At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  Johnson signed the two necessary orders at 1:28 and 1:30 A.M. Saturday, resting on precedent dating back to George Washington’s suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion in 1792, and veterans beneath Alabama flight paths soon recognized the loud drone of C-130 aircraft. Sixty-eight of them landed through the night at either end of the march route—the 720th MP Battalion at Craig Air Force Base just outside Selma, from Fort Hood, Texas, and the 503rd MP Battalion at Maxwell Air Force Base near Montgomery, from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The President retired at three o’clock and was awakened at 6:34 to prepare for his morning press conference. Outdoors, with Lady Bird sitting nearby under a shawl, he declared it an “unwelcome duty” to assume any part of a state’s responsibility for public order. He said nearly four thousand assorted soldiers would be ready by Sunday, along with two field hospitals he hoped would not be needed. “Over the next several days the eyes of the nation will be upon Alabama,” said Johnson, “and the eyes of the world will be on America.” He invoked Lincoln’s confidence that Americans would be “touched by the better angels of our nature.”

  IN SELMA, nearly two hundred clergy formed at midday on Saturday for what Bishop Myers of Michigan called “somewhat of a family quarrel” among the nation’s Episcopalians. They walked one block toward St. Paul’s Church before a police blockade stopped them and Wilson Baker announced that Bishop C. C. J. Carpenter of Alabama refused permission for visiting bishops to hold Communion service at any altar within his diocese. He waved off their explanations of canon law. “Don’t talk to me,” he said. “I’m not the bishop. I’m not even an Episcopalian.” Besides, Baker added, he could not “for your own sake” let a march venture near the hostile possemen downtown.

  The columns turned back to Brown Chapel, where the bishops conducted Communion services on the sidewalk with vessels borrowed from an Episcopal mission for Negroes in Birmingham. The rhythmic chants of their liturgy echoed among charged sounds and spectacles against the grain of normalcy, like a New Orleans funeral. Local children spurred clergymen in piggyback rides on the playground. A one-legged man on crutches stared from the church steps, wearing a yarmulke. Twenty-four portable toilets sat on a row of flatbed trucks parked on the street. Someone announced that homemade sausages and fifty more sandwiches were ready from the volunteer cooks inside, where Viola Liuzzo processed newcomers at one of the welcome tables less than a day after her own arrival from Wayne State. Army Specialist E-4 Hank Thomas wandered carefully in civilian clothes, avoiding recognition. A charter member of SNCC—one of the thirteen original Freedom Riders, Stokely Carmichael’s cellmate nearly four years ago at Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Penitentiary—Thomas did not want to explain to nonviolent comrades why he had accepted Army conscription, even as a medic, nor admit to any stray military officer that he had slipped his pass from Fort Benning for one last taste of the movement before shipping out to Asia with the First Air Cavalry.

  “By late Saturday,” wrote march participant and historian Charles Fager, “green army jeeps had begun rolling through Selma, dropping off soldiers carrying rifles tipped with fixed bayonets at street corners along the route to the armory.” Behind them came Alabama National Guard vehicles with “U.S.” painted freshly on the sides to advertise federalized command. A New York Times correspondent found the atmosphere among the soldiers “not particularly tense.” Festive hymns pulsed from Brown Chapel, where both Bevel and Diane Nash were to give evening speeches, but one Boston College student walked alone into segregationist ambush from an alley: beaten to the ground, yanked up by his hair, sliced on the right cheek with a razor blade.

  FBI agents reported the Leo Haley incident (“required three stitches”) to Washington among threats and warnings outside the usual conduits. A secretary at the Justice Department, then a lawyer, each reported an anonymous caller who said he owned a small plane and would “get that damn nigger Martin Luther King” from the air. Director Hoover, immensely relieved that military units had drawn the exposed security duties, pitched his Bureau with compensatory enthusiasm into intelligence work behind the lines. “Immediately contact airlines, railroads, bus lines, informants, contacts in Negro and other organizations,” he ordered, and a response “from all of our field offices” advised on Saturday that “a total of 1,856 persons are already in Selma or actually have departed and are en route.” They included ten priests from Connecticut and thirty-five Southern Methodist University students on a Greyhound bus from Dallas. Another sixty-three groups “totaling 1,011 in number” were said to be getting ready. Behind these absurd specifics—a standard FBI requirement in case Hoover wanted to assume a precisely omniscient pose—the report hedged with confidential sources estimating thousands “on standby” or coming “on their own.”

  A more comprehensive, fourteen-page FBI analysis prepared Director Hoover for Saturday night’s annual Gridiron Club dinner. Assistant Director DeLoach summarized the Bureau’s massive file of suspicious “Connections and Affiliations” on the part of NAACP director Roy Wilkins, dating back to the 1930s—clippings from the Communist Party’s Daily Worker newspaper quoting him against colonialism and for the Scottsboro Boys, informants who branded Wilkins an outright Communist or follower of a “Communist line,” an agent who overheard him remark in 1944 that Japanese immigrants had been “the best truck farmers in America.” Still, DeLoach reported that Wilkins had been reliably anti-Communist during the Cold War, and, most important, had praised the Director without fail. Thus briefed, dressed formally in the required white tie and tails, Hoover accepted his assigned seat next to Wilkins for the capital’s stag ritual of political satire. They joined Vice President Humphrey, the entire Cabinet, four Supreme Court Justices, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, nearly a hundred members of Congress, and assorted celebrity guests including rookie pro quarterback Joe Namath—leaving one seat conspicuously empty in the Statler Hilton ballroom.

  News stories speculated that President Johnson, ever sensitive to caricature, had contrived his Texas retreat expressly to avoid the obligation to smile through the merciless barbs reserved for the chief executive on Gridiron Club night. Members of the Washington press corps lampooned all powers in a spirited musical revue. One reporter impersonated Secretary McNamara in rimless glasses and hair slicked back perfectly like his facts, singing to the tune of “Heat Wave”:

  We’re havin’ a small war, a hole in the wall war

  The Buddhists are risin’, it isn’t surprisin’

  The natives will say they can can Khanh

  We’re fightin’ ’round Saigon, wish bygones were bygone

  And though we can fight there, displaying our might there

  They certainly could can Khanh

  Freshman senator Robert Kennedy watched himself struggle as an elfin schoolboy to master the shift in national diction since his brother’s assassination. “Today, ah’m all the way with LBJ,” his character drawled with Bostonian vowels that diminished until a Senate tutor exclaimed, “Ah thank he’s got it,” and the whole cast broke into an LBJ fandango to the tune of “The Rain in Spain.”

  THERE WERE no skits about the Selma influx of Negroes and clergy, which resisted humanizing parody more than Vietnam or Dallas. Outsiders to the movement remained inhibited, uninformed, and sullen to such extremes that the South’s largest newspaper literally struck itself dumb. By sudden corporate edict, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution resolved to boycott the final march in Alabama notwithstanding the proud regional credo on its front page: “Covers Dixie Like the Dew.” Top editors Ralph McGill and Eugene Patterson nursed glasses of whiskey in Atlanta, glumly stupefied that they were forbidden to send even one reporter to join the legions of worldwide press. They dismissed as a smokescreen the fluctuating rationale for the order—worries about libel suits, admonishments to hold back until newsworthy violence occurred.

  “Gene, let’s go over and catch the bus down to Selma,” said McGill. He proposed to sneak off that night and write dispatches as though they were front-l
ine reporters again.

  Patterson restrained his illustrious mentor, who, since becoming editor of the Constitution in 1938, had wrestled with the race issue in prize-winning columns—sometimes accepting segregation in the hope of moderate reform, sometimes chafing against acquiescence as “the most melancholy aspect” of Southern life. “Pappy, that would be an open rebellion,” Patterson warned. They would have to resign if they could not get stories into their own newspaper, he said, and likely be fired if they could, especially since many of their reporters already knew of the ban on coverage of the march.

  To his later regret, Patterson talked them out of rash defiance. They ached instead for the biggest Southern story of their lifetime, which portended a wholly different order with some five million newly enfranchised voters, and consoled themselves with visions of the runaway assignment. “Damn, it would be fun,” said McGill.

  CHAPTER 13

  To Montgomery

  March 21–24, 1965

  FRED Calhoun, parish custodian at Our Lady of the Universe, picked up a presumed box of trash and heard it ticking. He set the box carefully on the ground and hurried inside to early Sunday mass. Father Edward Foster appealed for calm. Catholic discipline did not permit mass to be abandoned once begun, he said, and besides, Negroes were accustomed to bombs on Dynamite Hill. Foster led a procession outside to complete the service on a portable altar, while Birmingham police relayed an emergency appeal to U.S. Army units on alert for the Selma march. By the time a demolition team arrived from the Third Army’s 142nd Ordnance Detachment (Explosives Disposal) at Fort McClellan, two more ticking green boxes were discovered nearby—one at a mortuary owned by A. G. Gaston, whose motel had been bombed while hosting King and his staff in 1963, another at the home of attorney Arthur Shores, which had been bombed twice during that campaign to break segregation. Master Sergeant Marvin Byron and Specialist 6 Robert Presley manually disarmed the first bomb of fifty-eight sticks of dynamite (forty whole, eighteen partial) set to go off at noon, and then, observed a New York Times correspondent from a distance, “dashed up the hill to Mr. Shores’s house.”

  Alarms from Birmingham flashed through temporary command posts in Selma and Montgomery over special hotlines into the Pentagon War Room. Bulletins by other channels heightened morning chaos in the Selma home where Wilson Baker himself more than once crawled under the floor joists to check for threatened bombs. Jean Jackson coped by turning out specialized breakfasts from her kitchen—eggs sunny-side-up for King, with the yolks semigooey and the whites firmly “together,” as he put it, no toast or bacon for the bearded rabbi on the front sofa, only crackers and an egg poached separately in a clean pan. Nobel Laureate Ralph Bunche, whose stomach condition was aggravated by nerves, received cottage cheese and scrambled eggs without salt. Jackson stepped over sleepers, including a doctor posted outside her small “VIP” bedroom, amid subdued and exotic pandemonium. Abraham Heschel, the rabbi, made a space at a window for morning prayers in Hebrew; a bishop prayed nearby in another language, probably Latin. A blanket, a pipe, and trademark orange peelings marked the spot where James Forman had slept under the dining room table. King made teasing estimates about how long Ralph Abernathy’s imminent “grand entrance” would monopolize the bathroom, which drove Bevel to retrieve his pillow from the tub. Staff members and government officials pushed inside among long-lost friends.

  FBI agents recorded that King’s party reached the crowds outside Brown Chapel at 10:58 A.M. Selma time, already late. Burke Marshall, retired from the Justice Department but present as President Johnson’s personal emissary, radioed estimates that the march would be delayed at least another hour pending arrival of expected dignitaries and an overdue charter plane from Germany. At First Baptist, doctors completed medical exams on the three hundred people chosen to make the extended march. On the steps of Brown Chapel, clergy of varied traditions used megaphones to deliver a series of homilies—Heschel from the Hebrew scriptures. A high delegation of Episcopalians returned from St. Paul’s, rebuffed again by churchmen who defended with dogged scholasticism a vestry policy of open worship for “all but Negro laity.” A delegation of Hawaiians arrived waving aloft a huge banner—“Hawaii Knows Integration Works”—and distributing garlands of traditional leis. King wore one around his neck as he knelt to pose with two of his favorite marching third-graders, Sheyann Webb and her friend Rachel West, after they led a freedom song.

  At 12:15 P.M., Attorney General Katzenbach funneled to the White House a disagreement between Army intelligence, which predicted that the march “will be moving out” before one o’clock, and his own Justice Department officials, who agreed with Hoover’s FBI that it would take longer, maybe ruinously past two, which would make it impossible to reach camp before dark. A correspondent for The New Yorker noted marchers talking wryly among themselves about the movement’s own private time zone called “C. P. T., Colored People Time.” Nevertheless, Bevel and Andrew Young dressed the billowing front ranks into columns roughly of six, marshals in armbands squeezed the formation half a mile back down Sylvan Street, and the whole contraption lurched forward at 12:46 P.M. Photographers took portraits from the back rails of an open truck moving slowly in advance. Camera crews carried enough spare film to support a continuous shot of the leaders, as it was already a whispered joke that the networks would fire anyone who missed impact footage of a sniper’s shot. Ivanhoe Donaldson posted a moving shield of volunteer marshals slightly ahead of King on both flanks, without his permission, to minimize direct sight lines.

  With nineteen jeeps and four military trucks in rear escort, and two helicopters hovering above, the march of three thousand followed the usual short route downtown. Hostile males among the spectators were quieter than at previous demonstrations, more inclined to heckle from their cars. One in a red roadster played “Dixie” at full volume, as broadcast just then by a cooperative radio station. Another aired a sarcastic “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” over four loudspeakers. Demonstrative females seemed comparatively undaunted by the intervening rows of Army MPs. Two matrons in their fifties shouted to each other in mock discovery: “You ever seen a white nigger?” “Look at the white niggers!” A well-dressed woman got out of her Chrysler at an intersection, stalked forward, stuck out her tongue decisively, then drove off. A mother with two small children led a chorus of inquisition about the sexual appetites of female marchers. What nuns in particular “heard concerning their chastity out of the mouths of the white women of Alabama,” wrote two observers for The Saturday Evening Post, “cannot be transmitted in public print.”

  More esoteric dissent shunned the great sendoff. Famously within the movement, Silas Norman shellacked the floor of the Selma SNCC office. Consistent with his promise not to lapse again from SNCC’s debated consensus weeks earlier—that the proposed march to Montgomery was a pointless captive of King’s showboat national politics—Norman never would claim a place in historic commemorations decades later, and this day he tended chores in studied disregard for the tumult passing by the window outside. Well up ahead, at a rump press conference on the courthouse steps, Sheriff Clark pointed out John Doar with his predecessor Burke Marshall alongside the approaching front ranks. “The federal government has given them everything they wanted,” Clark said morosely, to dispirited assent from fifty shelved possemen in the background.

  THE LINES turned left at Broad Street, away from Sheriff Clark and up Pettus Bridge for the third time since March 7. At the crest in full uniform waited Brigadier General Henry Graham, an everyday Realtor from Birmingham, who twice before had followed orders dutifully to safeguard historic transitions—rescuing trapped Freedom Riders cooperatively with John Doar in 1961, integrating the University of Alabama through Nicholas Katzenbach’s nationally televised confrontation with Governor Wallace in 1963. Graham issued commands shifting primary escort duty from the 720th MP Battalion to his own federalized Alabama National Guard, 31st Infantry Division, and the march lines started downward through brisk winds ab
ove the Alabama River. Bright sunshine already had raised temperatures well above overnight lows near freezing. No blockade of troopers loomed ahead. By coincidence, seminarians Jonathan Daniels and Judith Upham approached Selma from the opposite direction at the end of their long return drive from Massachusetts. Heading up Pettus Bridge, they waved a salute to the last columns coming down to the flat ground on the Montgomery side.

  Fearful tedium evaporated, recorded a journalist, “and the march entered another mood—jubilation.” Assistant Peace Corps Director Harris Wofford trotted among latecomers to join a rear contingent of high school students who clapped in ragtime to a hymn: “I’m gonna march when the spirit say march…sing when the spirit say sing…vote when the spirit say vote…die when the spirit say die.” Reporters counted at least four other songs going simultaneously over the extended line to the front. An exhilarated Rabbi Heschel “felt my legs were praying,” and kept pace with a couple from California who pushed the youngest participant in a stroller. The oldest marcher—Jimmie Lee Jackson’s eighty-two-year-old grandfather, Cager Lee—waved blithely to unfriendly stares from the shoulders of Highway 80. National Guard jeeps leapfrogged forward to stop traffic for security at rural intersections, where FBI agents photographed seventeen cars decorated with crudely whitewashed signs, including one marked “Coonsville, USA” that cruised in tandem with a state trooper.

  Security forces scrambled briefly when a tethered horse, frightened by helicopter noise, pulled up a road sign and galloped wildly toward the march with the metal post clanging behind on the pavement. Roughly two miles out, a federal observer who saw distant marchers felled as though by a scythe signed off Border Patrol radio to investigate on foot—“I’m going out of service!”—then returned minutes later to broadcast a chagrined all-clear. “Apparently,” he said, “the Negroes just decided to take a break all of a sudden, and just started lying down on the grass.” After the reclining multitude ate bologna sandwiches—King in a dark suit, overcoat, and new hiking boots—hard pavement troubled the march more than danger. Backpacks grew heavy and assorted protections awkward—yellow hardhats, umbrellas, one football helmet. For stragglers who dropped from the lines by the score, sore and sick, marshals arranged transport back to Selma in private automobiles with National Guard escorts.