At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  STALLED AMID Army jeeps at a roadblock, Bernard Lee remonstrated with soldiers that Dr. King’s party must turn into the St. Jude campsite to start the march. Andrew Young jumped from the car to do the same, and finally the light-skinned Ralph Bunche unfolded from the back seat with the aplomb of an international executive.

  “I’m Dr. Bunche, undersecretary of the United Nations,” he told the posted sergeant. “Here for the march.”

  “Sorry, sir,” replied the sergeant. “This is not the United Nations. My orders are no left turn.”

  As King emerged to ask Lee what was wrong, a Montgomery police motorcycle arrived under siren through traffic piling up behind. The officer brusquely interrupted the sergeant’s explanation of the impasse. “You danged fool,” he said, pointing in recognition of King. “This is the man. Let him through!”

  The car inched forward into the teeming grounds at St. Jude, full of competitive teasing about the relative impotence of pastoral reason and the United Nations, with ironic jokes about whether the rescuing policeman was old enough to have arrested King when he lived in Montgomery. Discussions of rank churned less happily around marshals Ivanhoe Donaldson and Frank Soracco as they distributed bright orange vests to the three hundred stalwarts who had marched the whole fifty miles, calling out, “Make way for the originals.” Newcomers surged around them at the point of formation, demanding extra vests for parallel status. Some said they belonged up front with fellow preachers, or claimed promised rewards—“our president told us Dr. King wanted us to march with him”—and a few refused outright to march behind “kids.”

  The young orange vests asserted themselves with the pluck that had made Selma High School a manpower center for demonstrations since 1963. “All you dignitaries got to get behind me,” shouted seventeen-year-old Profit Barlow. “I didn’t see any of you fellows in Selma, and I didn’t see you on the way to Montgomery. Ain’t nobody going to get in front of me but Dr. King.” His cohorts confirmed pretenders by their clean footwear and shooed them toward the rear.

  Roy Wilkins of the NAACP set an example for the recognized national leaders. “You fellows deserve to go first,” he told the orange vests, in a gesture that calmed frayed nerves through untimely distraction from waiting deputies of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department. They intercepted King to serve summons on several legal actions before he could leave Alabama: a preliminary injunction against boycotts, an action by the Selma Bus Line for recovery of lost revenue, a suit by the city of Selma for damages and reimbursement of public expenditures during demonstrations, all with duplicate paperwork for defendants Abernathy, Young, and Lewis. When King did join the march line, the tentative accommodation of leaders was swamped by an anonymous surge toward him from all sides. Marshals struggled to adapt by placing the younger orange vests well ahead of King as an honor vanguard, followed by an open space for the photographers, then King and Abernathy with front-row leaders Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph, Bunche, Hosea Williams, Lewis, Bevel, and Fred Shuttlesworth, plus Coretta and Juanita Abernathy, followed by Amelia Boynton, Cager Lee, and Marie Foster among more senior orange vests, James Forman, the entertainers, and a host of clergy including Orloff Miller, James Reeb’s last dinner companion.

  THEY EMBARKED nearly two hours late, almost noon in Washington. Marchers toward the front still jostled self-consciously for position, some hoisting important organizational banners. Rosa Parks found herself shoved several times to the sidewalk, where she stood until a marshal who knew her came along to make a fuss about getting her in the march. “I was in it, but they put me out,” Parks complained. She dropped back where placement was more relaxed. Of those content to wait for the crowded campsite to thin out, Viola Liuzzo asked a priest of St. Jude to take her into the high church tower to watch the line stretch into the distance beneath fading helicopters and light Army planes. Suddenly agitated, Liuzzo confessed fear of a contorted segregationist plot to assassinate George Wallace and blame the civil rights movement. She calmed down to waft along with the rearguard marchers, carrying her purse and shoes.

  “It required one hour and 40 minutes to pass a starting point,” FBI agents reported from an observation post, “and a head count tallied approximately 12,000 marchers.” A greater number joined spontaneously or from staging areas at many of the 104 road-blocked intersections along the last four miles into Montgomery, passing sights that made a fresh impression on most marchers but for some touched depths of an odyssey come home. From St. Jude hospital, where Coretta had given birth to the Kings’ first two children, the path moved into Negro neighborhoods down Oak Street past Holt Street Baptist Church, where King at twenty-six had addressed the first mass meeting of the bus boycott more than nine years earlier. Families waved from ramshackle homes. “Many cried,” wrote a correspondent. Belafonte turned to companions and said, “This is it. If I could sing what’s in the hearts and minds of these people, I’d be happy.”

  The columns streamed down Mobile Street into a downtown business district that was eerily deserted. Governor Wallace had proclaimed a “danger” holiday for female state employees, and major businesses placed newspaper advertisements endorsing his stay-home message. From an office building at the corner of Lee and Montgomery, marchers were showered with leaflets picturing King in 1957 at Tennessee’s Highlander Center, labeled “MARTIN LUTHER KING AT COMMUNIST TRAINING SCHOOL.” King himself doubtless had forgotten what he actually said in his speech* celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Highlander, but he knew well that Tennessee had persecuted the South’s pioneer interracial retreat to the brink of extinction, and that Governor Wallace among others made the photograph the centerpiece of an attack campaign springing up nationally on highway billboards.

  From a high window in the federal building, where four years earlier a horrified John Doar had watched mobs beat integrated Freedom Riders at the bus station, Frank Johnson witnessed a political demonstration for the first time in his life; he and a fellow judge measured two hours for the lines to pass the Jeff Davis Hotel. By temperament, Judge Johnson bristled against all street politics for the implication that justice was not yet available through the courts, but he came to exempt from private censure this one messy proof of “something special about democracy: that it can never be taken for granted.”

  Around the fountain at Court Square, where Rosa Parks had boarded her segregated bus home from work on the day in 1955 when her arrest started the boycott, the route opened broadly for the last six blocks up the hill toward the Palladian white dome of the Alabama state capitol. Soldiers stood behind wooden barricades on both sides of Dexter Avenue. Jim Leatherer of Saginaw thumped along in weary exultation, nodding, “I believe in you, I believe in democracy,” but he shook a crutch defiantly at elderly white hecklers in a distant window. A student in the lines received what amounted to a carefree effusion from the circumspect John Doar: “You’re only likely to see three great parades in a lifetime, and this is one of them.”

  To the right at the final intersection stood prim Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, organized nine decades earlier in the former Harwell Mason slave pen, on whose bulletin board, snug at the base of the capitol grounds, the vagabond sage Vernon Johns had scandalized whites and Negroes alike by posting sermon titles such as “Segregation After Death” and “When the Rapist Is White,” during the Korean War. Daddy King, having once begged his son not to follow the chewed-up Johns into the employ of “preacher-eating” Dexter deacons, now converged with the first marchers at the site of King’s first pastorate, along with Coretta’s parents, Obadiah and Bernice Scott.

  At a right angle to the church, a line of Alabama troopers barred access to state property across the wide neck of pavement where Dexter Avenue dead-ended into Bainbridge Street. Reserve troopers faced down the capitol hill from steps rising behind, and Governor Wallace had installed conspicuously on the marble plaza above a final protective barrier. To prevent “desecrating” political touch by Negroes and integrationists, plywood tem
porarily covered the bronze floor emblem on the spot where Jefferson Davis swore an oath to become the first Confederate President in February of 1861.

  Andrew Young climbed aboard a flatbed truck below. “This is a revolution, a revolution that won’t fire a shot….” he called over loudspeakers. “We come to love the hell out of the State of Alabama.” Rally host Abernathy entertained the thickening mass of arrivals with a wry commentary on flags. Refining rumors that a black mourning banner would fly above an evacuated capitol—and erroneous FBI intelligence that Wallace would raise the Soviet hammer and sickle “to show that socialism has taken over”—he described the Alabama and Confederate battle flags waving over the dome, with Old Glory struck down, and guessed mischievously that Alabamians had misplaced their country or forgotten its national anthem. “Let’s teach ’em the words!” Abernathy shouted, turning the crowd away from the dome to see American flags waving thickly above the marchers coming up Dexter Avenue.

  “The Star-Spangled Banner” spilled into “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Go, Tell It on the Mountain,” and “This Land Is Your Land” among patriotic folk songs and spirituals led by singers grouped around the cluster of microphones—Odetta, Leon Bibb, Oscar Brand, Len Chandler in a pith helmet, Joan Baez barefoot in a velvet dress. “Great day! Great day! Great day!” Belafonte shouted among them, above reports that marchers still were filing out of St. Jude. Mary Travers, of the trio Peter, Paul and Mary, kissed him on the cheek.

  Calls besieged corporate headquarters in New York to protest the visible contact between blond Travers and darkly West Indian Belafonte, which “makes a Southerner’s blood run hot.” A station manager in Charlotte, North Carolina, threatened CBS News president Fred Friendly with an organized revolt of affiliates unless he removed offensive “propaganda” from the network feed. Friendly and his vice presidents battled blinking telephone lights until the half-hour break, and then an opposing flood of calls denounced the switch from historic Montgomery back to regular soap operas.

  For ninety minutes, while executives straddled promises to resume the live broadcast from Alabama, television viewers missed the raw chemistry of a mass meeting that lurched between tedium and surprise. “I look worse than anybody else on this stage,” said bricklayer Albert Turner on behalf of Perry County. “That’s because I marched fifty miles.” Some prostrate orange vests could not be roused even for a nod to admiring celebrities, while others agitated to inject extra speakers into the all-male procession on the scheduled program. Amelia Boynton of Selma read a petition intended for Wallace. Rosa Parks, coaxed forward to thunderous applause, recalled hiding from the Klan as a small child. “My family was deprived of the land that they owned,” she said softly. “I am handicapped in every way.” Faltering, she said others could put it all better into words.

  “THEY TOLD us we wouldn’t get here,” King called out that afternoon. “And there were those who said that we would get here only over their dead bodies.” Already he strayed from lyrical prepared remarks about their long march from Selma “through desolate valleys and across the trying hills,” to claim validation for the competent and concrete result. “But all the world today knows that we are here,” he declared extemporaneously, “and we are standing before the forces of power in the State of Alabama, saying, ‘We ain’t gonna let nobody turn us around.’” Tepid response greeted a pause, and his deep opening tones continued at the slow pace of practiced salutation, inviting concentration rather than excitement. From the flatbed, wearing boots and a conservative dark suit, his plain necktie in a formal Windsor knot, King looked over heads massed down the gentle slope of Dexter Avenue to Court Square. As once before at the March on Washington, but never again in his lifetime, cameras from every network transmitted the full speech nationwide.

  He pronounced it fitting that the Selma campaign should end in Montgomery, where domestic nonviolent resistance had been born as an idea “more powerful than guns or clubs,” to spread and grow for eight years until the witness of jailed children in Birmingham aroused the nation “from the wells of its democratic spirit” to provide Negroes “some part of their rightful dignity” in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “But without the vote, it was dignity without strength,” King added, and “once more the method of nonviolent resistance was unsheathed.” He sketched the arduous, lonely vote drive in Alabama to its point of crisis, and said with deliberation: “There never was a moment in American history more honorable and more inspiring than the pilgrimage of clergymen and laymen of every race and faith, pouring into Selma to face danger at the side of its embattled Negroes.” King saluted President Johnson’s “sensitivity to feel the will of the country” and his forthrightness to recognize “the courage of the Negro for awakening the conscience of the nation,” then summarized the Alabama movement thus far. “From Montgomery to Birmingham, from Birmingham to Selma, from Selma back to Montgomery,” he said, “the trail wound in a circle long and often bloody. Yet it has become a highway up from darkness.”

  “Yes, sir,” answered scattered voices.

  “So I stand before you this afternoon with the conviction that segregation is on its deathbed in Alabama,” King announced, projecting a spur of energy, “and the only thing uncertain about it is how costly the segregationists and Wallace will make the funeral.”

  A wave of cheers rolled over an applause line that King had refined with fellow preachers since graduate school. By the rules of oratory, he usually followed the quickening moment of introduction with an anecdote or scriptural passage to frame an accessible question ahead, but here he detoured instead into a troublesome corner of history. “Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War,” King asserted, citing arguments published by Yale historian C. Vann Woodward in his acclaimed book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Southern states had permitted biracial voting for two decades after the end of Reconstruction in 1877—seating nearly a hundred elected Negro legislators in North and South Carolina alone—and for a time white supremacists themselves had ridiculed the crippling inconvenience of Jim Crow proposals.

  King left his script briefly again—“I want you to follow me through here”—to beg patience for abstractions that were remote to dedicated marchers and many scholars, let alone television viewers. What had changed toward the end of the nineteenth century, he argued, was that the fledgling Populist Party, with its potential voting alliance of “poor white masses” and Negroes, had provoked the “emerging bourbon interests” to take drastic action. “Through their control of the mass media,” said King, with a hint of conspiracy, they campaigned shrewdly and sensationally for “laws that made it a crime for Negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level. And that did it.”

  “Yes, sir,” called a lone voice from the huge crowd.

  The mechanical vocabulary of labor materialism and class politics was new in King’s public speech, and perhaps reflected partial drafts from Bayard Rustin among the advisers huddled on the flatbed. He rephrased his interpretation of Woodward’s book in biting religious language at the edge of blasphemy. “If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus,” King continued, “then it may be said of the Reconstruction Era that the Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow…a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man better than the black man.”

  “Yes, sir,” answered voices.

  “He ate Jim Crow…and his children too learned to feed upon Jim Crow,” said King. Against the threat of free ballots, political powers engineered the segregated society. “They segregated Southern churches from Christianity,” he declared. “They segregated Southern minds from honest thinking. And they segregated the Negro from everything!” Cheers erupted briefly from portions of the crowd. Most remained silent, however, as though confounded.

  King’s unexpected, unfinished diagnosis
rested on notions of raw political economy beyond his established pulpit. He drew a direct line from Reconstruction to the Selma march as twin crossroads in the patriotic history of freedom, a century apart, and warned by analogy of pitfalls in this second opportunity to “build a great society.” Inspiration and goodwill were not enough to stabilize new democracy born in traumatic sacrifice, because reactive fears would threaten not only empirical gains but the political vocabulary of self-government itself. After the Civil War, to undermine the three new freedom amendments in the Constitution, Americans broadly had distorted Reconstruction to accommodate a romantic view of white supremacy. Such pitfalls in history, while mysterious and beguiling, went to “the very origin, the root cause of segregation,” King said. Professor Woodward called them “strange,” in his restrained description of the decades when Southern states had come to fasten upon Negroes, and themselves, a segregation so thorough as to banish any fraternal organization with bylaws that allowed members of difference races to address each other as “brother.”

  KING EMPHASIZED the stakes of historical choice. “We’ve come a long way since that travesty of justice was perpetrated on the American mind,” he told the rally. “James Weldon Johnson put it eloquently. He said:

  ‘We have come over a way that with

  Tears has been watered.

  We have come, treading our path through the

  Blood of the slaughtered.’”

  The crowd fell silent as King touched bottom. Whatever had created segregation from slavery, both durable beyond the life span of totalitarian inventions since, he looked unflinching at the consequences. Far from crafting artificial comfort for white listeners, he was quoting a portion of Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing” that recalled degradation too harshly for many slave descendants themselves. Often omitted from performance, the middle stanza of the accepted “Negro National Anthem” evoked formless ghosts of the ancient Middle Passage into slavery, with sharp echoes more recently from the eras of lynching and Civil War. Outside Fort Pillow, Tennessee, where his Confederates massacred surrendered black troops, General Nathan Bedford Forrest had written straightforwardly in his battle report: “The river was dyed red with the blood of the slaughtered for 200 yards.” The wife of the white Union commander interceded with Abraham Lincoln on behalf of fresh sister widows who, as fugitive chattel under state laws, had no more right to veterans’ benefits than did animals or furniture, and Congress, answering Lincoln’s proposal to treat ex-slave orphans and widows “as though their marriages were legal,” granted family status to Negroes by law passed on July 2, 1864, a century to the day ahead of the Civil Rights Act that abolished segregation in the summer before Selma.