“Martin always wore the good-preacher blue suit,” says Young. “And I figured since we couldn’t stop him from marching, we just had to kind of believe that it was true when white folks said we all look alike. So everybody that was about Martin’s size and had a blue suit, I put in front of the line with him … There were some very important people who felt as though they were being pushed back, but all of the preachers loved the chance to get up in the front of the line with Martin Luther King. I don’t think to this day most of them know why they were up there.”
As the march made front-page news throughout the nation, the Voting Rights Act was before Congress. In the House Judiciary Committee, Congressman Emanuel Celler said, “Recent events in Alabama, involving murder, savage brutality, and violence by local police, state troopers, and posses, have so aroused the nation as to make action by this Congress necessary and speedy … the climate of public opinion throughout the nation has so changed because of the Alabama outrages, as to make assured the passage of this solid bill—a bill that would have been inconceivable a year ago.”
On Thursday, March 25, the march reached Montgomery, passing the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, King’s congregation during the Montgomery bus boycott. “It was a great moment to go back to Montgomery,” recalls Coretta Scott King, “because, you see, for us it was returning to Montgomery after ten years. And I kept thinking about ten years earlier, how we were … just blacks [in the movement] …” By contrast, the Selma-to-Montgomery march “had Catholic priests, and nuns, and you had other clergy, and you had a lot of white people. It was really a beautiful thing to pass Dexter Avenue Church and go toward the capitol marching together.”
The national television networks provided live coverage as Martin Luther King marched up to the capitol with many of the movement’s heroes by his side. There was Rosa Parks, the woman whose refusal to move to the back of the bus had triggered the Montgomery boycott; Roy Wilkins of the NAACP; Whitney Young of the National Urban League; A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; and John Lewis of SNCC. King walked up the capitol steps and faced his fellow marchers. “Last Sunday,” he said, “more than eight thousand of us started on a mighty walk from Selma, Alabama. We have walked on meandering highways and rested our bodies on rocky byways … Sister Pollard, … who lived in this community during the [bus] boycott, … was asked if she didn’t want a ride, and when she answered ‘no,’ the person said, ‘Well, aren’t you tired?’ And with ungrammatical profundity she said, ‘My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.’”
Rosa Parks was one of the honored guests at the Montgomery ceremonies. The Montgomery bus boycott ten years before was seen by many activists as the beginning of the movement.
Behind the civil rights leader, the capitol building was flying the Confederate flag. Governor Wallace occasionally looked out at the crowd from behind venetian blinds. King told his audience that, using the vote, black Americans could join whites as equals in a “society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.” But he predicted that getting blacks registered would be hard work, even if the Voting Rights Act were approved. “The road ahead is not altogether a smooth one. There are no broad highways to lead us easily and inevitably to quick solutions. We are still in for a season of suffering.” Then he continued triumphantly, “However difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because truth crushed to the earth will rise again. How long? Not long. Because you shall reap what you sow. How long? Not long … because the are of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. How long? Not long. Because mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” Ending with a recitation of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” King stressed the song’s final lines: “Be jubilant, my feet, our God is marching on … His truth is marching on.”
After the speech, eight march leaders were chosen to enter the capitol and present a petition to Governor Wallace, asking him to remove all obstacles to black voter registration in the state of Alabama. Amelia Boynton, one of the eight, recalls that when the group approached the capitol, they “encountered state troopers standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a solid line … and a second row of city officers with riot guns and bayonets. The officers moved toward us in formation, and someone asked, ‘What do you want?’ We told them we wanted to see the governor and were told he was not in. This was only minutes after our spokesman, SCLC secretary Rev. Joseph E. Lowery of Birmingham, had been told by Governor Wallace’s personal secretary that the governor was in his office.” When the eight activists persisted, the governor’s executive secretary agreed to take the petition from them.
The marchers had been advised to leave the Montgomery area as quickly as possible after the demonstration. The previous evening, Governor Wallace had appealed on television for those not participating in the march to avoid the capitol area, but the activists knew that violence was a real possibility. People had volunteered to drive the marchers back to Selma, where many of them lived or had lodgings. One such volunteer was Viola Liuzzo, a white homemaker from Detroit. After dropping off one group of marchers at Brown’s Chapel that evening, she headed back toward Montgomery, accompanied by Leroy Moton, the teenager who had carried an American flag during the march. Her Michigan license plates must have made her Oldsmobile an easy mark for the four Ku Klux Klansmen who chased her on Route 80. As their car pulled alongside Liuzzo’s, one of the four shot her twice in the face, killing her. Liuzzo’s car ran into a ditch. When the murderers came to look inside, Moton saved himself by pretending to be dead.
In Montgomery, more than 25,000 people listened to speakers in front of the state capitol building. Alabama’s state flag flies with the Confederate flag on the government building.
After the Klansmen had gone, the young man managed to flag down another demonstrator who was driving by. Within hours, the FBI discovered that one of its undercover informants had been in the car with the Klansmen. At noon the next day, President Johnson announced on television that the FBI had arrested the four. “My father,” said the president, “fought them [the Klan] many long years ago in Texas; and I have fought them all my life, because I believe them to threaten the peace of every community where they exist.”
Governor Wallace, appearing on the “Today” show, was defensive. “Of course I regret the incident,” he said, “but I would like to point out that people are assaulted in every state in the union … With 25,000 marching in the streets and chanting and maligning and slandering and libeling the people of this state, as they did for several hours on this network and the other networks, I think the people of our state were greatly restrained.”
Support for the Voting Rights Act increased in the wake of the violence. A dispute over whether to ban the use of poll taxes was the one factor that delayed the bill’s speedy passage. Such taxes had long been used to prevent blacks from voting in several southern states, but the Johnson administration feared that striking them down by federal statute alone might be unconstitutional. To resolve the issue, Johnson asked the attorney general to file suit against the four states where poll taxes were still employed—Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia.
Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia told an aide, “You know, you can’t stop this bill. We can’t deny the Negroes a basic constitutional right to vote.” On May 26, the Senate passed the bill by a vote of seventy-seven to nineteen. In the House, the bill withstood five weeks of debate before winning approval on July 9.
On August 6, President Johnson sat in the President’s Room off the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, preparing to make the Voting Rights Act the law of the land. President Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation one hundred and four years earlier in that same room. Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights luminaries stood by Johnson as he signed the bill.
“The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison m
en because they are different from other men …,” said the president. “[The Voting Rights Act] is one of the most monumental laws in the entire history of American freedom.”
* * *
Securing the Voting Rights Act was a major victory for the civil rights movement. But it was only one part of the larger struggle for dignity, equality, and justice. Segregation lingered in many spheres, black unemployment remained disproportionately high, and violence still flared against black men, women, and children. But with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, black citizens had at last gained access to one of the most potent tools of democracy. Black voters throughout the nation began to elect people of color to such public offices as mayor, state legislator, and congressional representative. Those officials began to serve constituencies that finally included people of all races.
By the summer following the bill’s passage, 9,000 blacks in Dallas County, Alabama, had registered to vote. Sheriff Jim Clark was voted out of office. Over the next decade, as more black people throughout the South began to register and vote, segregationists lost seats of local power. At the state level, progress was much slower. Governors Orval Faubus of Arkansas and George Wallace of Alabama remained in office for several more terms. Nationally, senators James Eastland of Mississippi and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina held their posts for many years. But even these once-ardent segregationists eventually found it politically prudent to soften their rhetoric and seek black support. Joseph Smitherman, still Selma’s mayor at this writing, was elected to six consecutive terms of office. He says that in the last election he gained as much as eighty percent of the black vote.
The voting power of blacks also affected federal appointments. President Kennedy named Thurgood Marshall to a United States circuit court of appeals in 1961. In 1965 President Johnson selected Marshall as his solicitor general and two years later asked him to serve as the nation’s first black justice of the Supreme Court. In 1966 Johnson appointed the nation’s first black cabinet member, Robert Weaver, to the position of secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. President Jimmy Carter appointed Andrew Young to the position of United Nations ambassador. Young went on to become the mayor of Atlanta, while Unita Blackwell became mayor of Mayersville, Mississippi—a state with more black elected officials than any other. By 1984, black mayors had been elected in 255 cities.
The North was also affected by the increased participation of blacks in the electoral process. In 1966, Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts became the first black elected to the United States Senate. The next year, Carl B. Stokes became the first black mayor of a major city when he won that office in Cleveland. Tom Bradley won Los Angeles’ mayoral seat in 1973, and former SNCC worker Marion Barry was elected mayor of Washington, D.C., in 1979. In 1983, Harold Washington became Chicago’s chief executive.
Few people in the movement believed that morality could be controlled by legislation. But expecting things to change without the force of law would be treating freedom like a gift subject to the generosity of the giver, and not a right due each American citizen. Securing legislation was a crucial step in making the country more democratic. Voting, access to public accommodations, and an equal education were no longer matters of local largess; they were matters of law.
Over a period of ten years, the civil rights movement not only dramatically altered the nation, but also transformed a race. Black people who had lived under oppression for 300 years gained a new sense of dignity and power and a truer sense of citizenship. White people were changed as well—after an unquestioned acceptance of a segregated society, many examined how they treated their black neighbors and went on to accept civil rights as human rights. But changing the hearts and minds of most white people would take more than legislation. After the Selma march, the assassination of Malcolm X, and the signing of the Voting Rights Act, a new sense of injustice began to burn in northern cities.
The movement’s emphasis shifted from the moral imperatives that had garnered support from the nation’s moderates—issues such as the right to vote and the right to a decent education—to issues whose moral rightness was not as readily apparent: job and housing discrimination, Johnson’s war on poverty, and affirmative action. The movement tackled these varied issues in many different ways, from black nationalism, black power and even a call for full-scale revolution to a continuation of marches, protests, court battles, and sit-ins. Nonviolence was no longer the only tool for change; many blacks had seen too many murders, too many betrayals. The built-up anger expressed itself in the 1965 riots in Watts and Harlem, and later in Chicago, Detroit, and many other cities. Violence fractured the movement’s widespread moral support. The split in the coalition between white liberals and black activists, seen in an early stage at the 1964 Democratic Convention, widened dramatically.
But the violent events of later years and the many new directions of the civil rights movement cannot obscure the remarkable accomplishments wrought by the men and women, black and white, who in ten short years rewove the fabric of American society. The decade spanning the Brown decision of 1954 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 saw more social change, more court decisions, and more legislation in the name of civil rights than any decade in our nation’s history. Those changes were forced by millions of Americans who, with a sense of service and justice, kept their eyes on the prize of freedom.
“I know one thing we did right
was the day we started to fight.
Keep your eyes on the prize,
hold on, hold on.
Epilogue
Where Have they Gone?
The civil rights movement involved thousands of people, black and white, young and old, who fought to make America live up to its promise of equality. The lives of these people in the years following 1965 reflect both changes in the country and changes in the country and changes in the movement itself. Many turned their attention to the Vietnam war; others participated in the Black Power movement; some went into politics and law. Others simply carried on with their lives, deciding, as E.D Nixon said after the successful Montgomery bus boycott, “I wanna enjoy some of this stuff myself.”
The following list is by no means comprehensive, but it presents biographical information that indicates the changed direction of the movement and the country. Names are listed in orde of their first significant appearance within the text.
CHAPTER ONE
James Nabrit, who joined the Howard University faculty during Charles Houston’s time, became president of Howard in 1960. In 1965 he was appointed United States deputy representative to the United Nations Security Council. After returning to Howard University in 1968, he retired from the presidency in 1969. He died in 1997 at the age of ninety-seven.
Thurgood Marshall, who in 1938 succeeded Charles Houston as special counsel to the NAACP, was appointed by President Kennedy to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Judicial Circuit in 1961. After four years on that appellate court, Marshall was named United States solicitor-general and, in 1967, President Johnson appointed him an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. He died in 1993. As one obituary noted, “We make movies about Malcolm X, we get a holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, but every day we live with the legacy of Justice Thurgood Marshall.”
Spottswood W. Robinson III, who was the special counsel for the southeast region of the NAACP, served as dean of the Howard University School of Law. In 1966 Robinson became the first black appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and served as chief judge from 1981 to 1986. He assumed senior status in 1989 and died in 1998.
Robert Carter, an attorney with the Legal Defense Fund, became the director of a local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and was then appointed a United States District court judge for the Southern District of New York. He died in 2012.
Linda Brown, of Brown v. Board of Education, lives in Topeka, Kansas, where she teaches music. She has two grown children. Her sc
hool, Monroe Elementary, was designated a U.S. National Historic Site unit of the National Park Service in 1992.
Oliver Brown, Linda Brown’s father, left Topeka four years after the 1954 decision and became a pastor at a Methodist church in Springfield, Missouri. He died in 1961 at the age of forty-two. His participation in the Brown case inspired his younger daughter, Cheryl Brown Henderson, to cofound the Brown Foundation for Educational Equity, Excellence and Research in 1988.
Jack Greenberg served as director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund from 1961 to 1984 and now teaches at Columbia Law School where he is a full-time faculty member.
CHAPTER TWO
James O. Eastland retired in 1978 after thirty-five years as a Mississippi senator. Eastland chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee from 1956 until 1978. He died in 1986.
Mose Wright gave lectures for the NAACP on the Emmett Till case before moving to Argo, Illinois, where he farmed until his death in 1973.
Curtis Jones, who visited Money, Mississippi, with his cousin Emmett Till in 1955, was a Chicago policeman for thirty years. When he died in 2000 he had never fired his weapon.
Roy Bryant sold his confession to Look magazine in 1956 and was ostracized by the local community. He moved to another town to begin a new general store, but that business failed as well due to boycotts from black customers. He died in 1994.
Charles Diggs, Jr., the black United States congressman from Michigan, held his congressional seat through twelve succeeding terms and was the first chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. He was convicted in 1978 of padding his congressional office payroll. He left federal prison in 1981 and in 1983 earned a bachelor’s degree from Howard University and became an undertaker in Maryland. He died in 1998.
Eyes on the Prize Page 34
