Civil Rights Events
March to Montgomery
Bloody Sunday
MONTGOMERY: Declaring that the march is "Not
conducive to the orderly flow of traffic and commerce," Governor Wallace
issues an edict forbidding it. "[The] march cannot and will not be
tolerated." He orders the state troopers to "Use whatever measures
are necessary to prevent a march."
SELMA: On Friday the 5th, Hosea Williams asks the
Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) for doctors and nurses in case of
violence. Led by Dr. Al Moldovan, six MCHR doctors and three nurses arrive in Selma on Saturday. The
march is scheduled to leave Selma
on Sunday, March 7th.
Anticipating that
their march will not be allowed out of Selma,
SCLC leaders make few logistic preparations for a 50-mile trek to Montgomery over 4 or 5
days. They assume everyone will be arrested for violating Wallace's edict. The
plan is to kneel and pray when ordered to turn around or disperse. By refilling
the jails, they will maintain pressure on Washington and the federal courts. Though he
[Martin Luther King] had previously
said he would lead the march, SCLC leaders convince him to remain in Atlanta — he is more
valuable out of jail speaking and mobilizing support than sitting in a cell.
It's a decision that infuriates SNCC field workers in Selma who condemn it as a betrayal of the
local marchers (though they themselves are still refusing to participate in the
march) (Tension 9).
Here is a different accounting of King’s absence.
On Saturday, March 6,
King was back in Atlanta,
where he decided to postpone the march until the following Monday. On a
conference phone call with his aides in Selma, he explained that for two
straight Sabbaths he had neglected his congregation—he was co-pastor of
Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church—and that he really needed to preach there the
next day. He would return to Selma
on Monday to lead the march. All his staff agreed to the postponement except
Hosea Williams, a rambunctious Army veteran with a flair for grass roots
organizing. “Hosea,” King warned, “you need to pray. You’re not with me. You
need to get with me.”
On Sunday morning,
though, King’s aides reported that more than five hundred pilgrims were
gathered at Brown Chapel and that Williams wanted permission to march that day.
In his church office King thought it over and relayed word to Brown Chapel that
his people could start without him. Since the march had been prohibited, he was
certain that they would get arrested at the bridge. He would simply join them
in jail. He expected no mayhem on Highway 80, since even the conservative Alabama press had excoriated Lingo’s troopers for their
savagery in Marion
(Oates 20).
SELMA: Sunday, March 7, dawns cold and raw.
Tension grips the city. The air is pregnant with potential violence. Carloads
of white thugs prowl the streets looking for trouble. Just over the Edmund
Pettus bridge on the road to Montgomery,
a swarm of state troopers, sheriff's deputies and mounted possemen, wait
impatiently. They are itching for action. John Carter Lewis, a Black
dishwasher, is stopped on his way home from work. He's guilty of being Black in
the wrong place. Two troopers attack him, striking him with their clubs,
breaking his arm and bloodying his head.
After Sunday services, some 400
marchers gather at Brown Chapel. Some are still in their Sunday suits and
dresses; others carry knapsacks and rolled up blankets tied with rough twine.
Their mood is somber but determined. There is little of the spirited singing
that buoyed previous protests.
John Lewis
recalled: We expected a confrontation. We knew that Sheriff Clark had issued
yet another call the evening before for even more deputies. Mass arrests would
probably be made. There might be injuries. Most likely, we would be stopped at
the edge of the city limits, arrested and maybe roughed up a little bit. We did
not expect anything worse than that.
The MCHR medical team sets up a first
aid station at Brown Chapel — a table, a mattress, and some basic
medical supplies.
Charles Bonner, a Selma student leader, remembered: Even
though we had been demonstrating for two years now, we had the uneasiness that
this was going to be a different day — uneasiness is to put it
mildly, if not euphemistically, because frankly it was a fear, it was a terror
that was going through us all. We were scared, because we didn't know what was
going to happen.
With horns blaring, a
caravan of cars filled with 200 marchers from Perry County
rolls in and unloads. Off to the side, SCLC divides its field workers into two
groups, those who will march and presumably end up in jail, and those who will
stay behind to mobilize a follow-on protest. James Bevel, Andrew Young, and
Hosea Williams flip coins to decide who will lead the march in King's absence.
Hosea is the odd man out.
It is mid-afternoon
when the 600 or so marchers line up two-by-two and head for the bridge. Leading
the line are Hosea Williams and John Lewis, behind them are SCLC leader Albert
Turner of Marion
and Bob Mants of SNCC. (It is SNCC policy that no one is allowed to go into
danger alone, so he volunteers to accompany John despite SNCC's opposition to
the march.) A few rows behind them are two of Selma's indomitable leaders, Amelia Boynton
and Marie Foster. A handful of white civil rights workers and Movement
supporters are mixed in among the Black students, teachers, maids, laborers,
and farmers who make up most of the marchers. Behind them is a flatbed truck
with some rented portable toilets and a couple of ambulances staffed by MCHR
medics. (All but one of the ambulances are actually hearses owned by Black
funeral parlors.)
Police roadblocks have
closed the bridge to vehicles. The MCHR ambulances are blocked. Gangs of
possemen on foot lurk nearby. The marchers remain on the sidewalk as they start
up the bridge rise. When the leaders reach the crest, they see what awaits on
the other side. State trooper cars, their lights flashing, are parked across
the highway. A phalanx of more than 200 troopers and sheriff's deputies are
lined up two and three deep to bar the march. To one side is a band of possemen
in their khaki uniforms and construction helmets. More than a dozen of them are
mounted on horses and they carry long leather bullwhips. White thugs armed with
bats and pipes and waving Confederate battle flags crowd the burger-joint
parking lot.
As the marchers start
down the bridge slope toward the waiting cops, Hosea Williams looks over the
rail at the cold, choppy waters of the Alabama River
100 feet below. "Can you swim," he asks John Lewis. "No."
"Neither can I, but we might have to."
The media is confined
off to the side where their view is limited. With their usual clueless
certainty, TV reporters are telling viewers that the "militant" SNCC
has "forced" this dangerous march on an "unwilling" Dr.
King.
Charles Bonner: We kept stepping two by two, one foot in
front of the other one, marching resolutely into hell, because it was so clear
that we were going to be beaten. I mean, these men were just so prepared, they
were not going to let their readiness go to waste by not beating us. I mean,
when you look back on it, it was very clear.
When they come down
off the bridge, the marchers cross over the Selma city line into the county jurisdiction
of Sheriff Clark. The troopers and deputies begin donning their gas masks. The
marchers stride forward on the shoulder of US-80, known in Alabama as the Jefferson Davis Highway. The front of the
line is about 100 feet from the bridge when Major Cloud of the state troopers
orders Williams and Lewis to halt and turn around (March 1-6).
“It would be
detrimental to your safety to continue this march,” Major John Cloud called out
from his bullhorn. “This is an unlawful assembly. You have to disperse, you are
ordered to disperse. Go home or go to your church. This march will not
continue.”
“Mr. Major,” replied
Williams, “I would like to have a word, can we have a word?”
“I’ve got nothing
further to say to you,” Cloud answered (Remembering 5).
As planned, the
leaders motion for everyone to kneel in prayer.
Bonner: "I was probably about 10 to 15 rows back
from John Lewis. ... I saw John Lewis ... kneel down with Hosea Williams, and
of course we sat, like these waves you seen in the stadiums, as they knelt all
the demonstrators behind fell in line and I knelt as well.
"Troopers
Advance!" shouts the Major. A wave of cops smashes into the people at the
front of the line.
Charles Fager: From between nearby buildings a line of
horses emerged at the gallop, their riders wearing the possemen's irregular
uniform and armed with bullwhips, ropes, and lengths of rubber tubing wrapped
with barbed wire. They rode into the melee with wild rebel yells, while behind
them the cheers of the spectators grew even louder. "Get those Goddamned
niggers!" came Jim Clark's voice. "And get those Goddamned white
niggers!"
John Lewis: The troopers and possemen swept forward as
one, like a human wave, a blur of blue shirts and billy clubs and bullwhips. We
had no chance to turn and retreat. There were six hundred people behind us,
bridge railings to either side and the river below. ... The first of the
troopers came over me, a large husky man. Without a word he swung his club
against the left side of my head. I didn't feel any pain, just the thud of the
blow, and my legs giving way. ... And then the same trooper hit me again. And
everything started to spin. I heard something that sounded like gunshots. And
then a cloud of smoke rose all around us. Tear gas. ... I began choking,
coughing. I couldn't get air into my lungs. I felt as if I was taking my last
breath.
Amelia Boynton is
viciously clubbed to the ground and tear gas is shot directly into her face as
she collapses into unconsciousness. Hosea Williams scoops up little Sheyann
Webb and carries her to safety through the tear gas and charging horses.
Sheyann Webb: He held on until we were off the bridge and
down on Broad Street
and he let me go. I didn't stop running until I got home. ... I was maybe a
little hysterical because I kept repeating over and over, "I can't stop
shaking Momma, I can't stop shaking." ... My daddy was like I'd never seen
him before. He had a shotgun and he yelled, "By God, if they want it this
way, I'll give it to them!" And he started out the door. Momma jumped up
and got in front of him. ... Finally he put the gun aside and sat down. I
remember just laying there on the couch, crying and feeling so disgusted. They
had beaten us like we were slaves.
Behind the possemen
come the white thugs, beating down anyone who manages to stumble out of the gas
cloud. They assault the reporters and break their cameras. One of the "reporters"
is actually an FBI agent, and the three men who attack him are later arrested
for assault on a federal agent. They are the only whites ever arrested for
violence on "Bloody Sunday." They are never brought to trial.
The troopers,
deputies, possemen, and thugs pursue the retreating marchers over the bridge
and through the city streets, beating and assaulting Blacks wherever they find
them — whether they're demonstrators or not. Dr. Moldovan and nurses Virginia
Wells and Linda Dugan plunge into the swirling tumult. They lift unconscious
and crippled victims into their ambulance and race back to the aid station at
Brown Chapel, which is quickly swamped with the injured and wounded. By the end
of the day, 100 of the 600 marchers require medical attention for fractured
skulls, broken teeth and limbs, gas poisoning, and whip lashes.
The troopers and
possemen swarm into the Carver Projects beating whomever they catch and
charging their horses up the steps of Brown Chapel to attack those trying to
seek sanctuary in the church. Another band of possemen force their way into
First Baptist and throw a teenage boy through a stained glass window. Sheriff
Clark fires tear gas into homes to drive people outside where they can be
attacked. [Wilson]
Baker tries to stop the carnage, but
Clark shouts in his face, "I've already waited a month too damn
long!"
Sheyann Webb's
constant companion, Rachel West, 8 years old, recalls:
I saw the horsemen ... riding at a gallop, coming around
a house up the way, and that's when I turned and ran. I heard the horses'
hooves and I turned and saw the riders hitting at the people and they were
coming fast toward me. I stopped and got up against the wall of one of the
apartment buildings and pressed myself against it as hard as I could. Two
horsemen went by and I knew if I didn't move I would be trapped there. I saw
the people crying [from the gas] as they went by and holding their eyes and
some had their arms up over their heads.
I took off running. ... I was out in the open then, right in the middle of the
street and heading for the yard toward our house, and I heard these other
horsemen coming and I knew they were going to catch me. I just knew they were
going to either trample me or hit me with a club or whip. My legs didn't seem
to be moving — it was like in a bad dream when you are chased by
something and can't run. Well, just as I got to the yard this white [SNCC
worker] named Frank Soracco came by me and he was moving fast. And I must have
been crying out, because he stopped and just swept me up and carried me under
the armpits and kept moving.
Some Blacks begin to
retaliate with thrown rocks and bottles, but Movement leaders and civil rights
workers move among them, urging nonviolent discipline. The cops are raging with
mob fury, all control abandoned to racist hate. Many are now carrying loaded
rifles and shotguns at the ready. The activists know that if a single white
officer is injured by a tossed brick there'll be a blood-bath of indiscriminate
gunfire.
Eventually, the frenzy
of cop violence subsides and the forces of "law and order" occupy the
Carver Project and Selma's
Black commercial district, forcing all Blacks inside and off the street. They
allow the MCHR ambulances to ferry the most seriously wounded — more than 90 —
to Good Samaritan Hospital
and Burwell Infirmary (a Black old-age home).
Among those
hospitalized is John Lewis with a skull fracture and concussion. Before he
allows himself to be taken to hospital, he tells the battered and bruised
people gathered in Brown Chapel, "I don't known how President Johnson can
send troops to Vietnam.
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.
Next time we march, we may have to keep going when we get to Montgomery. We have to go to Washington." His
words are reported in the New York Times and the Johnson administration
responds by announcing that they will send FBI agents to Selma to, "... investigate whether
unnecessary force was used by law officers and others."
As the afternoon wanes
and evening falls, Brown Chapel remains crowded with marchers and supporters
huddling together for mutual support. Acrid tear gas fumes still emanate from
clothes and skin. Eyes weep and breathing is labored. There is anger and rage,
of course, but also deep humiliation at being whipped and beaten and driven.
Outside, the troopers and deputies strut like conquering heroes. Inside, people
are dispirited and dejected. They have endured so much, violence, jail,
economic retaliation, and yet despite all, practically no one has been
registered to vote.
Sheyann Webb recalls:
When
I had first gotten to the church ... my eyes were still swollen and burning
from the tear gas. But what I saw there made me cry again. I'll never forget
the faces of those people. I'd never seen such looks before. I remember
standing and looking at them a long time before sitting down. They weren't
afraid, because they were too beaten to know any more fear. It was as though nobody
cared to even try to win anything anymore, like we were slaves after all and
had been put in our place by a good beating.
I sat with Rachel up toward the front. ... we were just sitting there crying,
listening to the others cry; some were even moaning and wailing. It was an
awful thing. It was like we were at our own funeral. But then later in the
night, maybe nine-thirty or ten, I don't know for sure, all of a sudden
somebody there started humming. I think they were moaning and it just went into
the humming of a freedom song. It was real low, but some of us children began
humming along, slow and soft. At first I didn't even know what it was, what
song, I mean. It was like a funeral sound, a dirge. Then I recognized
it — "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me' Round." I'd never
heard it or hummed it that way before. But it just started to catch on, and the
people began to pick it up. It started to swell, the humming.
Then we began singing the words. We sang, "Ain't gonna let George Wallace
turn me 'round." And, "Ain't gonna let Jim Clark turn me
'round." Ain't gonna let no state trooper turn me 'round. Ain't gonna let
no horses. ..ain't gonna let no tear gas — ain't gonna let nobody
turn me 'round." Nobody!
And everybody's singing now, and some of them are clapping their hands, and
they're still crying, but it's a different kind of crying. It's the kind of
crying that's got spirit, not the weeping they had been doing. And me and
Rachel are crying and singing and it just gets louder and louder. I know the
state troopers outside the church heard it. Everybody heard it. Because more
people were coming in then, leaving their apartments and coming to the
church — because something was happening.
We was singing and telling the world that we hadn't been whipped ... I think we
all realized it at the same time, that we had won something that day, because
people were standing up and singing like I'd never heard them before. ... When
I first went into that church that evening those people sitting there were
beaten — I mean their spirit, their will was beaten. But when that
singing started, we grew stronger. Each one of us said to ourselves that we
could go back out there and face the tear gas, face the horses, face whatever
Jim Clark could throw at us (March
6-12).
SELMA: Unknown to the battered freedom fighters
gathered in Brown Chapel, there is a political tsunami racing outward from Selma Alabama.
Print and radio reporters jam the lines as they file their stories by phone. TV
crews evade the trooper's highway blockade and rush their film to Montgomery where chartered planes fly it to New York for processing.
…
ATLANTA: Throughout
the late afternoon, urgent phone conversations are held between Movement
leaders in Selma and Dr. King and his executive
staff in Atlanta.
After more than 4,000 arrests, the brutal attack in Marion, police murder of
Jimmie Lee Jackson, and now a massive assault stretching from the Edmund Pettus
bridge into the heart of Selma's Black community, there can be no doubt that
Governor Wallace and Sheriff Clark are determined to suppress the voting rights
movement with savage police violence. That cannot be allowed.
Dr. King decides. They
have to defy Wallace and Clark by marching again. But not alone. For the first
time ever, he mobilizes all of SCLC's resources to issue a nationwide call for
people of conscience to stand with local Blacks as they nonviolently confront
troopers, deputies, and possemen. In previous years, small groups of
northerners had been asked to support protests in places like Birmingham and
St. Augustine, but never before has King made a general plea for thousands of
people to place their bodies on the line against police violence. As night
falls, hundreds of telegrams are being dispatched from Atlanta, reading in part:
The people of Selma will struggle on
for the soul of the nation, but it is fitting that all Americans help to bear
the burden. I call therefore, on clergy of all faiths, representatives of every
part of the country, to join me in Selma for a
minister’s march to Montgomery
on Tuesday morning, March ninth.
…
Tuesday is chosen to
give northern supporters time to reach Selma, and also time for SCLC attorneys
to file a motion in federal court on Monday morning to prevent the state of Alabama from blocking
the march. Unlike the Dallas County voter-registration cases which had to be
filed in the Mobile district court of Judge Thomas, this motion will go before
federal Judge Frank Johnson in Montgomery for the Middle District of Alabama.
Judge Johnson is considered a "southern liberal," and SCLC leaders
are confidant that he will grant their motion to allow a march from Selma to Montgomery.
In the past, Johnson has ruled against bus segregation during both the Montgomery Bus Boycott
and the Freedom Rides, and he has supported Black voting rights in a number of
cases. He has no love for Wallace — who once referred to him as a
"carpetbagging, scalawagging, integrating liar" — and even less for
the violent racists who bombed his mother's home in the mistaken belief that he
lived there. U.S.
Marshals now guard his home around the clock.
When word of the
brutal attack arrives from Selma, members of the
SNCC Executive Committee are meeting in Atlanta. … Bypassing SNCC's normal consensus-style
decision making process, Jim Forman issues a mobilization call for all SNCC
members to converge on Selma,
resume the march, and confront the cops and troopers. He charters a plane to
fly himself and other SNCC leaders from Atlanta
to Selma.
SNCC veteran and Selma organizer Prathia
Hall recalls:
On Bloody Sunday,
March 7, 1965, I was at the Atlanta SNCC office
when a call came from ... Selma.
Over the phone we could hear screams of people who were being attacked. SNCC
immediately chartered a plane so that people could go to Selma right away. As the group was ready to
leave, Judy Richardson said, "Wait a minute, there are no women in this
group. Where's Prathia?" And so I went.
It was a very traumatic time for me. When we
got there we saw what had happened. It was a bloody mess; people's heads had
been beaten; they'd been gassed. Of course we held a rally. At the meeting
people were angry; they, too, had been traumatized. One man stood up and said,
"I was out on the bridge today because I thought it was right. But while I
was on the bridge, Jim Clark came to my house and tear-gassed my
eighty-year-old mother, and next time he comes to my house, I'm going to be
ready." Everybody understood what that meant. People had lived their lives
basically sleeping with guns beside their beds — that was just a part of the
culture. These were people who were struggling to be nonviolent, who in their
hearts and spirits were not a violent people, but they also had notions of
self-defense."
JACKSON: SNCC's large Mississippi
staff is holding a state wide meeting in Jackson
when word of Selma
and Forman's mobilization call reaches them. By evening, carloads of SNCC
veterans are rushing east on Highway 80 at dangerously high speeds.
…
NATION: Across the
country, Freedom Movement activists respond. Some begin mobilizing support
demonstrations at federal buildings in their home communities. Others head for Alabama. Linda Dehnad,
of the New York SNCC office, recalls:
I was on the [Friends
of SNCC] steering committee in New
York. I worked with students. My house on Riverside Drive
& 90th Street [was] the place [for SNCC folk] to stay when they were in New York. So my house
always had SNCC people in it. On Bloody Sunday my dining room was filled with
people. We were watching TV. We just turned on the news. So we're watching the
news and somebody said, "Oh my God. That's John." Within 10 minutes,
my house was empty. They grabbed their stuff and they went.
The Sunday night movie
on ABC is the network premier of Judgment at Nuremburg, a major TV event with an estimated audience of 48 million.
Correspondent Frank Reynolds interrupts the program with news from Selma followed by 15
minutes of Bloody Sunday film. Some viewers are at first confused, assuming the
images are of Nazi atrocities. CBS and NBC also provide dramatic coverage — as
do the Monday morning newspapers (Sunday 1-8).
Nearly 50 million
Americans who had tuned into the film’s long-awaited television premier
couldn’t escape the historical echoes of Nazi storm troopers in the scenes of
the rampaging state troopers. “The juxtaposition struck like psychological
lightning in American homes,” wrote Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff in “The
Race Beat.”
The connection wasn’t
lost in Selma,
either. When his store was finally empty of customers, one local shopkeeper
confided to Washington Star reporter
Haynes Johnson about the city’s institutional racism, “Everybody knows it’s
going on, but they try to pretend they don’t see it. I saw ‘Judgment at Nuremberg’ on the Late
Show the other night and I thought it
fits right in; it’s just like Selma”
(Remembering 6).
For many Americans who
have never before marched, never before protested, Bloody Sunday is the tipping
point that moves them into action. Not Bloody Sunday alone, of course, but the
cumulative effect of all that has gone before. Students, clergy, housewives,
and men and women from all walks of life, both Black and white, determine to
take a stand. Some hear of and respond to King's call, others act
spontaneously. Some hit the road for Selma, some
protest locally, some demand immediate action from their U.S. senators and representatives (Sunday
9).
Works cited:
