Photographic Insert
1
Two paths to freedom. On the third try, March 21, 1965, Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King, Maurice Eisendrath, and Abraham Heschel (front row, left to right, from nun) step off from Selma, Alabama, in a nonviolent march to Montgomery for the right to vote.
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That same month, Marines lead the first U. S. combat units ashore at Danang to secure a non-Communist South Vietnam.
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On “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965, Alabama State Troopers and a sheriff’s posse in clouds of tear gas trample the first attempted voting rights march out of Selma.
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Registrar Carl Golson rebukes petitioners led by King, Abernathy (behind finger), and SNCC Chairman John Lewis (right of King) in Lowndes County, between Selma and Montgomery, where no black citizen had voted in the twentieth century.
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Outside Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, a helmeted sheriff’s posse blockades those who have answered King’s call to complete the voting rights march.
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Behind a “Berlin Wall” imposed by Alabama authorities, marchers sing freedom songs in a round-the-clock vigil.
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After a week of political upheaval, King watches from Selma as President Lyndon Johnson endorses the voting rights movement in a speech to Congress.
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Under court-ordered federal protection, the march covers 54 miles over five days, led here by King (in white cap), Coretta King, James Bevel, John Lewis (behind and to right), and Ivanhoe Donaldson (below flagpole, in boots), with Andrew Young and James Orange (far left).
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As marchers stretch out from Selma into Lowndes County by day.
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Jubilant local residents greet the procession along Highway 80.
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Beneath the dome of Alabama’s capitol, where Gov. George Wallace watches behind drawn blinds, a great host completes the march to Montgomery on March 25, 1965.
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Rosa Parks speaks to the crowd before King’s address on the triumphs and pitfalls of the modern civil rights movement.
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Viola Liuzzo of Detroit completes the march, but is bushwhacked that night while driving through Lowndes County.
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FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, President Johnson, and Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach announce four arrests one day after the Liuzzo murder (left to right), with Hoover concealing that an informant among the suspects had received FBI clearance to join the assault.
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Landmarks of 1965 crest with approval cere-monies for Medicare on July 30 (LBJ with Harry Truman).
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“No section of the country can boast of clean hands in the area of brotherhood,” King tells the Massachusetts legislature on April 22, 1965 , exploring sites for a northern campaign.
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The Voting Rights Act on August 6 (LBJ with Abernathy and King).
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The Immigration Reform Act on October 3 (at the Statue of Liberty). By repealing race-based quotas on foreign applicants, President Johnson declares, American law “will never again shadow the gate to the American nation with the twin barriers of prejudice and privilege.”
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Episcopal seminarian Jonathan Daniels (with Bunny West in Selma), who stayed among civil rights volunteers after the Montgomery march, is arrested at the first Lowndes County demonstration and then murdered by shotgun ambush upon his release from the county jail on August 20, 1965.
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An emergency “tent city” shelters Lowndes County sharecroppers who have been evicted from plantations after trying to register for the vote.
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On primary day, May 3, 1966, voting for the first time in their lives, black citizens of Lowndes County choose their own candidates for local office. Seated at one of the outdoor election tables, school teacher Sarah Logan (in white glasses) collects ballots bearing a novel black panther as the required election symbol, observed by Jesse “Note” Favors (far right), a runner-up for the sheriff’s nomination.
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Stokely Carmichael, SNCC project director in Lowndes County, hugs a young friend to celebrate the creation of an independent political party under Alabama law.
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A pioneer in educa-tion for civil rights, Septima Clark teaches literacy and citizenship to an aspir-ing voter in Wilcox County, Alabama.
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With his son Marty and daughter Yolanda (squeezed next to Hosea Williams), King hur-ries through a rural Alabama rainstorm in spring 1966 to encourage registration under the Voting Rights Act.
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A large crowd in back-alley Chicago hears King’s pitch to build a movement against slum conditions in their heartland city.
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In January of 1966, King begins the Chicago campaign by moving into a freezing, dilapi-dated tenement on the West Side.
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Seminary student Jesse Jackson leads marches against segregated Chicago housing and schools in the summer of 1966.
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Chicago Mayor Richard Daley mounts programs to reduce urban poverty and discrimination, then switches to repres-sion when shocking violence against King’s integration movement threatens the Democratic power base in white neighborhoods.
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Summit negotiators Al Raby (left), Ross Beatty of the Chicago Real Estate Board (center), and Edwin “Bill” Berry of the Chicago Urban League inspect an open-housing agreement in late August 1966. King’s Chicago campaign national-ized the issues of poverty and racial injustice but failed to draw a broad response like Selma.
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A march of 200 miles through Mississippi becomes a political and cultural watershed in June of 1966, after integration pioneer James Meredith was shot trying to prove that it was safe for black people to walk in his home state.
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The new SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael proclaims a “black power” slogan at the Meredith March rally in Greenwood on June 16, six weeks after his independ-ent voting effort in Lowndes County was either scorned or ignored.
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At a night meeting (clock-wise from left), Bernard Lee, Andrew Young, Robert Green, King, Lawrence Guyot, Harry Bowie, and Stokely Carmichael struggle to maintain unity on the Meredith March.
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Behind sensational public controversy over black power and Vietnam, the Meredith marchers recruit new voters such as 104-year-old Ed Fondren, hoisted with his first registration card out-side the Panola County, Mississippi, courthouse.
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In September 1966, King escorts students with Andrew Young, Joan Baez, and Hosea Williams (behind, left to right) past adult mobs that have terrorized black children outside the schools of Grenada, Mississippi.
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A weary King waits with Andrew Young for a flight out of Mississippi.
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Among Vietnam protesters jammed outside the White House gates in May 1967, James Bevel, Coretta King (behind Bevel), and pediatrician Benjamin Spock (above Coretta King) stand vigil to deliver a peace petition.
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Soldiers in Detroit are deployed to suppress one of several large ghetto race riots in the summer of 1967.
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Early in 1968, President Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara reflect the strain of a government and country divided over the Vietnam War.
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SNCC founder and NAACP counsel Marian Wright, testifying about acute hunger in Mississippi, urges King to mount a national movement to reduce poverty.
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King labors to convince skeptical advisers Andrew Young, Stanley Levison, Clarence Jones, Cleveland Robinson, and James Bevel (clockwise from King) that an uphill poverty movement offers a more positive emphasis than all-out effort to stop the Vietnam War.
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On a recruiting drive in March 1968, moved by the extreme hardship of displaced sharecroppers, King pledges to begin a poor people’s pilgrimage to Washington from Marks, Mississippi.
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A movement for the basic dignity of sanitation workers diverts King to Memphis, where supporters collect donations in symbolic garbage cans.
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In Memphis, after violence breaks out for the first time in a march led by King, sanitation workers maintain a picket line alongside National Guard armored vehicles.
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On April 3, determined to overcome a court injunction and restore nonviolent discipline for a renewed march, King and James Lawson (in clerical collar) follow Abernathy into Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel. King will be assassinated on this balcony the next day.