Eyes on the Prize

by Juan Williams

  The renowned preacher’s planned visit caught the attention of Selma’s leaders. Mayor Joseph Smitherman, who had been elected in the fall of 1964, did not want county sheriff Jim Clark to use his violent tactics against King. Though hardly a proponent of integration, Smitherman had been elected on a campaign promise to bring industry to Selma. Pictures of Clark attacking demonstrators on national television would hardly help the industrialization campaign. Smitherman appointed Wilson Baker to the newly created position of public safety director. The commissioner was to enforce the law within the city of Selma, while the sheriff would direct law-enforcement activities within the county. However, Sheriff Clark never really relinquished his role as the highest law-enforcement official in Selma.

  Mayor Smitherman sent Baker to see Burke Marshall, head of the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department. Baker asked Marshall to steer King away from Selma; his arrival, Baker reasoned, would only exacerbate an already tense situation. The lawman offered to ease voter registration requirements for blacks if King would avoid Selma. The cattle prods and nightsticks, he promised, would also be put away. Baker stated that he wanted to avoid violence—that it was Sheriff Clark who was responsible for the brutality. Baker couldn’t promise he would be able to keep the sheriff in check if Martin Luther King came to town. With Baker waiting, Marshall telephoned King to try to convince him to shun Selma. King’s response was brief. Hanging up the phone, Marshall turned to Baker and said, “They’re coming to Selma … They’ve already put too much work in on the project to turn back now.”

  Clarence Mitchell: A Profile of the “101st Senator”

  Clarence Mitchell sits with Joe Rauh and President Johnson.

  Demonstrations in the streets—and their attendant media coverage—did not necessarily bring about civil rights legislation in Congress. In the early 1960s, there were no blacks in the Senate, and only five black representatives. Clarence Mitchell, however, wielded enough power in Washington to be dubbed the 101st senator by Hubert Humphrey. Since 1950, when he became head of the NAACP’s Washington Bureau, Mitchell had walked the halls of the Senate with the nation’s policymakers, joking and chatting with them but forever arguing that they make the Constitution a reality for blacks. To remind himself of that document’s provisions, he carried a copy of it in his wallet. Although blacks were not yet allowed in the smoke-filled rooms, Mitchell was forever knocking on their doors. “When you have a law, you have a law that will work for you permanently,” he would tell the senators, not all of whom wanted to listen to the determined NAACP lobbyist. Mississippi’s Senator James O. Eastland, who still used the word “nigger” during floor debates, refused to speak to him.

  Mitchell was tireless in his crusading. “This guy walks so fast and so far I can’t keep up with him,” said Joseph Rauh, founder of Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal group that often worked with the NAACP. “Around noon I get hungry; he doesn’t eat; late afternoon I want a drink, and he doesn’t drink. Not only does he not rest, eat, or drink, but you get called names just for sitting beside him in the galleries.”

  Nicholas Katzenbach, former United States attorney general, recalls that Mitchell would court votes on key legislation by visiting each senator’s office, and if he “wasn’t thrown out bodily, he’d mark it down as favorable.” As a filibuster stalled action on the 1964 Civil Rights Act, some liberals proposed concessions to accommodate southern conservatives. Mitchell responded with uncharacteristic anger. He said blacks had waited too long for their civil rights to allow the bill to be watered down now. Hubert Humphrey put a hand on Mitchell’s knee and said, “Clarence, you’re three feet off your chair.” Mitchell, nonetheless, prevailed. He reminded the senators that he had met with President Johnson, whom he knew well from Johnson’s days as Senate majority leader, and that the president had promised him he would not cave in to the filibuster. The segregationists’ deadlock was finally broken, and on June 19, 1964, the bill passed by a vote of seventy-three to twenty-seven. But the act had a major flaw: it did not guarantee blacks the right to vote in local and state elections, which had shut them out for so long.

  On January 2, 1965, King spoke from the pulpit of Brown’s Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Selma. The Nobel Peace Prize winner drew an overflow crowd of 700. “We will seek to arouse the federal government by marching by the thousands [to] the places of registration,” he said. “When we get the right to vote, we will send to the statehouse not men who will stand in the doorways of universities to keep Negroes out, but men who will uphold the cause of Justice. Give us the ballot.” King planned to stage mass marches to the courthouse on the two registration days per month.

  With King’s arrival, Selma became national news, as did the overall southern pattern of denying blacks the right to register and vote. In his State of the Union Address, President Johnson articulated the goal of eliminating “every remaining obstacle to the right and the opportunity to vote,” but voting rights came seventh on his list of domestic priorities.

  In Selma, public safety director Baker asked Sheriff Clark not to allow any police brutality that could become national news. King’s speech also caused concern to SNCC workers in the city. Although the Dallas County Voters League had invited King to town, SNCC feared its voter registration project would be overshadowed by King and the television cameras that trailed him endlessly.

  The national press was now anticipating a confrontation in Selma over voting rights. When reporters asked white officials there why so few blacks were registered, Sheriff Clark said it was “largely because of their mental I.Q.” Judge Hare, the man who had enjoined more than three blacks at a time from gathering publicly, told one reporter, “You see, most of your Selma Negroes are descended from the Ebo and Angola tribes of Africa. You could never teach or trust an Ebo back in slave days, and even today I can spot their tribal characteristics. They have protruding heels, for instance.”

  In Washington, the Justice Department began a two-pronged attack on Selma’s voter registration practices. On January 11, 1965, the department reported to the president that its Civil Rights Division was drafting legislation to outlaw the use of literacy tests in voter registration and allow federal personnel to register voters where necessary. The second part of the strategy was a suit against the state of Alabama, charging that the statewide voter registration test should be amended because it amounted to a purposeful obstruction of the civil rights of blacks.

  On January 18, King and the SCLC began their Selma campaign. They had arranged protest marches and planned to show the nation the violence that blacks met when attempting to register to vote. Commissioner Baker knew of the plan and intended to steer clear of confrontation. King accompanied a group of Selma blacks to an all-white restaurant without incident. He then led them in a march to the courthouse, defying the court order against congregating. As per Baker’s orders, there were no arrests, but Sheriff Clark herded those waiting to register into an alley behind the building, and no blacks registered that day.

  The SCLC feared that, with no violence to cover, journalists from the national press would drift away, taking Washington’s attention with them. The activists staged another march on the courthouse the next day. This time, the demonstrators refused to obey Clark’s orders to wait in the alley.

  “Clark had a big club in his hand,” Amelia Boynton, the veteran Selma activist, later recalled, “and he yelled to me, ‘Where are you going? … You all got to get in this line [in the alley] …’ Before I could gather my wits, he had left the steps and jumped behind me, grabbed me by my coat, propelled me around and started shoving me down the street. I was stunned. I saw cameramen and newspaper reporters around and … I said, ‘I hope the newspapers see you acting this role.’ He said, ‘Dammit, I hope they do.’”

  Stirred by the sheriff’s dramatic arrest of Boynton, about sixty people surged through the front door of the courthouse and refused to heed Clark’s order to leave. They, too, were arrested. The next
day’s editions of the New York Times and the Washington Post ran photographs of Clark violently pushing Boynton down the street with his billy club. Baker’s strategy had crumbled quickly.

  With speaking engagements elsewhere, King had to leave town for a while. But the movement did not falter. That Wednesday, January 20, three groups of would-be voters marched to the front door of the courthouse and refused to move. Clark arrested them for obstructing the sidewalk. Two days later, more than a hundred of Selma’s black schoolteachers descended upon the courthouse to protest Boynton’s arrest. An elite group among the city’s blacks, teachers typically steered clear of civil rights activity for fear of being fired by the white school board. Their action was a welcome surprise to the movement.

  “This courthouse is a serious place of business,” said Sheriff Clark, “and you seem to think you can take it just to be Disneyland on parade. Do you have business in this courthouse?”

  “The only business we have is to come to the Board of Registrars to register …,” replied Rev. Frederick Reese, president of both the Dallas County Voters League and the Selma Teachers Association.

  “The Board of Registrars is not in session …,” retorted Clark. “You came down here to make a mockery out of this courthouse and we’re not going to have it.”

  The sheriff prodded the teachers with his nightstick, forcing them off the courthouse steps. The teachers regrouped and then, in dignified silence, began to march away. They headed for Brown’s Chapel, where they held a rally.

  After returning from his speaking engagements, King began to see the realization of the SCLC’s goals for Selma—that nonviolent demonstrations would arouse violence on the part of the racists and, as King later wrote, “Americans of conscience in the name of decency [would] demand federal intervention and legislation.”

  Andrew Young of the SCLC called the teachers’ march “the most significant thing that has happened in the racial movement since Birmingham.” The triumphant greeting among the organization’s workers became, “Brother, we got a movement going on in Selma.” Even the city’s schoolchildren were now involved, having witnessed their teachers marching. Other middle-class blacks also responded to the call. “The undertakers got a group, and they marched,” recalls Rev. Reese. “The beauticians got a group; they marched. Everybody marched after the teachers marched …”

  During one march, a fifty-three-year-old demonstrator named Annie Lee Cooper chose to resist Sheriff Clark’s strongarm tactics. Seeing Cooper step out of the line of marchers, Clark jabbed her with his elbow and ordered her to step back in line. Instead, Cooper turned and punched the lawman in the face. As Clark began to fall, Cooper slugged him again. Two deputies tried to wrestle her to the ground, but she broke loose, ran to Clark, and again punched him. Finally, three deputies managed to pin Cooper down, and the sheriff whacked her in the head with his club. The next day, photographs of the sheriff raising his stick over the woman’s head as his deputies held her down appeared in leading newspapers. Although Cooper had struck first, and repeatedly, the movement had salvaged a victory from the incident.

  Mayor Smitherman and Wilson Baker were losing patience. They had tried to keep the reins on Clark, but the repeated demonstrations and King’s presence were provoking the sheriff. At a press conference, the mayor expressed his anger at the civil rights leader.

  On Monday, February 1, the SCLC’s strategy called for King to get himself arrested. His letter from a Birmingham jail two years earlier had caught the nation’s attention, and the SCLC hoped for a similar coup in Selma. This time, however, King would enter jail with the letter already written.

  On Monday morning, King addressed the marchers he was about to lead to the courthouse. He cautioned them not to be distracted by national publicity or the confrontations with Sheriff Clark, but to focus on their objective—the right to vote. “If Negroes could vote, there would be no Jim Clarks,” said King. “Our children would not be crippled by segregated schools …” The minister then led 250 marchers from the church. They walked in an uninterrupted line, ignoring the city ordinance that demanded they break into small clusters. Commissioner Baker got out of his car and, in a voice rasping from a sore throat, said, “This is a deliberate attempt to violate the parade ordinance which you have obeyed for three weeks. If you don’t break the line up into small groups, I’ll have to arrest you.” The people kept going, and Baker got back into his car and caught up with King two blocks later. Baker told the demonstrators they were under arrest.

  Spurred by news of King’s arrest, 500 of Selma’s schoolchildren marched to the courthouse, violating the court order, and were arrested. The city’s jails were getting crowded. The next day, leading newspapers including the New York Times displayed page-one photos of King praying just before his arrest. Wednesday brought the arrests of more than a hundred additional marchers, followed by the arrests of 300 more schoolchildren. Each evening, the television news covered the mass arrests and showed children being led off to jail. Tales of brutality within the jails abounded—that there were no toilets, only buckets, and that in one improvised “prison camp” captives were forced to stand in single file and if a man stepped out of line, a guard would strike him.

  Senator Jacob Javits, a New York Republican, termed the mass arrests “shocking” and contacted the Justice Department. He later told reporters that department officials were monitoring Selma to determine whether new legislation might be necessary or if the administration should authorize federal officials to register voters. King, meanwhile, had sent telegrams to several congressmen saying that “events of the past month here in Selma have raised serious questions as to the adequacy of present voting rights legislation.” A congressional delegation of fifteen traveled to Selma to investigate.

  Congressman Charles Diggs of Detroit, a black man, was a member of that team. “I think it’s a general consensus of the delegation—which was bipartisan … [and] made up of Negro and white congressmen from various parts of the country—that new legislation is going to be necessary if Negroes are going to be able to exercise the franchise as freely in the South … as they can in Detroit, New York, California, and places like that,” Diggs commented.

  Andrew Young called the White House to ask that an emissary be sent to Selma to report back to the president. He also requested that Johnson make a statement in support of voting rights and prepare legislation to ensure those rights. Young was told that the president was monitoring the situation, that he had already spoken out in favor of voting rights in his State of the Union message, and that the Justice Department was studying the legislation question.

  To keep the voting rights issue at the top of the presidential and congressional agendas, the SCLC needed to hold the nation’s attention. The activists soon got some help from an unexpected source. On February 4, the militant Black Muslim minister Malcolm X came to speak in Selma at the invitation of SNCC. At first, King’s colleagues feared that the controversial leader might incite the local people and jeopardize King’s control of the movement. King was still in jail when Malcolm X told a capacity crowd at Brown’s Chapel that “the white people should thank Dr. King for holding people in check, for there are other [black leaders] who do not believe in these [nonviolent] measures.” Andrew Young hurried Coretta Scott King into the church, hoping she would dilute the impact of Malcolm X’s presence. Mrs. King remembers the Black Muslim saying, “If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King.” It would be one of Malcolm X’s final speeches; three weeks later the radical leader was shot to death in Harlem.

  On the day of Malcolm X’s speech, President Johnson held a press conference to deliver a statement in support of voting rights. It was his first direct response to Selma and a welcome surprise to the activists. “I should like to say that all Americans should be indignant when one American is denied the right to vote,” said Johnson. “The loss of that right to a single citizen undermines the freedom of every citi
zen. That is why all of us should be concerned with the efforts of our fellow Americans to register to vote in Alabama … I intend to see that that right is secured for all our citizens.” The same day, a federal judge issued an order requiring the registrar in Selma to process at least 100 applications per day.

  On Friday, February 5, King’s final day in jail, his “Letter From A Selma Jail” appeared as an advertisement in the New York Times. “When the King of Norway participated in awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to me, he surely did not think that in less than 60 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 … when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, many decent Americans were lulled into complacency because they thought the days of difficult struggle were over. 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, where there are more Negroes in jail with me than there are on the voting rolls.”

  When Amelia Boynton was violently arrested by Sheriff James Clark, the media captured the moment for the nation.

  Radical black nationalist Malcolm X offered himself as an alternative to people who declined to cooperate with Martin Luther King and the SCLC.

  More than 300 youngsters were arrested by Clark and his deputies when they protested at the Dallas County Courthouse.