Eyes on the Prize

by Juan Williams

  Television coverage of the police assault interrupted the networks’ regular programming; ABC broke into its broadcast of the film Judgment at Nuremberg. “When that beating happened at the foot of the bridge, it looked like war,” recalls Mayor Smitherman. “That went all over the country. And the people, the wrath of the nation came down on us.”

  From Atlanta, Martin Luther King sent telegrams to prominent clergymen across the nation, saying, “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. No American is without responsibility … Join me in Selma for a ministers’ march to Montgomery on Tuesday morning, March 9.”

  In Alabama’s capital, Governor Wallace declared that “Those folks in Selma have made this a seven-day-a-week job, but we can’t give one inch. We’re going to enforce state law.” Selma’s mayor tried to discredit King, saying the incident should make it “evident to the Negro people … that King and the other leaders who ask them to break the law are always absent from the violence as he was today.”

  On the day after “Bloody Sunday,” as it was soon dubbed, the SCLC asked U.S. District Court Judge Frank M. Johnson to forbid Governor Wallace from interfering with Tuesday’s march. The judge did not comply, but said he would hold a Thursday hearing on the matter. On Tuesday morning, he enjoined the protesters from marching until after the hearing. King and the SCLC now had to decide whether to defy the federal courts, which had been a primary ally of the movement since the 1954 Brown decision. In fact, civil rights leaders generally felt that this particular judge had been fair to them over the years. But the activists did not want to back off. King had called for the march, and hundreds of people from all over the country had come to participate. The march could not be cancelled.

  The Justice Department asked King to reconsider, but he refused. He then received an emergency visit from former Florida governor LeRoy Collins, head of the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service, which had been specifically created to deal with racial conflicts. King was adamant. He said later, “I would rather die on the highway in Alabama than make a butchery of conscience by compromising with evil.” At a subsequent meeting, however, Collins told King that, if the marchers turned back when they reached the line of police, there would be no violence. King, according to several accounts, responded noncommittally.

  Before the march, King told a capacity crowd at Brown’s Chapel they had “no alternative but to keep moving … We’ve gone too far now to turn back. And, in a real sense, we are moving and we cannot afford to stop, because Alabama and our nation have a date with destiny …”

  On “Turnaround Tuesday,” Rev. Ralph Abernathy led the marchers in prayer before they turned and headed back to the church.

  The minister led 1500 people out of the church and across the Pettus Bridge. Again, state troopers were waiting. Fifty miles away in Montgomery, Governor Wallace listened on the telephone as an aide reported every step of the march. In Washington, the Justice Department monitored its own telephone report. As on Sunday, Major John Cloud told the marchers, “You are ordered to stop. Stand where you are. This march will not continue.” Gently swaying from side to side, the phalanx of marchers sang “We Shall Overcome.” Afterwards, King knelt and asked Rev. Ralph Abernathy to lead the demonstrators in prayer. Then, to most everyone’s surprise, King rose and conducted the marchers back to the church. Many of King’s followers were confused and upset. “All of a sudden I realized that the people in front were turning around and coming back,” recalls Orloff Miller, a Unitarian minister from Boston, “and I was aghast. What is going on? Are we not going through with this confrontation? What’s happening?”

  Many movement activists felt King had betrayed them. Some even suspected he had made a secret deal with the federal government, and SNCC accused him of selling out.

  King later explained that he had promised to proceed with the march only until police violence was imminent. “We would disengage then,” King wrote later, “having made our point, revealing the continued presence of violence and showing clearly who are the oppressed and who are the oppressors, hoping, finally, that the national administration in Washington would feel and respond …”

  King asked those who had come to Selma for the march to stay on for a few more days, and many did. Later that night, Rev. Miller and two other white Unitarian ministers, Clark Olsen and James Reeb, were attacked as they left a soul-food restaurant in Selma. Reeb was struck on the head with a club; he died two days later. The death of the thirty-eight-year-old clergyman provoked a national outcry and demonstrations in many cities. The president issued a statement, saying, “The best legal talent in the federal government is engaged in preparing legislation which will secure [the] right [to vote] for every American.”

  As white America vented its anger, some blacks felt bitter that the killing of the white minister had stirred a nation unmoved by the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson. “It seemed to me that the movement itself was playing into the hands of racism,” said Stokely Carmichael, looking back. “What you want is the nation to be upset when anybody is killed … but it almost [seems that] for this to be recognized, a white person must be killed.”

  In Selma, tensions were at a peak. Police cordoned off the area around Brown’s Chapel to pen in the demonstrators and keep hostile whites out. On the fourth day, a small group of demonstrators broke through the ropes—which the protesters had dubbed the “Berlin Wall”—and had a verbal confrontation with some of Sheriff Clark’s men. But there was no violence, and Wilson Baker escorted the demonstrators back to the church. Realizing the futility of the barricade, Baker ordered it removed.

  After being beaten on the street, Unitarian minister James Reeb is taken to the hospital. He died days later.

  On Friday, March 12, King traveled to Montgomery for the hearing before Judge Johnson. The preacher defended the SCLC’s request that the demonstrators be allowed to march to Montgomery without state interference. Sheriff Clark asked that King be held in contempt of the court’s order not to march on the previous Tuesday. The judge responded, “Any contempt proceeding will be a matter between the court and the contempter, and is not any business of James Clark.” King told Johnson he had never intended to lead the marchers all the way to Montgomery on Tuesday, but only to confront the state troopers and demonstrate the activists’ resolve. The judge handed down no decision that day.

  On Saturday, Alabama governor George Wallace flew to Washington, D.C., in the state’s powder-blue airplane, which had a Confederate flag emblazoned on its side. The governor met with President Johnson, who tried to convince Wallace to assist with the march. Justice Department staffer Burke Marshall was at the meeting. He recalls, “Governor Wallace didn’t quite grovel, but he was [very] pliant by the end of the two hours, with President Johnson putting his arm around him and squeezing him and telling him it’s a moment of history, and how do we want to be remembered in history? Do we want to be remembered as petty little men, or do we want to be remembered as great figures that faced up to our moments of crisis?” The president then escorted the governor out, hoping, Marshall says, “that Governor Wallace, who was by that time like a rubber band, would act like a responsible governor.”

  Ministers and the March: An Interview with Orloff Miller

  Boston-born Orloff Miller was one of the hundreds of clergy who heeded Martin Luther King’s call to join the Selma march. Miller represented the Unitarian Universalist Church, which emphasizes freedom in religious belief and toleration of dissenting opinions. A Unitarian minister for twenty-five years, Miller currently lives in San Francisco.

  … When the telegram came from Martin Luther King asking ministers of all faiths to come to Selma, I had been back two months from Mississippi. We had visited the projects sponsored by the Council of Federated Organizations, and much to my delight, I found Unitarian Universalist student
s very much involved in the Mississippi Freedom effort. And so I was ready for that telegram when it arrived…. I immediately got on the phone and called ministers who were connected with our programs all across the United States and Canada.

  … Most of us went to Selma without even a toothbrush because we thought it was a one-day event. Nevertheless, when Dr. King asked if we could remain a few days, a number of us decided to stay, I among them.

  … Jim Reeb, Clark Olsen, and I decided to have dinner together. We had been told that we should not try to eat in the white community downtown, but in some of the black restaurants. Jim had been associate minister at All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C., until he went to Boston six months before the march. While he was in Washington, he had been our minister liaison with student groups at American University and George Washington University and the other schools around Washington. Clark was minister of the Unitarian Fellowship in Berkeley at the time.

  … We double-checked at the SCLC office for directions to the restaurant. We went to Walker’s Cafe and found a lot of our colleagues there. The restaurant was hard-pressed to find enough food. I remember I ordered steak and I got chicken … After dinner, as we started walking across the street, there appeared four or five white men and they yelled at us, “Hey, you niggers.” We did not look across at them, but we quickened our pace … One of them was carrying a club, and Clark said he turned around and saw the club just as it was swung. Jim Reeb, who was closest to the curb, caught the full impact of that blow on the side of his head …

  We took Jim by ambulance to University Hospital in Birminitham, sixty-five miles away. We had to stop first at the SCLC office, because the hospital would not accept Jim for care without some kind of a deposit. Diane Nash made out a check for $150 … We got a few miles out of town and the ambulance had a flat tire. A sheriff’s car came along, they flashed their flashlights inside the ambulance, and they asked us all kinds of questions. “Who is that there? What happened?” We explained and asked for an escort. They refused. “You won’t need an escort, you don’t need anybody to help,” they said … We actually hit 110 miles [per hour] at one point heading for Birmingham…

  It’s a terrible thing to have to say, but for some reason it took the death of a white clergyman to turn things around. Tuesday was the “Turnaround Day”—not only of the march, but also of how America saw the civil rights struggle. Because when Jim Reeb, a white clergyman from the North, was killed in Selma, people suddenly sat up and took notice and from then on things changed in the movement. People came from all over the country to Selma. Selma became a flood of demonstrators. People went to Washington and they [put pressure] on President Johnson. When ministers went to the White House, Johnson rightly said, “Where have you been all these years?” And where had we been? We finally woke up and it was Jim’s death that woke us up.

  After Wallace left the White House, the president held a news conference in the Rose Garden. “What happened in Selma was an American tragedy,” said Johnson, his face solemn. “The blows that were received, the blood that was shed, the life of the good man that was lost, must strengthen the determination of each of us to bring full equality and equal justice to all of our people. This is not just the policy of your government or your president. It is in the heart and the purpose and the meaning of America itself.” This time, the president backed his words with action. He announced that on Monday he would send a bill to Congress to “strike down all restrictions used to deny the people the right to vote.”

  That Monday night, seventy million people watched on television as Johnson stood before Congress to announce the voting rights legislation. He spoke not only to the politicians but to his fellow Americans, asking them to support the blacks’ quest for true suffrage. “Their cause,” Johnson said, “must be our cause, too. Because it’s not just Negroes, but it’s really all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And,” he concluded, “we shall overcome.”

  In an address to a joint session of Congress on March 15, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson presented his proposal for a Voting Rights Act. The president concluded his speech with the words, “We shall overcome.”

  The president had used the movement’s most powerful theme. C. T. Vivian remembers the moment well. “We were all sitting around together … and when LBJ said, ‘And we shall overcome,’ we all cheered. And I looked over … and Martin was very quietly sitting in the chair, and a tear ran down his cheek. It was a victory like none other. It was an affirmation of the movement.”

  Selma’s Mayor Smitherman also noticed the president’s choice of words. “President Johnson came on and said, ‘We shall overcome,’ and it was like you’d been struck by a dagger in your heart … I mean, you know, what’s the guy doing?”

  In Montgomery, SNCC’s chairman James Forman was less impressed, calling the president’s use of the movement’s phrase a “tinkling empty symbol.” The day after Johnson’s speech, Forman led a march in Montgomery to the capitol building. Some of the activists were attacked by mounted city police brandishing cattle prods. Deputies with ropes and whips lashed the demonstrators. Forman and the young blacks with him were enraged that such brutality continued after the president’s speech.

  Speaking in a church later that night, Forman said, “I want to know, did President Johnson mean what he said? See, that’s what I want to know, because there’s only one man in the country that can stop George Wallace and those posses … these problems will not be solved until [the man] in that shaggedy old place called the White House begins to shake and gets on the phone and says, ‘Now listen, George, we’re coming down there and throw you in jail if you don’t stop that mess’ … I said it today and I will say it again: If we can’t sit at the table, let’s knock the fuckin’ legs off, excuse me.”

  Martin Luther King, Jr., rose to speak next. Showing uncharacteristic ire, he intoned, “I’m not satisfied as long as the Negro sees life as a long and empty corridor with a ‘No Exit’ sign at the end. The cup of endurance has run over.” The speeches inflamed the crowd. King tried to calm the people, reminding them that the Montgomery bus boycott eleven years earlier had endured its darkest moments just before the United States Supreme Court ruled that the buses must be integrated. But the angry crowd was not in the mood for a history lesson. Then Andrew Young approached King, who listened briefly to his SCLC aide before announcing triumphantly, “Judge Johnson has just ruled that we have a legal and constitutional right to march from Selma to Montgomery.” The crowd roared its approval.

  The ruling cleared the way for the march to take place, but Governor Wallace still had not agreed to provide the marchers with police protection. He called the protesters “Communist-trained anarchists” and said that the state could not afford to pay state troopers to protect them. President Johnson responded by federalizing the Alabama National Guard and ordering its 1,800 members to watch over the march. Johnson also dispatched 2,000 Army troops, 100 FBI agents, and another 100 federal marshals. On Sunday, March 21, the Selma-to-Montgomery march finally got underway.

  Four thousand people, black and white, gathered at Brown’s Chapel for the fifty-four-mile journey. Some who had never marched before joined those who had been demonstrating for ten years. King was in the lead, walking with Ralph Bunche, a fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner, and Rabbi Abraham Heschel of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Belligerent segregationists lined the route, taunting the demonstrators and holding signs such as “Yankee Trash Go Home,” but there were no attacks.

  “As far as the marchers were concerned, everything went off smoothly,” remembers Amelia Boynton, “but the troopers and organized marshals were kept busy beating the bushes for possible snipers.”

  The March from Selma to Montgomery

  At night the marchers slept in tents they pitched along the route, and a team of volunteers shuttled food and supplies to them from march headquarters in Selma. Veterans and novices alike were sustained by a spirit of histor
y in the making. “You didn’t get tired, you really didn’t get weary,” recalls John Lewis, whose group had originally opposed the march. “You had to go—it was more than an ordinary march. To me, there was never a march like this one before, there hasn’t been one since … It was the sense of community moving there, and as you walked you saw people coming, waving, bringing you food or bringing you something to drink.”

  “The teenagers were a great inspiration,” says Boynton. “I was much impressed with a fifteen-year-old Selma boy, [Leroy] Moton. His face beamed with pride as he carried the American flag … Every now and then he would burst into song and we would join him, often singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’”

  Major John Cloud, who had ordered the attack on the first march, rode in his patrol car at the head of the march for part of the way, as did Sheriff Clark. Reporters asked Clark if he had any feelings about the event. “No,” he replied. “I’m glad to get rid of the ones that are leaving [Selma], but I wish they’d come back and get the rest of them …”

  By the final leg of the march, some 25,000 people were striding toward Alabama’s capital city. Near the end of the five days’ walk, the SCLC learned of a possible plot to assassinate King as the throng entered Montgomery. Andrew Young knew that King would not leave the march; the question was how to preserve both the triumphant finale and King’s life.