry Graham, an everyday Realtor from Birmingham, who twice before had followed orders dutifully to safeguard historic transitions—rescuing trapped Freedom Riders cooperatively with John Doar in 1961, integrating the University of Alabama through Nicholas Katzenbach’s nationally televised confrontation with Governor Wallace in 1963. Graham issued commands shifting primary escort duty from the 720th MP Battalion to his own federalized Alabama National Guard, 31st Infantry Division, and the march lines started downward through brisk winds above the Alabama River. Bright sunshine already had raised temperatures well above overnight lows near freezing. No blockade of troopers loomed ahead. By coincidence, seminarians Jonathan Daniels and Judith Upham approached Selma from the opposite direction at the end of their long return drive from Massachusetts. Heading up Pettus Bridge, they waved a salute to the last columns coming down to the flat ground on the Montgomery side.
Fearful tedium evaporated, recorded a journalist, “and the march entered another mood—jubilation.” Assistant Peace Corps Director Harris Wofford trotted among latecomers to join a rear contingent of high school students who clapped in ragtime to a hymn: “I’m gonna march when the spirit say march…sing when the spirit say sing…vote when the spirit say vote…die when the spirit say die.” Reporters counted at least four other songs going simultaneously over the extended line to the front. An exhilarated Rabbi Heschel “felt my legs were praying,” and kept pace with a couple from California who pushed the youngest participant in a stroller. The oldest marcher—Jimmie Lee Jackson’s eighty-two-year-old grandfather, Cager Lee—waved blithely to unfriendly stares from the shoulders of Highway 80. National Guard jeeps leapfrogged forward to stop traffic for security at rural intersections, where FBI agents photographed seventeen cars decorated with crudely whitewashed signs, including one marked “Coonsville, USA” that cruised in tandem with a state trooper.
Security forces scrambled briefly when a tethered horse, frightened by helicopter noise, pulled up a road sign and galloped wildly toward the march with the metal post clanging behind on the pavement. Roughly two miles out, a federal observer who saw distant marchers felled as though by a scythe signed off Border Patrol radio to investigate on foot—“I’m going out of service!”—then returned minutes later to broadcast a chagrined all-clear. “Apparently,” he said, “the Negroes just decided to take a break all of a sudden, and just started lying down on the grass.” After the reclining multitude ate bologna sandwiches—King in a dark suit, overcoat, and new hiking boots—hard pavement troubled the march more than danger. Backpacks grew heavy and assorted protections awkward—yellow hardhats, umbrellas, one football helmet. For stragglers who dropped from the lines by the score, sore and sick, marshals arranged transport back to Selma in private automobiles with National Guard escorts.
Justice Department officials debated whether and how to streamline the cumbersome relay for excess marchers due to be shipped back to Selma for the night. John Doar argued that federal assistance beyond court-mandated security would undermine the department’s impartial advocacy for voting rights. Deputy Attorney General Ramsey Clark overruled him. Safe meant smooth, he said, and the President wanted no effort spared. From maps showing that tracks passed near the first overnight campsite, Clark contacted officials of the Western Alabama Railroad by radio to hire a special train. Callers promptly threatened to blow it up. Hushed emergency orders halted the run fifteen miles outside Montgomery until Army units could fan out along bridges and trestles ahead.
Seven miles out of Selma, the march was obliged to detour south to the closest available Negro freehold in Dallas County. The front ranks that stepped into David Hall’s field at 5:07 P.M. found advance workers bustling to raise four large field tents, including one for women donated by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Federalized Guardsmen from Alabama’s 156th MPs took up positions around the perimeter. Professor Elwyn Smith of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary arrived after dusk in a yellow Hertz truck with three tons of supper—spaghetti, cornbread, pork and beans—prepared by cooks at Green Street Baptist and transported in king-sized galvanized garbage cans by Smith’s round-the-clock food crew of twelve. Vehicles evacuated day marchers directly to Selma or across Highway 80 to the rendezvous junction of Tyler, where the nine-car train special loaded a thousand people at 75 cents apiece for an express trip into Selma, arriving at 8:45 P.M. Leaders canceled meetings at the campsite so that a remnant of some four hundred could try to bed down, plagued by a shortage of blankets and only one oil-barrel fire against the cold. “A few marchers made their way to the loft of a barn beside the Hall farmhouse, to profit from the heat given off by the animals in the stalls below,” wrote Renata Adler for The New Yorker. “Five guinea hens perched in a tree outside the barn. The march’s security patrol wandered about with walkie-talkies.”
BEFORE MIDNIGHT, Bill Moyers notified President Johnson from the White House that Army demolition teams had disarmed a total of four large bombs at Negro sites in Birmingham. Two more turned up Monday, as the President finished an extended Texas weekend of rest by manic exuberance. He told a yarn about how he had begun a penniless rebellion trip at the age of seventeen by charging cases of pork and beans surreptitiously to his father, so that for weeks “we ate pork and beans three times a day, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner” on the runaway hitchhike to California. “I guess that’s why I like them so much now,” he said, exhorting hesitant guests through a reprise menu at the LBJ Ranch. A twenty-car motorcade of Secret Service agents, friends, and reporters chased dust at high speeds across the Texas Hill Country into a breathless, jarring skid behind Johnson, who stopped to call his foreman about a newborn goat kid that lay abandoned in the road.
PROFESSOR SMITH’S food truck stirred camp with galvanized cans of oatmeal before six o’clock Monday for an early start. Marchers shivered awake to 28 degrees with heavily frosted ground; by noon, many were stripping down to T-shirts in the bright cool of Alabama’s early spring, and, having covered another seven miles, some walked barefoot to soothe aching feet. From the Pentagon, McNamara’s special assistant Joe Califano circulated the first bihourly bulletin to top government officials: “There are about 392 people in the column, of which approximately 45 are white…. During the last hour, a bus from Selma brought 40 fresh marchers to the group and returned 40 tired marchers to Selma.” Helicopters buzzed a lone Piper Cub that dived toward the march but swerved off course to drop thousands of yellow segregationist leaflets into the desolate woods around Soapstone Creek. The military escort “noticeably increased” before the Lowndes County boundary, reported the Washington Post. A demolition team took lead position ahead of the press truck, reinforced by eight new Army jeeps and several staff cars. Major General Carl Turner, provost marshal of the Army, emerged to walk now and then on the shoulder.
At the next rest stop, dissent greeted Andrew Young’s announcement that lines must pare down to comply with Judge Johnson’s limit of three hundred. Nonselected teenagers protested that it should be a Negro march to reflect their long record of sacrifices in Selma. A white woman agreed, and Young was obliged to compose a mini-sermon on two points: first, that whites offered practical protection as lightning rods for attention, second, that it would be unprincipled to exclude them. As he did, Ivanhoe Donaldson and the marshals culled their chosen Negro veterans by county: 157 from Dallas (Selma), eighty-nine from Perry (home of Jimmie Lee Jackson), twenty-one from Wilcox, fifteen from Marengo. There were none from Lowndes. Beyond the few outsiders already designated, such as Episcopalian “Goldy” Sherrill, Hosea Williams compacted a final category of “Dr. King’s Special Guests” to ten, including Harris Wofford and an aide to U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii. Buses returned to Selma with some hundred people—exhilarated, resentful, relieved, some vowing to be back—from the spot where Highway 80 narrowed to two lanes for twenty-two miles through Lowndes County.
“Pick it up, now!” shouted King. FBI agents counted 308 marchers, twenty-two of them white. Califano’s “Report No. 2 as of 1400” told McNamara and Katzenbach that one-third were female, and noted the late arrival of SNCC’s John Lewis among columns that moved three abreast over Big Swamp Creek on a narrow ribbon of land, through “opaque waters dotted with lily pads and floating algae,” wrote Charles Fager, “dead trees standing with the bark gone and the wood weathered smooth, long strands of gray moss fluttering,” then gently back up into dry and lonely square miles of scrub pasture, barely green.
Openness made the sun unexpectedly cruel, so that 250 of the marchers needed medical treatment by nightfall for sunburn and heatstroke. King removed his green marching hat with earflaps and placed it on John Lewis, saying he needed to protect his shaved head wound from Bloody Sunday. Negro teenagers wrote “VOTE” on their foreheads with thick white sun cream. Sister Mary Leoline of Kansas City, the only nun to walk the whole way, wilted inside a layered habit with a starched wimple that framed her round face, puffy and burned severely red. Jim Leatherer, a settlement house worker from Saginaw, Michigan, hopped on one leg with crutches, hands and armpits raw, lips cracked from the sun. Freed of Selma’s street hecklers, who had mocked him with a parade cadence of “Left, left, left,” he disclosed miles along that he sometimes challenged female companions not to be put off by his fleshy right stump, causing Worth Long of SNCC to howl with semi-feigned indignation that white men stooped to guilt hustling, which was controversial within the movement as applied to white women. Leatherer said he was a democrat. Bevel and others coerced him into the medical van for spells of rest, but marshal Soracco chased weary dawdlers off a latrine truck as bad for morale. An itinerant local preacher of seventy-two years urged the teenagers forward, asking why they needed five days to go fifty-four miles. “I’m used to walking,” he said with bravado. “I could do it in a day and a half.”
BYSTANDERS IN the landscape were scarce until the columns approached the invisible hamlet of Trickem Fork. From the shade of two oak trees that rose on the horizon, a score of Negroes moved to the center of Highway 80, having waited four hours. Will Jackson, seventy-five, unaccountably left the door of his prized pickup standing wide open to peer intently back toward Selma. Twenty-two years earlier, he had stood numb near the courthouse lawn in Hayneville as his young daughter Mary Lee wrestled to the ground and choked a wealthy white farmer for putting his arm around her again. With former Sheriff Woodruff refusing the farmer’s pleas for help, saying he had brought the scrap on himself, Mary Lee Jackson had won scars of lifelong conflict—proudly vindicating family lessons never to run from a fight of honor, but fleeing permanently for Detroit within days, sadly aware what it would cost her father and brothers to defend her in Lowndes County. Her mother, Mary Jane, who had wailed through the public commotion, now absorbed as revelation the slowly advancing host of helicopters, jeeps, marchers, trucks, soldiers, medical vans, and reporters. “Lordy!” she cried. “I didn’t ever thought I’d seen anythin’ like this!”
Mattie Lee Moorer threw her arms around King’s neck, singing a biblical hymn of ancestors about “numbers no man can know.” She later recalled that he “got right in with it” on the music, but complained that “the ladies took Dr. King away from me.” The elderly swirled about—Mattie Ruth Mallard, Will Jackson’s brother Gully, and Lula May, among “1800s people” born in the last century—and barefoot children scampered from the trees to be part of the excitement.
“I done kissed him!” cried one of the older women, in tears.
“Who? Who you done kissed?” shouted others.
“The Martin Luther King,” said Juanita Huggins. “I done kissed the Martin Luther King!” A strong singer, Huggins launched a new song: “Lord, I Cannot Stay on This Highway by Myself.”
Andrew Young tried to keep the columns moving past the knot of emotion. “Look at that!” he called out, asking reporters to notice the broken windows and missing roof shingles of Mt. Gillard Missionary Baptist Church, just off the highway. “That’s why we’re marching.” Young urged the Lowndes County residents to keep seeking the vote. While some reporters tried to interview them on the road, others who lingered to inspect the church discovered to their amazement that the unmarked shack nearby on brick stilts was the functioning public school for Negroes, Rolen Elementary, with an outhouse, rusty corrugated roof, rotted steps, and patches of Alabama license plates nailed askew over holes in the floor. Jesse “Note” Favors told reporters he had helped plant the overhanging oak trees as a student in 1931, when the saplings “weren’t no bigger ’round than my wrists.”
Coretta King joined the march late Monday from a concert in North Carolina, bringing newspaper accounts that she and King read side by side down the highway. LeRoy Collins fell alongside as mediator, bringing details of Governor Wallace’s latest efforts to restrict the final rally in Montgomery. Near White Hall, more Lowndes County residents waved and even cheered the march. Napoleon Mays, a deacon at Mt. Gillard and distant relative of Morehouse College president Benjamin Mays, joined the ranks with a small flock of nieces, nephews, and his own children. Frank Haralson hastened boldly from a pine tree to greet the columns head-on, extending his hand. Ralph Abernathy asked whether he had ever seen Martin Luther King.
“No, sir,” said Haralson.
“Well, you’re shaking hands with him now,” said Abernathy. Haralson drew himself up into a wide-eyed stare.
“Will you march with us?” King asked gently.
“I’ll walk one step, anyway,” Haralson replied. On his cane, which supported an imperfectly healed broken leg, he walked the last two and a half of Monday’s sixteen miles to camp in a cow pasture infested with red ants. Workers from one of the volunteers committees poured kerosene on the mounds, and actor Pernell Roberts of the television show Bonanza helped raise the four tents. Rosie Steele, a seventy-eight-year-old widow, confided to a Negro reporter what had changed her mind about opening the property she had accumulated during World War II, “when prices was up” at her country store. Steele recalled “telling my daughter the other day” that to her, President Johnson had been “just another white Southerner when I heard him talking about Vietnam,” but then came the speech about Selma, “saying we had the right to vote, to march clear to Montgomery if we wanted to,” and she decided she could not refuse King’s scouts. “If the president can take a stand,” said Steele, “I guess I can, too.”
After dark, a teenager sneaked under a tent flap and asked nervously how to start a youth movement like Selma’s in Lowndes County. Some restless marchers sneaked the other way past military sentries to gather outside the country store. A convoy of eight white college students pulled up and got out of their cars, prompting security marshals, including a minister from New Jersey, to join the standoff. Asked what they wanted, one curious visitor said, “I don’t know,” and an awkwardly honest conversation turned sour on the question of motive. Students from Tennessee and Georgia concluded that the march aimed for hatred, not freedom, saying they heard white families were firing their maids. A student from Alabama insisted that the male marchers were being paid $15 a day, and recited precise lightning gossip that one female marcher was hospitalized already with $1,500 in her pockets from sleeping with forty-one niggers. To incredulous requests for names and verification, he politely shrugged, “Well, actually, ma’am, she bled to death.”
King broke away twice from the Lowndes County bivouac. With Abernathy, he rode back to Jean Jackson’s kitchen in Selma and soaked blistered feet in a tub. After returning to overnight at Steele’s campsite, he excused himself to raise funds for the march by a quick charter flight to Cleveland. “Mr. Young is in charge until his return,” Califano’s Pentagon “Report No. 6” advised in Washington, where President Johnson, back from Texas, watched the successful space launch of Gemini 3. Military control of the Alabama protection mission passed “at 0600” from Selma’s Team Alpha to Team Bravo based in Montgomery, Califano noted, adding that early rains caused trouble with mud: “One latrine truck is still stuck but should be on the road shortly.”
At 10:25 Tuesday morning, the Lowndes County skies opened. “It hit with drops as big as quarters, pouring down on them with a great clap of sound,” wrote one journalist from a trail car, “and coming back off the blacktop and crushed-gravel highway in a spray as high as their knees.” Scattered white hecklers shouted from umbrellas that “a nigger won’t stay out in the rain,” but the lines slowed only until the continuing deluge saturated clothes and bedrolls beyond worry. Teenagers picked up the cadence for an uninhibited wet march. “A few youngsters put on cornflakes boxes for hats,” reported the New York Times. “Their freedom songs rang out louder than ever.” An old minister added merriment with a spontaneous shouted prayer of thanks to “Reverend Abernickel” for leading the exodus by flood, even though Abernathy did not march in King’s absence. Halfway to Montgomery, on request from John Doar through Pentagon channels, Guardsmen in splattered ponchos along the route obediently turned outward toward the countryside, acknowledging external rather than internal danger.
WHILE MEETING with the House leadership, President Johnson first deflected a call from columnist Drew Pearson. “Just tell him no—tell him I’ve got the Security Council right after…this is just the worst day of the year for me,” he whispered to the operator, but changed his mind to give Pearson a soft, off-the-record telephone monologue on Vietnam (“I can’t send up a white flag”) that ran on for fifteen minutes and pushed him late for a photograph visit. To British foreign minister Michael Stewart and his arriving entourage, Johnson continued seamlessly that some people wanted him to “bomb the hell out of China,” some wanted him to run yellow, and Barry Goldwater, his defeated Republican opponent in 1964, wanted him to defoliate North Vietnam with nuclear bombs to “clear the brush where I can see” infiltrators on the trails. “Sometimes I just get all hunkered up like a jackass in a hailstorm,” Johnson told the nonplussed diplomats, veering between picaresque anecdote and masterful synopsis well into the appointed time for Stewart to deliver a luncheon speech elsewhere. “He is power sublimated, like Niagara Falls,” U.S. ambassador to England David K. E. Bruce recorded in his diary. “He read a long letter from an American soldier in Vietnam to his ‘Mom,’ strongly supporting American policy…. The cameramen made their onslaught in two waves. Then the Foreign Minister was released, after ninety minutes of an experience he is never likely to forget.”
Johnson started a late lunch with Secretary McNamara as “Report No. 7” from the Pentagon tracked the Selma march across the turnoff to Hayneville. “It is still raining,” Califano advised. On cue from the carrier Intrepid, the President broke away to congratulate Gemini 3 astronauts Virgil Grissom and John Young for completing three earth orbits in five hours to Atlantic Ocean splashdown only sixty miles off target. Shortly thereafter, as crews removed the immense bank of temporary cameras from the Oval Office, he received a decisive conference call from the House Speaker’s caucus about legislative negotiations on the bill to create Medicare. “I think we’ve got you something,” reported committee chairman Wilbur Mills.
“Wonderful,” said Johnson. He reviewed the agreement by imaginary inquiry: “All right now, my doctor…he pumps my stomach out to see if I’ve got any ulcers…does he charge what he wants to?”
“No, he can’t quite charge what he wants to,” replied the administration’s chief negotiator, Wilbur Cohen. Medical bills would be routed through insurance companies—“somebody like Blue Shield”—in a compromise arrangement “to be sure the government wasn’t regulating the fees directly.” Patients would pay a percentage of the costs.
“All right,” said Johnson. “That keeps your hypochondriacs out.” He cross-examined the negotiators on their mechanism to mollify the doctors and insurance companies without breaking the new Medicare budget, then pressed for a vote before each group mobilized against the shared revenue stream. “Now remember this,” he instructed Cohen. “Nine out of ten things I get in trouble on, is because they lay around…. It stinks, it’s just like a dead cat on the door…. You either bury that cat or get some life in it.” He reminded House Speaker John McCormack of a saying by his predecessor, Sam Rayburn, that a finished committee report was a dead cat “stinkin’ every day. And let’s get it passed before they can get their letters in.” He spurred on Majority Leader Carl Albert, and promised Wilbur Mills to cover the projected costs without deficit, saying “four hundred million is not going to separate us friends when it’s for health, when it’s for sickness, because there’s a greater demand, and I know it, for this bill than for all my other program put together…and it will last longer.” Johnson told Mills a soft Texas yarn while munching a bit of sandwich, then worked himself back up to his war cry: “And for God’s sake, don’t let the dead cat stand on your porch! Mr. Rayburn used to say they stunk and they stunk and they stunk.” Mills averred that his own method was to seize the voting majority, by which time the President was purring again. “I know where you learned it,” he said. “Let me talk to the Speaker.”
THE ALABAMA marchers sloshed that afternoon into campsite three, which the FBI classified as “a sea of mud” on pastureland owned by Birmingham entrepreneur A. G. Gaston at the eastern end of Lowndes County. Army demolition units sank to their ankles combing the field for bombs. The logistics committee located level high ground to pitch only two of the four field tents, which were uninhabitable until donated bales of hay and straw could be heaved from trucks by chain relay and spread into flimsy rafts of dryness. Conditions blotted out group activities including a “community sing” for morale. Folksinger Odetta found Pete Seeger curled up asleep.
Episcopal priest Morris Samuel of Los Angeles recruited seminarian Jonathan Daniels among extra security marshals for a night of stress. One marcher who broke down into shouts and seizures was hauled off to treatment for “emotional exhaustion.” Another fell violently ill, and FBI inspector Joseph Sullivan only partly calmed fears of deliberate food poison by tracing a strange taste to extra creosote cleaner in a rented water truck, which previously had hauled sewage. (The U.S. Army supplied water the rest of the way, despite the misgivings of some marchers and the legal scruples of John Doar.) Wet Guardsmen on perimeter duty broke discipline to call people “nigger,” and one reportedly spit in the face of a priest. A Northern white pilgrim, desperate for sleep, quarreled vainly with the perpetual singers, shouting, “You goddam kids, shut up!” Two photographers scuffled for position to catch a tilted Unitarian, who had dozed off seated, at the instant he toppled into the muck.
In Cleveland that evening, a police guard arrested one of twenty-eight pickets at the Hotel Sheraton for charging with a Confederate flag up to King’s room on the ninth floor. Downstairs in the giant banquet hall, energy from compressed history piled newer agendas ahead of recent ones. King told 2,200 paying guests that proceeds intended to honor his Nobel Prize would be used to defray SCLC’s $50,000 cost for the Selma-to-Montgomery march, and that beyond a second landmark law on segregation he looked soon to address “unjust conditions” of race nationwide, outside the South. “In the world as it is today,” he said, “America can no longer afford an anemic-type democracy.” The governor of Ohio sent a personal donation to the banquet for presentation by Negro publisher William Walker, whose family in Selma once owned the café where Rev. James Reeb ate supper before the ambush two Tuesdays earlier. Ohio’s largest newspaper, the Plain Dealer, highlighted blistered feet on the front page—“Dr. King, in Cleveland, Tries Not to Limp”—and reported as a breakthrough that the diocese authorized Catholic clergy to march over the objections of the Alabama archbishop. Well after midnight, King and his traveling aide Bernard Lee made room for two Ohio priests on the chartered flight back to Montgomery by way of Pittsburgh and Atlanta.
The Alabama columns followed Andrew Young out of Gaston’s pasture before seven o’clock Wednesday morning, mostly soggy and miserable but relieved to be on the move. Jonathan Daniels hitched a ride back to the rearguard bustle of Selma and the clutter of signs posted throughout Brown Chapel—“All those who wish to take hot baths, contact Mrs. Lilly”—looking for sleep after all-night security duty. His seminary companion Judith Upham crossed in the other direction to join the ranks past the first mile, where Highway 80 opened to four lanes and the court order no longer restricted numbers. The march doubled to 675 people by nine o’clock. Those with transistor radios heard descriptions of the last close-up photographs transmitted from the exploratory satellite Ranger 9 before crash impact on the moon crater Alphonsus, and station WHHY broadcast news of fresh resolutions by the Alabama legislature declaring the march to be a pestilence of sex orgies and vulgar language, specifying that “young women are returning to their respective states apparently as unwed expectant mothers.” John Lewis joked to reporters that segregationists were preoccupied with interracial sex, which was “why you see so many shades of brown on this march.” Harris Wofford “almost welcomed the wild charges” as relief from sentimentality, noting privately that some Northerners babbled naively about the rustic glory of abject poverty, like “Peace Corps Volunteers during their first week abroad.”
WITH ABERNATHY and Coretta, King rejoined the columns at eleven o’clock in Montgomery County, beyond the Lowndes boundary about halfway through Wednesday’s sixteen miles. He welcomed some of the constant arrivals who had swelled the ranks above a thousand, dropped off by bus and car—long-lost preacher friends from Crozer Seminary, a Jewish delegation from the Anti-Defamation League. The grime of bedraggled permanent marchers dispersed in a sea of clean new faces and fresh shirts, some unwisely attached to suitcases. FBI agents recorded the presence of more celebrities—singer Tony Bennett, actor Anthony Perkins and his wife—among numbers that doubled again before thunderstorms at 1:30 drenched lines stretched more than a mile. Coming out of open country, they passed Montgomery’s Dannelly Airport, headquarters for military escort Team Bravo, where officials processed a rash of unseen threats to firebomb the women’s tent, blow up Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, and to shoot King from the roof of a downtown building. By three o’clock the lead vehicles approached campsite four at the City of St. Jude, a Catholic compound on the outskirts of Montgomery. “The latest estimates ran between 4,000 and 5,000 just before entering the bivouac area,” Joseph Califano informed government leaders from the Pentagon.
Above the drone of helicopters, nuns and schoolchildren of St. Jude sang with crowds of Negroes from the surrounding neighborhood, greeting not only the marchers from Highway 80 but also thousands who converged for Thursday’s final push to the capitol. C. Vann Woodward and John Hope Franklin arrived in a delegation of twenty prominent historians. A trainload of 117 Washingtonians, stranded all night by balky crews on their Atlanta–West Point special, hiked wearily from the railroad station. Two hundred students came straight from Kilbey State Prison and nearby jails, released on bond a week after James Forman’s Montgomery demonstrations. Assorted columns filed for hours into the fenced grounds of St. Jude with “a grandeur that was almost biblical,” reported the New York Times. Even troubles acquired epic scale. Hands passed food above heads jammed close on a St. Jude lawn trampled to mud. Pastors joined volunteers trying to repair a failed generator. Poles snapped on two of the field tents.