Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  “No, but I’d like to see you a minute,” said James Robinson, of J. B. Stoner’s National States Rights Party. When King approached, Robinson slugged him once in the face, knocking him to the floor, and kicked him once in the groin before A. D. King and Wilson Baker pulled Robinson away. (At the flash of violence, reporter Paul Good observed one excited white woman jump on a chair for a better view, shouting, “Get him! Get him!”) Baker arrested Robinson. Stunned, King went off to rooms at the Albert with nine fellow guests, including Fred Shuttlesworth. He soon made light of the attack, but there was serious consternation in the Justice Department over the day’s twenty-odd FBI monitoring reports indicating that King actually had invited firebrand American Nazis into an all-Negro mass meeting. When Rockwell appeared that night outside First Baptist Church with a small entourage, Selma police blocked the entrance. One of his followers objected, shouting, “Commander! Commander!”

  “Commander, hell,” growled Wilson Baker. “I’m the commander here, and your asses are going to jail.” He arrested Rockwell and two Nazis, including the man who had appeared in minstrel blackface in the House chamber two weeks earlier, along with a J. B. Stoner ally from Birmingham. Stoner himself addressed a small rally that night outside Selma. Rockwell agreed to leave town the next day in exchange for dropped charges.

  There was tension that first night of integration at the Hotel Albert. Judge Hare was furious that his injunction had been disregarded, and the Selma newspaper reported “rumblings of discontent that the sheriff and his force were displeased with police handling of the crowds.” The city attorney ordered Baker to arrest Negroes when they marched from the church on Tuesday—not to support Judge Hare, he claimed, but to protect them from Sheriff Clark. “And charge ’em with what?” demanded Baker, who resisted being provoked to make illegal arrests in order to forestall something worse.

  Movement leaders called on Tuesday for fifty jail volunteers willing to refuse an expected order to confine themselves in the back alley. When they held at proper intervals along Alabama Avenue, awaiting their turn in the registrar’s office, Clark ordered their arrest. Deputies first hauled away SCLC’s Hosea Williams and SNCC chairman John Lewis. The sheriff did not use his conspicuous cattle prod or nightstick, but he became agitated enough to seize Amelia Boynton by the neck of her dress coat and shove her roughly down the sidewalk in front of the assembled photographers. After that, deputies used the sharp jolt of cattle prods to herd the line back toward the county jail. In the noise and stumbling, teacher Margaret Moore stayed close to third-grader Sheyann Webb. “Don’t be scared…,” she told her. “Just stay close. Don’t let go of my hand.”

  “It was no surprise to me,” a triumphant James Bevel shouted at the Tuesday night meeting, that Selma authorities simply opened jail doors to free Sheyann Webb and several of the adult prisoners. “You see my contention is simply this,” he said. “…The moment people want freedom bad enough to pay for it, they can get it. Y’all don’t believe that.” He predicted the movement would win the right to vote, “probably this year,” and challenged the audience to prepare for hard responsibilities. “We could get the Negroes registered,” shouted Bevel, “and then the white folks buy the votes for a pint of liquor!” Ralph Abernathy jumped up to propose Jim Clark as an honorary member of the Dallas County Voters League, now that the photograph of him manhandling Amelia Boynton was on the news wires.

  Wilson Baker conceded the same point from the opposite side, denouncing Clark to reporters as “out of control.” Selma’s newspaper conceded that the remaining fifty movement prisoners were held under “Charges Named Later.” If Clark had simply allowed the protesters to stand there unmolested one more day, Baker firmly believed, the frustrated registration drive would have moved elsewhere. King took an intermediate position between morale and results. Clark’s oppression did raise spirits; more than two hundred marched to arrest on Wednesday in three waves, the first led by Rev. L. L. Anderson of Tabernacle Baptist. However, the movement also needed practical victories, and the hard reality was that not a single Negro who stood all day in the courthouse alley so much as applied for admission to the voting rolls, as the registrars managed to be occupied with others.

  THAT WEDNESDAY, January 20, for the inauguration of President Johnson, 1.2 million people gathered on the Washington Mall, a mark that would stand above all capital occasions for at least three decades. The multitude was roughly four times the turnout for the March on Washington, and sixty times the frostbitten crowd of twenty thousand that had braved President Kennedy’s inaugural address four years earlier. A White House briefer hailed “the first Inauguration where every operation was integrated from the church to the ballroom,” and racial breakthroughs were absorbed in a landslide breadth of public optimism. Leontyne Price sang “America the Beautiful” at the formal swearing-in on the East Capitol steps. Roy Wilkins and CORE lawyer Floyd McKissick were among a dozen civil rights figures who took honored turns in President Johnson’s reviewing stand for the inaugural parade. Bayard Rustin attended one of the gala balls, as did many leaders of the MFDP’s ongoing congressional challenge: Fannie Lou Hamer, Edwin King, Victoria Gray, Aaron Henry, E. W. Steptoe, Annie Devine, and the irrepressible arson-and-ambush survivor Hartman Turnbow, who declared his ambition to dance with the Mississippi governor’s wife. Jet reported King to be “conspicuously absent from all the inaugural ceremonies,” in spite of invitations and Johnson’s telegram encouraging him and Coretta to attend. “Informed sources” told the magazine that “the President was concerned about the arrest of 200 Negroes in Dr. Martin L. King Jr.’s voter registration drive in Selma.”

  With celebrations ended, President Johnson convened on Friday morning the first confidential working session of his full term. He told congressional leaders that the nation’s worst problem was Vietnam, which he “wrestles with all the time, day and night.” While the President did not describe the situation quite as gravely as Ambassador Taylor’s secret summary earlier in January,* he did say it was not safe for the United States to mount air operations while dependent wives and children remained posted in Vietnam, targets for retaliation. Secretary of State Rusk disclosed that U.S. allies considered South Vietnam too politically unstable to risk helping. In reaction, Senator Russell Long of Louisiana advocated bombing North Vietnam, and Senator Everett Dirksen wanted to yank home the dependents of a “pampered” military mission. “Why do we have to send all our civilization to war?” he asked.

  AFTER CLASSES in Selma, students raced to spread news that the first teacher was sighted at all-Negro Clark Elementary School, holding her toothbrush silently aloft as a badge of resolve. Inside, educators arrived in their best dress to review elaborate preparations and voted to release a few hardship colleagues from signed pledges on the carefully preserved scroll. The remaining 110 formed two abreast and exited the school in a solemn procession of teachers, thirty feet apart, past awed neighbors and clumps of students. Never before in the movement had there been a demonstration by the most vulnerable class of Negro professionals, all of whom owed jobs to white politicians—not in Nashville, Jackson, St. Augustine, or Birmingham at its peak. Some were inspired by the example of Margaret Moore or the pep talks of their elected leader, Rev. F. D. Reese. Others were ashamed to teach civics when they could not vote themselves, or could no longer bear to scold absentee pupils who braved jail and taunted them as slaves.

  FBI agents recorded that the head of the line reached the front steps of the courthouse at 3:24 P.M. Friday, January 22. School board president Edgar Stewart, a former FBI agent, confronted Reese there with word that the registrar’s office was closed and that the teachers’ written request to register after class had been denied. While Stewart and Reese politely debated whether it would injure or improve school relations for one or more teachers to walk past the closed office as a testament of desire to vote, Sheriff Clark muttered that the teachers were making a “plaything” of the courthouse. “You have one minute to get off t
hese steps!” he told Reese. Clark led deputies with nightsticks in shoving the teachers down the concrete steps to the sidewalk. He then vanished into the courthouse, whereupon “Big Lester” Hankerson—the former seaport gangster who had surrendered his pistols to King in Savannah—supervised the teachers in collecting themselves and ascending the steps again in good order.

  Twice more they returned after Sheriff Clark pushed them down the steps. The third time, with the sheriff threatening to arrest the whole group and the teachers clutching their toothbrush jail kits, a Selma lawyer pulled Clark inside the courthouse for precautionary consultations on what it might mean to incarcerate 95 percent of the Negro schoolteachers. The sheriff emerged more incensed than ever, and once more battered the line down the steps. Andrew Young stepped in to call a halt, saying their point was made, and the double column re-formed to march back up Alabama Avenue.

  When they turned onto Sylvan Street, the FBI observers recorded, “three hundred Negro children and teenagers gave the returning marchers an ovation.” Reese paraded his jubilant lines straight into Brown Chapel, down to the pulpit and around the perimeter aisles, as inrushing crowds began a spontaneous youth rally with the song “This Little Light of Mine.” Teachers pinched themselves to prove they had gone through with it. Children hugged classroom taskmasters they had scorned as windbags. Movement veterans openly wept. Martin Luther King arrived to preach the first of two emotional tributes in two different churches that night, and Reese declared that if the teachers were not afraid to march for the right to vote, nobody should be afraid. The morticians began planning their own march to the courthouse. So did the barbers.

  MALCOLM X, back from a speaking trip to Canada, fought off a Friday night ambush by three members of the Nation outside his home in New York. On Sunday, he delivered a lecture about the lost cultural identity of Africans in America, partly by analogy with “lost sheep” and “dry bones” stories in the Bible. During the collection, he confirmed to a questioner that he had reacted strongly to a television news clip of the attack on Martin Luther King at Selma’s Hotel Albert. “I saw the man knock him in his mouth,” said Malcolm. “Well, that hurt me, I’ll tell you, because I’m black and he’s black—I don’t care how dumb he is.” He read a telegram he had dispatched to Nazi commander Rockwell, warning that he was “no longer held in check by Elijah Muhammad’s separationist Black Muslim movement,” and that he would arrange “maximum physical retaliation” upon anyone who attempted “harm to Reverend King or any other black Americans who are only attempting to enjoy their rights….”

  “You and I will not get anywhere by standing on the sidelines, saying they’re doing it wrong,” Malcolm told his audience. After twelve years of “condemning everybody walking, and at no time were we permitted to get involved,” he proclaimed freedom from artificial constraint: “Okay, I say let’s get involved, but let’s get involved all the way.” He announced a general program to win voting rights by threat of execution. “Anyone who stops you from trying to register and vote is breaking the law,” he said. “You can waste him. Yes, you can waste him, and there’s nothing he can do about it.” However, Malcolm perceived fresh obstacles in the way of actions or tactical experiments. On finances, he announced that the night’s collection fell $15 short of the nightly rental due for the Audubon Ballroom. More ominously, he said, organizations trained for violence “will turn all of their anger against each other….” This was his own plight. “A very bad situation has set in and deteriorated to the point,” said Malcolm, “where you have black people trying to kill black people.”

  OVER THE WEEKEND, when the death of Sir Winston Churchill dominated world news, U.S. District Judge Daniel Thomas of Mobile issued a court order in reponse to a lawsuit filed by Amelia Boynton and other Selma plaintiffs. The judge ruled that neither side in the voting rights conflict was behaving “in an orderly and effective manner,” but his remedy offended all parties. Denouncing him as a “segregationist judge,” James Bevel cited his exacting new requirement that applicants line up in the back alley toward Lauderdale Street, as Sheriff Clark desired, and he emphasized the new order’s evasive silence on the core issues of pace and fairness in the registration process itself. On the other hand, Dallas County authorities felt betrayed by Thomas’s legal finding of “unnecessary arrests” and his detailed rules to guarantee peaceful assembly. James Hare, the courtly but amiable local judge who freely exhibited his distinctive hobby—tracing local Negroes back to the bloodlines of specific tribes in Africa, so as to gauge genetic propensities for trouble or domestication—reacted testily to correction by his judicial friend from neighboring Autauga County. “I don’t care what Judge Thomas ordered,” Hare told visitors. “If there are any demonstrations in front of this courthouse…I have ordered the sheriff to put them in jail.” Sheriff Clark bounced miserably between conflicting superiors in the political order. “Y’all don’t treat me right,” he told Judge Thomas.

  By Monday morning, January 25, when Martin Luther King led 250 people down Alabama Avenue to the courthouse, prevailing local sentiment shifted in favor of Sheriff Clark against outside interference. Clark halted the long double column. Under the new rules from Judge Thomas—which specified that one hundred applicants be assigned numbered places in the alley toward Lauderdale—he requested that Chief Baker clear the city sidewalks of “demonstrators” in excess of the one hundred. When SNCC workers contested this interpretation, Baker ordered one dragged off to jail in the first such arrest by city police. Some of those behind stepped out for a better view of the commotion, which prompted Sheriff Clark to walk briskly down the line pushing strays back behind an imaginary half width of the sidewalk.

  He ran into trouble from Annie Lee Cooper, one of the two women fired from Dunn’s Rest Home for trying to register on Selma’s first Freedom Day. Cooper told Clark not to twist her arm, then staggered him with several roundhouse blows. Hefty and berserk, she more than held her own for a time against officers who rushed to Clark’s aid—“I probably hit those other deputies, too,” she said later—and photographers arrived to shoot the moment when three deputies held her down for Clark to club her with his nightstick. Anger flashed among her compatriots in the line, but march leaders restrained them as officers hauled Cooper to jail in double handcuffs. “Don’t bother with it!” shouted King.

  That night, in the first mass meeting at Tabernacle Baptist Church since the Sam Boynton memorial service of 1963, speakers ardently fought the day’s gloom. “They are not just running around harassing people for the fun of it,” said James Bevel, who warned that opponents were trying to do two things: “discourage us” and “make discipline break down.” Justified or not, any speck of Negro violence hurt the movement because “then they don’t talk about the registration drive,” said Bevel. “…We want the world to know they ain’t registering nobody!” Reverend Anderson presented the incident as both a shortfall in nonviolent devotion and a communal sacrifice by Cooper, who “took a beating today for you and for me.” He coaxed an offering from the crowd with a vivid description of her whipping—“If that doesn’t make you want to give five dollars, you’re not worth a dime”—then presented Martin Luther King.

  King preached for nearly an hour. He exhorted the audience to remember that Selma was the “proving ground” for a larger movement that would spread through Alabama and beyond. He played to their mirth over opinion surveys showing that race problems had ended with the civil rights bill. He tried to present the day’s setbacks as proof that the opposition was desperate, then speculated on the twin effects of guilt. “I have a psychological theory,” he said, that guilt has “a constructive angle, and that is, it causes you to repent, makes you penitent…and mend your evil,” but also makes you “drown the guilt by engaging more in the very act that brought on the guilt. That’s what’s happening to some of our white brothers.” They would revert to compulsive hatred “to try to provoke violence in us,” he predicted, and urged Tabernacle listeners to
resist with love.

  “I’m not talking about emotional bosh,” said King. In a reprise of his early sermons, he described the semantic differences between the three Greek words for love, illustrating romantic eros with soaring recitals of poetry by Poe and Shakespeare that titillated, impressed, and finally delighted the crowd into punctuating shouts of approval. (“You know,” King said impishly, “I can remember this because I used to quote it to my wife when we were courting. That’s eros.”) Setting aside also the friendship devotion of philios, he preached on agape as the heart of nonviolence. “Theologians would say that it is the love of God operating in the human heart,” he declared. “…You love every man because God loves him…. I think this is what Jesus meant when he said Love your enemies…. Love is understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men.”

  King recalled stories of the movement’s darkest hours. “It’s still midnight in Selma,” he said, but they would persevere no less than their slave forebears who had absorbed to their bones the despairing question “Is there no balm in Gilead?” from the Bible. “They did an amazing thing,” cried King. “They looked back across the centuries and took Jeremiah’s question mark and straightened it…. In one of their great spirituals, they could sing, ‘There IS a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole….’” He preached to climax from the song.