The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories

by Bryan Woolley

  We arrived in Selma about 7 a.m. on March 17, groggy from 34 hours on the road. Volunteers led us off in small groups to homes and churches open to us as living quarters. A young boy took me and two other Harvard students—Roy Branson and Bob Schraeder—to the Green Street Baptist Church. We unrolled our sleeping bags on the floor of a Sunday school room and tried to sleep. We couldn’t.

  That afternoon we joined 500 demonstrators who were moving in double file toward the courthouse. The sky had turned dark and threatening. My marching partner was a black girl who said her name was Easter, about 12 years old. She was shy, or maybe just quiet. I asked her how many of the marches she had been in. She said, “All of them we’ve had.” I asked her if she had been at the Pettus Bridge. She said, “Yes.” She had two small scars on her face. I wondered if she had received them in the marches, but I wasn’t bold enough to ask.

  Just as we arrived at the courthouse, the dark skies opened. Heavy rain and hail pelted us. Easter had a colorful plaid umbrella. She opened it, and I held it over us. Not many of the marchers had had her foresight. A young black man standing next to us was getting soaked. We invited him under the umbrella, too.

  Several black ministers stood on the courthouse steps and said prayers. The Rev. Hosea Williams, who had led the marchers to the Pettus Bridge on what was now being called “Bloody Sunday,” made a speech. I remember nothing of what he said, just the rain and the hail and the smirks on the faces looking at us through the courthouse windows, happy at our soaking. We stayed a long time, I think. Then we sang several freedom songs and began our walk back to Brown Chapel AME Church, where all the marches started.

  State troopers were swarming over the downtown area. I counted seven of their cars on a single block. Two troopers were in each. White men stood in groups under the awnings in front of the stores, shouting as we walked by: “Nigger lover!” “White nigger!” Easter and I, walking together under the plaid umbrella, seemed especially to anger them. A man said: “Look at that preacher and his nigger gal! Ain’t they cute?”

  Twenty-five years later, I remember his face. He was the first to show me hatred in person.

  Judge Johnson decided that day to allow the march to Montgomery. He ordered the Alabama State Troopers not only to refrain from attacking the marchers, but to protect them. If they failed, he warned, they would be held in contempt of court.

  The judge placed restrictions on the marchers, too. About 40 of the 54 miles of highway between Selma and the capitol in Montgomery were only two lanes wide. Along that stretch, the judge said, no more than 300 people could march, and one lane of the highway must always be kept open to traffic.

  So the plan became this: The march would begin at Brown Chapel on March 21 after an outdoor church service. The crowd of black Selma citizens and the volunteers then would march out of the city as far as the four-lane pavement extended, about eight miles. Then all but 300 marchers would return to Selma.

  The 300 would march for three days until the highway widened to four lanes again, a few miles outside Montgomery. Then the throng would rejoin them for the push to the capitol, where, it was hoped, Dr. King and Mr. Reese and the other leaders would meet with Gov. Wallace.

  About 250 of the 300 would be local people who had fought the voting rights battle in Selma for many months, even years. The remaining 50 would be celebrities who had raised money to support the march, dignitaries who had lent their names and reputations to the cause, and a few volunteers from around the country whose work for civil rights had been long and hard.

  When our buses headed back to Boston on March 19, Roy and Bob and I weren’t aboard. We couldn’t bear to leave Selma just as the greatest march of the civil rights struggle was about to begin. We weren’t among the honored 300, but there was plenty of work to do. Soon after Judge Johnson handed down his order, the black section of Selma came to resemble the staging area for an invasion. Dozens of trucks moved in and out, delivering food, air mattresses, tents, medical supplies, portable toilets. Many of the cargoes came from other states, since Alabama suppliers refused to sell or rent to the cause.

  Lines of chartered buses stopped in front of the churches, bringing hundreds of new volunteers for the big march. Most were white, most of them clergy and professors and students, some from as far away as Hawaii. Cheers greeted them all. Reporters, photographers and TV crews were arriving from all over the world. It was raining every day.

  In the churchyards, Hosea Williams and other veterans were teaching us how to fall to the ground, roll up in a ball and cup our hands over our genitals. “They always try to hit you there first,” Mr. Williams said. “If they can’t hit you there, they’ll go for the head and the kidneys, but you can’t protect everything.”

  He told us to carry identification and at least $2 at all times, so we wouldn’t be arrested for vagrancy. He told us to carry no aspirin or prescription medicines, so we wouldn’t be arrested for possession of drugs, and no pocketknives, nail files or ballpoint pens, so we wouldn’t be jailed for carrying deadly weapons.

  State troopers, Dallas County deputies and Selma policemen sat in their cars near the street comers, watching us.

  Those of us not among the 300 were assigned jobs preparing food, driving trucks, finding phones for the reporters to use, carrying messages, raising tents. Roy and Bob and I were among those assigned to be marshals.

  The marshals were to wear yellow armbands and walk outside the ranks and keep order among the marchers on the big day. We were to keep our people away from the roadsides, so hostile onlookers couldn’t grab them, pull them away and beat them or kill them. We were to help stragglers and find ways to get them safely out of the march and back home. We were to keep our people from answering the jeers and curses they would hear. We were to keep them looking straight ahead.

  Sunday was sunny and warm. Three thousand of us stood in the street in front of Brown Chapel, in the midst of the George Washington Carver Homes public housing project. On the church steps was a lectern covered with a white cloth. Smoke from a garbage fire drifted around the side of the church. Cinders were falling on the crowd. Dr. King was speaking.

  “You will be the people that will light a new chapter in the history books of our nation,” he said. “This is one of the greatest demonstrations for human rights in history. We have waited for freedom. We are tired of waiting. Now is the time. Walk together, children. Don’t you get weary. And it will lead us to the Promised Land. And Alabama will be a new Alabama, and America will be a new America.”

  Then, marching eight abreast, we started.

  Downtown, a segregated crowd lined the sidewalks, white people on one side of the street, black people on the other. They were shouting. “White nigger!” “Communist!” “Scum!” “Yes!” “Freedom!” “Praise God!”

  I was walking on the white side of the street, down the narrow space between the marchers and the crowd. A man stepped off the sidewalk and grabbed my arm. He tried to rip off my marshal’s armband. “What the hell does all this damn stuff mean?” he said. I looked him in the eyes and said nothing, as I had been trained to do. I slowly pulled my arm from his grasp. He stepped back onto the sidewalk, and I walked on.

  A police car was at the comer where we turned onto Broad Street, Selma’s main thoroughfare. A recording of Dixie blared from the car’s loudspeaker. Then Bye Bye Blackbird. A policeman standing beside the car made a big show of taking pictures—or pretending to—of local black people in the march. “We know who you are. We’ll remember you,” he said.

  When we crossed Edmund Pettus Bridge, I noticed the federal presence for the first time. National guardsmen and regular Army MPs were everywhere. Military helicopters circled over us.

  Gov. Wallace had claimed that Alabama lacked the resources to protect the marchers as Judge Johnson had ordered, so President Lyndon Johnson had nationalized the Alabama guard and sent the MPs from Fort Benning, Ga. Soldiers stood in pairs—a black and a white in each pair—all along the highway, bay
onets fixed to their rifles.

  Beyond the bridge, crowds of white people leaned into the road, shouting so loudly that we could hear nothing else. The nuns among us bore the worst. What the white women by the roadside screamed about their chastity can’t be repeated here. Some of the men by the roadside were drunk. For a quarter of a mile, I almost held my breath, afraid they would pull me or someone from our column into their midst.

  Then suddenly we were in the countryside, passing pastures and fields and woods and small communities where whites and blacks stood together by the road, the whites shouting insults, the blacks singing.

  Cars crowded the other half of the four-lane highway. Many bore signs: “Coonsville, U.S.A.” “Go Home, Scum.” Teenagers leaning from car windows waved Confederate flags. Where a country lane opened into the highway, two guardsmen stood, one white, one black. The white soldier glared with rage. Tears rolled down the black soldier’s face.

  We reached the camping ground—a plot of land owned by a black farmer, eight miles from Selma—just before sundown. The temperature was dropping fast and thunderclouds were gathering. The leaders canceled the mass rally that had been scheduled, and the marchers, except for the 300, were shuttled by bus to a special train, which would return them to Selma.

  A young black man invited Bob and me to ride back to town in his car with him and two of his friends. It would be faster than the train, so we accepted. We got into the back seat with one of the friends.

  As we crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the driver told Bob and me to crouch down so we couldn’t be seen through the windows. Just as we reached the heart of downtown, the engine died. The driver coasted the car around a comer off Broad Street and parked it.

  “It’s the generator,” he said. “It’s been giving trouble. I’ll go call somebody to come get us.” He told Bob and me to hunker on the floor of the back seat, then he went away.

  A few minutes later, he returned. He said he had found a phone, but it was out of order. He tried to start the car again. It wouldn’t. He left to look for another phone.

  Everybody was tense. “If the troopers see you in this car with us, they’ll kill us all,” said the man in the front seat. Then a car door slammed. “Oh, God, It’s deputies!” he whispered.

  A flashlight glared at the window. What you boys doing?” It was more a threat than a question.

  “Car busted,” mumbled the man in the front seat. “My friend has gone to look for another one.”

  “What’s wrong with it?” the deputy asked.

  “Don’t know. It just stopped.”

  The deputy flashed his light into the face of the man in the back seat with Bob and me. At that moment, I knew with absolute certainty that we were going to be killed. But my mind was full of a calm that I hadn’t known before—a tranquility I still can’t explain. It was as if I were standing outside myself, watching myself as I would a character in a movie, not at all grieved that he was about to die.

  Then the light moved away. “Well, all right,” the deputy said. The door slammed again. The police car pulled away. The man in the front seat said, “There was two of them. Lord.”

  In a while, our driver returned with another car. His friends hustled Bob and me into the back seat. We stuck to the back streets and eased back to Brown Chapel.

  The next two days moved slowly for Roy and Bob and me. We read, slept and stayed up almost all of Tuesday night playing poker. Roy, a Seventh Day Adventist, had to be taught the game. It was raining again. I was fighting a cold, probably the result of that first rainy walk to the courthouse with Easter.

  Things being as they were, I couldn’t go to any of the drugstores in Selma, all owned by whites. A small boy told me about an old man who had a tiny store in a tin shed and took me there. The man had one box of Anacin and one bottle of Vicks cough syrup. I bought them, doctored myself, and contrary to Hosea Williams’ orders, kept them with me in my coat pocket.

  In the mornings, after the 300 were on the road again, we would ride out on trucks and help clean up their campsite. The days were wet and cold. The mud was deep and black and sticky. I had a fever.

  About 4 p.m. on Wednesday, March 24, Roy and Bob and I climbed aboard an enclosed truck with about 50 black people and a couple of other whites to ride to the last night’s encampment at the City of St. Jude, a Catholic hospital-school complex just inside the Montgomery city limits. When we arrived, a large crowd already was milling about the tents and trucks, waiting for the big show that singer Harry Belafonte had put together to entertain the marchers. The people were searching for dry spots to sit and eat the sack lunches that were being distributed, but rain earlier in the day had made the place a quagmire.

  Everything was going wrong. The lights and sound equipment which Mr. Belafonte had sent from New York to Montgomery had wound up in New Orleans. At 7:30, when darkness had fallen and the show was supposed to begin, a work crew still was trying to rig makeshift lights and speakers on the stage, which was built of coffin boxes.

  As the crowd grew, it became restless. The people in back began to push the people in front closer and closer toward the stage. The marshals surrounded the stage and locked arms to try to keep the crowd back, but we couldn’t. Soon we were crushed against the coffin boxes. Then, when we managed to move the people who were crushing us back a few feet, they were crushed between us and those who were pushing from behind. After two hours of this, when it seemed that our arms were about to be pulled from their sockets, the lights came on, Mr. Belafonte stepped onto the stage, the crowd calmed, and the show began at last.

  Sammy Davis, Jr., Shelley Winters, Dick Gregory, Leonard Bernstein, Billy Eckstine, Alan King, Anthony Perkins, Tony Bennett, Odetta, Nina Simone, James Baldwin, Peter, Paul and Mary, the Chad Mitchell Trio and about 20 more celebrities performed or made short speeches. So did Dr. Ralph Bunche, Dr. King and other leaders of the movement.

  When the show ended, I went to pick up my gear for the ride to the First CME Church, where the marshals had been assigned to eat and sleep. My overcoat was missing. It was old and not much of a loss, but my Anacin and cough medicine were in its pockets.

  By the time my friends and I got to the church, all the food was gone, and every square foot of the basement, sanctuary, pews, balcony, chancel and classrooms were covered with sleeping bodies. We finally found a tiny storeroom on the third floor that had only one occupant. We unrolled our sleeping bags and lay down without bothering to take off our clothes or even get inside the bags.

  It was 3:30 a.m.

  I looked forward and couldn’t see the beginning of the column. I looked back and couldn’t see the end. Marchers were streaming into the column from the side streets like tributaries flowing into a great river. Many wore their church clothes. Well-wishers lined the streets. Kindergarten children on the sidewalks were singing freedom songs, led by their teachers. Ancient, toothless women grinned and waved at us from their porches.

  The mood of the marchers was different from what it had been when the march started Sunday. Then, our mood was quiet determination. We had walked in silence, ignoring the jeers and taunts of those who hated us. But now our determination had become triumph, and the streets echoed with shouts, freedom songs, hymns and laughter. “Come on!” the marchers shouted to the onlookers. “Come on! We’re not afraid!”

  There were 25,000 of us now. As we neared downtown, only a few white people watched us from the sidewalks, but the windows of stores and offices were full of faces. There were fewer insults, or maybe they were just harder to hear over our own tumult. A meek-looking little man with a frightened grin on his face stood in the street and held a small Confederate flag above his head.

  Some were on our side. A white boy ran out of a restaurant carrying two soft drinks and gave them to two black women just ahead of me. “Pass these around to your friends,” he said. Then he went and stood on the sidewalk, smiling. He was about 18 years old.

  At last we reached the plaza of Dexter Avenue. There
stood the beautiful white capitol, gleaming in the sun. The Alabama and Confederate flags flew at the top of its dome. The Stars and Stripes were nowhere visible. On the porch stood many official-looking men. Gov. Wallace wasn’t among them. He was in his office, we learned later, watching from behind the slats of the Venetian blinds.

  On the capitol porch lay a large slab of plywood. Several green-helmeted state troopers were standing on it. The wood covered a brass plaque marking the spot where Jefferson Davis took his oath of office as president of the Confederacy 104 years earlier. I heard later that the troopers were afraid Dr. King might stand on it and make his speech from there. But he and the other leaders were on a flatbed truck near the foot of the capitol steps. The Rev. Ralph Abernathy stepped to the microphone and said: “I’d like to sing the national anthem, but I don’t see an American flag here.” Instantly, hundreds of flags, large and small, rose above the crowd.

  “We have been drenched by the rain,” Dr. King said. “Our bodies are tired. Our feet are sore. They told us we wouldn’t get here. And there are those who said we would get here over their dead bodies.”

  “Speak!” the crowd said. “Speak!”

  “Segregation is on its death bed in Alabama,” he said, “and the only thing uncertain about it is how costly the segregationists and Wallace will make the funeral.”

  When he finished, we sang We Shall Overcome, and suddenly it was over. The crowd began breaking up. The troops who had protected us were released from duty. Bob and Roy and I, carrying our gear, followed the stream of people a few blocks, then began asking the way to the Greyhound station.