At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  Hastily, they reviewed contingencies of nonviolent practice for the volunteers assembled in Brown Chapel. If stopped, they would sit in prayer until arrested or tear-gassed, which would provide ample ground to seek relief in federal court. Young told reporters that King decided to stay in Atlanta once Governor Wallace announced his intention to block the march, the better to seek political support in the North. Lewis read a statement about why they were marching. He carried a backpack stocked haphazardly for a short trip to jail, with an apple, an orange, a toothbrush, and a copy of American Political Traditions. After a final chorus of “God Will Take Care of You,” Lewis and Hosea Williams led the way from Brown Chapel at 1:40 P.M. Sunday—only to run into a glowering Wilson Baker, who, having resigned and un-resigned that morning in renewed infighting among segregationists, required them to abide by every scintilla of the parade ordinances until he could bid them good riddance from his jurisdiction. The marchers repaired to the playground of Carver Homes for an anticlimactic interval to form roughly twenty-four squads of twenty-five, each with a staff person to maintain proper spacing, and they stepped off again two abreast at 2:18 P.M., followed by a vehicular train that reflected their meager expectation of reaching outdoor bivouac: a flatbed truck with four portable toilets, two ambulances for the medical committee volunteers, and three borrowed hearses for supplies.

  SQUADS CLOSED ranks as the march line turned out of Selma as never before, climbing on the left sidewalk up the long slope of an empty Pettus Bridge. Police officers held up the ambulances and hearses, saying the roadway was closed to traffic, and a state administrator served notice that the out-of-state volunteers were not licensed to dispense medical care in Alabama. Diane Nash, patrolling the rear of the march line for stragglers, was drawn into a dispute over the legal status of Red Cross armbands and the meaning of “emergency treatment” in one section of the state code, but the support vehicles remained stranded as the front of the line reached the overarching steel girders at the crest of the bridge, nearly a hundred feet above river waters that were choppy from the crisp March winds.

  Down the bridge before Lewis and Williams opened a vista of forbidding reception. In the middle distance, a wall of trooper cruisers blocked all four lanes of Highway 80. Closer, a reserve of some 150 troopers, sheriff’s deputies, and possemen mingled behind a front line of twenty-five troopers about two hundred yards beyond the foot of the bridge—the possemen in khaki jackets and white helmets, fifteen of them mounted on horseback, the troopers in blue uniforms and blue helmets. Scores of white spectators jammed the parking lot of “Chicken Treat, Home of the Mickey Burger,” some standing on parked cars, across the highway from several dozen Negroes who gathered cautiously behind an old school bus. Near the front line, outside the showroom of Lehman Pontiac, troopers guarded an observation area reserved for journalists and several of the twenty FBI observers scattered around Selma.

  With the march line sighted on the bridge, a buzz about rumors and source reports died down in the observation area. FBI communications were sifting two death threats out of Chicago alone, one falsely claiming that a hired gunman spotted King in Selma. A television correspondent who knew better took King’s absence as confirmation of his political soundings on “some sort of power struggle” behind the scenes, in which the more militant SNCC students reportedly had imposed the Sunday march upon an unwilling King. At least one network camera operator, without knowing that SNCC’s executive committee actually was renouncing the march as King’s folly,* adapted in his own pragmatic way to the volatile confusion of cross-racial journalism in Selma. He dutifully followed the instructions of troopers and deputies who promised to guarantee his safety, but also wore a new athletic supporter and protective cup to guard against a repeat of earlier attacks from the same uniformed authorities. On foot, and from makeshift perches, the camera crews gathered images that soon obliterated a host of preoccupations while lifting some details into lore—that Hosea Williams claimed under his breath to have captured such bridges in Germany, that one tipsy marcher near the front had to be steadied over the crest, that Lewis and Williams eyed a possible destination below in the Alabama River and confessed softly to each other that neither could swim.

  What the machines recorded as Williams and Lewis continued methodically down the slope was an eerie silence, broken by the snorting of horses. After they had covered roughly a hundred yards of level ground, a quietly spoken order ahead introduced unnerving new sights and sounds to the marchers: snapping noises that swept along the barrier line ahead as officers secured otherworldly gas masks of bug-eyed goggles and elongated rubber snouts. Williams and Lewis halted the march line at a separation of fifty feet when an unmasked trooper stepped forward with a bullhorn. “It would be detrimental to your safety to continue this march,” said Major John Cloud, a scholarly-looking deputy to Al Lingo. “And I’m saying that this is an unlawful assembly. You are to disperse. You are ordered to disperse. Go home or go to your church. This march will not continue. Is that clear to you? I’ve got nothing further to say to you.”

  “May we have a word with the major?” asked Hosea Williams. Without amplification, his voice was barely audible to the journalists nearby.

  “There is no word to be had,” replied Cloud. He gave the marchers two minutes to withdraw, and the lines faced each other silently in front of Haisten’s Mattress and Awning Company. Lewis and Williams looked straight ahead, wearing light and dark raincoats, respectively, each with a buttoned tab collar pushing forward his necktie. Behind Lewis, Bob Mants stood motionless in an overcoat and collegiate scarf, wearing “high-water pants” that were stylish on the Atlanta University campuses, stopping five inches above the ankle. Behind Williams stood Albert Turner in rural denim, carrying a stuffed backpack that evidenced the hope of the Perry County marchers to sustain themselves all the way to Montgomery. Mants and Turner wore the jaunty Sluggo cap, also known as the Big Apple hat.

  After one minute and five seconds, Major Cloud addressed his front unit without the bullhorn: “Troopers, advance.” The blue line of elephantine masks moved forward with slow, irregular steps, overlapping and concentrating to curl around the front ranks of marchers. With nightsticks held chest high, parallel to the ground, the troopers pushed into the well-dressed formation, which sagged for nearly four suspended seconds until the whole mass burst to the rear, toppling marchers with accelerating speed as troopers hurtled over and through them. Almost instantly, silence gave way to a high-pitched shriek like the war cry of Indians in Hollywood movies, as the march line screamed and white spectators thrilled, some waving encouragement alongside the charge. John Lewis shot out of the mass at an angle, leaning oddly as he sank to the ground in five steps, felled by a truncheon blow to the head. A clattering of horses’ hooves on pavement signaled the general deployment of Alabama reserves and raised the volume of the pulsing shrill yell. Two troopers in the forward tangle stumbled over bodies into a heap and came up swinging clubs. The sharp report of guns sounded twice on the first launch of tear gas, one round reportedly fired by Sheriff Clark himself. A canister landed behind a moving wave of chaos that had not yet registered all the way back up Pettus Bridge toward Selma, where some marchers in the distance still knelt in prayer as instructed. From the tangle in the foreground, a Negro woman came spilling out to the side, pursued by one masked trooper and struck by two others she passed. Three ducking Negro men crossed toward nowhere with an injured woman they carried by arms and a leg, her undergarments flapping. Horsemen and masked officers on foot chased marchers who tried to escape down along the riverbank, herding them back. The cloud of tear gas from canister and spray darkened toward the mouth of the bridge, obscuring all but the outlines of a half-dozen figures on the ground and scattered nightsticks in the air.

  FROM A corner pay phone in Selma, SNCC worker Lafayette Surney was describing the departure when distant bedlam sounded and the first marchers streamed back over the bridge. The contact at SNCC headquarters in Atlanta tran
scribed Surney’s first words of alarm at 3:15 P.M., Selma time: “State Troopers are throwing tear gas on them. A few are running back. A few are being blinded by tear gas.” Nearby, Rev. John Morris heard radio news bulletins on the attack and jumped from his car to see refugees flee past. With James Bevel and Andrew Young, he pitched into Diane Nash’s efforts to extricate the blockaded medical teams. Injured marchers came to them instead, and the ambulances and hearses overflowed also with victims of blows inflicted by waiting teams of possemen who fell upon retreating marchers once they reached downtown Selma. Surney’s account generated notes by the minute in Atlanta. At 3:16 P.M.: “Police are beating people on the streets. Oh, man, they’re just picking them up and putting them in ambulances. People are getting hurt pretty bad.” At 3:17 P.M.: “Ambulances are going by with their sirens going. People are running, crying, telling what’s happening.” Atlanta SNCC workers crowded around the wide-area telephone service phone receiver to hear the riveting noises in the background.

  Marchers in flight back to Selma collided with one another in the mists of choking tear gas. Many clung to the bridge railing on the sidewalk to escape the mounted possemen who swung clubs or homemade flails of rubber hose laced with spikes, then jumped through gaps back into the roadway to run more freely, dodging troopers and possemen on foot. Third-grader Sheyann Webb, swept into the air by her armpits, wiggled and hollered for Hosea Williams to put her down because he could not carry her as fast as she could run.

  “Here come the white hoodlums,” Lafayette Surney reported to Atlanta over SNCC’s WATS line at 3:25 P.M. “I’m on the corner of one of the main streets. A lady said they tried to kill her.” Surney, a young movement veteran from Ruleville, Mississippi, was soon injured himself in the pell-mell retreat toward Brown Chapel.

  Dr. Moldovan and two nurses broke away from the blockade by force of will, and the only ambulance to make it out of Selma on the original line of march crossed to find a thinning civilian battlefield on the far side of the bridge, littered with abandoned purses, umbrellas, hats, packs, shoes, and prostrate human forms, several with spewing tear gas canisters close by. The heavy gas curled thickly above and around the grass in the dividing strip of Highway 80. Gasping through damp cloths, the medical workers found Amelia Boynton near the point of the first trooper surge. Boynton, who formally had invited King to reinforce a stalled voting rights campaign in Selma, lay immobile from blows but somewhat protected from fumes by a borrowed rain hat that had slipped down over her face. The owner of the rain hat sat woozy nearby. Margaret Moore, a pioneer schoolteacher who had offered Bernard Lafayette the first toehold of a civil rights project in 1962—indoor lodging—at first resisted the ambulance for fear of white people jeering her rescue, but Moore and Boynton rode into Selma on Moldovan’s first trip.

  By 3:30 P.M., more than a hundred troopers, possemen, and sheriff’s deputies pursued the marchers over the mile back to the neighborhood around Brown Chapel, where they attacked stragglers in a frenzy. Some drove their quarry indoors; others yelled for Negroes to come out. Down the block, troopers threw one teenager through a ground-floor window into the basement of First Baptist Church. In the Carver housing project, John Webb cried with his shotgun trained on the door from the couch, where his daughter Sheyann said she could not stop shaking. Across the way, Frank Soracco did not stop running until he collapsed bruised and gassed in the upstairs bathroom of his host family, locking the door. Outside, Sheriff Clark fired one of many canisters into a home. Wilson Baker, who saw mounted possemen urge their horses up the steps of Brown Chapel to take swings, confronted the sheriff in front of reporters, demanding that Clark stop the show of force and move “your cowboys” out of the city. “I’ve already waited a month too damn long about moving in!” Clark defiantly replied, and Baker, helpless to control the blood lust in some of his own men, let alone Clark, waved police officers out of the area with resignation.

  At 3:32 P.M. from Brown Chapel, a wobbly John Lewis tried to summarize the shocking attack firsthand over a new connection to the SNCC line in Atlanta. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” he said. “They are shooting gas, acid. One very old lady I know has a broken arm.” A female SNCC worker took the phone to report that Lewis “has a small hole in his head,” and dispatched him over his protest to a makeshift first-aid center. “We have a problem,” she announced at 3:40 P.M. “The guys are not nonviolent any more. They’re ready to fight. About two or three busloads of possemen are in front of the church beating people, throwing tear gas.” Leaders ventured outside to plead for calm. Andrew Young challenged would-be gunmen to compare their rusty weapons with the opposing arsenal. Bevel pleaded with teenagers not to let the attackers “off the hook” by throwing rocks.

  Sheriff Clark and most of the assorted authorities soon paraded back and forth on deserted Sylvan Street, jittery but with horses at a walk. A local reporter followed one detachment that searched out the large number of Negroes who had been curious about the march but now sat frozen in their cars. Although the Selma Times-Journal remained a segregationist newspaper, to the point that Monday’s edition would muffle the worldwide news from home beneath a banner headline of a more congenial lead story—“Johnson Asks Congress to Intensify Fight on Crime”—its editors did publish straightforward observations on the inside pages. “Members of the posse beat on the hoods of the automobiles with their nightsticks and pointed their clubs at the drivers, shouting, ‘Get the hell out of town! Go on, I mean it! We want all the Niggers off the streets!’ The Negroes all left without protest,” the unsigned story concluded. “Thirty minutes after the marchers’ encounter with the troopers, a Negro could not be seen walking the streets.”

  REPORTERS FOLLOWED the aftermath into the parsonage next door to Brown Chapel. “Negroes lay on the floors and chairs, many weeping and moaning,” wrote Roy Reed for the New York Times. “A girl in red slacks was carried from the house screaming. Mrs. Boynton lay semiconscious on a table.” Doctors and nurses worked feverishly through more than a hundred patients, bandaging heads, daubing eyes, shipping more serious cases to the only local hospital that would treat them—Good Samaritan, a Catholic mission facility run by the Edmundite Order in a Negro neighborhood. By relay of ambulance and hearse, they ferried patients there until fifty-eight of them occupied every surface, including the floor of the employee dining room, and then eight more went down a dirt road to the humble Burwell Infirmary. Operated since 1926 by Mrs. Minnie B. Anderson, it served primarily as a nursing home for twenty-five long-term residents, including a 108-year-old woman and a sixty-two-year-old man who could move only his hands, plus a maternity unit with one old incubator and a charity ward for abandoned children—all jammed, with only one vacant bed. Two practical nurses, just back from Pettus Bridge themselves, cheerfully made room on the floor and used a respirator all night to keep one asthmatic man alive until the tear gas cleared from his lungs.

  Lafayette Surney found John Lewis at Good Samaritan two hours after the rampage, admitted for a fractured skull. FBI agents reported the most common injuries to be lacerations and broken bones, but Lewis and Surney alike saw more suffering from tear gas that still seeped out of the patients’ saturated clothes. “Tear gas—that’s the baddest thing,” recorded the note-taker in Atlanta when Surney called the Atlanta WATS line from the hospital. SNCC headquarters swarmed in mobilization. Julian Bond, snatched from home, issued two bulletins by 5:30 P.M. and offered taped excerpts of the dramatic WATS-line reports to radio stations. Four carloads of SNCC workers were driving to Selma from Jackson, Mississippi. Ivanhoe Donaldson and Courtland Cox were bargaining in a Piper Cub with a rattled pilot who agreed to drop them quickly at a tiny landing strip outside Selma, while James Forman harangued officials at Hertz to meet them with a rental car. Forman hired a second emergency charter flight for experienced fieldworkers including Stokely Carmichael, who, after three summers and a full year in Mississippi, was by coincidence in Atlanta looking for transfer into Alabama. Fo
rman also left repeated telephone messages for Martin Luther King, whose secretary said he was deep in conference over the crisis, and he sent a telegram to ABC executives in New York protesting the “misstatements and distortions which [Sheriff] Clark disseminated today through the nationwide facilities of your TV network. We shall expect to hear from you without delay.”

  The ABC News film crew raced network competitors in a cavalry relay dictated by broadcast technology before videotape or satellite transmission. They drove around the troopers blockading Highway 80 at the first chance, then on through Lowndes County to the Montgomery airport and flights through Atlanta to New York, bearing canisters of undeveloped film to lab technicians rushed in for Sunday night work. Before nine o’clock—eight o’clock in Selma—news executives privately viewed footage from Pettus Bridge while their network signal disseminated the scheduled television premiere of Judgment at Nuremberg, which had won two Academy Awards and nine more nominations in 1961. Actor Spencer Tracy was in the kitchen of temporary quarters where his character, an unvarnished Maine judge, was newly arrived to try magistrates of the Third Reich for war crimes. As a married couple of dutiful but thoroughly cowed German house servants served him milk and a cheese sandwich, Tracy gently probed for clues about life under Hitler—asking about daily habits and hardships, then about local parades and the giant Nazi rallies held every year in Nuremberg. “I’m just curious,” he said. “I’d like to know.” The servants evasively replied that they were “only little people” who avoided politics and had suffered greatly in the war. Tracy asked whether they had ever heard of Dachau, not far away.