Voices in Our Blood

by Jon Meacham

  I looked out on the room, crammed wall to wall and floor to ceiling with people. There was not a spot for one more body. I had no speech prepared. I had not had the time or opportunity to give much thought to what I would say. The words just came.

  “I don’t know how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam,” I said. “I don’t see how he can send troops to the Congo. I don’t see how he can send troops to Africa, and he can’t send troops to Selma, Alabama.”

  There was clapping, and some shouts of “Yes!” and “Amen!”

  “Next time we march,” I continued, “we may have to keep going when we get to Montgomery. We may have to go on to Washington.”

  When those words were printed in The New York Times the next morning, the Justice Department announced it was sending FBI agents to Selma to investigate whether “unnecessary force was used by law officers and others.” For two months we’d been facing “unnecessary force,” but that apparently had not been enough. This, finally, was enough.

  Now, after speaking, it was time for me to have my own injuries examined. I went next door to the parsonage, where the doctors took one look at my head and immediately sent me over to Good Samaritan. What I remember most about arriving there was the smell in the waiting room. The chairs were jammed with people from the march—victims and their families—and their clothing reeked of tear gas. The bitter, acrid smell filled the room.

  The nurses and nuns were very busy. Priests roamed the room, comforting and calming people. When one of the nurses saw my head, I was immediately taken through and X-rayed. My head wound was cleaned and dressed, then I was admitted. By ten that night, exhausted and groggy from painkillers, I finally fell asleep.

  It was not until the next day that I learned what else had happened that evening, that just past 9:30 P.M., ABC Television cut into its Sunday night movie—a premiere broadcast of Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg, a film about Nazi racism—with a special bulletin. News anchor Frank Reynolds came onscreen to tell viewers of a brutal clash that afternoon between state troopers and black protest marchers in Selma, Alabama. They then showed fifteen minutes of film footage of the attack.

  The images were stunning—scene after scene of policemen on foot and on horseback beating defenseless American citizens. Many viewers thought this was somehow part of the movie. It seemed too strange, too ugly to be real. It couldn’t be real.

  But it was. At one point in the film clip, Jim Clark’s voice could be heard clearly in the background: “Get those goddamned niggers!” he yelled. “And get those goddamned white niggers.”

  The American public had already seen so much of this sort of thing, countless images of beatings and dogs and cursing and hoses. But something about that day in Selma touched a nerve deeper than anything that had come before. Maybe it was the concentrated focus of the scene, the mass movement of those troopers on foot and riders on horseback rolling into and over two long lines of stoic, silent, unarmed people. This wasn’t like Birmingham, where chanting and cheering and singing preceded a wild stampede and scattering. This was a face-off in the most vivid terms between a dignified, composed, completely nonviolent multitude of silent protestors and the truly malevolent force of a heavily armed, hateful battalion of troopers. The sight of them rolling over us like human tanks was something that had never been seen before.

  People just couldn’t believe this was happening, not in America. Women and children being attacked by armed men on horseback—it was impossible to believe.

  But it had happened. And the response from across the nation to what would go down in history as Bloody Sunday was immediate. By midnight that evening, even as I lay asleep in my room over at Good Samaritan, people from as far away as New York and Minnesota were flying into Alabama and driving to Selma, forming a vigil of their own outside Brown’s Chapel. President Johnson, who had been contacted by the Justice Department almost immediately after the attack, watched the ABC footage that evening. He knew he would have to respond. Dr. King, too, was informed of what had happened as soon as the President—Andy Young called King in Atlanta, and the two agreed that now there would be a march. They made plans to file a request the first thing in the morning, asking for a federal injunction barring state interference in a massive Selma-to-Montgomery march.

  That request arrived the next morning, Monday, in Montgomery, on the desk of Federal District Judge Frank Johnson—the same judge who had issued the injunction four years earlier providing us with safe passage out of Montgomery during the Freedom Ride.

  Banner headlines, with four-column photographs—many showing the trooper clubbing me as I lay on the ground with my arm upraised—appeared that Monday morning in newspapers around the world. By midday I was receiving telegrams and cards and flowers from total strangers. A wreath arrived from an elderly woman in Southern California: “A FORMER ALABAMIAN,” the card read. “WE ARE WITH YOU.”

  Dr. King and Ralph Abernathy came to see me. They told me what was going on outside, that people all across the country were with us, that they were going to have this march. “It’s going to happen, John,” Dr. King told me. “Rest assured it is going to happen.”

  John Doar, from the Justice Department, came to interview me about the attack, to take a deposition of sorts. The federal government was now very involved in this thing.

  The hospital staff kept the press away from my room, except for a UPI photographer, who was allowed in to shoot a picture, I saw no reporters at all.

  I was in a lot of pain that day. And I felt very strange lying in that bed. With all my arrests and injuries over the years, I had never actually been admitted to a hospital before. I’d been treated, but never admitted. And I did not like it. I felt very restless and a little bit frightened. Maybe it was the drugs, but I had visions of someone slipping into the room and doing something to me. I felt vulnerable, helpless.

  Worst of all, though, was the sense of being cut off. I was hearing about everything secondhand, if at all. It was killing me not to know what was going on outside that hospital, because I knew there was plenty going on.

  And I was right.

  Several carloads, and a truckload as well, of SNCC field workers from Mississippi had rushed in that day, along with a chartered plane of staff people from Atlanta—Forman and others. All told, more than thirty SNCC people had arrived in Selma by that afternoon.

  They came with a mixture of hurt and outrage and shame and guilt. They were concerned for the local people of Selma, and also for one of their own. I had been hurt, and they didn’t like it. It made them mad. It got them excited, too. This was an emergency, a crisis, something to respond to. It was like firemen who hadn’t had a fire to put out in a long time. Now everyone wanted to be the first to get to the blaze.

  None of them came to see me in the hospital, except for Lafayette Surrney, whose purpose was to collect information for a press release. I really wasn’t hurt about that. I guessed that they were probably very busy.

  And I was right. Word came from Judge Johnson that Monday afternoon that he would not grant an injunction without a hearing, and he would not be able to hold a hearing any sooner than Thursday. That evening the SCLC and SNCC leadership—Dr. King, Andy Young and others of the SCLC; Forman, Willie Ricks and Fay Bellamy of SNCC, along with Jim Farmer, who’d come on the scene to represent CORE—argued over whether they should risk losing the judge’s support by staging a march before getting his approval, or risk losing credibility and momentum by waiting patiently until he issued his injunction.

  Unlike two days earlier, when he had been dead set against SNCC’s participation, Forman was now pushing hard to march, and to march now. Hosea was with him, as was Farmer. Most of the others leaned toward accepting Judge Johnson’s terms. If I had been there, I would have said we should march and let the courts do what they would—what they should. I wouldn’t have gone as far as Forman, who was furious that this judge was telling us to wait—he called Judge Johnson’s offer “legal blackmail”�
��but I would have said this was no time to stop and sit still.

  Our SNCC people were even more fed up with the SCLC than they had been two days before. King’s staff had prepared a fund-raising ad to be placed in The New York Times, showing a photograph of me being beaten on the bridge. That really bothered a lot of our people. The way Julian later put it to one reporter, “It was our chairman who was leading the march. . . . SCLC was hogging all the publicity and all the money and doing very little to deserve it. . . . We just resented SCLC’s ability to capitalize on things we thought we were doing.”

  I understood that resentment. But again, I felt that SNCC had lost the upper hand completely, along with any right to complain, by not being part of that march. When Julian said it was “our chairman” leading the march, he was ignoring the fact that our leadership had pointedly decided the night before that I would march not as the chairman of SNCC but as myself. There was something wrong with trying to have it both ways now. I had played the role of a go-between up until this point, bridging my roles with both SNCC and the SCLC, but clearly that was going to be harder to do from here on out.

  The final decision at that Monday night meeting was left up to Dr. King, and he decided there would be no march on Tuesday. Then he left with the others to attend a rally at Brown’s Chapel. The place was packed; the atmosphere was overwhelmingly emotional, and apparently it overwhelmed Dr. King as well, who stunned everyone who had been at that meeting by announcing to the crowd that there would be a march the next day.

  Late that night and on into the next morning, the SNCC and SCLC leaders met at the home of a local black dentist, Dr. Sullivan Jackson, to hash out the plans for the Tuesday march. State and federal authorities had issued official statements forbidding it. George Wallace actually claimed he had “saved lives” by having Lingo and Clark and their men stop us that Sunday afternoon—the counties ahead, the places we would have to pass through to get to Montgomery, said the governor, were much more dangerous than anything we faced in Selma. Those same dangers, he now claimed, were too great to allow us to march on this day.

  Dr. King and the others were up until 4 A.M. trying to work out some sort of compromise with government officials in the face of a restraining order against this march issued by Judge Johnson. King spoke by phone early that morning with Attorney General Katzenbach in Washington. Then, after a few hours’ sleep, King met with several federal officials, including John Doar and former Florida governor LeRoy Collins, who was now director of the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service and who had been sent by President Johnson to mediate this situation. After Collins met with King that morning, he went to talk to state and local officials, including Lingo and Clark, who were once again stationed with their troops at the east end of the bridge.

  No one besides Dr. King and a few of his closest staffers knew exactly what was decided by those early-morning phone calls and meetings. When a column of two thousand marchers led by Dr. King left Brown’s Chapel early that afternoon, walking the same route toward the same bridge we’d tried to cross that Sunday, they all assumed they were headed for Montgomery. When they were stopped at the bridge by a U.S. marshal who read aloud Judge Johnson’s order against this march, they assumed this was just a formality. And when Dr. King then led the column over the crest of the bridge to the bottom of the other side, where the armed troopers were massed once again, the marchers steeled themselves for another attack.

  This time, though, the troopers stood still and simply watched as Dr. King brought the column to a halt and led the marchers in prayer. Then they sang “We Shall Overcome.” And then, as the troopers moved aside to open the way east to Montgomery, Dr. King turned around and headed back to the church.

  The marchers were shocked and confused. They had no idea what was going on. They had come to put their bodies on the line, and now they were backing down, retreating, going home. They followed Dr. King—what else could they do? But they were disappointed. Many were openly angry.

  Jim Forman was absolutely livid. When he—and everyone else—learned that Dr. King had made an agreement with federal officials that morning to march only to the bridge, as a symbolic gesture, and then to turn back and await Judge Johnson’s hearing later that week, he exploded, denouncing Dr. King’s “trickery” and saying that this was the last straw. SNCC had had enough. There would be no more working with the SCLC. There would be no waiting for any judge’s injunction. SNCC was finished with waiting, finished with Selma. It was time to do something on our own, said Forman. Within twenty-four hours he shifted our manpower and focus from Selma to the streets of Montgomery, where SNCC-led student forces from Tuskegee Institute and Alabama State University began laying siege to the state capitol with a series of demonstrations more overt and aggressive than anything seen in Selma. Taunting, provoking, clashing with mounted policemen—the SNCC protests that week in Montgomery would prove to be nothing like our nonviolent campaign in Selma.

  All this news hit me like a windstorm when I was released from the hospital that Tuesday night. I was still in great pain—my head was pounding. My skull was fractured. I’d had a serious concussion. The doctors told me I needed more treatment and suggested I see some specialists up in Boston. But there was no way I was going to Boston. There was no time. I’d already lain in that hospital long enough. It was driving me crazy.

  One good thing about the three days I spent in that hospital bed was that it gave me a lot of time to think, to reflect. I had every reason to be discouraged. My feelings and philosophy about the movement, about our strategies and tactics, my commitment to nonviolence, my loyalty to Dr. King were all increasingly putting me at odds with many of my SNCC colleagues. We even differed about the events of that Tuesday, about Dr. King’s “double-dealing,” as some of them called it. I had no problem with what Dr. King did. I thought it was in keeping with the philosophy of the movement, that there comes a time when you must retreat, and that there is nothing wrong with retreating. There is nothing wrong with coming back to fight another day. Dr. King knew—we all knew—that Judge Johnson was going to give us what we were asking for if we simply followed procedure, followed the rules.

  But I was in the minority. Most of the people in SNCC were sick of procedure, sick of the rules. Some were sick of me. By all rights, I should have been despondent when I came out of that hospital, but I wasn’t. Quite the opposite. I guess I’ve always been a person who looks at the big picture rather than focusing on little details. That’s probably a curse as much as it is a blessing. But that’s what I saw that Tuesday night as I emerged from that hospital—the big picture. And it looked wonderful. I was convinced now more than ever that we would prevail. The response we had gotten nationally in the wake of that Sunday attack was so much greater than anything I’d seen since I’d become a part of the movement for civil rights. It was greater than the Freedom Rides, greater than the March on Washington, greater than Mississippi Summer. The country seemed truly aroused. People were really moved. During the first forty-eight hours after Bloody Sunday, there were demonstrations in more than eighty cities protesting the brutality and urging the passage of a voting rights act. There were speeches on the floors of both houses of Congress condemning the attack and calling for voting rights legislation. A telegram signed by more than sixty congressmen was sent to President Johnson, asking for “immediate” submission of a voting rights bill.

  Yes, we had serious problems with SNCC. They would have to be worked out, and I had no doubt they would be. But meanwhile, the movement had an incredible amount of momentum. When I came out of the hospital that Tuesday night, despite all the buzz among my SNCC colleagues about the “betrayal” that afternoon, I was exhilarated.

  There was a rally that night at Brown’s Chapel, and I was overjoyed to be there. People in the press were pushing and pushing about the “split” between SNCC and the SCLC. They asked me openly about it. I told them, no, there was no split. How could there be a split, I said, between two gro
ups that have never pretended to be one?

  “I am not going to engage in any public discussion of organizational problems,” I stated. “SCLC is not the enemy. George Wallace and segregation are the enemy.”

  Ivanhoe Donaldson put it a different way. “Within the movement,” he told one reporter, “we are a family. Arguments take place in any family.”

  He couldn’t have put it any better. And the wisest families, he might have added, keep their arguments to themselves. Yes, we had problems among ourselves and with the SCLC, but I wasn’t about to discuss them with the press.

  That night, after the rally at Brown’s, I went home with one of the families in the Carver project, the Wests, and slept like a baby. It was not until the next morning that I heard what had happened while I was asleep.

  More than four hundred out-of-town ministers—most of them white—had taken part in the march that afternoon. After the rally that evening, three of them went and had dinner at Walker’s Cafe, the diner that was such a favorite among movement people. After their meal, as they walked back toward the church, they lost their way and wound up passing through a poor white section of town. As they went by a little bar called the Silver Moon, a crowd from inside the bar came out and surrounded them. Before they knew what was happening, one of the three, a thirty-eight-year-old Unitarian minister from Boston named James J. Reeb, was clubbed in the head by a full baseball-style swing of a bat. He was so badly injured that the local emergency room staff put him in an ambulance and sent him on to Birmingham University Hospital, where he was listed Wednesday morning in critical condition with a large blood clot in his brain.

  Thursday, with the Reverend Reeb’s condition headlined in the newspapers, I went to Montgomery for the beginning of the federal court hearing on the SCLC request for an injunction to block state interference and allow a Selma-to-Montgomery march. Walking back into Frank Johnson’s courtroom, where I’d testified four years earlier during the Freedom Ride, felt familiar in some ways, but different in one hugely important one. Four years earlier, the governor of Alabama was John Patterson. He was the figure of state authority who was squared off against the federal figure, Judge Johnson. Now the governor was George Wallace, a man whose clashes with Judge Johnson went back for years and years.