Civil Rights Events

Selma Voting Rights Movement

Getting Started

 

Despite years of Freedom Movement struggle, suffering, and sacrifice, few Black voters have been added to voting rolls in the Deep South. Blacks who try to register face legal barriers, so-called "literacy tests," terrorism, economic retaliation, and police harassment. By the end of Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964, after lynchings, shootings, beatings, jailings, evictions, and firings, only 1,600 new voters have been registered in that state — barely .004 of the unregistered Blacks.

 

While Blacks have deep and bitter knowledge about denial of voting rights, it is only in the aftermath of Freedom Summer, the lynching of Chaney, Schwerner, & Goodman, and the MFDP Challenge to Democratic Convention that awareness of this as a national issue has begun to slowly emerge among white northerners. (And there is little appreciation that similar issues apply to Latinos in the Southwest, and Native Americans in many areas.)

So far as the Johnson administration is concerned, voting rights are not on the agenda for now. After receiving the Nobel Prize, Dr. King meets with the president in December of 1964. Johnson assures King that he'll get around to Black voting rights someday, but not in 1965. LBJ tells King that 1965 is to be the year of "Great Society," and "War on Poverty" legislation — not civil rights. "Martin," he says, "you're right about [voting rights]. I'm going to do it eventually, but I can't get a voting rights bill through in this session of Congress" (Situation 1).

In Selma, Alabama, the seat of Dallas County, in the heart of the state’s black belt (agriculturally and racially speaking), attempts to register black residents to vote have been almost entirely thwarted.  “In Dallas County, where SNCC organizers Bernard and Colia Lafayette had started a voter-registration project back in early 1963, no more than 100 new Black voters have been added after two hard years. As 1964 ends, total Black registration in Dallas County is just 335, only 2% of the 15,000 who are eligible” (Black Belt 1).

Passage of the Civil Rights Bill in July 1964 brought hope to Dallas County.  It is swiftly dashed.

On Saturday, July 4, four Black members of the literacy project — Silas Norman, Karen House, Carol Lawson and James Wiley — attempt to implement the new law by desegregating [in Selma] the Thirsty Boy drive-in. A crowd of whites attack them, and they are arrested for "Trespass." At the movie theater, Black students come down from the "Colored" balcony to the white-only main floor. They are also attacked and beaten by whites. The cops close the theater — there will be no integration in Selma, no matter what some federal law in Washington says.

Sunday evening there is a large mass meeting — the first big turnout in months. Sheriff Clark declares the meeting a "riot." Fifty deputies and possemen attack with clubs and tear gas. Monday, July 6, is one of the two monthly voter registration days. SNCC Chairman John Lewis leads a column of voter applicants to the Courthouse. They hope the new law will offer them some protection, but Clark herds 50 them into an alley and places them under arrest. As they are marched through the downtown streets to the county jail, the deputies and possemen jab them with clubs and burn them with cattle prods.

On July 9, Judge James Hare issues an injunction forbidding any gathering of three or more people under sponsorship of SNCC, SCLC, or DCVL [Dallas County Voter’s League] as organizations, or with the involvement of 41 named leaders including the SNCC organizers, the Boyntons, Marie Foster, Rev. L.L. Anderson, Rev. F.D. Reese, and others. In essence, this injunction makes it illegal to even talk to more than two people at a time about civil rights or voter registration in Selma Alabama. And because it is an injunction rather than a law, Judge Hare can jail anyone who — in his sole opinion — violates it. And he can do so without the fuss, bother, and expense of a jury trial.

Activists and their attorneys file appeals. They know that on some bright day in the distant future, the blatantly unconstitutional order will eventually be overturned by a higher court. But here and now it paralyzes the Movement. Neither DCVL nor SNCC have the resources — human, financial, legal — to defy the injunction with large-scale civil disobedience. The weekly mass meetings are halted — for the remainder of 1964 there are no public Movement events in Selma, Alabama. The bravest of the local DCVL leaders continue to meet clandestinely; SNCC organizing is driven deep underground, and a pall of discouragement saps voter registration attempts (Selma Injunction 1-2).

SNCC had been the primary civil rights organization in Selma that had worked with the local Dallas County Voter's League (DCVL) in 1963 and 1964.  Most of SNCC resources — organizers, money, leadership, focus — however, had been concentrated in Mississippi, first for the Summer Project and then for the MFDP Congressional Challenge.

Back in September of 1963, when four young girls were killed in the Birmingham bombing of the 16th Street Baptist church, Diane Nash Bevel and her husband James Bevel drew up a "Proposal for Action in Montgomery" — a plan for a massive direct action assault on denial of voting rights.

…

Their draft plan called for building and training a nonviolent army 20-40,000 strong who would engage in large-scale civil disobedience by blocking roads, airports, and government buildings to demand the removal of Governor Wallace and the immediate registration of every Alabama citizen over the age of 21. When she presents the idea to Dr. King, she tells him, "... you can tell people not to fight only if you offer them a way by which justice can be served without violence." Rev. C.T. Vivian and SNCC & CORE activists support the idea, but King and most of his other advisors do not consider it feasible.

 

A month later, Diane and James Bevel again raise the plan, later called the "Alabama Project," at an SCLC board meeting. The general concept of some kind of "March on Montgomery" some time in the future is supported, but no date is set, no specific plans are made, and there is no consensus around the idea of militant direct action and massive civil disobedience. Instead, SCLC's attention is focused on continuing the struggle in Birmingham and the situation in Danville VA (Alabama Project 1-2).

Ultimately, the “Alabama Project” idea is put on the shelf until after the 1964 Presidential Election.

In November 1964, with the Civil Rights Act passed and Goldwater defeated, the Bevels again raise the "Alabama Project," arguing that the time has come to move on voting rights — which cannot be won without national legislation that eliminates "literacy tests" and strips power from county registrars. Such legislation, they argue, can only be won through mass action in the streets (Alabama Project 4).

Rev. F.D. Reese of the Dallas County Voter’s League (DCVL) recalled: “In late 1964, SNCC's finances were dwindling. This organization was also beginning to experience internal differences regarding philosophies. The organization's effectiveness was waning in Dallas County. ... Those of us who had the vision knew the Movement in Dallas County had to be elevated to another level.”  The DCVL leadership decided to “formally invited SCLC and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to come to Selma.”

DCVL becomes the SCLC affiliate in Selma and SCLC commits to a voting rights campaign in Alabama with an initial focus on Selma and then expanding into rural Black Belt counties.

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Saturday, January 2, 1965, is set as the date for defying the injunction and commencing a massive direct action campaign. There are no illusions. Selma, Dallas County, and the Alabama Black Belt are bastions of white-supremacy and violent resistance to Black aspirations. Everyone understands that when you demand the right to vote in Alabama you put your life — and the lives of those who join you — on the line (Alabama Project 5).

Major differences now separate the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Both nationally and in Selma, relations between SNCC and SCLC are tense. SNCC staff have been working and organizing in Selma for two years, enduring hardship, danger, brutality, and jail to slowly build an organizational foundation. They deeply resent SCLC coming in to use that foundation for a kind of large-scale mobilization that they distrust. SCLC counters that Selma's local leaders have asked for their help because the injunction has halted progress for six months.

Once close allies in the southern struggle, the two organizations are now on divergent paths. Dr. King and SCLC are still deeply committed to nonviolence, integration, multiracial activism, and appeals to the conscience of the nation. But after years of liberal indifference, federal inaction, and political betrayal, many in SNCC now question, and in some cases explicitly reject, some or all of those concepts.

SNCC is oriented toward building grassroots community organizations led by those at the bottom of society. Rather than seeing themselves as leaders, SNCC field secretaries view themselves as community organizers empowering local people to take control over their own lives. For its part, SCLC maintains that the community is already organized around the Black church, an institution that has sustained and shepherded Blacks through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Depression, two world wars, and the modern era of school desegregation and bus boycotts. As they see it, Black ministers are, and always have been, the accepted community heads, and that the focus should be on moving those churches and preachers into social-political action. SNCC argues back that the ministers and congregation leaders are primarily concerned with issues affecting the Black elite and they do little for the sharecroppers, maids, and laborers who fill the pews. SCLC responds that splitting Black communities into rival camps weakens everyone and aids no one.

SNCC field secretaries toil anonymously in the most dangerous areas of the South with little or no media coverage or recognition, and they deeply resent the flood of publicity and adulation bestowed on Dr. King when he visits locales where they have been working for years. Some SNCC members express that bitterness by referring to him in a mocking tone as "De Lawd."

Though King accepts such derision with easy grace, other SCLC leaders and staff bristle with hostility. In SNCC's view, local Black communities can provide their own leaders and that media-centric, "big-name" outsiders like King not only hinder that process but are unnecessary. To SCLC, nationally-recognized spokesmen who can articulate the Freedom Movement to the world are essential, and some openly scoff at what they see as SNCC's over-idealization of local activism, noting that whenever King speaks in a Black community it is those very same local people who flood the aisles to overflowing.

In SCLC's view, the only way to substantially change the lives of those at the bottom of society is to win transformative national legislation like the Civil Rights Act. SNCC sees little value in federal laws that are weakly enforced and that, in any case, do not even attempt to address the grinding poverty of the great majority of the Black population.  …

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In order to win legislation at the national level, SCLC has to influence and maintain ties with the Johnson administration and the northern-liberal wing of the Democratic Party. But LBJ and those same liberals betrayed the MFDP at the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City and SNCC wants nothing more to do with them. Instead, they have turned toward building independent Black-led political organizations outside the Democratic Party … (SCLC 1-3).

On December 28, Dr. King convenes a … meeting where he presents the SCLC plan, now called the "Project for an Alabama Political Freedom Movement." The proposal is to break the Selma injunction on January 2, engage in mass action and voter registration in Dallas County, and then spread out into the rural counties of the Alabama Black Belt. By spring, the campaign is to evolve into a freedom registration and freedom ballot campaign similar to what SNCC/COFO organized in Mississippi, culminating on May 4 in a direct action and legal challenge to the seating of the entire Alabama state legislature on grounds similar to those of the MFDP Congressional Challenge.

Bob Moses and Ivanhoe Donaldson of SNCC argue against the SCLC proposal. Instead, they urge support for the MFDP congressional challenge. But local leaders and activists from Selma and elsewhere in Alabama strongly endorse SCLC's plan and commit themselves to it. The ministers of Brown Chapel, Tabernacle, and First Baptist courageously pledge their churches for meeting space in defiance of the injunction.

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Inside city hall and over at the county courthouse, the white power-structure cannot agree on how to handle the direct action campaign that SCLC has just publicly announced. Newly elected Mayor Smitherman, a local refrigerator salesman, is a "moderate" segregationist. He hopes to attract northern business investment — Hammermill Paper of Pennsylvania is considering Selma as the location for a big new plant, but they will shy away if "racial troubles" shine a spotlight of negative media on the town. Smitherman has appointed veteran lawman Wilson Baker to head the city's 30-man police force. They and their supporters believe that the most effective method of countering civil rights protests (and avoiding bad press) is to "kill 'em with kindness" as Police Chief Laurie Pritchett did in Albany GA.

Short-tempered Sheriff Jim Clark and arch-segregationist Judge Hare furiously disagree. They and their hard-line, white-supremacy faction are committed to maintaining southern apartheid through brutal repression. As they see it, billy-clubs, electric cattle-prods, whips, jail cells, and charging horses, are what is needed to keep the Coloreds in line — and if Yankee business interests don't like it, they can take their investments elsewhere.

These two factions are at war with each other. Baker narrowly lost to Clark in the sheriff's race, carrying the (white) city vote but not the rural areas. Now they angrily spar over jurisdiction. Baker's cops patrol the city except for the block where the county courthouse sits, which Clark and his deputies control. Outside the city limits, Clark and his volunteer posse reign supreme.

In the mid-1960s, more than 200 men belonged to the Dallas County Sheriff's posse. Some of them were also members or supporters of racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan or National States Rights Party. Possemen wore cheap badges issued by Clark and semi- uniforms of khaki work clothes and plastic construction-site safety helmets. They were armed with electric cattle-prods and a variety of hardwood clubs including ax-handles. Some were mounted on horseback and carried long leather whips they could use to lash people on foot. Originally formed after World War II to oppose labor unions, under Clark the posse's mission was to defend white supremacy and suppress all forms of Black protest. And not just in Dallas County. In 1961, the posse formed part of the mob that beat the Freedom Riders in Montgomery, they participated in the mass violence when James Meredith integrated 'Ole Miss in 1962, and Bull Connor called them in to help crack the heads of student protesters during the Birmingham Campaign of 1963 (Selma 1-4).

The January 2nd date is chosen because Sheriff Clark will be out of town at the Orange Bowl football game in Miami. Chief Baker has stated that city police under his command will not enforce Judge Hare's illegal injunction, and without Clark to lead them, there is little chance that sheriff's deputies will break up the mass meeting on their own.

Rev. F.D. Reese recalled: “The day before the scheduled Mass Meeting it snowed. On 2 January 1965, the first Mass Meeting since July 1964 was held at Brown Chapel.  … Around 3:00 p.m. on 2 January 1965 we thought no one was going to show for the mass meeting. ... Slowly the people started coming into the church. The Courageous Eight had given every indication that we were ready to go to jail. Law enforcement officers were present to see how many people would turn out. More people turned out than the city authorities expected. They did not arrest us. There were too many Black people inside and outside of Brown Chapel to be confined to the Selma City Jail.”

The mass meeting is a huge success, some 700 Black citizens from Selma, Dallas County, and the surrounding Black Belt fill Brown Chapel to overflowing. They are determined to defy the injunction, determined to be free. Also in the audience are numerous reporters and both state and local cops. Clark is not yet back from Miami and no effort is made to enforce the injunction.

… Now that the injunction has been defied without arrests or violence, the focus turns to the demand for voting rights. The voter registration office at the courthouse is only open on alternate Mondays — the next date is January 18. That gives two weeks to recruit, organize, and train voter applicants to show up en masse to register.

On Sunday the 3rd, King leaves for speaking engagements, fund-raising events, and meetings to organize national support. Diane Nash Bevel coordinates SCLC and SNCC staff, now operating in pairs, who fan out through Selma's Black neighborhoods, canvassing door-to-door to talk about voter registration. Though fear is still pervasive, a few courageous souls step forward. On Thursday, January 7, evening meetings and workshops with prospective registrants are held in each of Selma's five electoral wards. Sheriff's deputies barge into some of the meetings to "observe." Bevel electrifies the 50 participants at the Ward IV meeting in Brown Chapel by ordering them out of the building. They leave. The next day, some 200 students attend a youth rally. On Tuesday the 12th, ward meetings of up to 100 begin electing block captains.

Bernard Lafayette, SNCC's first Selma organizer who has close ties to both SNCC and SCLC, arrives from Chicago to help ease friction between the two organizations. Hosea Williams of SCLC and John Lewis of SNCC are now in Selma. SNCC and SCLC field staff reinforcements begin to arrive.  …

 

King returns to Selma on Thursday, January 14, to address a large mass meeting at First Baptist. He declares Monday a "Freedom Day" when direct action is to commence with a mass march to the courthouse by voter applicants. "If we march by the hundreds, we will make it clear to the nation that we are determined to vote." Volunteers will also apply for "white-only" city jobs, and integration teams will attempt to implement the Civil Rights Act by demanding service at segregated facilities — the first such action since students were beaten and arrested the previous July.

…

On Monday morning, January 18, Black citizens gather at Brown Chapel. After freedom songs, prayers, and speeches, Dr. King and John Lewis lead 300 marchers out of the church in Selma's first protest action since the injunction. Some are courageous adults determined to become voters, others are students for whom freedom is more important than attending class. They walk two-by-two on the Sylvan Street sidewalk (today, Sylvan Street is Martin Luther King Street). Police Chief Wilson Baker quickly halts the line. They have no permit for a "parade," but he agrees to allow them to walk in small groups to the courthouse. In other words, he is not enforcing Judge Hare's "three-person" injunction, but neither is he allowing Blacks to exercise their Constitutional right to peacefully march in protest.

Judge Hare and Sheriff Clark are furious at Baker's "betrayal." Clark, his deputies, and his posse, wait at the courthouse where they — not Baker — have jurisdiction (Marching 1).

 

Works cited:

“The Alabama Project.”  Selma Voting Rights Campaign (Jan-Mar).  Civil Rights Movement History 1965: Selma & the March to Montgomery.  Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline.  Web.  https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis65.htm#1965intro

“The Black Belt, Dallas County, and Selma Alabama.”   Selma Voting Rights Campaign (Jan-Mar).  Civil Rights Movement History 1965: Selma & the March to Montgomery.  Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline.  Web.   https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis65.htm#1965intro

“Marching to the Courthouse.”  Selma Voting Rights Campaign (Jan-Mar).  Civil Rights Movement History 1965: Selma & the March to Montgomery.  Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline.  Web.   https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis65.htm#1965selmaplan

“SCLC & SNCC.”  Selma Voting Rights Campaign (Jan-Mar).  Civil Rights Movement History 1965: Selma & the March to Montgomery.  Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline.  Web.  https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis65.htm#1965selmaplan

“The Selma Injunction (July).”  Effects of the Civil Rights Act.   Civil Rights Movement History 1964 July-Dec.  Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline.  Web.   https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim64c.htm#1964selmainj

“Selma on the Eve.”  Selma Voting Rights Campaign (Jan-Mar).  Civil Rights Movement History 1965: Selma & the March to Montgomery.  Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline.  Web.  https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis65.htm#1965selmaplan

“The Situation.”  Selma Voting Rights Campaign (Jan-Mar).  Civil Rights Movement History 1965: Selma & the March to Montgomery.  Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline.  Web.  https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis65.htm#1965selma