After the Tall Timber

by Renata Adler

  We have lived after all through two sunny periods of lies, and seen some of the truth in both of them: the Eisenhower lie that the noble American experiment was complete, that all was well, that there was no need to move; and the Kennedy era lie that with glamour, image and the instantaneous application of power you can gratify immediately, totally, those human concerns that are, in reality, met by inches, by years of work and suffering. I believe that the generation gap is in part an almost meteorological collision of those airs, the two lies of those years. Some have moved and see no reason why anyone else should rock the boat: others, impatient with the slowness of motion, see no reason to move at all until the coming of the Word. We are between. Our heroes, I suppose, mine anyway, are both famous and obscure: Martin Luther King, Bob Moses, Charles Evers, Alvin Poussaint of the Medical Committee on Human Rights, John Doar, others. Our thinkers—Hannah Arendt, Richard Rovere, Bayard Rustin, Harold Rosenberg, Daniel P. Moynihan, others—write from an awareness of precedent, of what has already been said and done and what can still be said and done, without mixing artistic and political metaphor. (Everything that has been said has, after all, been said many times.) In this collection, even in the dated or term-paper influenced pieces, there ought to be a sense of tendency, despite a suspicion of groups, of that emergent “we.” We are not in the world for therapy. We are non-violent. Our values are corny ones, reason, decency, prosperity, human dignity, contact, the finest, broadest possible America. Some of us have despaired and, in the only indisputably sincere expression of the apocalyptic vision, immolated themselves. But somewhere there is a reconciliation of that auto worker and that black, not on a symbolic plane, but because history is irreversible and there is a real common interest in the rich, mixed quality of life. And three of us have just come back (substantively and yet with drama), from the way to perhaps other populations, outer limits, from the moon.

  July 1969

  THE MARCH FOR NON-VIOLENCE FROM SELMA

  THE THIRTY thousand people who at one point or another took part in this week’s march from the Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Selma, Alabama, to the statehouse in Montgomery were giving highly dramatic expression to a principle that could be articulated only in the vaguest terms. They were a varied lot: local blacks, Northern clergymen, members of labor unions, delegates from state and city governments, entertainers, mothers pushing baby carriages, members of civil-rights groups more or less at odds with one another, isolated, shaggy marchers with an air of simple vagrancy, doctors, lawyers, teachers, children, college students, and a preponderance of what one marcher described as “ordinary, garden-variety civilians from just about everywhere.” They were insulated in front by soldiers and television camera crews, overhead and underfoot by helicopters and Army demolition teams, at the sides and rear by more members of the press and military, and over all by agents of the FBI. Most of them were aware that protection along a route of more than fifty miles of hostile country could not be absolute (on the night before the march, a student who had come here from Boston University was slashed across the cheek with a razor blade), yet few of the thirty-two hundred marchers who set out on Sunday morning seemed to have a strong consciousness of risk. They did not have a sharply defined sense of purpose, either. President Johnson’s speech about voting rights and Judge Johnson’s granting of permission for the march to take place had made the march itself ceremonial—almost redundant. The immediate aims of the abortive earlier marches had been realized: the national conscience had been aroused and federal intervention had been secured. In a sense, the government of Alabama was now in rebellion, and the marchers, with the sanction and protection of the federal government, were demonstrating against a rebellious state. It was unclear what such a demonstration could hope to achieve. Few segregationists could be converted by it, the national commitment to civil rights would hardly be increased by it, there was certainly an element of danger in it, and for the local citizenry it might have a long and ugly aftermath. The marchers, who had five days and four nights in which to talk, tended for the most part to avoid discussions of principle, apparently in the hope that their good will, their sense of solidarity, and the sheer pageantry of the occasion would resolve matters at some symbolic level and yield a clear statement of practical purpose before the march came to an end.

  From this point of view, the first few hours of Sunday morning in Selma were far from satisfying. Broad Street, the town’s main thoroughfare, was deserted and indifferent. At the black First Baptist Church, on the corner of Sylvan Street and Jefferson Davis Avenue, denim-clad veterans of earlier marches stood wearily aloof from recruits, who ate watery scrambled eggs, drank watery coffee, and simply milled about. On Sylvan Street itself, an unpaved red sand road dividing identical rows of brick houses known as the George Washington Carver Development, crowds were gathering, some facing the entrance to the Brown Chapel Church, others on the steps of the church facing out. Inside the church, more people were milling, while a few tried to sleep on benches or on the floor. For several hours, nothing happened. The church service that was to begin the march was scheduled to take place at ten o’clock, but veterans advised newcomers—in the first of several bitter, self-mocking jokes that became current on the Selma-Montgomery road—that this was CPT, Colored People Time, and the service actually began more than an hour behind schedule.

  In a field behind the housing development, the Reverend Andrew Young, executive director of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which sponsored the march, was giving marshals and night security guards last-minute instructions in the tactics of non-violence. “Keep women and children in the middle,” he said. “If there’s a shot, stand up and make the others kneel down. Don’t be lagging around, or you’re going to get hurt. Don’t rely on the troopers, either. If you’re beaten on, crouch and put your hands over the back of your head. Don’t put up your arm to ward off a blow. If you fall, fall right down and look dead. Get to know the people in your unit, so you can tell if somebody’s missing or if there’s somebody there who shouldn’t be there. And listen! If you can’t be nonviolent, let me know now.” A young man in the standard denim overalls of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) murmured, “Man, you’ve got it all so structured. There seems to be a certain anxiety here about structure.” Everyone laughed, a bit nervously, and the marshals went to the front of the church.

  The crowd there was growing, still arrayed in two lines, one facing in, the other facing out. There were National Guardsmen and local policemen, on foot and in jeeps and cars, along the sides of Sylvan Street and around its corners, at Jefferson Davis and Alabama Avenues. The marchers themselves appeared to have dressed for all kinds of weather and occasions—in denims, cassocks, tweed coats, ponchos, boots, sneakers, Shetland sweaters, silk dresses, college sweat shirts, sports shirts, khaki slacks, fur-collared coats, pea jackets, and trenchcoats. As they waited, they sang innumerable, increasingly dispirited choruses of “We Shall Overcome,” “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’Round,” and other songs of the movement. There was a moment of excitement when Dr. King and other speakers assembled on the steps, but a succession of long, rhetorical, and, to a certain extent (when press helicopters buzzed too low or when the microphone went dead), inaudible speeches put a damper on that too. An enthusiastic lady, of a sort that often afflicts banquets and church suppers, sang several hymns of many stanzas, with little melody and much vibrato. Exhaust fumes from a television truck parked to the right of the steps began to choke some of the marchers, and they walked away, coughing. Speakers praised one another extravagantly in monotonous political-convention cadences (“the man who . . .”). An irreverent, irritated voice with a Bronx accent shouted, “Would you mind please talking a little louder.” Several members of the crowd sat down in the street, and the march assumed the first of its many moods—that of tedium.

  Then Dr. King began to speak, and suddenly, for no apparent reason, several Ar
my jeeps drove straight through the center of the crowd. (“Didn’t realize we were interrupting,” said one of the drivers, smiling. He had a DD, for Dixie Division, emblem on his uniform.) The startled crowd, divided in half for a moment, became aware of its size. Dr. King’s speech came to an end, and there was a last, unified, and loud rendition of “We Shall Overcome.” Then the marshals quickly arranged the crowd in columns, six abreast—women and children in the middle—and the procession set out down Sylvan Street. It was about one o’clock. On Alabama Avenue, the marchers turned right, passing lines of silent white citizens on the sidewalks. On Broad Street, which is also U.S. Route 80 to Montgomery, they turned left, and as segregationist loudspeakers along the way blared “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” and the white onlookers began to jeer, the marchers approached and crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge. And the march entered another mood—jubilation.

  The day was sunny and cool. The flat road, an amalgam of asphalt and the local sand, looked pink. The people in the line linked arms, and the procession was long enough to permit the marchers to sing five different civil-rights songs simultaneously without confusion; the vanguard could not hear what the rear guard was singing. Occasionally, various leaders of the movement broke out of the line to join interviewers from the television networks, which took turns using a camera truck that preceded the line of march. For the first few miles, the highway was flanked by billboards (“Keep Selma Beautiful, Cover It with Dodge”), smaller signs (Rotary, Kiwanis, Lions, Citizens Council), diners, and gas stations. Little clusters of white onlookers appeared at various points along the road, some shouting threats and insults, others silently waving Confederate flags, and still others taking pictures of the marchers, presumably as a warning that their faces would not be forgotten when the march was over. The procession filled the two left lanes of the four-lane highway, but in the two right lanes traffic was proceeding almost normally. A black Volkswagen passed the marchers several times; on its doors and fenders were signs, lettered in whitewash: “MARTIN LUTHER KINK,” “WALK, COON,” “COONESVILLE, U.S.A.,” AND “RENT YOUR PRIEST SUIT HERE.” Several small children at the roadside waved toy rifles and popguns and chanted “Nigger lover!” “White nigger!” “Half-breed!” and other epithets. A man in front of a roadside diner thumbed his nose for the entire twenty minutes it took the procession to pass him, and a well-dressed matron briefly stopped her Chrysler, got out, stuck out her tongue, climbed in again, slammed the door, and drove off.

  Several times, the march came to an abrupt halt, and in the middle ranks and the rear guard there were murmurs of alarm. Then it became clear that these were only rest stops, and the marchers relaxed and resumed their singing. Rented trucks, driven by ministers of the San Francisco Theological Seminary, carried portable toilets up and down the line. When press photographers attempted to take pictures of civil-rights leaders entering the men’s rooms, the Reverend Mr. Young shouted, “Can’t a man even go to the john in peace?” The photographers moved away. Three tired marchers rode a short distance on the water truck, and James Forman, the executive secretary of SNCC, who was being interviewed in French for Canadian television, broke off his interview to mutter as the truck passed, “Hey, man, you cats could walk.” The marchers got down from the truck at once. Forman resumed his interview. “I think he’s having trouble with his French,” said one of the marchers. “He just said that no Negro in America is allowed to vote.” “His French is all right,” said another. “But he may be less concerned with the immediate truth than with stirring up the kind of chaos that makes things change.”

  By sunset of the first day, the caravan was more than seven miles from Selma, and most of the marchers returned by a special train to town, where some of them left for their home communities and others were put up for the night in the black development on Sylvan Street. Two hundred and eighty blacks, representing Alabama counties (a hundred and forty-eight from Dallas County, eighty-nine from Perry, twenty-three from Marengo, and twenty from Wilcox), and twenty whites, from all over the country, who had been chosen to make the entire journey to Montgomery (the court permitted no more than three hundred marchers on the twenty-mile stretch of Route 80 midway between Selma and Montgomery, where it is only a two-lane highway) turned off Route 80 onto a tarred road leading to the David Hall farm—their campsite for the night. Four large tents had already been pitched in a field. As the marchers lined up for supper (three tons of spaghetti), which was served to them on paper plates, from brand-new garbage pails, night fell. Groups of National Guardsmen who surrounded the farm lighted campfires. “It looks like Camelot,” said one of the younger whites.

  Camelot soon became very cold and damp. By nine o’clock, most of the marchers had retired to the tents, but within an hour they had to be roused and sorted out. One tent was for men, another for women, the third for the marchers’ own night security patrol, and the fourth for the press. When everyone had been assigned to his or her proper tent, it developed that there was a shortage of blankets, winter clothes, and sleeping bags. A shivering group huddled around an incinerator, the campsite’s only source of heat. A few marchers made their way to the loft of a barn beside the Hall farmhouse, to profit from the heat given off by the animals in the stalls below. Five guinea hens perched in a tree outside the barn. The march’s security patrol wandered about with walkie-talkies; they had labelled their outposts Able, Baker, Charlie, and Dog, using the Army’s old system, to set them apart from Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, and Delta, the outposts of the National Guard along the perimeter of the field. The night grew colder, damper, and darker, and the group around the incinerator fire grew uneasy.

  There was talk of the march ahead through Lowndes County, where swamps and the woods behind them might easily shelter a sniper in a tree or a canoe. Several marchers claimed to have spotted members of the American Nazi Party along the line of march. Someone mentioned the Ku Klux Klan “counter-demonstration” that had taken place in Montgomery that afternoon.

  “And the snakes,” a man said.

  “What snakes?” said a Northern voice.

  “Copperheads and cottonmouth. It takes the heat to bring them out, but a trooper told me somebody’s caught five baskets full and is letting them go where we camp tomorrow night.”

  “How’d the trooper hear about it?”

  “Spies.”

  “Well, I suppose there might be spies right here in camp.”

  “There might. And bombs and mines. They cleared a few this afternoon. Man, this isn’t any Boy Scout jamboree. It’s something else.”

  By the time dawn came, the campers were a thoroughly chilled and bleary-eyed group. The oatmeal served at breakfast gave rise to a certain amount of mirth (“Tastes like fermented library paste,” said one of the clergymen), and the news that the National Guardsmen had burned thirteen fence posts, two shovel handles, and an outhouse belonging to a neighboring church in order to keep warm during the night cheered everyone considerably. At a press conference held by Jack Rosenthal, the young Director of Public Information of the Justice Department, the rumors about snakes, bombs, and mines were checked out, and it was learned that none of them were true. A reporter waved several racist leaflets that had been dropped from an airplane and asked whether anything was being done to prevent such planes from dropping bombs. “What do you want us to do?” Rosenthal replied. “Use anti-aircraft guns?”

  The procession set out promptly at 8 A.M. The distance to the next campsite—Rosa Steele’s farm—was seventeen miles. Again the day was sunny, and as the air grew warmer some of the more sunburned members of the group donned berets or Stetsons or tied scarves or handkerchiefs around their heads. To the white onlookers who clustered beside the road, the three hundred marchers must have seemed a faintly piratical band. At the head of the line were Dr. and Mrs. King, wearing green caps with earmuffs and reading newspapers as they walked. Not far behind them was a pale-green wagon (known to the marchers as the Green Dragon) with Mississippi license plates, in which rod
e doctors wearing armbands of the MCHR (the Medical Committee for Human Rights). Farther back were some of the younger civil-rights leaders: Hosea Williams, SCLC director of the march and veteran of the bitter struggle for public accommodations in Savannah, Georgia; the Reverend James Bevel, formerly of SNCC, now SCLC project director for Alabama (Mr. Bevel was wearing the many-colored yarmulke that has become almost his trademark—“a link,” he says, “to our Old Testament heritage”); John Lewis, chairman of SNCC; and the Reverend Andrew Young.

  Behind the leaders, some of the main personae of the march had begun to emerge, among them Joe Young, a blind greenhouse worker from Atlanta, Georgia, and Jim Letherer, a one-legged settlement-house worker from Saginaw, Michigan. (“Left! Left! Left!” the segregationist onlookers chanted as Mr. Letherer moved along on crutches.) Chuck Fager, a young worker for SCLC, wearing denims and a black yarmulke, was waving and shouting, “Come march with us! Why don’t you come along and march with us?” (“It sets up a dialogue,” he explained. “The last time I was in jail, a sheriff pulled me aside and asked me where the hell I was from. Any sort of talk like that sets up a dialogue.”) Sister Mary Leoline, a nun from Christ the King parish in Kansas City, Kansas, was talking to John Bart Gerald, a young novelist from New York. “This is a great time to be alive,” she said. A few members of the night security guard had somehow acquired cameras, and they were now photographing bystanders who were photographing marchers; it appeared that a sort of reciprocal Most Wanted list was being compiled. From time to time, the marchers were still singing (“Oh-h-h, Wallace, segregation’s bound to fall”), and the chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, Assistant Attorney General John Doar, tall, tanned, and coatless, was striding back and forth along the line of march to see that all was going well.