Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  “You are ordered to stop and stand where you are,” Major Cloud boomed through his bullhorn. “This march will not continue.”

  “We have a right to march,” King shot back. “There is also a fight to march on Montgomery.”

  When Cloud repeated his order, King asked him to let them pray. “You can have your prayer,” Cloud replied, “and then you must return to your church.” Behind him, the troopers stood sullen and still. One leered at King from under his hard hat, the stub of a cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth. As hundreds of marchers knelt in the crisp sunlight, King motioned to Abernathy. “We come to present our bodies as a living sacrifice,” Abernathy intoned. “We don’t have much to offer, but we do have our bodies, and we lay them on the altar today.” In another prayer, a Methodist bishop from Washington, D.C., compared this to the exodus out of Egypt and asked God to part the Red Sea and let them through. As he finished, Cloud turned to his men and shouted, “Clear the road completely—move out!” At that the troopers stood aside, leaving the way to Montgomery clear. The Methodist bishop was awe-struck, certain that God had answered his prayer.

  King eyed the troopers suspiciously. What were they up to now? One Negro thought this an attempt to embarrass him by exposing his “lack of militancy.” But King sensed a trap. “Let’s return to church,” he said, “and complete our fight in the courts.” And the marchers, some singing “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” headed unmolested back into town. Confronted by scores of white ministers and King himself, all in full view of national television cameras, the state troopers this time had restrained themselves.

  Back at Brown Chapel, King called the march a victory and promised that he and his people would get to Montgomery one day. Immensely relieved that they had not been beaten or killed, most of his followers were content with the abbreviated march, even regarded it as a kind of triumph, too. “We really weren’t disappointed,” said Marie Foster. “We didn’t have knapsacks and gear and didn’t really expect to march all the way that day.”

  The Methodist bishop, however, felt betrayed. And James Forman and other SNCC people were furious. They had wanted to storm on to Montgomery that day, even if it meant crashing through Lingo’s troopers. The students were already mad at King, since SNCC had begun the Selma movement (as it had that in Albany) and yet once again King and “Slick” got all the publicity and the glory. Now they censored him bitterly for turning around at the police barrier, fumed too about all the white people he had brought into the movement, denounced his admonitions to love those who pummeled and oppressed them, vowed not to “take any more shit.” The students wanted to retaliate against white America, hold militant sit-ins and demonstrations in Washington as well as Alabama. “If we can’t sit at the table of democracy,” raged Forman, “we’ll knock the fucking legs off.” Soon SNCC was in virtual rebellion against “de Lawd” and officially withdrew from his projected Montgomery trek, although members could still participate as individuals if they so desired. John Lewis was one of the few who did.

  King lamented SNCC’s defection and tried to talk with Forman and his student colleagues, tried to ease the friction between them. He fretted that they would jeopardize the entire Selma campaign if they carried out their threats to picket the White House and hold sit-ins in the Justice Department. Journalist Pat Watters was convinced that what SNCC really wanted was to wrest away King’s “symbolic leadership.”

  The departure of SNCC was not the only casualty of Tuesday’s demonstration. That night, James Reeb and several other white Unitarians dined at a Negro cafe whose specialty was soul food—fried chicken and collard greens, cornbread and sweet-potato pie. Afterward, on their way to SCLC headquarters, Reeb and two other clergymen walked by the Silver Moon Café a notorious den for whites. “Hey, you niggers!” a voice rang out. Four white toughs emerged from the shadows and fell on the ministers with clubs, one tough smacking Reeb in the head as though he were swinging a baseball bat. Reeb lapsed into a coma, and an ambulance sped him to a hospital in Birmingham.

  All the next day, King “stayed in seclusion” in the rear of Brown Chapel. But he could hear the commotion out in front, where Wilson Baker tied a rope across Sylvan Street to enforce the city ban on further demonstrations. Civil-rights people dubbed Baker’s rope “the Berlin wall” and started a round-the-clock, sit-down prayer vigil in front of the chapel. King could hear them singing throughout the day:

  We’ve got a rope that’s a Berlin Wall

  We’re gonna stand here till it falls

  Hate is the thing that built that wall

  Love is the thing that’ll make it fall

  Thursday, March 11, found King in Judge Johnson’s court in Montgomery, where hearings began on the projected march from Selma and on King’s own defiance of Johnson’s injunction. When King explained why he’d led the abbreviated march, testifying that he hadn’t intended to go on to Montgomery that day, the judge dropped contempt charges against him. On Thursday evening, King learned that Reeb had just died in Birmingham, his wife at his side. “A morally inclement climate” killed that brave man, King said, the same “atmosphere of inhumanity in Alabama” that had spawned bloody Sunday and the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson.

  Reeb’s murder provoked a storm of public indignation. The American Jewish Committee condemned this “shameful exhibition of brutality.” The AFL-CIO was “appalled,” and the United Steelworkers laid the blame on Wallace and his “storm troopers.” As King pointed out, there had been no such public outcry over Jimmie Lee Jackson’s death, because white America was accustomed to the killing of Negroes in Dixie. But a white minister was another matter, and telephones and telegraphs into Washington blazed with demands that federal troops be sent to Selma. In the White House, Johnson conceded that he was “concerned, perturbed, and frustrated.” He and Mrs. Johnson both phoned their condolences to Mrs. Reeb, and the President sent flowers and then dispatched Air Force One to fly her home.

  Deeply affected by Reeb’s death, the President announced that he intended to appear before Congress the following Monday night, March 15, and personally submit a strict new voting-rights bill before national television. As King had hoped, events in Selma—and the wide-scale outrage they had ignited—had convinced Johnson that he should draft a stronger voting bill than his administration had been contemplating, and had aroused moderate and progressive members of both parties in Congress, thus assuring Johnson of the support he needed to get the measure enacted. “The real hero of this struggle is the American Negro,” Johnson said himself. “Who among us can say that we could have made the same progress” without the Negro’s protests, which were “designed to call attention to injustice, designed to provoke change, designed to stir reform?” The President even asked King to be his special guest in the Senate gallery, a symbolic tribute to the success of his campaign.

  But King was in Selma that Monday, conducting a memorial service for Reeb at the courthouse. That night he and his assistants settled into the Jackson living room, to watch Johnson’s congressional appearance on television, the first time a President had personally given a special message on domestic legislation in nineteen years. “It is wrong—deadly wrong—to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote,” Johnson said in his slow Texas drawl, and he reviewed all the obstacles to Negro voting in the South, impediments his bill proposed to abolish through federal overseers who would supervise registration in segregated counties—exactly what King had been demanding. “We have already waited 100 years and more,” the President went on, paraphrasing King’s own language, “and the time for waiting is gone.” On the issue of the Negro’s right to vote, “there must be no delay, or no hesitation, or no compromise.” With Congress interrupting him repeatedly with applause, Johnson pointed out that “at times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last wee
k in Selma, Alabama.” But, “even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement…the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.” In closing, he spoke out of his south Texas past and his own brush with poverty and racism as a young Texas schoolteacher. “Their cause must be our cause too. Because it’s not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.” He added slowly and deliberately, “And we shall overcome!”

  Congress exploded in a standing ovation, the second of the evening. As television cameras swept the cheering hall, Mrs. Jackson glanced at King in her living room. He was crying. “President Johnson,” he said later in a statement, “made one of the most eloquent, unequivocal and passionate pleas for human rights ever made by the President of the United States.”

  Two days later, in Montgomery, Judge Johnson handed the movement still another victory. After almost a week of hearings, the judge now approved the Selma-to-Montgomery march and ordered Alabama officials not to interfere. The plan Johnson endorsed, devised with military precision by SCLC, called for the pilgrimage to commence on March 21 and culminate in Montgomery three days later. Only three hundred select people were to cover the entire distance, with a giant rally at the Alabama capitol to climax the historic journey. “The extent of the right to assemble, demonstrate and march should be commensurate with the wrongs that are being protested and petitioned against,” Judge Johnson ruled. “In this case, the wrongs are enormous.”

  King and his followers were jubilant. But Johnson’s decision threw Wallace into a tirade. On state-wide television, he told a stomping, cheering legislature that Judge Johnson was a hypocrite who presided over a mock court and that the marchers were “Communist-trained anarchists” goaded on by “a collectivist press.” Such venom turned King’s stomach. He thought Wallace “a demagog with a capital D,” who symbolized in America “many of the evils that were alive in Hitler’s Germany. He is a merchant of racism, peddling hate under the guise of States’ rights.” King wasn’t sure Wallace believed all the poison he preached, but he was artful enough “to convince others that he does.”

  After his television speech, Wallace telegraphed President Johnson that Alabama could not protect the marchers because it would cost too much. Scolding the governor for refusing to maintain law and order in his state (“I thought you cared strongly about this”), the President federalized 1,863 Alabama National Guardsmen and dispatched a large contingent of military police, U.S. marshals, and other federal officials to Selma. At last King had the kind of national protection he had long called for.

  In Selma, King and his staff plunged into feverish preparations for the march. Field Director Hosea Williams rounded up latrine trucks and other support vehicles, organized a “loaves and fishes” committee responsible for food, and sent teams scouring the countryside along Highway 80 in search of campsites. King himself promised that the journey would be a “gigantic witness to the fulfillment of democracy” and invited movie stars, entertainers, social and political celebrities—“all our friends of goodwill”—to join the marchers for a grand finale in Montgomery on Thursday.

  And so on Sunday morning, March 21, a cast of 3,200 zealous people gathered under the sunlit chinaberry trees around Brown Chapel, ready to participate in act one of King’s unprecedented drama. Wearing sunglasses, Abernathy scanned the vast crowd and said, “Wallace, it’s all over now.” Then King stood at the microphone, a Hawaiian lei around his neck, Coretta beaming nearby. “You will be the people that will light a new chapter in the history books of our nation,” he sang out in the crisp spring air. “Those of us who are Negroes don’t have much. We have known the long night of poverty. Because of the system, we don’t have much education and some of us don’t know how to make our nouns and verbs agree. But thank God we have our bodies, our feet, and our souls.”

  Then he and Abernathy set out for Montgomery, flanked by Ralph Bunche of the United Nations and Rabbi Abraham Heschel of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, a remarkable-looking man with his flowing white beard and wind-tossed hair. Behind the leaders came a motley force of maids and movie stars, coeds and clergymen, nuns and barefoot college boys, civil-rights veterans and couples pushing baby carriages. In downtown Selma, Clark’s deputies directed traffic and the sheriff himself, still wearing his NEVER button, stood scarcely noticed on a street corner. As two state-trooper cars escorted the marchers across the bridge, a record-store loudspeaker blared out “Bye-bye Blackbird.”

  King led his huge procession out the Jefferson Davis Highway now, helicopters clattering overhead and armed troops standing at intervals along the route. Several hundred whites lined the roadside, too, and a car painted with racial slurs (“cheap ammo here,” “open season on niggers”) cruised by in the opposite lane. Confederate flags bristled among the bystanders, some of whom heckled the column, gesturing obscenely and holding up signs that read “Nigger lover,” “Martin Luther Kink,” “Nigger King go home!” King tried to ignore them, but some incidents could not be ignored. With two children looking up at her, a woman in her early thirties screamed, “You all got your birth-control pills? You all got your birth-control pills?” Several small children chanted “white nigger!” and waved popguns and toy rifles as the column passed. But only a young white man lost control of himself. He started screaming and lunged at the marchers, but friends grabbed him and held on as he raged hysterically, his arms thrashing the air. On the whole, though, the spectators were subdued, looking on in silence as King and his fellow blacks, United States flags swirling overhead, trampled forever the old stereotype of the southern Negro as a submissive Uncle Tom.

  At the first encampment some seven miles out, most people headed back to Selma by car and bus; and King and the rest bedded down for the night in well-guarded hospital tents, the men in one and the women in another. Throughout the night, King could peer outside his tent and see the silhouettes of soldiers around glowing campfires. “Most of us were too tired to talk,” recalled Harris Wofford, but a group of Dallas County students sang on and on:

  Many good men have lived and died,

  So we could be marching side by side.

  The next morning, wrote a New York Times reporter, “the encampment resembled a cross between a ‘Grapes of Wrath’ migrant labor camp and the Continental Army bivouac at Valley Forge,” as the marchers huddled in blankets around their campfires downing coffee and dry oatmeal. At eight King led them out under a cloudless sky, the marchers chanting in unison:

  Old Wallace, never can jail us all.

  Old Wallace, segregation’s bound to fall.

  Pick ’em up and put ’em down

  All the way Montgom’ry town.

  As they tramped through the rolling countryside, carloads of federal authorities guarded their front and flanks, and a convoy of army vehicles, utility trucks, and ambulances followed in their wake. Far ahead, King could make out army patrols checking every bridge and searching the fields and forests along the highway. Presently a sputtering little plane circled over the marchers and showered them with racist leaflets. They came from “The Confederate Air Force.”

  At the Lowndes County line, where the highway narrowed to two lanes, the column trimmed down to the three hundred Alabama Freedom Marchers chosen to go the entire distance. Most of them were local Negroes and veterans of the campaign, the rest assorted clerics and civil-rights people from across the land. There was Sister Mary Leoline of Kansas City, a gentle, bespectacled nun whom roadside whites taunted mercilessly, suggesting what she really wanted from the Negro. There was one-legged James Letherer of Michigan, who hobbled along on crutches and complained that his real handicap was that “I can’t do more to help these people.” There was Cager Lee, Jimmie Lee Jackson’s aged grandfather, who could march only a few miles a day, but would always come back the next, saying, “Just got to tramp some more.” There was seventeen-year-
old Joe Boone, a Negro who’d been arrested seven times in the Selma demonstrations. “My mother and father never thought this day would come,” he said. “But it’s here and I want to do my part.” There was vivacious Marie Foster, who’d helped pioneer the voting-rights drive because “I had taken enough and decided to do something about it,” marching now in her finest clothes, her hair in a fetching permanent. There was Andy Young, running up and down the line tending the sick and the sunburned. Above all there was King himself, clad in a blue shirt and a green cap with earmuffs, reading newspapers and strolling with Coretta and John Lewis at the front of his potluck army. Walking alongside was rumpled and rangy John Doar, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, a four-year veteran of the southern campaigns and a hero of the southern Negro (Marie Foster and Amelia Boynton wanted to run him for President), making certain that Judge Johnson’s restraining order was obeyed. Ahead of the column rolled a large open truck, brimming with cameramen and reporters who (in the words of an Ebony journalist) recorded “every twist of the mouth and wrinkle of the forehead of leader King.” From time to time, Abernathy would introduce King to wayside Negroes as another Moses sent by God to lead his people out of the wilderness.

  They were inside Lowndes County now, a remote region of dense forests and snake-filled swamps. Winding past trees festooned with Spanish moss, the column approached a large two-story house, where several whites and a Negro servant were standing in the front yard. The whites, gesturing at the marchers, whispered something and broke out laughing. The Negro woman also laughed. Behind King, a young black couple embraced and sang happily as they swung by the whites: “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.” Eying the Negro woman, they shouted an improvised line: “Ain’t Gonna Let Aunt Jemima Turn Me Around.”

  Further down, King pointed to a weather-beaten pine shack (one of many they would pass that day), a shipwreck Negro home, smoke curling from its chimney, that epitomized the rural black poverty in Lowndes County. In the yard, nine ragged Negroes watched the remarkable parade without a word or even a smile.