The following day, presidential press secretary George Reedy announced Johnson’s intention to send a “proposal” on voting rights to Congress, but he did not give specifics or say when the action would be taken. King went to Washington, hoping to meet with the president, but was told that Johnson was preoccupied with Vietnam. The civil rights leader left for Birmingham, where he met with another disappointment: A planned march of “thousands” drew barely 200 people. But on February 8, word came that Johnson would now see King. The two met for fifteen minutes, and though nothing specific was agreed upon, the minister had at least made his case directly to the president.
On Tuesday, February 16, SCLC executive staff member C. T. Vivian led twenty-five demonstrators through the rainy streets of Selma to the county courthouse to protest a new voter registration policy. Officials had announced that blacks wishing to register could sign a ledger, and those who did so would be served first on the two days per month when the registrar’s office was open. To Vivian, the new rule gave a false impression that concessions were being made to Selma’s blacks. He walked up the courthouse steps and began to lecture Sheriff Clark, who was blocking the doorway with a group of armed deputies.
“We want you to know, gentlemen, that—every one of you—we know your badge numbers, we know your names …” Vivian scolded. “There are those who followed Hitler like you blindly follow this Sheriff Clark. They didn’t think their day would come. But they also were pulled into the courtroom and they were also given their death sentences … You’re racists in the same way Hitler was a racist … You can’t keep anyone in the U.S. from voting without hurting the rights of all other citizens. Democracy’s built on this. This is why every man has the right to vote … And this is what we’re trying to say to you. These people have the right to stand inside this courthouse. If you’d had your basic civics courses, you’d know this, gentlemen.”
Sheriff Clark remembers, “[Vivian] started shouting at me that I was Hitler, I was a brute, that I was a Nazi. I don’t remember all … and I lost my temper then.” Clark ordered the television cameramen to turn off their lights, and when they did he suddenly struck Vivian in the mouth, sending him sprawling onto the stone steps. “You can arrest us, Sheriff Clark,” said Vivian, putting a hand to his bleeding lip. “You don’t have to beat us … You beat people bloody in order that they will not have the privilege to vote.” Clark said later he didn’t recall hitting Vivian, but did say, “I went to the doctor and got an X ray and found out I had a linear fracture in a finger on my left hand.”
The scene provided gripping footage on the news that evening. Mayor Smitherman and Wilson Baker tried to tell reporters that Clark alone was to blame for the incident, but Martin Luther King rejoined, “I’m here to tell you that the businessmen, the mayor of this city, and everybody in the white power structure of this city must take responsibility for everything that Jim Clark does in this community.”
Vivian was invited to speak in the nearby town of Marion on February 18 about his confrontation with Clark. The meeting culminated in a nighttime march, a tactic the activists knew was dangerous. The area was surrounded by auxiliary police, state troopers, and angry white civilians.
Just before the attack, the streetlights went out. Newspeople were threatened and harassed; panicked demonstrators scurried to flee the ruffians. Eighty-two-year-old Cager Lee had been beaten and was bleeding. His grandson, twenty-six-year-old Jimmy Lee Jackson, rushed him into a cafe to escape further abuse, but several troopers followed them in. One officer hit Jackson’s mother, and the young man struck back. Another trooper hit Jackson in the face with a stick, and according to later testimony, yet another pulled a gun and shot him in the stomach. He died seven days later. Dozens of other people, including NBC reporter Richard Valeriani, were badly beaten.
The next day, the story of the police brutality hit the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. Valeriani appeared on television from his hospital bed, his speech slurred and his head bandaged.
The constant violence had begun to take an emotional toll on the movement. The entire nation now understood the reign of terror by which southern bigots kept blacks from voting. Still the violence continued, and on February 22 the Justice Department phoned King to warn him of a possible plot on his life.
There was no word yet from the president on the new voter registration proposal. On Tuesday, February 23, a group of Republican congressmen in Washington issued a statement: “How long will Congress and the American people be asked to wait while this administration studies and restudies Dr. King’s request for new federal legislation? The need is apparent. The time is now.”
One of the many confrontations between C. T. Vivian and Sheriff Clark.
The funeral of Jimmy Lee Jackson.
Not all whites living in Selma approved of the violence against black people. Here, demonstrators show their support publicly.
That Sunday, two days after the death of Jimmy Lee Jackson, the SCLC’s James Bevel suggested in a sermon that the civil rights marchers take their case straight to Governor George Wallace in Montgomery. He proposed to march the entire distance from Marion, the site of Jackson’s shooting, to the state capital.
On Tuesday, March 2, President Johnson met with Roy Wilkins and Clarence Mitchell of the NAACP to discuss legislation creating federal voter registration. Meanwhile, King told reporters that Johnson had a “mandate from the American people—he must go out this time and get a voting rights bill that will end the necessity for any more voting rights bills.”
At Jimmy Lee Jackson’s funeral, held the next day, mourners draped a large white banner over the entrance to Brown’s Chapel bearing the words, “Racism Killed Our Brother.” King, speaking at the memorial service, said Jackson had been murdered by those who beat people “in the name of the law”; by politicians who fed their constituents “the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism”; by a federal government that was eager to spend money on a war in Vietnam while refusing to “protect the lives of its own citizens seeking the right to vote”; and by “every Negro who passively accepts the evils of segregation and stands on the sidelines in the struggle for justice. Jimmy Lee Jackson’s death says we must work unrelentingly to make the American dream a reality.”
“We was infuriated to the point that we wanted to carry Jimmy’s body to George Wallace and dump it on the steps of the Capitol,” said Albert Turner, a local civil rights leader in Marion. “We had decided that we were going to get killed or we was going to be free.”
King declared his support for the fifty-mile march, beginning the following Sunday across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma and continuing along Route 80 to the state capital in Montgomery. For some, the mood was somber. There had been, as SNCC’s John Lewis put it, “too many funerals … people with courage and dignity gave the supreme sacrifice, really, paid the supreme price. It was troublesome and it was a very low moment for many of us, a very dark and lonely hour, because, in a real sense, we felt a great sense of responsibility.”
Governor Wallace wanted no part of a march that would cast him in the role of murderer. At a press conference, he announced that the state would not permit the march because it would tie up traffic on the highway. Wallace put the highway patrol on alert.
SNCC, the civil rights group with the longest history in Selma, tried to talk the SCLC out of staging the march. In a letter to King, John Lewis wrote, “We strongly believe that the objectives of the march do not justify the dangers … consequently the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee will [only] live up to those minimal commitments … to provide radios and cars, doctors and nurses, and nothing beyond that.”
The SCLC was undeterred. The march would begin as scheduled on March 7. It would take at least four days, providing plenty of time for dialogue with the nation’s news reporters.
On Friday, March 5, King visited Johnson and the two conferred for over an hour. Afterwards King told reporters he had asked the president to inc
lude federal registrars in the voting rights bill and abolish all use of literacy tests. The two leaders did not know that the Justice Department had created a proposal that compromised on the literacy test question: If, in a state or county that employed the test, fewer than fifty percent of those of voting age were either not registered or not voting, the literacy test would be banned. The proposal also allowed the use of federal registrars in any state or county where literacy tests were suspended. The proposal was on its way to the White House as King left.
The next day, some seventy sympathetic whites held their own march on Selma’s Dallas County Courthouse. They were led by Rev. Joseph Ellwanger, chairman of the Concerned White Citizens of Alabama. Standing on the steps where C. T. Vivian had been beaten, Ellwanger read a statement saying they had “come to Selma today to tell the nation that there are white people in Alabama who will speak out against the events which have recently occurred in this and neighboring counties and towns. We consider it a shocking injustice that there are still counties in Alabama where there are no Negroes registered to vote and where Negroes have reason to fear hostility and harassment by public officials when they do try to register … We are horrified at the brutal way in which the police at times have attempted to break up peaceful assemblies and demonstrations by American citizens who are exercising their constitutional right to protest injustice …”
As Ellwanger spoke, a group of segregationists began a counter rally, singing “Dixie” in an effort to drown out the speech. Ellwanger raised his voice, and the contingent of supportive whites struck up a rendition of “America the Beautiful.” Blacks, too, had been drawn to the scene, and they chimed in with “We Shall Overcome.” Wilson Baker rushed to the courthouse and urged Ellwanger to leave before a riot broke out. Ellwanger and his group left, as did the black bystanders; but a SNCC photographer was attacked by the segregationists. When the man managed to lock himself in a parked car, the mob hoisted the vehicle off the ground, but Baker persuaded them to put it down and let the photographer go.
King did not return to Selma after his White House meeting. He had frequently been away from his church in Atlanta and, although he had promised to lead the march, he now said he needed to be in his own pulpit that day. He would join the march to Montgomery later.
Although SNCC did not approve of the march, the executive committee agreed to let SNCC members participate as individuals. On the morning of the march, SCLC workers Hosea Williams, Andy Young, and James Bevel met at Brown’s Chapel and flipped a coin to decide who would lead the march in King’s absence. It fell to Hosea Williams to lead the demonstrators; SNCC chairman John Lewis would walk beside him. Six hundred people, standing two by two, lined up behind them. To everyone’s surprise, there were no police in sight as Williams and Lewis led the marchers six blocks to Broad Street and began to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge spanning the Alabama River in East Selma.
Clouds of tear gas rise over the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
“When we arrived at the apex of the Edmund Pettus Bridge,” recalls Lewis, “we saw a sea of blue[-clad] Alabama state troopers.” Gas masks hung from the belts of the troopers, who were slapping billy clubs against their hands. Williams asked Lewis if he could swim. Lewis looked down at the cold river and answered, “No.”
As the marchers approached the far side of the bridge, Major John Cloud ordered them to turn back. “It would be detrimental to your safety to continue this march,” he said. “You are ordered to disperse, go home or to your church. This march will not continue. You have two minutes …”
Williams asked, “May we have a word with you, Major?” Cloud replied that there was nothing to talk about. He waited, then commanded, “Troopers, advance.” Fifty policemen moved forward, knocking the first ten to twenty demonstrators off their feet. People screamed and struggled to break free as their packs and bags were scattered across the pavement. Tear gas was fired, and then lawmen on horseback charged into the stumbling protesters.
“The horses … were more humane than the troopers; they stepped over fallen victims,” recalls Amelia Boynton. “As I stepped aside from a trooper’s club, I felt a blow on my arm … Another blow by a trooper, as I was gasping for breath, knocked me to the ground and there I lay, unconscious …”
“All I could see was the outburst of tear gas,” said Sheyann Webb, then eight years old. “I saw people being beaten and I tried to run home as fast as I could. And as I began to run home, I saw horses behind me … Hosea Williams picked me up and I told him to put me down, he wasn’t running fast enough.”
The Media and the Movement: An Interview With Richard Valeriani
Richard Valeriani joined NBC in 1962 and covered the civil rights protests in Albany, Birmingham, and Selma for the network. He later spent twenty years in Washington, where he reported on the State Department, White House, and Pentagon. Valeriani currently works for NBC News in New York.
I think that television helped accelerate the progress of a movement whose time had come. The wires, newspapers, and magazines would eventually have had a similar impact. But it would not have been nearly so immediate. The other thing that television did, and I think this is overlooked, is that it forced the print media to be more honest than it had ever been in covering these events. In the old days, the wire service guy would sit there in Birmingham and call up the local sheriff … He would write the sheriff’s point of view entirely. Television forced [print journalists] to go there and see what was happening, and then they could not distort it.
… A lot of people identified the press with the movement. We were in the middle. I used to get complaints all the time. The local whites said that we were helping outside agitators and that if we went away, they would go away. They said that in effect we were part of the movement, instigating the movement, encouraging them to do these things. On the other hand, we’d get complaints from blacks that we were not encouraging the movement, that we were not doing enough to propagandize their cause. The best you could do was to juxtapose something that Bull Connor said with something that Martin Luther King said or with something that Jim Clark said. But we were constantly caught.
One night, when Chuck Quinn and I were covering the Selma events together, there was to be a nighttime march in Marion, Alabama. Nighttime marches were always dangerous … we knew there was going to be trouble right away because local folks threatened us, sprayed our cameras with black paint so we couldn’t shoot, ordered us to put the cameras down, and harassed us. It was a very tense situation. When the march started, the cops went in and broke it up, very violent. They killed Jimmie Lee Jackson that night. The passions that were aroused led somebody to walk up behind me and hit me in the back of the head with an ax handle. Now luckily for me, he hit me with a roundhouse swing instead of coming overhead and hitting me on the top of the skull. I staggered and was stunned, and a state trooper came up to this guy who hit me. He took the ax handle away, threw it on the steps of city hall, and said, “I guess you’ve done enough damage with that tonight.” But the policeman did not arrest him. Then another white man walked up to me and said, “Are you hurt? Do you need a doctor?” I put my hand to the back of my head and then looked at it and it was full of blood. I said, “Yeah, I think I do. I’m bleeding.” And then he thrust his face right up against mine and said, “Well, we don’t have doctors for people like you.” But my crew got me off to the hospital. The next day the mayor visited me at the hospital and apologized, and they finally did arrest the guy after it had caused something of a national uproar.
The Invasion of Selma: An Interview with Joseph Smitherma
Joseph Smitherman operated an appliance store until 1960, when he was elected to the Selma City Council. Four years later, he became mayor of Selma. Except for a one-year hiatus, Smitherman has held that office ever since, and is now serving his sixth term. Smitherman reports that in the fourth- and fifth-term elections, he won seventy and eighty percent of the black vote, respectively.
They picked Selma ju
st like a movie producer would pick a set. You had the right ingredients. Clark, in his day, had a helmet liner like General Patton, an Eisenhower jacket, and a swagger stick. Baker was very impressive. And I guess I was the least of all—I was 145 pounds and had a crew cut and big ears. So you had a young mayor with no background or experience, and you had this dynamic figure, Wilson Baker, a professional law enforcement officer, a moderate, if you please. And you had Sheriff Clark, who was a military figure.
… I was not there [on Bloody Sunday]. I stayed away, at city hall. I did not understand how big it was until I saw it on television. I was only about three blocks from it, but I didn’t go out on the streets. I would stand on city hall because being around Dr. King was a political no-no.
… We became the march capital of the world. Kids would come in, students, to get their spurs in Selma. I remember I had a phone call from the University of Minnesota and some young girl said, “We’re coming to your city tomorrow.” I don’t know what I told her really, but I didn’t care for it. She chartered an airplane and brought a group of students to Montgomery Airport. Landed, rented a bus, came over here, marched two hours, got in the bus, went back up in the plane.
… Even then you knew [racial discrimination] was wrong but you would always rationalize: “Why were they pushing this and why were they trying to tear up the society by coming on this strong with demonstrations? Why didn’t these outside agitators leave us alone to work out our own problems?” That was generally the attitude. Of course we knew it was wrong to shoot fire hoses and turn dogs loose; we never did that here. But we all shared the blame.
“The police were riding along on horseback beating people,” remembers Andrew Young. “The tear gas was so thick you couldn’t get to where the people were who needed help … there were people who came back to the church and started talking about going to get their guns. And you had to talk them down … ‘What kind of gun you got? .32, .38? You know how that’s going to hold up against the automatic rifles and … shotguns that they’ve got? And how many you got? They [the police] had at least 200 shotguns out there with buckshot in them. You ever see buckshot? You ever see what buckshot does to a deer?’ … You make people think about the specifics of violence, and then they realize how suicidal and nonsensical it is.”
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