Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  Back in Selma, King found that Clark was doing his part to keep things stirred up. During King’s absence, the marches had actually begun to dwindle, and Baker’s own hopes had risen: if Clark could be restrained, maybe King’s crusade could yet be derailed. But Clark could not be restrained. On February 10, he and his possemen attacked a column of young student marchers and drove them out of town at a run, hitting and shocking them with cattle prods. “You wanted to march, didn’t you?” the possemen yelled. “Now march!” They chased the youngsters a mile or so, until they stumbled vomiting and crying into ditches.

  In protest, King led 2,800 furious Negroes on the biggest march of the campaign, promising them and all the nation beyond that they were going to bring a voting-rights law into being in the streets of Selma. At the courthouse, Clark responded by jabbing C. T. Vivian in the stomach with a billy club. When Vivian wrested it away, a deputy smashed him in the mouth with his billy club. All this occurred right in front of scribbling reporters and television cameramen. As Time reported, Clark was the movement’s energizing force: every time it faltered, the sheriff and his deputies revived it with some new outrage. And The Nation proclaimed King himself “the finest tactician the South has produced since Robert E. Lee.” Like Lee, The Nation observed, King got a lot of help from the stupidity of his opponents.

  Clark, in the meantime, had checked into Vaughan Memorial Hospital complaining of chest pains. “The niggers are givin’ me a heart attack,” he wailed. And he would curse and castigate them for trying to gain “black supremacy” in Dallas County. The sheriff collected shirts—had eighty-eight of them now—and used to give the old ones to Negroes who kept their place. But not any more. “No, sir,” said his wife, “he’s not giving any more of his good shirts to those niggers after what they’ve put him through down here.” While he convalesced, though, two hundred young demonstrators stood in the rain in front of the courthouse, praying for his recovery—in mind as well as body.

  By now King had escalated the campaign again, expanding it into adjacent Perry and Wilcox Counties and calling for night marches there as well as in Selma to heighten pressure on local white authorities. As he and his staff drove through rural Wilcox County, King was horrified at the racial oppression he found there. On one plantation, blacks had never seen U.S. currency; they used octagonal tin coins parceled out by the white owners, and shopped at the plantation commissary like slaves. On the courthouse lawn in Camden, King confronted Sheriff P. C. “Lummy” Jenkins in a futile effort to get Negroes registered. King learned that Jenkins had such a reputation for ferocity that a Negro wanted for some “crime” would come in voluntarily and surrender. “This is intimidation and degradation reminiscent only of chattel slavery,” King said. “This is white supremacist arrogance and Negro servility possible only in an atmosphere where the Negro feels himself so isolated, so hopeless, that he is stripped of all dignity.” Conditions were almost as bad in Perry County, where SCLC staffers were organizing. In the county seat of Marion, where King and Coretta had been married eleven years before, Negroes crowded around King in a desperate effort to see and touch him. Later King learned that some whites had planned to assassinate him, but couldn’t get a clear shot because of the crush of Negroes around him and his staff.

  Aroused by his visit, a group of Marion Negroes attempted a night march on February 18, but Lingo’s state troopers ambushed the luckless blacks and clubbed them screaming through the streets. When Jimmie Lee Jackson, a young pulpwood cutter, tried to defend his mother and grandfather, a trooper shot him in the stomach with a revolver. An ambulance rushed him to the Negro hospital in Selma, where doctors did all they could to save his life. As he hovered near death, Colonel Lingo served Jackson for assault and battery with intent to kill a police officer.

  King fell ill with a fever and had to spend the weekend in bed. On Monday, though, he called on Jackson in the hospital and could only shake his head at the madness of what had happened. Only twenty-five, darkly handsome and muscular, Jimmie just this last year had been elected the youngest deacon in the history of his home-town church. Angry, in despair, King headed for Brown Chapel to lead a night protest march, in defiance of a ban issued on Saturday by Governor Wallace. But King’s aides begged him to call it off. The Justice Department and the FBI had both warned them of a plot to assassinate King if he marched that night. The plot called for a diversionary group to attack the middle of the column and draw off the police, then a death squad to shoot him in the front. King protested that he couldn’t give in to such threats, but his frightened staff finally persuaded him to stay off the streets that night.

  Two days later Jimmie Lee Jackson died, and King and all his colleagues and hundreds of area Negroes heralded him as a martyr and escorted his hearse on a rain-streaked pilgrimage back to Marion. Here, in Jimmie’s church, a plain wooden building with wooden floors, King gave the eulogy before four hundred mourners. In the front row, Jimmie’s mother wept and his eighty-two year-old grandfather, Cager Lee, a small and brittle man, stared at King with eyes of ineffable sorrow. Who killed Jimmie Lee Jackson? King asked rhetorically. He was killed by every lawless sheriff, every racist politician from governors down, every indifferent white minister, every passive Negro who “stands on the sidelines in the struggle for justice.” Yet “Jimmie Lee Jackson’s death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly to make the American dream a reality.” Under weeping skies, King and hundreds of others buried Jimmie in a hillside cemetery, where pine trees stood dark and still, laying him to final rest beside his father, killed in a car wreck several years before.

  After the funeral, King and his staff escalated the campaign again. In a press conference, wearing his overalls and skull cap, a brooding James Bevel announced that King would lead a mass march to the Alabama capitol in Montgomery. It was to begin in Selma the next Sunday, March 7. Pressed by reporters, King confirmed what Bevel said: they were going to petition George Wallace to end police brutality and grant Alabama Negroes the elective franchise. “I can’t promise you that it won’t get you killed,” King told a hushed crowd in Brown Chapel. “But we must stand up for what is right.”

  The announcement stunned Alabama officials, for the image of hundreds of flag-waving Negroes descending on the state capitol was more than they could bear. Governor Wallace banned the march and instructed Lingo to enforce his order “with whatever means are available.” Wallace aides, though, assured Mayor Smitherman that there would be no violence, and Smitherman in turn promised the full cooperation of the city police. But all this infuriated Wilson Baker. Smitherman and Wallace were both crazy, he said, if they believed that Lingo and Clark would not molest the marchers, and Baker threatened to resign before he would let his men participate in a bloodbath. At last Smitherman relented and allowed the city police to stay out of the matter. Once the marchers crossed Edmund Pettis Bridge and left Selma, they would be in the hands of Lingo and Clark.

  On Friday, March 5, King was in Washington for a long talk with Johnson and then returned to Atlanta on Saturday. He now decided to postpone the march until the following Monday. On a conference call with his aides in Selma, he explained that he had neglected his congregation for two straight Sundays and that he really needed to preach in Ebenezer the next day. He would return to Selma on Monday and lead the march then. All of his staff agreed to the postponement except rambunctious Hosea Williams. “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 banned, he was certain that they would get arrested at the bridge and that 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 fo
r their savagery in Marion.

  He did not know what happened on Highway 80—the Jefferson Davis Highway—until his excited aides phoned him later in the afternoon from the Brown Chapel parsonage. Five hundred and twenty-five people, led by Williams and SNCC’s John Lewis, had left Brown Chapel and crossed the bridge toting bedrolls and blankets, only to confront a chilling sight: “Wallace’s storm troopers,” as civil-rights workers called the highway patrol, stood three deep across all four lanes of Highway 80, wearing gas masks beneath their sky-blue hard hats and armed with billy clubs. State trooper cars, with the Confederate stars and bars on their bumpers, were parked everywhere along the roadside. As the blacks approached the wall of troopers, an officer raised a bullhorn and shouted, “Turn around and go back to your church! You will not be allowed to march any further! You’ve got two minutes to disperse!” One minute later, King’s men told him, the officer ordered a charge, and the troopers waded into the Negroes with clubs flailing. They shoved the front ranks back like dominoes, fractured Lewis’s skull, hammered women and men alike to the ground. Then the troopers regrouped and attacked again, this time firing canisters of tear gas. The marchers fell back in clouds of smoke, choking and crying in pain.

  As white onlookers cheered wildly, Clark’s mounted posse now rode out between some buildings along the highway, and Clark shrieked, “Get those goddamn niggers!” With a rebel yell, the possemen charged into the Negroes, lashing them with bullwhips and rubber tubing wrapped in barbed wire. “Please, no!” cried a Negro. “God, we’re being killed.” Reeling under the blows, the blacks retreated pell mell back to Brown Chapel, the road behind them littered with bedrolls, shoes, and purses. At the chapel, some Negroes hurled bricks and bottles at the possemen, while Williams and Lewis, his head covered with blood, guided their stricken people inside. The air reeked of tear gas as they huddled in the sanctuary, some groaning and weeping, others in shock.

  Outside, Wilson Baker tried to assume jurisdiction in the area, but the sheriff shoved past him. “I’ve already waited a month too damned long about moving in,” Clark bellowed. Whereupon his possemen rioted in the Negro section, beating people and storming into the First Baptist Church, where they seized a Negro youth and flung him through a stained-glass window depicting Christ as the Good Shepherd. Before it was over, seventy Negroes had been hospitalized and seventy others treated for injuries.

  In Atlanta, King was stricken with grief. “I shall never forget my agony of conscience for not being there when I heard of the dastardly acts perpetrated against nonviolent demonstrators that Sunday,” he said later. But then he got an inspiration. He had long complained that clergymen had “too often been the taillight rather than the headlight” of the civil-rights movement, and here was a tremendous opportunity to enlist them actively in the struggle. Accordingly he sent out a flurry of telegrams, summoning religious leaders across the nation to join him in Selma for “a ministers’ march to Montgomery” on Tuesday, March 9. “In the vicious maltreatment of defenseless citizens of Selma, where old women and young children were gassed and clubbed at random, we have witnessed an eruption of the disease of racism which seeks to destroy all America,” King said in his call. “The people of Selma will struggle on for the soul of America, but it is fitting that all Americans help to bear the burden.”

  As King’s telegrams flashed across the Republic, ABC Television interrupted its Sunday-night movie, Judgment at Nuremberg, to show a vivid film clip of Selma’s “bloody Sunday.” And stories and photographs about it ran in all the major newspapers and news magazines. The news shook the country as had no other event in the civil-rights struggle—not even the dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham. In Washington, President Johnson deplored such brutality, and 1,000 people marched in protest. In Detroit, the Democratic mayor and the Republican governor led 10,000 people in a sympathy march for Selma’s battered Negroes. A thousand people demonstrated in Union, New Jersey, 2,000 in Toronto, Canada, and thousands more in cities from New England to the West Coast.

  Meanwhile the response to King’s telegrams was sensational, as clergymen in one city after another dropped whatever they were doing and headed for the nearest air terminal. In Boston, Reverend James Reeb, a soft-spoken white Unitarian and director of a low-income housing project for Negroes, told a colleague that it was time for those who really cared for human freedom “to make a direct witness.” He left his wife and four children and set out for Selma by plane and bus. So did former Kennedy assistant Harris Wofford, back from two years in Africa, who said that King’s was “a call I couldn’t refuse.” Overnight, some four hundred ministers, rabbis, priests, nuns, students, and lay leaders—black and white alike—rushed to stand in Selma’s streets with Martin Luther King and face Alabama officials in the name of human dignity. State authorities, of course, branded them agitators one and all. “Why not?” retorted one cleric. “An agitator is the part of the washing machine that gets the dirt out.”

  King spent most of Monday in Atlanta, talking on the phone with Washington, Selma, and Montgomery. Because of the recent threats on his life, King’s aides were greatly concerned about his safety, but King was going back to Selma that evening come what may. For him, it was “a matter of conscience.” In Montgomery, meanwhile, his attorneys filed into Judge Frank M. Johnson’s U.S. District Court and asked that he enjoin Alabama officials from blocking Tuesday’s march. King expected a favorable ruling since Johnson had the best civil-rights record of any judge in the Deep South. A native Alabamian, Johnson had attended the University of Alabama with Wallace and had once been his friend. But they had fallen out over civil rights, so much so that Wallace referred to the judge as “a low-down, carpetbaggin’, scalawaggin’, race-mixin’ liar.”

  But Judge Johnson refused to hand down an injunction that Monday. Instead he asked King’s forces to postpone the march until after a court hearing on Tuesday. At first King agreed. But when he reached Selma on Monday evening and found all those clergymen prepared to stand with him, he resolved to march as planned. “We’ve gone too far to turn back now,” he exhorted a mass meeting in Brown Chapel. “We must let them know that nothing can stop us—not even death itself. We must be ready for a season of suffering.” There were plenty who were ready, too, especially among local Negroes. Enraged and emboldened by Sunday’s beatings, they were eager indeed for a show of defiance. “I had the flu yesterday and wasn’t able to march,” an old man told James Bevel, “but I’m going to be out there tomorrow.” “We’re going, and nothing can stop us,” declared a youngster at a youth meeting, and the children chanted back, “Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.”

  That night, in Dr. Jackson’s home, King and other movement leaders debated for three intense hours about what kind of march should be undertaken. Should they attempt to reach Montgomery or settle for a token demonstration here in Selma? Clearly the troopers and possemen would be massed out on Highway 80 the next day, itching for bloodshed. Under considerable duress, King argued that it was not the nonviolent way to try to break through an armed wall, and he sold his colleagues on a compromise. They would march to the site of Sunday’s beatings and confront the police line, making it clear to all the world that Alabama planned to stop them with violence. Then they would turn back, in hopes that the spectacle would have a salutary impact on Washington.

  Tuesday morning brought an unexpected blow: Judge Johnson officially banned the march that day, and King and his lieutenants groaned in despair. For the most part, the federal judiciary had been a powerful ally of the movement, helping it time and again with favorable decisions. Now King would have to proceed in defiance of a federal court order, and some advisers pressed him to cancel the march lest he alienate the very Washington politicians on whom he depended for voting-rights legislation. Yes, King was upset about the decision, felt “it was like condemning the robbed man for being robbed,” said it created an awful dilemma for him. Yet he would not cancel the march, could not cancel it. He remembered only too well the lesson of
Albany, where he had honored a federal injunction and it had broken his momentum. If he waited until after protracted court hearings, all the clergymen in Selma might leave, public interest evaporate, and a decisive moment in the struggle be irretrievably lost. And there was still another consideration: if he did nothing today, pent-up emotions might explode into “an uncontrollable situation.” He had to provide his people with “an outlet.” He had to march at least to the police barrier.

  Meanwhile Attorney General Katzenbach phoned and asked King not to march. “Mr. Attorney General,” King said, “you have not been a black man in America for three hundred years.” Then an administrative task force under LeRoy Collins, head of the Federal Community Relations Service, arrived at the Jackson home and beseeched King in the name of President Johnson to call off the demonstration. But King still refused. A while later, Collins returned with the news that he had met with Lingo and Clark in the back room of an auto agency and persuaded them to restrain their men so long as King turned back. Some said King’s only response was a smile. Clark and Lingo had broken promises before, and whites who knew them thought a lot of people would be dead by nightfall.

  At Brown Chapel that afternoon, some 1,500 marchers listened quietly as King spoke of his “painful and difficult decision” to defy the court injunction. “I do not know what lies ahead of us. There may be beatings, jailings, and tear gas. But I would rather die on the highways of Alabama than make a butchery of my conscience. There is nothing more tragic in all this world than to know right and not do it. I cannot stand in the midst of all these glaring evils and not take a stand.”

  He led them through town two abreast, stopping at the Pettis Bridge to hear a U.S. marshal read the court’s restraining order. Then he walked them out to the Jefferson Davis Highway, where columns of state troopers, brandishing billy clubs at waist level, again barred their way.