Presently the column came to a dusty little Negro community called Trickem Crossroads. Walking next to King, Young pointed at an old church and called back to the others: “Look at that church with the shingles off the roof and the broken windows! Look at that! That’s why we’re marching!” Across from the church was a dilapidated Negro school propped up on red bricks, a three-room shanty with asphalt shingles covering the holes in its sides. King spotted a group of old folk and children standing under two oak trees in front of the school, squinting at him in the sunlight. When he halted the procession, an old woman ran from under the trees, kissed him breathlessly, and ran back crying, “I done kissed him! I done kissed him!” “Who?” another asked. “The Martin Luther King!” she exclaimed. “I done kissed the Martin Luther King!”
Another woman kissed him, too, and said, “God will keep His arms around you.” “Yes,” King replied. “Trust in Him.” Oh, she could not believe it was him. She had first heard his name when whites had bombed his home in Montgomery, and she had loved to hear his name and look at his picture ever since. “I trust in God,” she sighed, “and I’ll hug the Martin Luther King anytime I see him. They can’t bother me ‘bout huggin’ the Martin Luther King.”
Young asked the old folk, “Now are you people gonna register to vote? We’re not just marchin’ here for fun.”
“Yes, sir,” they said, nodding at him and King. “Yes, sir.” (And they did too: inspired by the Martin Luther King, fifty people from Trickem went to Hayneville, to the old jail there that housed the registrar’s office, and sought their voting rights.)
On the move again, King saw an old black man limping with a cane across a field, heading this way. When he got to the highway, he reached for a hand among the marchers. “Did you ever see Dr. Martin Luther King?” asked one. “No, sir,” said the old man. “Well, you’re shaking hands with him now,” the marcher said. “Oh, Lordy!” cried the old man. “I just wanted to walk one mile with y’all,” he told King. He ended up walking all the way to the next campsite. “I been called a little boy long enough, don’t you think?”
In camp, King rubbed a sore foot and spoke to reporters about the old Communist charge. On the line of march, the column had passed a large billboard with a picture purportedly showing King at a “Communist training school.” Actually it was a photograph of King at the Highlander Folk School at Monteagle, Tennessee, originally a training center for union organizers and later a meeting ground for interracial civil-rights groups. Rosa Parks had visited the school and left with renewed hopes for the future of integration; Harris Wofford had once taken an Indian leader there; and King, Eleanor Roosevelt, and others had spoken at the school on the occasion of its twenty-fifth anniversary. An undercover agent for Georgia segregationists had taken the photograph, and the Klan and White Citizens’ Councils had distributed copies across the South, claiming that they showed him associating with “known Communists.” Segregationists branded Highlander as a “Communist training school,” and the state of Tennessee eventually closed and confiscated it. King told the reporters about his single appearance at the school and laughed about the billboard: “If I was trained there, it was mighty short training.” He scoffed at accusations that the march was infested with Reds. “There are as many Communists in the Civil Rights movement,” he said, “as there are Eskimos in Florida.”
After a doctor treated his foot, King headed back to Selma with Coretta and Lee, ignoring a report of yet another plot to assassinate him. The next day, he flew off for an important speaking engagement in Cleveland; he would rejoin the marchers outside of Montgomery. Inevitably, some people chastised him for taking off like that. But Hosea Williams stoutly defended him. “It isn’t the President’s job to be in the sun and the mud all the time. His job was to lead us out of Selma—that was the most dangerous part. Then he’s gone, trying to raise our budget around the country. He is telling our story. That’s the job of the President.”
While King was away, the Alabama legislature charged by a unanimous vote that the marchers were conducting wild interracial sex orgies at their camps, were everywhere exposing themselves, kissing, and copulating. “All these segregationists can think of is fornication,” said one black marcher, “and that is why there are so many shades of Negroes.” Said another: “These white folks must think we are supermen, to be able to march all day in that weather [it had rained hard on Tuesday], eat a little pork and beans, make whoopee all night, and then get up the next morning and march all day again.”
On Wednesday, as the weary marchers neared the outskirts of Montgomery, the Kings, Abernathys, and hundreds of others joined them for a triumphal entry into the Alabama capital. “We have a new song to sing tomorrow,” King told them. “We have overcome.” James Letherer hobbled in the lead now, his underarms rubbed raw and his face etched in pain. Flanking him were two flag bearers—one black and one white—and a young Negro man from New York who played “Yankee Doodle” on a fife. Suddenly it began to rain in torrents. Marie Foster could see King striding ahead, the rain soaking him and spattering two feet off the pavement. But the storm ended and the sun reappeared, flooding the marchers with a burst of light. As they swept past a service station, a crewcut white man leaped from his car, raised his fist and started to shout something, only to stand speechless as the procession of clapping, singing, flag-waving people seemed to go on forever.
And so they were in Montgomery at last, come to petition George Wallace and remonstrate against racial oppression in Alabama. That night, in a muddy ballpark at St. Jude’s Catholic complex, the movement put on a grand show to celebrate the occasion. Ten thousand people clapped and cheered as Harry Belafonte, Joan Baez, James Baldwin, Leonard Bernstein, and other celebrities put in appearances, and joined Peter, Paul, and Mary in singing Bob Dylan’s “Blowin” in the Wind.” Then King stood on the flood-lit platform with his pantlegs rolled up over knee-length hiking boots, and he led them in the movement’s ritual chant.
“What do you want?” King cried.
“Freedom!”
“When do you want it?”
“Now!”
The next day, March 25, he led some 25,000 people on a climactic march through Montgomery, first capital and much-trumpeted cradle of the Confederacy. Protected by 800 federal troops, the procession moved by the Jefferson Davis Hotel, with a huge Rebel flag draped across its front, and Confederate Square where Negroes had been auctioned off in slavery days. King had passed these places many times while he lived in Montgomery. But the symbolism today was striking. At Confederate Square, the throng halted and sang:
Deep in my heart, I do believe
We have overcome—today.
Moving up Dexter Avenue now, King could make out his old church, as serene and dignified as always, and it conjured up a lot of memories. The march from Selma had brought the Negro protest movement full circle, since it had all begun with the Montgomery bus boycott a decade before.
Behind King tramped a horde of nonviolent warriors—the largest civil-rights demonstration in southern history. There were the three hundred Freedom Marchers in front, all clad in orange vests to distinguish them. There were hundreds of Negroes from the Montgomery area, one crying as she walked beside Wofford, “This is the day! This is the day!” There was a plump, bespectacled white woman who carried a basket in one arm and a sign in the other: “Here is one native Selman for freedom and justice.” There were cavalcades of notables and groups of civil-rights people from as far away as Canada, all waving signs and banners overhead. Like a conquering army, they surged up Dexter Avenue to the white capitol building, with Confederate and Alabama flags snapping over its dome. The spectacle was as ironic as it was unprecedented, for it was up Dexter Avenue that Jefferson Davis’s inaugural parade had moved, and it was in the portico of the capitol that Davis had taken his oath of office as President of the slave-based Confederacy. Now, more than a century later, Alabama Negroes—most of them descendants of slaves—stood massed at the same st
atehouse, singing “We Have Overcome,” with state troopers and the statue of Davis himself looking on.
Wallace refused to come out of the capitol and receive the Negroes’ petition, which demanded the right to vote and an end to police brutality. But they could see the governor peering out the blinds of his office. After Abernathy gave him an extravagant introduction, saying he was “conceived by God,” King stood on the flatbed of a trailer, television cameras focusing in on his round, intense face. Behind him, the sun was setting on the capitol. “They told us we wouldn’t get here,” he cried over the loudspeaker. “Tell it, doctor!” Bernard Lee responded. “And there were those who said that we would get here only over their dead bodies, but all the world today knows that we are here and that we are standing before the forces of power in the state of Alabama saying, ‘we ain’t goin’ let nobody turn us around.’ ” For ten years now, those forces have tried to nurture and defend evil, “but evil is choking to death in the dusty roads and streets of this state. So I stand before you today with the conviction that segregation is on its death bed, and the only thing uncertain about it is how costly the segregationists and Wallace will make the funeral.”
Not since his “I Have a Dream” speech had King been so inspired as he was this day. His audience listened transfixed as his words rolled over the loudspeaker in rhythmic, hypnotic cadences, older Negroes shouting, “Speak! Speak!” “Yessir! Yessir!” “We are on the move now. Yes, we are on the move and no wave of racism can stop us.” The burning of our churches, the bombing of our homes, the clubbing and killing of our clergymen and young people will not deter us. “Let us march on to the realization of the American dream.” Let us march on the ballot boxes, march on poverty, march on segregated schools and segregated housing, march on until racism is annihilated and “the Wallaces of our nation tremble away in silence.”
“My people, my people, listen! The battle is in our hands…. I must admit to you there are still some difficult days ahead. We are still in for a season for suffering.” But we must struggle on with faith in the power of nonviolence. “Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man but to win his friendship and understanding. We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. That will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.”
How long will it take? “I come to say to you this afternoon however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because truth pressed to earth will rise again. How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever. How long? Not long, because you will reap what you sow. How long? Not long, because the arm of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. How long? Not long, cause mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword. His truth is marching on…. Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him. Be jubilant, my feet. Our God is marching on.
Glory, glory hallelujah!
Glory, glory hallelujah!
Glory, glory hallelujah!”
AND SO THE GREAT MARCH was over. Even if Wallace had refused their petition, Alabama Negroes had exercised the right of all Americans to protest their grievances, demonstrating to Congress and all the country their determination to gain the ballot.* But alas, like so many others in the campaign, the great march itself ended in violence. That night, in a high-speed car chase on Highway 80, Klansmen shot and killed civil-rights volunteer Viola Liuzzo; and the movement had another martyr and the nation another convulsion of moral indignation. Yet as Ebony correspondent Simeon Booker put it, the great march really ended with two deaths that Thursday—Mrs. Liuzzo’s and Jim Crow’s.
In truth, the Selma campaign was the movement’s finest hour, was King’s finest hour. Congress was well on the way toward enacting the voting-rights bill, which King expected to occur early in the summer. As Robert C. Maynard of the Washington Post said, King had proven himself “a master organizer of demonstrations” and had exposed “the plight of the Negro in the South as had never been done before. As television journalism zeroes in, Dr. King brought…Alabama dramatically into the homes of Americans. He made racism in the South come alive.”
In early April, Stanley Levison wrote King about other significances of Selma. For the first time in the struggle, Levison pointed out, King had brought whites and Negroes from all over the land on an actual pilgrimage to the Deep South. Birmingham had been a milestone because hundreds of thousands of Americans had moved “from paper resolutions of support to sympathy meetings and marches in their own communities and in Washington. Selma brought them to the battleground itself.” And the pilgrims were not merely the long-committed liberals who had come south before. “They were new forces from all faiths and classes,” Levison observed. Moreover, King himself was “one of the exceptional figures who attained the heights of popular confidence and trust without having obligations to any political party or other dominant interests. Seldom has anyone in American history come up by this path.” As a consequence, King had emerged as “the great moral force in the country today,” an independent leader utterly devoid of the taint of power and political ambition.
For King, the overriding question now was “What do we do next?” As he often said, the movement had grown like ever-widening circles, from attacks on segregated transportation and public facilities in single cities (as in Montgomery and Albany) to direct-action campaigns aimed at segregated public accommodations and Negro disfranchisement across the entire South (as in Birmingham, St. Augustine, and Selma). What, then, to do for an encore to Selma?
For six weeks, King and his staff debated that question, with James Bevel, adamant and animated, calling for more black-belt demonstrations and a national boycott of Alabama to fight racial oppression there. Hosea Williams, on the other hand, sponsored what became known as SCOPE—the Summer Community Organization and Political Education Project—which would utilize scores of northern college students in a mass voter-registration effort in the South, designed to implement the voting-rights measure once it became law. At first, King approved both projects. But when he proposed Bevel’s boycott idea on NBC’s Meet the Press, it provoked such widespread criticism from liberal sources that he quietly dropped it. Further demonstrations in the black belt seemed impossible, too, since Negroes there were too emotionally and physically drained to take to the streets again. And to what end? Finally King settled for SCOPE, and Williams went about assiduously recruiting more than 300 student volunteers to register southern Negroes and dramatize the need for federal registrars, thus maintaining pressure on Congress.
But King’s heart was really not in any southern project. As the spring of 1965 passed, he had his eye increasingly on the teeming ghettoes of the North. In an SCLC board meeting in Baltimore, he talked about circuit riding into troublesome northern cities where riots had flamed up last summer. As yet he had no specific plan of action. But he told a fund-raising rally, “You can expect us in New York and in Philadelphia and Chicago and Detroit and Los Angeles. Selma, Alabama, isn’t right but Baltimore isn’t right either, and New York City isn’t right.”
At SCLC’s board meeting, King solemnly advised the directors that Ralph Abernathy was to succeed him as president in the event of his death. “I can think of no man who is closer to me or who could better carry on than my longtime friend and associate,” King said. A hush fell over the room. Privately, a lot of people were appalled at his choice, but nobody dared challenge him. Should King die, and that was a distinct possibility given the rash of assassination threats recently, many SCLC officials thought it would mean the end of the organization. Abernathy may have shared their fears. Put on the spot, he said quietly, “I do not look forward to filling the shoes of Martin Luther King. I don’t think anybody can fill them.”
With heightening concern over the ghettos, King visited New York and then set out
for Boston, where the mayor proclaimed April 23 as “Martin Luther King Day,” despite FBI attempts to block it. After touring the slums of Roxbury, King remarked that “some of the same things wrong with Alabama are wrong with Boston, Massachusetts.” With a bitter fight raging there over racial busing, reporters solicited his opinion. “Busing would be an inconvenience,” King replied. “But I think our white brothers should be willing to suffer a little inconvenience to rectify a social situation far greater than an inconvenience.” In short, the real problem was not busing. It was the monstrous network of discriminatory practices that had created Negro slums and unequal Negro schools in the first place.
King’s trip to Boston and other northern cities convinced him that his next stop must be the North. In a June retreat at Airlee House in Virginia, he assembled his staff and advisers and announced that the time had come to make theirs a truly national crusade for Negro freedom. While SCOPE would continue voter registration in the South, he and the rest of his staff would launch a People-to-People tour of various northern cities, looking for a target city—a northern Birmingham—in which to launch a direct-action campaign against slums.
King’s decision to move north was not impulsive. He had worried for years about the miseries of the ghetto Negro—miseries which the elective franchise alone could not alleviate (northern Negroes already had the vote). Like other civil-rights leaders, though, King had believed that the North would benefit derivatively from the gains of the southern movement. But this, he confessed, was a miscalculation. “We forgot what we knew daily in the South—freedom is not given, it is won by struggle.” While the southern Negro learned a new dignity and won his right to eat in restaurants, attend desegregated schools, and vote, Negro slum life continued unabated. Blacks who streamed into northern cities found themselves walled into ghettoes by racist real-estate practices and the federal housing authority itself, which encouraged neighborhoods of “the same social and racial classes.” Within the ghettoes themselves, “avaricious and unprincipled” landlords exploited Negro tenants ruthlessly, charging them exorbitant rents but refusing to maintain minimum health and housing standards. Restricted to the ghettoes, Negroes had no choice but to attend squalid, overcrowded slum schools and suffered from an epidemic shortage of jobs. Trapped in a bewildering nightmare from which there was no escape, the ghetto Negro was seething with unarticulated fury and frustration. With summer at hand, King feared that the ghettoes were going to erupt in more riots, worse even than last year, unless he and SCLC could channel Negro unrest into nonviolent, well-orchestrated protests that would dramatize ghetto conditions and force indifferent city officials to pay attention. He recalled how many northern mayors had welcomed him to their cities and extolled the heroism of the southern Negro. But when he confronted them about the squalor of their own slums, they politely but firmly dropped the subject. All his experience insisted that voluntary reform was chimerical. “There was blindness, obtuseness, and rigidity that would only be altered by a dynamic movement,” he contended.
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