MARCH TO FREEDOM: SELMA AND THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT
THE CAMPAIGNS FOR REFORM IN EDUCATION AND HEALTH CARE unfolded in the midst of the ongoing struggle by black Americans to gain the franchise in the South. The Brown decision of 1954 had opened the door to school integration, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had outlawed Jim Crow in parks, theaters, hotels, and public transportation, but in seven southern states—Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia—the vast majority of blacks could not vote.1 During the Freedom Summer of 1964, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) and SNCC had established freedom schools in Mississippi to build support for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. More than eighty thousand black Mississippians had voted for the MFDP delegation that traveled to Atlantic City to attend the Democratic National Convention. But that political process had taken place outside the regular voting mechanism, still dominated by the white power structure and still closed to African Americans.2 In Mississippi and Alabama, only 6 and 19 percent, respectively, of voting-age blacks were on the rolls.3 In some counties in those two states in which the majority of residents were black, not a single one was registered to vote. White registrars in league with local sheriffs used the poll tax and literacy tests to discourage black voting, but if these did not suffice, those seeking to exercise the franchise could be fired from their jobs, arrested on trumped-up charges, or simply beaten up.
Given his philosophy and experience, LBJ believed that the vote was everything. In a series of remarkable conversations with NAACP head Roy Wilkins, Johnson spelled out his faith in democracy. Their only hope for African Americans, LBJ told the civil rights leader, was to get behind the movement for mass enfranchisement and registration for poor whites as well as blacks. “I know you get disheartened,” he told Wilkins:
and I do, and you think that there is no use trying to get an illiterate [white] truck driver and tell him what is best for him because he has been mistreated—and how he will not cooperate and so forth. I feel that way every day. . . . [But] this old farmer that rides looking at the back end of the mule on the cultivator all day long—he just sits there and thinks. It is his boy that is in Viet Nam, his sister that is out of a job, his brother-in-law that got his car repossessed—and somehow or other, they just add up and they will do what is right. . . . I will resign my office twelve months from now if I am not right, you will see the people [blacks] come into power in every southern state if you will let them vote. . . . Everyone of these states that you consider the worst ones in the Union will wind up being the best.4
Enfranchisement was the path to power and self-realization in more senses than one, the president told Wilkins in another conversation. “We cannot register them from Washington,” Johnson said. “Now the only ones that can register them [that is, persuade southern blacks to register] are the Negroes themselves. . . . It is your patriotic duty—just like going to fight in Vietnam.”5 In his January 1965 State of the Union address, the president informed lawmakers that he was going to press for the elimination of “every remaining obstacle to the right and the opportunity to vote.” Privately, he asked Nicholas Katzenbach, the acting attorney general, to draft legislation that would enforce the constitutionally mandated right of every adult American to cast the ballot.6
WORKING CLOSELY WITH LBJ IN THE EFFORT TO SECURE THE FRANCHISE for black Americans was Martin Luther King. From the beginning, their alliance was an uneasy one. Throughout his political career, LBJ had preferred to deal with black leaders such as A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, and even Adam Clayton Powell.7 They were people from the world of politics, or they were associated with interest groups that sought protection and power in the political arena. Johnson had leverage with them; they were subject to deal making and compromise. They seemed willing to trust his superb sense of political timing and his prioritizing. Not so King. The head of the SCLC was both an intellectual and a spiritual leader. His and Johnson’s values were similar, but they relied on dramatically different means for putting those values into action. Like William Lloyd Garrison, the famed abolitionist, Martin Luther King lived in the tension between conscience and law. Practitioners of civil disobedience assume that conscience must obey not statutory or constitutional law but a higher moral law.8
In the South, King and his associates realized that the law was the bulwark of injustice and thus morally invalid in many cases. Consequently, King deliberately flouted the law and went to jail, and he encouraged others, including children, to do the same. Johnson valued the parliamentary process, the orderly working of democracy, as much as the social justice that the system was supposed to produce. He believed in this sense that means and ends were inseparable. Demonstrations, deliberate flouting of the law, the politics of confrontation—all of which King and the SCLC practiced—made LBJ extremely uncomfortable. “I don’t look for any overwhelming crisis on the part of the white people,” Richard Russell told Johnson a week after the 1964 presidential election. “I don’t know how much some of your extreme colored brethren are going to kick up. If they go to raisin’ cane, of course, it will cause trouble.”9 Confrontation could easily spiral out of control into violence, black rage, white backlash, and even, ultimately, racial war. At the same time, LBJ understood the political value of demonstrations and sit-ins; he realized that they created the energy necessary for reform. Moreover, he recognized that the laws that the white power structure in the South were trying to enforce were often in violation of the Constitution.
Then there was the religious dimension. King was first and foremost a Christian minister, a preacher, a spiritual leader. As a mass movement, the Second Reconstruction was in no small part an evangelical religious phenomenon. Johnson appreciated the validity of prophets and preachers, but the world in which they lived was alien to him. Out of faith and an experience of the divine came social values, and it was proper at times to invoke religion in behalf of social justice as part of the rhetoric of politics, but Johnson feared a world in which religion transcended law and politics. In this he was not unlike other liberals of his day. The Schlesingers, Galbraiths, and Lippmanns were ambivalent about civil disobedience and social action through faith and testimony. Liberals felt most at home in the orderly world of courts and laws, of science and universities; the nonviolence practiced by King and his followers was rooted in the southern black evangelical church, with all its fervent spirituality and emotion.10
For his part, King understood and appreciated Johnson, but unlike Wilkins and Young, insisted on holding him at arm’s length. In his recorded conversations with the president, King is cordial but formal and restrained. If the civil rights game had been played solely by Lyndon Johnson’s rules, King believed, the Second Reconstruction would have died aborning.
Johnson met with King on December 3, 1963. The civil rights leader briefed reporters afterward, and the president was pleased except for one thing. King had told the media that he had made clear to LBJ that “we will have demonstrations until the injustices that have caused them are eliminated.” Johnson thought that King had nodded in agreement to his request for a cessation of marches and sit-ins, which had been curtailed for thirty days during the official mourning period for JFK. Assuring King that the civil rights bill then pending in Congress had the White House’s full support, LBJ had urged the SCLC chief to concentrate on registering voters and lobbying Congress. According to Lee White, Johnson’s aide for civil rights, who had attended the meeting, the incident raised doubts about King’s reliability.11
But each man needed the other. Without their tacit alliance, the Second Reconstruction would have wilted on the vine. The two men shared a common goal and tended to attract similar friends and like-minded enemies. Both King and Johnson were caught up in a youth movement that they struggled to control. At the founding of SNCC at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, in April 1960, Ella Baker, an activist and organizer who had advised King during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, urged the students to maintain their independence. She believed that King and the other SCLC ministers were too authoritarian, that they spent too little time helping poor blacks organize at the grassroots level.12 The signers of the 1962 Port Huron Statement would later accuse LBJ of being an elitist liberal out of tune with the times and out of touch with the poor, the young, the disinherited of the earth.
The relationship between King and Johnson was further complicated by the machinations of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. The director was obsessively protective of the reputation of the bureau. The first time Martin Luther King’s name came across his desk was on an SCLC memo to the incoming Kennedy administration, pointing out that the FBI was one of those federal agencies with virtually no black employees other than janitors and maids. As such, it was much in need of integrating. Hoover, who thought blacks unworthy of the bureau anyway, was indignant. Then, in 1962, when asked why he thought the FBI had not arrested whites who had openly assaulted nonviolent protesters in Albany, Georgia, King had speculated that the local FBI agents were white southerners who were culturally and emotionally linked to local racists.13 In August 1963, the FBI labeled King “the most dangerous Negro to the future of this nation,” and Hoover persuaded Attorney General Robert Kennedy to authorize wiretaps of King’s home and his SCLC offices in Atlanta and New York.14 As noted earlier, since coming to Washington, Johnson had carefully cultivated Hoover. He was obviously a powerful man and a dangerous enemy. During LBJ’s vice presidency, the director was not a problem LBJ had to confront directly. When LBJ became president, that changed.
In December 1963, the FBI began delivering massive amounts of raw data to the White House on a variety of subjects. Hoover thought the information might be “of interest” to the new president. These were the famous “raw files,” consisting of uncorroborated secondhand information and excerpts from wiretaps that, though spun by the bureau, still provided valuable political intelligence. These reports went sometimes directly to LBJ and sometimes to Bill Moyers or Walter Jenkins; they were kept in a safe tended by Mildred Stegall, Jenkins’s secretary. Among the communications were special memos signed by Hoover himself designed to portray Martin Luther King as dangerously unstable and a tool of communists who had allegedly infiltrated the civil rights movement. Every communication ended with a paragraph listing the “communist credentials” of King’s top aides. A March 9, 1964, letter was typical: “As of July, 1963, [Stanley] Levinson [adviser and fund-raiser for King] was a secret member of the Communist party, USA. [Clarence] Jones [another King aide] has been identified as a person in a position of leadership in the Labor Youth League . . . designated as subversive pursuant to Executive Order 10450. . . . [Bayard] Rustin has admitted joining the Young Communist League in 1936.”15
As he turned to confront the ongoing issue of racial justice during the first weeks of his presidency—the most compelling and potentially divisive issue facing America—Johnson was chilled by the knowledge that Hoover and the FBI were waiting in the wings, ready to provide segregationist senators and congressmen with intelligence, real or manufactured, that the Second Reconstruction was nothing more than a Trojan horse for the Communist International and that Martin Luther King was nothing less than a stooge of the Kremlin. Matters were further complicated by the fact that the Justice Department had to rely almost entirely on the bureau to investigate civil rights crimes and gather the evidence necessary to bring the guilty to justice. In its criticism of the bureau, an increasingly outraged black leadership might push Hoover into open alliance with Senators Russell and Eastland. Conversely, if the federal government did not legislate equality and protection for black Americans and then protect them in the exercise of those rights, it would deliver the movement into the hands of extremists. The line he would have to walk, LBJ perceived, was fine indeed.
Then, in early 1964, the FBI’s campaign against King reached a new low. On the night of January 6, agents with the cooperation of the management of the Willard Hotel in Washington installed bugs in King’s suite. Following a day of business, the civil rights leader and several of his assistants returned to the hotel room. At least two women were already there. The FBI recording machines picked up the sounds of clinking glasses and cocktail party conversation. As the hours passed the gathering became livelier, eventually resulting in group sex. At one point King’s voice could be heard above the others: “I’m not a Negro tonight!”16 Upon hearing the tapes Hoover was both appalled and ecstatic. “King is a ‘tom cat’ with obsessive, degenerate sexual urges,” the director wrote in a memo. He decided to do everything possible to discredit King and destroy him as America’s preeminent civil rights leader. In February, FBI Deputy Director Deke DeLoach delivered the FBI’s voluminous file on King and his associates to the White House, proving in the FBI’s collective mind that the civil rights leader was a sexual pervert and communist dupe. DeLoach warned that if the contents of the files became public, they could derail the 1964 Civil Rights Act then pending in Congress.
Johnson was shocked that King would commit the indiscretions recorded at the Willard. But LBJ was hardly one to hold nonmonogamous activity against another man. When a friend urged King to be more circumspect, he replied, “I’m away from home twenty-five to twenty seven days a month. Fucking’s a form of anxiety reduction.”17 Morality wasn’t as much the issue as the potential damage to the movement. When Whitney Young heard a rumor of the existence of the King sex tapes and pictures, he went directly to Johnson to ask whether it was true. The president said, “Yes, it’s true.” Young asked to see some of the evidence, and LBJ obliged. Appalled, the civil rights leader remarked to Johnson, “This is terrible. You’ve got to do something. What are you going to do about it?”—meaning, what was the president going to do about reining in the FBI. Johnson replied, “Well, what are you going to do about it? You’re the civil rights leader!”—meaning, what was Young going to do to force King to be more discreet.18
According to Hoover, on November 27, 1964, Wilkins called at the FBI and spoke with Deke DeLoach. “Wilkins said that personally he would not mind seeing King ruined,” the director reported to President Johnson, “but he felt that while King was no good, the ruination of King would spell the downfall of the entire civil rights movement. Wilkins stated that he personally knew King was a liar and had little respect for him.”19 But there was a silver lining. Johnson did not want King ruined and the civil rights movement discredited, but given King’s penchant for independence, White House knowledge of his illicit sexual activities might come in handy.
As befitting his role as a minister of God, King asked to smoke the peace pipe with Hoover. After some prodding from the White House, the director accepted, and the two men had a polite if formal encounter at FBI headquarters. King apologized for remarks attributed to him criticizing the bureau, and he told Hoover that as a Christian he could never accept communism.20 Hoover appeared mollified, but on that very day he sent to the White House a thirteen-page FBI report titled “Communism and the Negro Movement.” It provided detailed descriptions of King’s “personal debauchery” and repeated accusations that he knowingly associated with Communists. “Your advice is requested,” Hoover asked Johnson, “as to whether we should disseminate this document to responsible figures in the executive branch of government.”
After consulting with the president, Moyers, who had replaced the disgraced Jenkins as liaison with the FBI, told Deke DeLoach that the director should use his own judgment about sending out the report.21 If he did not at least seem to go along with the director’s vendetta against King, the president reasoned, Hoover could turn on him. Among other things, the director could threaten to make public Johnson’s orders to the FBI to spy on the MFDP and Bobby Kennedy at Atlantic City. LBJ had already decided to keep Hoover on beyond the mandatory retirement age, commenting famously to aides that he would rather have him “inside the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in.” Then there was the president’s ongoing ambivalence about King—his stubborn refusal to bend to the presidential will; in addition, Johnson believed that King and other civil rights leaders were never willing to give him the credit he deserved. Finally, Johnson had lived through the McCarthy era and was as afraid as any other Democrat of being labeled “soft on communism.”
In October it was announced that Martin Luther King had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. On December 18, 1964, the Johnsons (rather reluctantly on LBJ’s part; the president was jealous) had welcomed Martin and Coretta King to the White House following their return from the festivities in Oslo. In his acceptance speech, King had declared, “All that I have said boils down to the point of affirming that mankind’s survival is dependent upon man’s ability to solve the problems of racial injustice, poverty and war.” LBJ could not have put it more succinctly. But in separate remarks, the civil rights leader had also called for a US boycott of South Africa, linked apartheid in South Africa with Jim Crow in Mississippi, and, after charges were dismissed against three white men accused in the Cheney-Schwerner-Goodman murders, called for an economic boycott of Mississippi. In private conversation, LBJ had questioned the wisdom of such statements.22
During their post-Nobel tête-à-tête, King informed the president that he would soon be launching a massive voting rights campaign in Alabama; his goal was to demonstrate that blacks could not register to vote in the former Confederacy without federal legislation. “Martin, you are right about that,” Johnson replied. “I’m going to do it eventually, but I can’t get voting rights through in this session of Congress. . . . Now, there’s some other bills that I have here that I want to get through in my Great Society program, and I think in the long run they’ll help Negroes more, as much as a voting rights bill. And let’s get those through and then the other.” King reminded the president of his oft-stated belief in the fundamental importance of participation in the political process by all citizens. Johnson responded, “I can’t get it [a voting rights bill] through, because I need the votes of the southern bloc to get these other things through. And if I present a voting rights bill, they will block the whole program.” The SCLC chief had the last word, however. The campaign for voting rights legislation would begin in Selma on January 2. “We’ll just have to do the best we can,” he said as he took his leave.23
Johnson’s reluctance to move at once on a voting rights bill was somewhat puzzling. King was right about the president’s belief in the primacy of the franchise. Perhaps he was, as usual, worried about losing control. But there was also the fact that voting qualifications had long been within the purview of states and localities. As a conversation he had with Nicholas Katzenbach at about the same time he was meeting with King indicated, Johnson was conflicted. “I basically believe that we can have a simple, effective method of gettin’ ’em registered,” Johnson told the attorney general (Katzenbach had succeeded Robert Kennedy). “Now, if the state laws are too high and they disqualify a bunch of them, maybe we can go into the Supreme Court and get them held unconstitutional. . . . If the [local] registrars make them stand in line too long, maybe we can work that out where the [US] postmasters can do it. Let’s find some way.” When Katzenbach suggested that it would take a constitutional amendment to establish federal government control over voter registration, the president replied, “If you think we ought to have a constitutional amendment on voting, let’s have it.”24
On the appointed day in Selma, King addressed a cheering crowd of several hundred: “Today marks the beginning of a determined, organized, mobilized campaign to get the right to vote everywhere in Alabama,” he proclaimed. “If we are refused, we will appeal to Governor George Wallace. If he refuses to listen, we will appeal to the legislature. If they don’t listen, we will appeal to the conscience of the Congress. . . . We must be ready to march. We must be ready to go to jail by the thousands. . . . Our cry to the state of Alabama is a simple one. Give us the ballot!”25 What King wanted was an ironclad national voting rights bill. So did LBJ, but he was not sure it could or should be done in 1965.
LBJ continued to see himself as the hope of the white South, the unenlightened as well as the enlightened. “We’ve got to have some understanding,” he told Ed Clark, an old Austin friend whose son was a white liberal then living in the Deep South. “We’ve got to have some leadership; we’ve got to have some sympathy; we’ve got to have some kindness. I called them in South Carolina . . . yesterday and Georgia and told them that as long as I was in the White House the door would be open to them and they would be treated with respect.” But in the end they would come around, he said. Again, LBJ saw himself as redeemer of all of the South, not just the black South. “Lincoln went back to Springfield,” he observed after his victory in the 1964 election:
. . . after he was president and he went down the street of the town wherever he had lived his life. He said there was not one person in it who would speak to him, not one . . . it made him mighty proud that he’d done what he’d done and he was mighty sorry for those folks. . . . We’ve got to educate ’em [white southerners] and you can’t be putting ’em off by themselves. . . . The first thing that happens the sociologists say is that . . . you develop an inferiority complex and the rest of your life you’re hitting at people when you think they’re going to strike you even when they’re not.26
Indeed, it may have been that domestically, LBJ’s greatest impact was on white southerners. “I ran for governor in 1958,” Buford Ellington recalled, “and was elected on an anti–civil rights stand here in Tennessee, because I just couldn’t bring it to my mind that anybody had any business telling us what we had to do in our state. Yet in less than two years I was traveling the country for this man, trying to help him in his fight to bring it about.”27
Martin Luther King, too, was interested in redeeming the white South, but he was determined to do it sooner rather than later and even if the recipients of his beneficence had to be dragged kicking and screaming to grace. Montgomery civil rights leader Reverend James Bevel was named to head a statewide voting rights campaign that would begin in Selma. Large numbers of blacks would appear at the courthouse on registration days, and there would be marches and demonstrations until all were registered. Selma, a city of some twenty-nine thousand, was still entirely segregated as of 1965. The Brown decision and the 1964 Civil Rights Act seemed to have made no impression at all. Parks, restaurants, schools, water fountains, public toilets—all were segregated.
In Dallas County, of which Selma was the county seat, there were 14,400 whites and 15,115 blacks of voting age. Exactly 156 of the latter, or 1 percent, were registered. Chief enforcer of Jim Crow in Dallas County was Sheriff Jim Clark, the stereotypical southern lawman with paunch, jowls, campaign hat, pistol, and cattle prod. He had at his command not only his deputies and the Selma police but also white “posse” members to discourage marches and break up demonstrations. The mayor, Joe T. Smitherman, was somewhat more progressive. He felt the sight of police dogs and water hoses being used against black women and children would not be conducive to the continued economic development of the community. But he was a segregationist nonetheless, and his hold over Clark was quite tenuous. In league with Clark was Circuit Judge James Hare, an amateur anthropologist who believed that Alabama blacks were particularly retrograde because they were descended from the Ibo tribesmen of Nigeria and had no Berber (Arab) blood.28 Presiding over all of this was Governor George Corley Wallace, who having stood in the schoolhouse door in an attempt to block integration, was not going to concede the right to vote to African Americans.
Though Bevel was the chief organizer for the Selma voting rights effort, King was to be its icon. Judge Hare had issued a decree forbidding some fifty named individuals and fifteen organizations from holding meetings of more than three persons. Among other things, King intended to convene gatherings in defiance of the order and get himself arrested. Beginning Monday, January 18, he led waves of local blacks to the courthouse to register, where they were confronted by Clark and ordered to disperse. They did but then returned. They were duly arrested, made bail, and returned again. As the organizers had anticipated, Clark’s temper began to fray, and he ordered his officers to employ physical intimidation. During the second week of the demonstrations, Clark shoved Mrs. Annie Lee Cooper. Mrs. Cooper, a dignified, sturdy woman, hit him in the face and, as he staggered backward, delivered two more punches, knocking him to the ground. Enraged Clark got up, threw Cooper to the ground, and jumped on top of her, baton in hand. The next morning that picture appeared on the front page of the New York Times. On February 1, the next regular registration day, King was arrested and thrown in jail.29
In Washington, meanwhile, LBJ and Nick Katzenbach were monitoring events closely. The Justice Department had dispatched trouble-shooter John Doar to the scene to try to keep a lid on things. The first week in February, he persuaded US District Judge Daniel Thomas to issue an order suspending Alabama’s literacy test and demanding that Selma speed up registration of black voters. King was still not satisfied. From jail, using his aide Andrew Young as a messenger, he asked LBJ to send a personal representative to Selma, declare his support for voting rights in Alabama, and use his office and his influence with Congress to see that those rights were realized.30 Johnson was not willing to do everything King wanted, but the day after his release from jail, the White House announced that it was going to send a voting rights bill to Congress before the end of 1965.31 On February 9, King traveled to Washington to meet with Katzenbach and Vice President Humphrey. Somewhat reluctantly, LBJ agreed to a fifteen-minute chat.32 Emerging from the Oval Office, King assured reporters of the president’s commitment to voting rights, but he returned to Alabama in a fairly pessimistic mood. The state, the nation, and the president would need additional prodding, he believed.33
Arriving back in Selma, King found tempers on the rise. Black Muslim leader Malcolm X came to town, but to the relief of the SCLC, he delivered a restrained speech calling for all Negroes to unify behind King. But then police shot and killed a young demonstrator, Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was planning a march to protest the arrest of a local SCLC leader in the nearby town of Marion. King delivered a moving, fiery eulogy at the interment, and James Bevel announced that there would be a march from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital lying some fifty-four miles to the east on Highway 80. The Reverend King would lead the way and at march’s end present petitions to Governor Wallace and the state legislature demanding that all voting-age Alabamians be enfranchised. The march would get under way Sunday, March 7. Throughout, it was Martin Luther King who guided and inspired. J. L. “Ike” Chestnut, a Birmingham lawyer with Selma roots who all but lived in the Dallas County courthouse while representing the jailed marchers, concluded that “no one else [but King] could have unified the collection of ministers, gangsters, self-seekers, students, prima donnas, and devoted, high-minded people we had in Selma that winter.”34
On the evening before the march to Montgomery, word came that Governor Wallace had declared the event to be an unauthorized assembly and dangerous to the public order. He ordered Albert J. Lingo, head of the Alabama State Police, to assemble his troopers just outside the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which boosted Highway 80 over the Alabama River just east of Selma, and use whatever means necessary to stop the march. Wallace had personally recruited Lingo, who had a reputation for being “hell on niggers.” The state police commander was a man with an uncontrollable temper who had Confederate battle flags bolted onto the front bumper of each state patrol car after he took office.35 King, then in Atlanta, had planned to return to Alabama to lead the procession but was persuaded by Bevel and others to stay put. There had been threats on his life, and they felt the risk of assassination was too great.
As the five hundred or so marchers crossed the Pettus Bridge on March 15, they came face to face with Major John Cloud and his troopers. Lurking behind them were Sheriff Clark and his deputies. Whites lined the south side of the road. Cloud ordered the marchers to disperse. When they did not, his troopers, many on horseback, charged. Several fired tear gas canisters into the crowd. As the knot of demonstrators broke and ran for town, state police rode them to ground where Clark’s men beat them with billy clubs, kicked, and stomped them. Amid the flowing blood and screams, the line of white spectators cheered. Some fifty-seven marchers were seriously injured. At the Brown Chapel, where the march had originated, volunteer nurses and doctors from around the country treated bloody heads and broken limbs. The television network ABC interrupted its regularly scheduled programming on Sunday night to present a long televised report on the brutality. The next day a vivid, blow-by-blow account of what came to be known as “Bloody Sunday,” appeared on the front page of the New York Times.36 In pictures and prose Newsweek depicted the bloodletting and gassing under the headline “An American Tragedy.”37 King immediately flew from Atlanta to Selma and announced that the marchers would try again on Tuesday. King called for sympathetic volunteers from around the country to come and march with them. Stirred by images of violence on television and in the newspapers, hundreds did so.
As he had feared, LBJ was caught between King and the civil rights activists, on the one hand, and Wallace and the segregationist power structure in Alabama, on the other. On the scene, John Doar; LeRoy Collins, head of the Federal Mediation Service; and Buford Ellington tried to work out a compromise. Somewhat ironically, Wallace wanted federal intervention. If LBJ was forced to nationalize the Alabama National Guard and send in the troops, the governor could claim to bitter-end segregationists that he had been overwhelmed by a greater force. “You remember what he did there at the University of Alabama,” Lister Hill, the moderate Democratic senator from Alabama and a friend of LBJ’s, told the president. “He went there and stood in the doorway and wouldn’t let anybody come in until the federal troops [arrived]. . . . He wanted to show the people of Alabama he fought to the bitter end. . . . That’s what you’re up against now. . . . That’s a hell of a decision to have to make, because when you move in there, the people down home are going to think, My God, he [LBJ] just moved in there and took over for this King!”38
LBJ most certainly did not want to send an occupying force to Alabama. Neither did his advisers. “I just think it’s disastrous when you get troops in, frankly,” Katzenbach told him.39 Katzenbach later observed in his oral history that both Kennedy and Johnson shared his misgivings. “Both of them, I think shared the philosophy . . . that you never were going to succeed on civil rights until you could use the force of voluntary compliance with the law and not simply sending in troops and marshals and taking responsibility away from local law enforcement. . . . And the second you substituted for local law enforcement, they had an out.”40 As a southerner, LBJ had grown up with the memory of Reconstruction, both real and imagined. “If I just send in federal troops with their big black boots, it will look like Reconstruction all over again,” he remarked during the Selma crisis. He told his aides, “They know deep in their hearts that things are going to change. They may not like it, but they will accommodate. But not if it looks like the Civil War all over again! That will force them right into the arms of extremists and make a martyr of Wallace. . . . I may have to send in troops, but not until I have to, not until everyone can see I had no other choice.”41
Meanwhile, in Selma, the Reverend James Reeb, a Unitarian minister working for the American Friends Service Committee in Boston who had flown to Selma to march with King, was assaulted with two other white ministers by four thugs. One of them shattered Reeb’s skull with a three-foot-long bludgeon. He died in a Birmingham hospital on Thursday evening, March 11. King, who confided to Doar and Katzenbach that he was in fear for his own life—more so than usual—led some two thousand marchers across the Pettus Bridge the next day. The procession halted before Lingo, Clark, and their massed forces. The group sang “We Shall Overcome,” knelt in silent prayer for several moments, and then got up and walked back into town. King put everyone on notice, however, that those who had gathered to support voting rights for black Alabamians remained determined to make the journey to Montgomery.
In an effort to retake the initiative from King and Johnson, Wallace asked for a summit meeting with the president to take place on February 13. In fact, the president had already decided to invite the governor to the White House when he received Wallace’s request.42 Just before noon on the appointed day, a smiling Johnson welcomed Wallace and his attorney general, Seymore Trammel, to the Oval Office. The president had the diminutive Wallace sit in the large overstuffed sofa and positioned himself in the rocking chair opposite, which he pulled so close that when he leaned forward his nose nearly touched the top of the governor’s head.
It seemed to him, Johnson offered in a friendly voice, that all the demonstrators wanted was the right to vote. “You cannot deal with street revolutionaries,” Wallace replied sternly. “You can never satisfy them . . . first, it is a front seat on a bus; next, it’s a takeover of parks; then it’s public schools; then it’s voting rights; then it’s jobs; then it’s distribution of wealth without work.”43 Johnson pulled closer, reached over, and gripped Wallace’s knee and launched into an hour-long monologue on his vision of a just and prosperous America. “You can be a part of that,” he kept saying. Stop “looking back to 1865 and start planning for 2065.” As Wallace seem to shrink, Trammel tried to interrupt, invoking “the growing menace of the Communist demonstrators in Alabama.” Johnson turned slowly. “He looked at me like I was some kind of dog mess,” remembered Trammel. Johnson thrust a pencil and tablet in his hands and told him to take notes. Why, oh why was Wallace abandoning his liberal roots? “Why are you off on this black thing? You ought to be down there calling for help for Aunt Susie in the nursing home.” Then to the crux. “Why don’t you let the niggers vote?” Wallace protested that he had no power over county registrars. Johnson suddenly stiffened. “Don’t you shit me, George Wallace,” he said.44 Rising he put both hands on the back of the sofa, leaned over Wallace, and said, “George, you’re fucking over your president. Why are you fucking over your president?”
After three hours, Wallace emerged looking like a wilted plant. In the subsequent press conference in the Rose Garden, Johnson continued to dominate. “The Governor expressed his concern that the demonstrations which have taken place are a threat to the peace and security of the people of Alabama,” he told the more than one hundred reporters who had assembled for the occasion. “I said that those Negro citizens of Alabama who have systematically been denied the right to register and to participate in the choice of those who govern them should be provided the opportunity of directing national attention to their plight. . . . I am firmly convinced, as I said to the Governor a few moments ago, that when all of the eligible Negroes of Alabama have been registered, the economic and the social injustices they have experienced throughout will be righted, and the demonstrations, I believe, will stop.”45
Lyndon Johnson was not a man to ignore the power of circumstance. His advisers and his instincts told him that the time had come for the administration and the federal government to join hands with Martin Luther King and his followers and lead rather than follow in the struggle for dignity and equality for African Americans. “What the public felt on Monday [the day following Bloody Sunday], in my opinion, was the deepest sense of outrage it has ever felt on the civil rights question,” Harry McPherson, whom LBJ would increasingly look to as the administration’s conscience on civil rights, told the president. “I had dinner with Abe Fortas Monday night. That reasonable man was for sending troops at once.”46 On the evening of March 14, LBJ met with congressional leaders of both parties. The president told them he was considering a televised address to a joint session to denounce the Selma outrages and introduce his voting rights bill. Mansfield and Dirksen were negative. What if Congress did not rally? The president and the voting rights acts would fall flat on their faces. Speaker McCormack disagreed and made an impassioned plea in behalf of a televised speech. He had of course been carefully primed by Johnson. The tide quickly turned, and by the time the meeting closed, the group was unanimous in supporting an address to a joint session.
The White House had but twenty-four hours to prepare. Johnson summoned McPherson, Goodwin, Busby, Valenti, and company. “I sat with my staff for several hours,” Johnson later recalled. “I described the general outline of what I wanted to say. I wanted to use every ounce of moral persuasion the Presidency held. I wanted no hedging, no equivocation. And I wanted to talk from my own heart, from my own experience.”47 According to Goodwin, he drafted the speech, but the substance and, in the end, the wording were entirely Johnson. “It was by me,” he said, “but it was for and of the Lyndon Johnson I had carefully studied and come to know.”48
As the time for LBJ’s March 15 address approached, the Capitol and the nation sensed that something extraordinary was about to happen. Word went out that the president’s speech to the joint session was not to be missed. LBJ entered a packed House chamber a little after nine in the evening. In addition to the legislators, all of the Supreme Court justices, the entire ambassadorial corps, and the cabinet were present. Even the aisles were filled, an unprecedented occurrence. Overhead, the galleries were jammed with whites and blacks, some in street clothes fresh from demonstrations and others in neat business attire. Lady Bird and Lynda sat among them in the presence of an odd special guest—J. Edgar Hoover. A few members of Congress had deliberately absented themselves: the entire Mississippi delegation, for example. Virtually all Americans were aware of the historic moment and had their TV sets on in anticipation.
Tall, erect, smiling, Johnson made the customary handshakes and proceeded to the podium. He wasted no time. “I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy,” he began in a slow, melodious tone. “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,” he intoned. “So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.” Those who were there remembered almost total silence, a collective holding of breaths. The nation had reached a moral juncture brought about by “the cries of pain and the hymns and protests of oppressed people [who] have summoned into convocation all the majesty of this great government . . . rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself,” Johnson declared, his voice rising, his pace quickening. “The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. And should we defeat every enemy, 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.’” He was interrupted by the first burst of applause, hesitant, solid, then thunderous. No president, not even Abraham Lincoln, had identified himself, the Constitution, the values of the country with the cause of equal rights for African Americans. One shrewd heartland politician was finishing what another had started.
The next great step in the march to equality was a national voting rights law, LBJ declared. No law could be effective unless local officials were willing to enforce it. He was, he said, sending to Congress immediately following his speech a special message that would put in place machinery to register black voters in areas where local officials were unwilling to do so and to provide protection to them in their exercise of the franchise. What president who took his oath of office seriously could do less? By now LBJ’s voice was inspired, rolling, ringing, a Texas version of the southern Baptist rhythm and tenor that Martin Luther King had mastered. “There is no Constitutional issue here,” LBJ declared. “The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong—deadly wrong—to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights.”
The real heroes of the hour were the civil rights activists who were demonstrating, going to jail, and dying, LBJ continued. “Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”49 And then, the president of the United States, remarkably, paused and then proclaimed slowly, deliberately: “we—shall—overcome!” The assembled throng rose almost as one and delivered a roaring, prolonged ovation. In the galleries and on the floor, longtime laborers in the vineyard of civil rights wept openly. At home watching, black Americans sat stunned, daring to hope that at last their dream of full citizenship might actually come true. As Lady Bird and Lynda departed the chamber, a reporter asked the president’s eldest how she felt about the speech. “It was just like that old hymn,” she said, “‘once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide.’”50
JOHNSONIAN RHETORIC NOTWITHSTANDING, MARTIN LUTHER KING intended to keep the pressure on. Alabama was a long way from Washington, and he sensed no softening in the attitudes of the George Wallaces, Al Lingos, and Jim Clarks of the world. On March 17, Federal District Court Judge Frank Johnson, sitting in Montgomery, issued an order declaring the governor’s action in outlawing a march from Selma to the capital unconstitutional. The SCLC could hold its march, and participants were entitled to state protection. Wallace was at last trapped. On March 18, he called the president. “These people are pouring in from all over the country,” he whined. “Two days ago . . . James Forman suggested in front of all the nuns and priests that if anybody went in a café and they wouldn’t serve ’em, they’d ‘kick the fuckin’ legs of the tables off.’ . . . It inflames people. . . . I don’t want anybody to get hurt. . . . A Negro priest yesterday asked all the patrolmen what their wives were doing, whether some of their friends could have dates with their wives. You know, trying to provoke them. . . . These fifty thousand people. . . . They’re going to bankrupt the state.” LBJ listened patiently but remained firm. It would be much better, much less divisive if the National Guard acted as a state rather than a federal force. But Wallace would not give.51
That night the governor told the Alabama legislature in a televised speech that the state could not afford to activate the National Guard. He demanded that the president send federal authorities to Alabama. LBJ was furious. “You’re dealing with a very treacherous guy,” he told Buford Ellington. “He’s a no good son of a bitch. . . . Son of a bitch! He’s absolutely treacherous.”52 Later, Wallace wired the White House that he did not have the assets available to protect a march from Selma to Montgomery. The effort would require 6,171 men, 489 vehicles, and 15 buses. Absurd, Johnson told reporters. The governor had available to him 10,000 Alabama national guardsmen, but if he could not or would not call them up, he as president would order in more troops to protect King and his fellow demonstrators.53 True to his word, the president issued orders federalizing the Alabama National Guard and dispatched a sizable contingent of regular Army troops to Maxwell Air Force Base to stand by.54 “Be sure whatever we do is measured, fitting, and adequate—like in Viet Nam,” he told Katzenbach, Ellington, and Justice Department official Burke Marshall.55
On March 21, some 392 civil rights activists with King at their head set out on foot from Selma to Montgomery. This time there were no state troopers or Selma police to stop them. Federalized guardsmen did their duty, and there were only minor incidents along the way. The entire march was covered by television cameras and print journalists. The trek, some fifty-four miles, took several days. It was bitterly cold at night, and King slept in a trailer that followed the column. By the time the contingent reached the outskirts of Montgomery, the ranks of the marchers had swelled to twelve hundred, including show business celebrities Peter, Paul, and Mary, Joan Baez, Dick Gregory, Frank Sinatra, and Marlon Brando.56 The morning after the marchers arrived on March 24, King addressed a throng of some twenty-five thousand gathered on the plaza in front of the state capitol. The redoubtable Wallace peeked at the proceedings from behind venetian blinds in his office.57
That night a white civil rights activist from Detroit, Mrs. Viola Liuzzo, was shot in the head and killed as she drove Le Roy Moton, a young black man, back to Selma from Montgomery.58 In his subsequent report on the incident, Hoover informed LBJ that “we found numerous needle marks indicating she had been taking dope although we can’t say that definitely because she is dead.” To Katzenbach he reported that Mrs. Liuzzo “was sitting very, very close to the Negro in the car . . . it had the appearance of a necking party.”59 The White House ignored Hoover’s innuendoes and ordered the FBI to apprehend the perpetrators at once.60 “Looks like we ought to give some thought [to how we can] really move in on that Klan more effectively,” LBJ observed to Katzenbach. “Is there anything that we can do in the way of legislation on that? . . . Pretty well outlawing them.”61 In response to questions from reporters concerning the Liuzzo murder, the president described the Klan as a “hooded society of bigots.”62 The thing to do, Johnson subsequently told Katzenbach, was to turn the House Un-American Activities Committee loose on them.63 That would spike Hoover and the segregationists’ red-baiting guns.
FOCUS NOW SHIFTED TO CONGRESS AND THE VOTING RIGHTS BILL. “We needed something where you didn’t have to litigate for fifteen years before you finally get . . . some relief,” Deputy Attorney General Ramsey Clark later said.64 There was some real doubt, however, that the federal government had the constitutional power to establish and regulate voter qualifications beyond those explicitly based on race. The Constitution, as it was ratified, gave each state complete discretion to determine voter qualifications for its residents. Following the Civil War, Congress had passed and the states had ratified three amendments that affected voting rights. The Thirteenth prohibited slavery; the Fourteenth granted citizenship to anyone “born or naturalized in the United States” and guaranteed every person due process and equal protection under the law; and the Fifteenth stipulated that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” In 1957 in the wake of the Brown decision, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the Little Rock Crisis, Congress had enacted a civil rights bill that authorized the attorney general to sue for injunctive relief on behalf of persons whose Fifteenth Amendment rights were being violated. It also created a Civil Rights division within Justice to pursue any necessary litigation. In the years that followed, however, the Justice Department was largely stymied by recalcitrant southern registrars and judges.
Even as the Johnson administration prepared to move ahead with a comprehensive voting rights measure, there were dissenting voices from within. As was the case in the argument against sending federal troops into the South to protect civil rights protestors, the establishment of a federal voter registration system would remove the onus from the indigenous white population, Horace Busby argued. Local communities must be brought to the realization that discrimination was immoral and unconstitutional and act on their own. The imposition of federal registrars would merely provide Dixie with another chance to decry federal intervention and to avoid responsibility.65 Citing the obstacles placed in the way of the Justice Department in the wake of the 1957 law, Attorney General Katzenbach told the White House, “While I agree with Mr. Busby that the political consequences of the proposed message are serious, I see no real alternative.”66
In short, by the spring of 1965 Johnson, King, and, it seemed, the nation as a whole were not willing to wait for the South to come around on its own. In the days following Bloody Sunday and the president’s speech to Congress in support of the Voting Rights Act, a surge of support for the civil rights movement crested across America, quickening the tempo of the social revolution Lyndon Johnson had dreamed about from the first night of his presidency. “The might of past empires is little compared to our own,” LBJ had declared in his “We Shall Overcome” speech. “But I do not want to be the President who built empires, or sought grandeur, or extended dominion. I want to be the President who educated young children to the wonders of their world. I want to be the President who helped to feed the hungry . . . who helped the poor to find their own way, who protected the right of every citizen to vote.”67 There was the horror of Selma but also the buoyant optimism generated by the promise of expanded educational opportunity, adequate health care for the elderly, and hope for the poverty-stricken. A Gallup poll showed that four out of five Americans favored a voting rights law. Even in the South, a majority of white Americans supported legislation to ensure the right of black Americans to cast the ballot.68
The legislation that the White House presented to the Hill on March 17 began by echoing the Fifteenth Amendment. It prohibited the denial of the right to vote on the basis of race or color. The measure invalidated “any test or device” that was used to discriminate in any federal, state, or local election in areas in which, as of November 1, 1964, more than 50 percent of the persons of voting age were not registered and had not voted in the last presidential election. Twenty or more residents of a jurisdiction were empowered to petition the attorney general to ask for relief from voter discrimination. If the complaint was authenticated, the Civil Service Commission, which oversaw the hiring and firing of government employees, would appoint examiners to check the qualifications of voter applicants and certify them to vote if they were twenty-one years of age or older and legal residents. Finally, no person could be denied the right to vote for failure to pay a poll tax.69
The bill was referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose chair, Senator James Eastland (D-MS), was perhaps Congress’s most outspoken segregationist. To prevent him from keeping the measure bottled up indefinitely, Majority Leader Mansfield offered a motion on the Senate floor requiring the committee to report the bill out by April 9; his proposal passed by an overwhelming margin. Led by Robert Kennedy, who had been elected to the Senate from New York following his resignation as attorney general, liberals in the Senate made a brief but unsuccessful attempt to toughen the administration’s measure by outlawing the poll tax entirely.70 Although the Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the Constitution banning the use of poll taxes in federal elections had been ratified a year earlier, the administration and the amendment’s sponsors did not include a provision in the Voting Rights Act explicitly prohibiting the use of poll taxes (as distinct from turning an individual away for failure to pay) in state elections because they feared the courts would declare the entire measure unconstitutional. Furthermore, by excluding poll taxes from the definition of “tests and devices,” the coverage formula would not apply to Texas, mitigating opposition from that state’s powerful congressional delegation.
Johnson, of course, believed that the move to outlaw the poll tax in all elections was just one more attempt by the Kennedys to upstage and embarrass him. He observed to Senator Birch Bayh (D-IN), who wanted to vote for the amendment, that he could not understand the Kennedys. Attorney General Katzenbach was their man, and he had taken the position that the poll tax amendment the liberals had put forward was unconstitutional. “They brought him from Yale, they pulled them together and he loves them and he is loyal to them, he is devoted to them. . . . I took their lawyer because I foresaw this very problem. I foresaw that I would be charged with not being quite strong enough on Civil Rights.”71
On April 22, the full Senate began debate on the bill. Dirksen was unequivocal in his support. The black vote was coming to the South, and the GOP did not want to be left out. Bitter-enders like Strom Thurmond (RSC) proclaimed that the bill would lead to “despotism and tyranny,” while Senator Sam Ervin (D-NC) argued that the measure was unconstitutional because it deprived states of their right under Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution to establish voter qualifications. Russell Long let the White House know that he was going to vote for the measure, and he predicted that he would be able to carry eleven other southern senators with him. On May 25, the Senate voted for cloture 70 to 30, thus overcoming the threat of filibuster. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed the Senate by a vote of 77 to 19 the following day. The majority included 5 southern and border state Democrats.
The scene of action then shifted to the House, where the Judiciary Committee’s ranking Republican, William McCulloch (R-OH)—he who had played such a key role in passage of the 1964 civil rights bill—generally supported expanding voting rights, but he opposed both the poll tax ban and the coverage formula. He proved unable, however, to prevent the committee from reporting the voting rights measure out with a “do pass” recommendation. On the floor, McCulloch introduced an alternative bill that would allow the attorney general to appoint federal registrars after receiving twenty-five bona fide complaints of discrimination and to impose a nationwide ban on literacy tests for persons who could prove that they had a sixth-grade education. The White House feared the worst, but after Representative William M. Tuck (D-VA), a McCulloch ally, stated publicly that he opposed the Senate version because it would ensure that blacks could vote—implying that that was the Ohioan’s true goal—support for the McCulloch alternative dwindled. The House followed the Senate’s lead on July 9 by a vote of 333 to 85. Among the majority were 33 Democrats and 3 Republicans from the South. On August 6, 1965, LBJ proudly presided over a televised signing ceremony in the rotunda of the Capitol.72
Throughout the fall and indeed for the remainder of his administration, LBJ badgered Justice, local officials, and civil rights leaders to launch one voter registration drive after another. “I don’t care if you are Mexican, American, Negro, Baptist, Catholic, Jew—just vote,” he remarked to Roy Wilkins. Questions of race and religion would then disappear; with every person voting his or her best interests, social justice would inevitably follow and it would be based on democracy, on “home rule” rather than “federal edict.”73 But the federal government could not make long-disenfranchised blacks vote. It could not overcome the apathy instilled by years of abuse and neglect. African American leaders were going to have to spur their community to political action. One of Johnson’s converts was Thurgood Marshall, the pioneering civil rights lawyer Kennedy had appointed to the US Court of Appeals. “I told them [other civil rights leaders] the last time I met with them,” he told the president, “that there was nothing in the Voting Bill or Constitution or any place else that required the Attorney General to go down into the bayous and pick up the Negro in his Cadillac and take him to vote.”74
By July 14, 1965, federal agencies had identified eight counties each in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, along with four in Georgia, that did not meet the 50 percent rule. Operating from Civil Service offices in Atlanta and Dallas, supervisors opened local offices in the affected areas. By the end of January 1966, the campaign had registered 93,778 new voters, 91,212 black and 2,566 white. Progress was slow but steady. In March 1966, the Supreme Court held the basic components of the Voting Rights Act to be constitutional.75 By the 1968 presidential election, Mississippi had reached 59 percent, and black registration in the eleven former Confederate states averaged 62 percent. In 1980 only 7 percent fewer blacks, proportionately, than whites were on the nation’s voting rolls.76
LBJ’s faith in the ballot as a means to empower African Americans was not misplaced, but the benefits of enfranchisement had their limits. Blacks in the North had long had the legal right to vote, but that had not brought ghetto-dwellers economic opportunity and social justice.