Voices in Our Blood

by Jon Meacham

  Frank Johnson and George Wallace had been classmates at the University of Alabama in the 1930s, but other than that they had next to nothing in common. While Wallace was from the same southeastern, deeply Confederate part of the state as I, Johnson grew up in north Alabama, near Tennessee, in a county that had actually sided with the Union during the Civil War. Early in his career Johnson established a reputation for fairness and reason in the face of racists. During the Montgomery bus boycott he was a member of a three-judge panel that handed down a decision in favor of desegregation. Later, he sat on another panel that struck down Alabama’s poll-tax law. In 1958 he ordered the voter registration records of Barbour County to be turned over to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. The Barbour County circuit judge who held those records refused to give them up. Only after Johnson threatened him with a contempt charge did the circuit judge relent and give up the records. That judge was George Wallace.

  In the wake of that episode, Wallace famously called Johnson an “integrating, carpetbagging, scalawagging, race-mixing, bald-faced liar.” Now, seven years later, the two were squaring off again, this time with Wallace sitting in the governor’s mansion.

  We had spent several days meeting with our lawyers—Fred Gray, Arthur Shores, Orzell Billingsley and J. L. Chestnut—preparing our case, which was to establish that our rights had been repeatedly violated during our two-month campaign in Selma, often through violent means, and that this march, as a method of demonstrating our right to those rights, should be allowed.

  We expected the hearing to extend over several days, which it did. I testified, describing in detail my experience the Sunday of the attack on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The FBI agents who witnessed that attack also testified. A film clip of the attack—three minutes of footage shot by Larry Pierce for CBS—was shown, and when the courtroom lights were turned back on, Judge Johnson stood silently, shook his head, straightened his robe and called for a recess. He was visibly disgusted.

  On the third day of the hearing Colonel Lingo testified and indicated that the order to use force that day came straight from George Wallace. He didn’t come right out and say it then, but years later, when Lingo was running for sheriff of Jefferson County, he was explicit. “I was ordered to cause the scene that the troopers made,” he said. “Who ordered me? The governor! Governor George C. Wallace ordered me to stop the marchers even if we had to use force, to bring this thing to a halt. He said that we’d teach other niggers to try to march on a public highway in Alabama. He said that he was damned if he would allow such a thing to take place.”

  Whether Wallace actually ordered it or not, he certainly condoned the attack that took place that Sunday. And he never criticized it. In fact, even as Judge Johnson’s hearing was moving into its third day, Wallace was on his way to Washington to meet with President Johnson and try to convince the President to step in and stop us from marching. That meeting wound up backfiring on Wallace. Not only did Johnson not agree to help Wallace, but he emerged from the meeting and made a stunning announcement to the reporters waiting outside:

  The events of last Sunday cannot and will not be repeated, but the demonstrations in Selma have a much larger meaning. They are a protest against a deep and very unjust flaw in American democracy itself.

  Ninety-five years ago our Constitution was amended to require that no American be denied the right to vote because of race or color. Almost a century later, many Americans are kept from voting simply because they are Negroes.

  Therefore, this Monday I will send to the Congress a request for legislation to carry out the amendment of the Constitution.

  That was Saturday, March 13. The Reverend Reeb had passed away two nights earlier, prompting even more demonstrations across the country in support of our efforts in Selma. That Sunday, Forman and I flew to New York for a march in Harlem protesting the events in Alabama. Several thousand people, most of them black, a great many dressed in white Masonic uniforms, paraded, then listened as I told them what had happened and what was going to happen in Selma.

  Meanwhile, down in Montgomery, as well as in cities across the country, SNCC-led demonstrations were heating up. There were sit-ins at the Justice Department and protests outside the White House. I heard later that President Johnson actually complained at a meeting that Sunday night that his daughter Luci couldn’t study because of all the noise outside.

  The next day, Monday, I was back in Montgomery for the fourth day of the hearing. It was clear now that Judge Johnson was going to give us the injunction we wanted. He asked us that day to submit a plan for the march we wanted to make. We went back that afternoon—Andy Young, Hosea Williams, Jack Greenberg, who was head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, several other SCLC people and I—to the Albert Pick Motel in Montgomery and drew up details of the number of people we expected to march, the route we would follow and the number of days it would take.

  Then I headed back to Selma, where a rally was held that afternoon in honor of the Reverend Reeb. More than two thousand people marched through downtown Selma to the courthouse steps, where Dr. King led a twenty-minute service, with Jim Clark’s deputies looking on but doing nothing to stop it.

  I was in Selma that night when I got word that there had been an outburst of violence earlier that afternoon in Montgomery, where several hundred SNCC demonstrators—mainly the Tuskegee Institute and Alabama State students organized by Forman—had clashed with police and mounted deputies who tried to stop them from demonstrating. When the police began pushing in and physically shoving the students aside, some of the students responded by throwing rocks, bricks and bottles. That brought the mounted possemen forward, swinging clubs and whips. When the students ran, the possemen chased them on horseback, actually riding up onto the porches of private homes. At least one glass door was broken by the charge of a deputy on horseback.

  I was horrified to hear this. It was almost surreal. The violence seemed to be getting wilder and wilder each day. I talked to Forman early that evening on the phone and agreed that we should stage a march the next day to protest the extremity of the possemen’s attack. I had the final day of Judge Johnson’s hearing to attend in the morning, but I would be there for the march after that.

  After talking with Forman, I settled in that night at the home of Dr. Jackson, the Selma dentist, to watch President Johnson make a live televised address to Congress. Dr. King and several SCLC staffers were also squeezed into Dr. and Mrs. Jackson’s small living room. The President had invited Dr. King and me to come up to Washington that night and join the audience for his speech, but we decided the place for us to be was Selma.

  And so, along with 70 million other Americans who watched the broadcast that evening, we listened to Lyndon Johnson make what many others and I consider not only the finest speech of his career, but probably the strongest speech any American president has ever made on the subject of civil rights.

  It began powerfully:

  At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.

  It moved toward a climax with a focus on voting rights:

  Rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. . . . The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. And should we defeat every enemy, and should we double our wealth and conquer the stars and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation.

  And it peaked with the President citing our favorite freedom song, the anthem, the very heart and soul, of the civil rights movement:

  Even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.

  Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not j
ust Negroes, but really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.

  And we shall overcome.

  All told, the speech was forty-five minutes long. It was interrupted forty times by applause, twice by standing ovations. I was deeply moved. Lyndon Johnson was no politician that night. He was a man who spoke from his heart. His were the words of a statesman and more; they were the words of a poet. Dr. King must have agreed. He wiped away a tear at the point where Johnson said the words “We shall overcome.”

  Predictably, not everyone was so moved. I was not surprised to hear Jim Forman attack the speech. The President’s reference to our anthem was a “tinkling empty symbol,” Forman told one reporter. “Johnson,” he later said to another writer, “spoiled a good song that day.”

  We never did have time to discuss the speech, Forman and I. Events were tumbling much too swiftly. The next morning I was back in Montgomery, watching our attorneys hand Judge Johnson the plans for our march. The hearing was now over. Johnson would make his decision by the following day.

  That afternoon—gray, overcast, with a steady rain drizzling down—I joined Forman, Dr. King and others at the front of a group of six hundred people marching from the state capitol to the Montgomery County Courthouse to protest the violence of the day before. To this day, photos from that day’s march, showing us wearing ponchos and raincoats, are mistakenly presented as if they were taken during the march from Selma to Montgomery, which they were not. That march was yet to come.

  That evening, at a rally called by SCLC officials, with Dr. King and Abernathy in the audience, along with dozens of middle-class, mainstream black ministers, Forman stunned everyone with one of the angriest, most fiery speeches made by a movement leader up to that point.

  There’s only one man in the country that can stop George Wallace and those posses.

  These problems will not be solved until the man in that shaggedy old place called the White House begins to shake and gets on the phone and says, “Now listen, George, we’re coming down there and throw you in jail if you don’t stop that mess.” . . .

  I said it today, and I will say it again. If we can’t sit at the table of democracy, we’ll knock the fucking legs off!

  The fact that he quickly caught himself and muttered the words “Excuse me” was lost on almost everyone there. This was a church. Not only were those pews filled with ministers, but there were women and children in the audience, too. They were shocked. I was not. I’d heard Forman use that kind of language many times at SNCC meetings. But I was dismayed. That was not the language of the nonviolence movement. That was not the message of the movement, at least not of the movement I was a part of. And that was what was most significant to me about that speech, not the fact that Forman’s words were so bold and profane, but the fact that they pointed the way down a road SNCC was headed that I knew I would not be able to travel.

  Even Dr. King, when he stepped to the podium after Forman was finished, had trouble restoring calm. People were visibly upset. Several had already gotten up to leave. Then, as if on some sort of cue, one of Dr. King’s staffers arrived, approached the podium and had a word with King, who nodded, smiled and waved everyone quiet.

  Judge Johnson, Dr. King announced, had issued his ruling. The march from Selma to Montgomery would be allowed.

  The judge’s written order, officially released the next morning, beautifully and succinctly summarized what we had been through in Selma, and why we had gone through it:

  The evidence in this case reflects that . . . an almost continuous pattern of conduct has existed on the part of defendant Sheriff Clark, his deputies, and his auxiliary deputies known as “possemen” of harassment, intimidation, coercion, threatening conduct, and, sometimes, brutal mistreatment toward these plaintiffs and other members of their class. . . .

  The attempted march alongside U.S. Highway 80 . . . on March 7, 1965, involved nothing more than a peaceful effort on the part of Negro citizens to exercise a classic constitutional right: that is, the right to assemble peaceably and to petition one’s government for the redress of grievances.

  . . . it seems basic to our constitutional principles that the extent of the right to assemble, demonstrate and march peaceably along the highways and streets in an orderly manner should be commensurate with the enormity of the wrongs that are being protested and petitioned against. In this case, the wrongs are enormous. The extent of the right to demonstrate against these wrongs should be determined accordingly.

  We had told the judge the march would begin on Sunday, March 21. This was Wednesday. That gave us five days to prepare. And this time, as compared to our small, spontaneous effort on Bloody Sunday, there would be preparation, as well as the full participation of SNCC, the SCLC, the NAACP, the Urban League and every other civil and human rights organization in the United States. In many ways, this event promised to be as big as the March on Washington. The numbers would be nowhere near that many, of course, but unlike the demonstration in Washington, which was a rally more than an actual march, this was literally going to be a mass movement of people, thousands and thousands of them, walking down a highway, cutting through the heart of the state of Alabama.

  The next five days were a swirl of activity, much like preparing an army for an assault. Marchers, not just from Selma but from across the nation, were mobilized and organized, route sections and schedules were mapped out, printed up and distributed, tents big enough to sleep people by the hundreds were secured. Food. Security. Communications. There were thousands of details to take care of, and thousands of dollars, most of it raised by the SCLC, to be spent. Just a quick scan of the records from that week indicates both the enormity and the tediousness of this undertaking:

  Walkie-talkies, flashlights, pots and pans and stoves for cooking . . . the list went on and on. And so did the manpower. A crew of twelve ministers—we called them the “fish and loaves committee”—was responsible for transporting food to each campsite each evening. Ten local women cooked the evening meals in church kitchens in Selma. Ten others made sandwiches around the clock. Squads of doctors and nurses from the same Medical Committee for Human Rights that had provided the physicians who tended the wounded on Bloody Sunday now geared up for a different kind of casualty, with dozens of cases of rubbing alcohol and hundreds of boxes of Band-Aids, for the marchers’ sore muscles and blistered feet.

  Meanwhile, state and federal authorities were doing their part to prepare. The two westbound lanes of Highway 80 between Selma and Montgomery would be closed off for the five days of the march—all traffic in both directions would be routed onto the eastbound lanes. At the order of President Johnson, more than 1,800 armed Alabama National Guardsmen would line the fifty-four-mile route, along with two thousand U.S. Army troops, a hundred FBI agents and a hundred U.S. marshals. Helicopters and light planes would patrol the route from the air, watching for snipers or other signs of trouble, and demolition teams would clear the way ahead of us, inspecting bridges and bends in the road for planted explosives.

  That Saturday night, the evening before the march would begin, more than two hundred people came to spend the night in Brown’s Chapel. We all made short speeches—Bevel and Diane, Andy Young and I. Dick Gregory couldn’t help working a little routine into his speech. “It would be just our luck,” he said, looking ahead to our arrival in Montgomery, “to find out that Wallace is colored.”

  When we awoke Sunday morning, more than three thousand people had gathered outside the church. Dr. King greeted them with a speech intended to make the local Selmans among them comfortable with the middle-class professionals and out-of-town celebrities who had arrived to join them. We were all very sensitive about this, about keeping the focus as much as possible on the people who had brought this historic day about, the everyday men and women of Selma. We made a point to put them at the front of the march, right behind the row that led the way.

  That row included Dr. King and his wife, Coretta, A. Phi
lip Randolph, Ralph Bunche, Ralph and Juanita Abernathy, Andy Young, Hosea, me, Forman, Dick Gregory and Rabbi Abraham Heschel of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, a biblical-looking man with a long, flowing white beard. When he walked up to join us, one onlooker shouted out, “There goes God!”

  Someone arrived with an armful of Hawaiian leis, which were placed around each of our necks. Abernathy stepped forward and announced, “Wallace, it’s all over now.”

  And then we stepped off, 3,200 people walking in a column that stretched a mile long.

  Ahead of us rolled a television truck, its lights and cameras trained on Dr. King’s every step.

  Behind us walked an unimaginable cross section of American people.

  There was a one-legged man on crutches—Jim Leatherer, from Saginaw, Michigan—who answered each person who thanked him for coming by thanking them in return. “I believe in you,” he said over and over again. “I believe in democracy.”

  There was a couple from California pushing a baby in a stroller.

  Assistant Attorneys General John Doar and Ramsey Clark were both there, walking among the crowd like everyone else.

  Cager Lee, Jimmie Lee Jackson’s elderly grandfather, who had been wounded the night Jimmie Lee was killed, was with us. It was hard for him to do even a few miles a day, but Mr. Lee was bound and determined to do them. “Just got to tramp some more,” he said, nodding his head and pushing on.