King meanwhile was in and out of town. He left for a brief speaking tour, turned up in Atlanta to preach at Ebenezer, then hurried back to Selma for the demonstrations on Monday, January 25. As he directed operations, a column bore down on Clark’s courthouse singing “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.” Now they were protected by a federal court order, handed down in Mobile over the weekend, that overruled Clark’s injunction and forbade city and county officials to impede the “orderly process” of voter registration. But Clark and the registrars created various obstructions to frustrate the Negroes and keep them off the rolls. In response to their demands, Clark now wore a lapel button that read “NEVER” and strode angrily down the line, shoving people around. When Mrs. Annie Lee Cooper, a huge woman, remarked that “There ain’t nobody scared around here,” Clark pushed her so hard that she lost her balance. Enraged, she punched the sheriff to his knees and then slugged him again. A deputy grabbed her from behind, but she stomped his foot and elbowed him in the stomach and then knocked Clark down a second time. At last three deputies subdued Mrs. Cooper and held her fast as Clark beat her methodically with his billy club, ignoring the reporters who trained their cameras on him.
Several black men started to interfere, but King stopped them. “Don’t do it, men. I know how you feel because I know how I feel. But hold your peace.” In truth, King was as furious as they were. But he was determined that Selma Negroes adhere to his philosophy and tactics of nonviolence, something he and his staff had been drilling into them since the movement had begun. As James Bevel told them, any man who had the urge to hit white officers was a fool. “That is just what they want you to do. Then they can call you a mob and beat you to death.” In any case, they were exposing the viciousness inherent in segregation now, one of the goals of direct action. A photograph of the beating of Mrs. Cooper was soon circulating widely across the country.
That Monday night, with passions running high over Mrs. Cooper, local blacks crowded into Brown Chapel to hear Ralph Abernathy. King asked him to give the main talk because he excelled at soothing people through droll wit and defiance. In Brown Chapel that night, he treated his people to a memorable show. He pointed to a radio antenna attached to the pulpit and said the police had installed that “doohickey” and had warned him to watch what he said. “But they forgot something when they said that,” Abernathy exclaimed with his jowly face set in a frown. “They forgot that Ralph Abernathy isn’t afraid of any white man, or any white man’s doohickey either. In fact, I’m not afraid to talk to it man to man.” He held the antenna up and cried, “Doohickey, hear me well!” and shouts and waves of laughter rolled over the sanctuary. “We don’t have to spread out when we go down to that courthouse, doohickey. And the next time we go we’re going to walk together, we’re not going to go two together twenty feet apart. We’re not going to have a parade, we’re just going to walk down to the courthouse. When we want a parade, doohickey, we’ll get the R. B. Hudson High School Band and take over the town!”
The next day King left his staff to run the campaign and returned to Atlanta for an interracial banquet in his honor. As a Nobel laureate, he was Atlanta’s most famous resident, and Benjamin Mays, Ralph McGill, Mayor Allen, and other prominent Atlantans had organized the affair to give King the recognition he was due in his home town. The banquet, however, had whipped up a tempest of controversy, with many white businessmen in hot opposition. “We ain’t gonna have no dinner for no nigger,” raged a top bank executive in town. The FBI, of course, tried to sabotage the affair by making “covert contacts with community leaders with charges about King’s personal life,” recalled an Atlanta agent. At one point things were so acrimonious that King said he didn’t care whether there was a banquet or not. But at last the voices of good will prevailed. Former Mayor Hartsfield beseeched opposition businessmen, “Let’s keep our good reputation and be known as an adult town.” In honoring King, Rabbi Jacob Rothchild pointed out, “we honor not him alone, but ourselves and our city as well.” At the same time, a New York Times story about the dispute scandalized image-conscious Atlanta and helped gain King’s sponsors the business support they needed to proceed. The first of its kind in Atlanta history, the banquet took place on the night of January 27 in the old Dinkier Hotel in the center of downtown.
King arrived late with Coretta and their three oldest children. The police were out in force—there had been a raft of bomb threats—and Klansmen in full regalia were picketing on the sidewalks. When he reached the banquet room, King found more than 1,500 people awaiting him, including many Negroes and almost every major white business leader in the city. At the head table, he leaned over and apologized to Mayor Allen for being late. “I forgot what time we were on.”
“How’s that?” Allen said.
“Eastern Standard Time, CST or CPT,” King said.
“CPT?”
“Colored People’s Time,” King said with a grin. “It always takes us longer to get where we’re going.”
With his children scampering about under the table, King surveyed the room and was deeply moved. Four years before, he had been jailed in Atlanta for trying to eat a sandwich at a downtown lunch counter. Tonight he was the honored guest at a downtown dinner in which Negroes and whites, yardmen and bankers, maids and social matrons, sat and ate together. Here in microcosm was his dream fulfilled, a dream that one day in Dixie the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners might sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
At the rostrum now, prepared to say a few words of thanks, King had tears in his eyes. “This is a very significant evening, for me and for the South,” he said. “I must confess I’ve enjoyed being on this mountaintop, and I’m tempted to stay here and retreat to a more quiet and serene life. But I must return to the valley.” Mayor Allen gave him a proclamation bound in a lavender velvet portfolio, reflecting that the Nobel laureate had “every reason in the world to be somewhat bitter and pompous toward people who had spent much of their past lives fighting what he had dedicated his life to do. But he was a big man, a great man.” At the end of the ceremonies, everybody in the room—black people and white—joined hands and sang “We Shall Overcome.”
ON SUNDAY, JANUARY 31, KING WAS BACK in Selma, staying with Dr. Sullivan Jackson, a friend and local dentist whose home now served as King’s staff headquarters. Mrs. Jackson, an articulate, animated schoolteacher, recalled that King was so busy, so much on the move, that he would often arrive at the Jackson home without a change of clothes and would have to borrow her husband’s suits, socks, and pajamas. He frequented Mrs. Jackson’s kitchen, smelling and sampling her stews, blackeyed peas, and whatever else she was cooking for his staff. When she said she felt like “the movement’s cook” because she had to prepare meals for so many people, King would smile and say expansively, “Lady, you will go down in history as being one of the greatest cooks.”
At a staff meeting, King and his aides worked out battle plans for the week. Colonel Al Lingo and a squad of state troopers were in Selma now, rumbling around town in their menacing two-tone Fords, with the stars and bars of the Confederacy emblazoned on their front bumpers, and hankering to break the heads of some “outside agitators.” After Abernathy’s “doohickey” speech, Mayor Smitherman had called Lingo in, fearing that Negroes were about to riot and that the city needed reinforcements. With Lingo here, King sensed that the moment of “creative tension” was fast approaching. Now was the time for mass marches and mass arrests and for King himself to go to jail.
That night, King sat behind the pulpit in Brown Chapel, his hands clasped in front of his chin and a pensive expression on his face, as his assistants exhorted a mass rally. This was becoming the pattern in the campaign. With Brown Chapel serving as the movement’s command post, there would be a mass meeting at night followed by another the next morning, after which marchers would set out for Clark’s courthouse. Now it was King’s turn to speak, and Hosea Williams marveled at how he could “let loose,
really get down,” with these black-belt folk, many of them in from the countryside. A slim, bright-eyed third-grader named Sheyann Webb, introduced to King as “his youngest freedom fighter,” never forgot him in these mass meetings. He would seek her out and sometimes hold her in his lap behind the pulpit, the two of them joining the crowd in singing “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” the anthem of the Selma movement. And when King spoke, “it just really put something through me,” Sheyann said later, “it just do something to me…. I just enjoyed looking at him, besides listening to him.” When he finished he would turn to her and say, “Sheyann, what do you want?” And she would say, “Freedom.”
The next morning, King told hundreds of marchers gathered around Brown Chapel why they were going to jail this day. “If Negroes could vote, there would be no Jim Clarks, there would be no oppressive poverty directed against Negroes, our children would not be crippled by segregated schools, and the whole community might live together in harmony. Whatever it takes to get the right to vote in this state we’re going to follow that course…. If it takes filling up the jails…if it takes marching on the state capital en masse and standing before the governor to demand our rights.”
Then he led some 250 marchers en masse down Selma’s streets, forcing a disheartened Wilson Baker to arrest them for parading without a permit. He shepherded them off to the county jail—the city jail was too small to hold them all—and left King and Abernathy and other singing Negroes in the dayroom there. It was a bleak place, with steel-gray walls and rancid mattresses lying helter-skelter on the floor. Across a catwalk from the dayroom was a row of cells filled with county prisoners, who subsisted on the prison fare of one cup of blackeyed peas and a square of cornbread twice a day. One Negro told King that he had been behind bars for twenty-seven months, after lawmen had arrested and beaten him one Saturday night. He didn’t know for certain what they had charged him with, but heard it was for raping a white woman. Another Negro said he had been locked up for two years without bond privileges and was still awaiting trial. King thought this grim evidence of black-belt justice for Negroes.
As was their custom in jail, King and Abernathy fasted for two days, prayed and meditated, sang hymns and exercised, and held conferences with SCLC aides and lawyers, who reported that hundreds of marchers—including several hundred school children—had been arrested on Tuesday and that a sheriff’s deputy was reported to have shocked Hosea Williams with a cattle prod. On Thursday, February 4, Coretta visited King in jail and told him that Malcolm X had been in Selma that day and had spoken at Brown Chapel, where several hundred Negroes were awaiting marching orders. King was astonished that Malcolm would invade “my own territory down here,” but not surprised that it was SNCC that had invited him. Coretta had talked with Malcolm, though, and he had given her a message for King. “Will you tell Dr. King that I had planned to visit with him in jail? I won’t get a chance now because I’ve got to leave to get to New York in time to catch a plane for London…. I want Dr. King to know that I didn’t come to Selma to make his job difficult. I really did come thinking that I could make it easier. If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King.”
King appreciated Malcolm’s sincerity. In fact, he was aware that Malcolm had broken with Elijah Muhammad and the Muslims, made a pilgrimage to Mecca and converted to orthodox Islam, and moderated his views on the inherent evil of the white man—if not the basic racism of American society. For Malcolm, the days of unrelenting hatred for the “white devil” were behind him now. “The sickness and madness of those days,” he told a black journalist, “I’m glad to be free of them. It’s a time for martyrs now. And if I’m to be one, it will be in the cause of brotherhood. That’s the only thing that can save this country. I’ve learned it the hard way—but I’ve learned it.” King thought it a propitious sign that this proud and brilliant man seemed to be moving away from racism. (In two and a half weeks, though, Malcolm X would be dead, shot down by Negro assassins in New York City, and King would reflect that Malcolm was a victim of the violence in America that had spawned him.)
From his jail cell, King continued to direct the Selma movement, jotting on Waldorf-Astoria stationary detailed battle instructions to his executive director, Andrew Young. First, King wrote, Young should call LeRoy Collins, former governor of Florida and head of the Federal Community Relations Service, and implore him to come to Selma and talk with city and county officials about expediting voter registration. Young should urge President Johnson to send an emissary, too, and appeal to Selma’s white leaders in a White House press conference. Above all, Young should work on getting a congressional delegation to come down and investigate conditions in Dallas County. The local newspaper editor, speaking for county and city officials, had already telegraphed Johnson to dispatch such a delegation, and King insisted that “we should join in calling for this. By all means don’t let them get the offensive. They are trying to give the impression that they are an orderly and good community because they integrated public accommodations. We must insist that voting is the issue and here Selma has dirty hands.” Meanwhile Young should keep the pressure on in the streets. Get the teachers to march again. Keep some activity going every day this week. Even consider a night march to the courthouse “to let Clark show [his] true colors.”
As Young and other movement people contacted Washington, the mass marches continued until Dallas County jails were bursting with more than 3,000 Negroes. When King’s field lieutenants failed one day to mount a demonstration, King scolded Young in a note: “please don’t be soft. We have the offensive. It was a mistake not to march today. In a crisis we must have a sense of drama.”
By now, King’s imprisonment had made national headlines and brought reporters and television newsmen streaming into Selma from across the country. In response to a flurry of telegrams in King’s name, a congressional delegation was coming to Selma on Friday, February 5, to see for themselves what was going on. And President Johnson, in a White House press conference, promised to secure the right to vote for “all our citizens.”
So far everything was going precisely as King had hoped. Assured of a national audience, he penned “Letter from a Selma Jail.”
Dear Friends,
When the King of Norway participated in awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to me he surely did not think that in less than sixty days I would be in jail. He, and almost all world opinion will be shocked because they are little aware of the unfinished business in the South.
By jailing hundreds of Negroes, the city of Selma, Alabama, has revealed the persisting ugliness of segregation to the nation and the world…. Why are we in jail? Have you ever been required to answer 100 questions on government, some abstruse even to a political-science specialist, merely to vote? Have you ever stood in line with over a hundred others and after waiting an entire day seen less than ten given the qualifying test?
THIS IS SELMA, ALABAMA. THERE ARE MORE NEGROES IN JAIL WITH ME THAN THERE ARE ON THE VOTING ROLLS.
But apart from voting rights, merely to be a person in Selma is not easy. When reporters asked Sheriff Clark if a woman defendant was married, he replied “She’s a nigger woman and she hasn’t got a Miss or Mrs. in front of her name.”
This is the U.S.A. in 1965. We are in jail simply because we cannot tolerate these conditions for ourselves or our nation.
“We need the help of all decent Americans….
Martin Luther King, Jr.
The “Letter” appeared as an advertisement in the February 5 issue of the New York Times. That same Friday, King bailed out of jail and held a news conference about his next move: he would personally ask the President to sponsor a voting-rights bill for southern Negroes, stressing in particular the need for federal registrars in the South. Then he lunched with the congressional task force at Dr. Jackson’s home and rehearsed the horrors that black people endured here in the black belt. In some demonstrations, whites had even thrown
snakes on Negroes seeking to register. Repelled by what they found in Selma, the congressmen returned to Washington and promoted their own voting-rights legislation on Capitol Hill. With the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights also hard at work, King’s hopes were soaring.
On February 9 he flew off to Washington for a round of talks with administration officials. But it required some remarkable operatics before he could see the President. After King had announced his visit in Selma, Harry Wachtel had called the White House and tried to arrange a meeting. But Johnson was distinctly cool to the idea. His response was that “nobody—not even a Nobel Prize winner—had the right to invite himself to the White House.” Sure, the President hoped to push for a voting-rights bill. But he didn’t want the country to think that King was making him do it. Finally Wachtel and a Johnson aide named Lee White worked out a staged meeting that avoided the impression that King could come to the White House whenever he wanted. According to the script, King conferred with Attorney General Katzenbach and Vice-President Humphrey, who, for his part, expressed doubts that Congress would pass additional civil-rights legislation so soon after the 1964 measure, but added that it might “if the pressure was unrelenting.” Then, on cue, Johnson phoned the Vice-President and asked him to bring the German ambassador by for a scheduled visit. Since King was in his office, Humphrey, following the script, nonchalantly invited him to come along and say hello to the President. So it was that King got his hearing with Johnson, who then assured him that he would send a voting-rights message to Congress “very soon.”
Though appalled at Johnson’s vanity, King thought the session worthwhile, because it publicly linked the Selma campaign to the President’s general commitment to some form of voting legislation. Even so, his talks in Washington reinforced his conviction that only by increasing the pressure from Selma could a meaningful voting bill ever be enacted.
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