A 50-year reflection on…
Movements from Selma: A Trilogy of Marches in 1965
By Donald James Special to the Chronicle
Sunday morning, March 7, 1965, was not a typical day of worship at Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Alabama, as approximately 600 marchers convened at this house of worship, prayed and prepared to embark on a 54-mile trek to the state capitol building in Montgomery. The purpose of the march was two-fold: to protest against the continuous ill strategies, tactics and laws that created barriers for African Americans yearning to register and vote, and protest the recent beating and deadly shooting of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a young African American male and church deacon, who was killed protecting his mother from a state trooper’s beating during a voting rights protest in Marion, Alabama, about 28 miles northwest of Selma.
While Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was instrumental in the planning stages of the proposed March 7th movement from Selma to Montgomery, on this particular Sunday, he was in Atlanta, where he preached the morning sermon at his Ebenezer Baptist Church. Therefore, under the leadership of Hosea Williams, a civil rights activist and top general for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), along with John Lewis, leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the marchers were energized and ready for the walk to Montgomery, even though it was deemed dangerous due to possible snipers along the route, as well as other threats by white anti-civil rights agitators. Yet, despite such possibilities, and amid orders not to march from Gov. George Wallace, Alabama’s top elected official, the marchers left Brown Chapel for what they thought would be a foot journey to Montgomery. First, however, they had to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which spanned the Alabama River and led out of Selma.
As the marchers, inclusive of black men, women, children, along with a sprinkling of white supporters reached the half-way point of the bridge, they saw a wall of Alabama state troopers and Selma police officers blocking their path at the foot of the span. As the marchers continued to move forward, they stopped about 35 feet from the law officers, where Major John Cloud, the commanding officer in charge of the law officers, told marchers to disband, turnaround, and walk in the opposite direction. Instead of turning around, the marchers fell down to their knees and looked to God in prayer.
Unmoved by the peaceful group’s prayers and non-threating demeanors, Cloud gave the order for his troops to attack. Thus, many marchers, including children, were beaten with billy clubs and whips, amid thrown tear gas canisters, as approximately 160 troopers and local police, some of whom were on horses, charged the marchers in a passion of rage and hatred.
Lewis, who two decades later would become a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from the state of Georgia, sustained a serious head injury at the hands of the attackers. Blood of the marchers cascaded to the bridge’s pavement, as well as on the streets used for their retreat. Throngs of white people stood on the sidelines cheering the vicious attacks by the police and troopers as if they were rooting for their favorite sports team. However, this was not a game; it was real. There was so much blood shed by marchers on that day, 50 years ago, that it was immediately and infamously called, “Bloody Sunday”.
Many of the retreating marchers were so angry and outraged at the savagery of the beatings that they wanted revenge by getting their guns to shoot it out with the attackers. SCLC’s Andrew Young has been greatly credited with bringing an aura of peace to the volatile situation that could have easily escalated into a massive killing field in Selma of both black and white people.
Much of the nation was repulsed by “Bloody Sunday”, as television news outlets carried the brutal attacks live to every sector of the country, including the White House. King was particularly mortified and began a series of urgent talks with President Lyndon B. Johnson and other federal officials about “Bloody Sunday” and the constitutional right the group had to conduct a peacefully march from Selma to Montgomery.
King would not give up. He and other civil rights leaders marked Tuesday, March 9, 1965 on their calendar as the day that the second attempt to march from Selma to Montgomery would take place. This time, King would be with the marchers.
Many civil rights historians have written that Johnson tried to talk King out of organizing the second march, fearing more bloodshed. However, King and many previous and new marchers wanted to go forward. Therefore, on March 9, King and between 2,500 to 3,000 marchers set out to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge –again – and head to Montgomery to protest the unlawful tactics that denied blacks the right to vote in America, especially in the south.
Just like two days before, police and state troopers were waiting at the bridge. This time, however, marchers were allowed to cross, but once on the other side they stopped, prayed, turned around, and went back across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which was in compliance with a court order for the marchers not to advance to Montgomery. The day of the second Selma march was known as, “Turnaround Tuesday.”
According to many historians of the Civil Rights Movement, only a few leaders were told of the plan to only cross the bridge, pray and turnaround. Thus, there was some confusion by marchers, even some fingers pointing at King for appearing weak in the face of adversity.
Some speculated that King didn’t want a confrontation as a prelude to another blood bath at the hands of the police and troopers; others have suggested that King did not want to go against an injunction that forbade a march to Montgomery; and there were some, including a few well-known civil rights advocates of the era, who felt that King simply sold out the marchers to the wishes of Johnson.
Nevertheless, Johnson, who denounced the antics of “Bloody Sunday” and perhaps through a secret deal with King, agreed with the results of the second Selma march. Johnson subsequently went to work to demonstrate to the nation that black people had just as much of a right to vote as white people.
On March, 15, 1965, Johnson, in a nationally televised address before a joint session of Congress, decried the unjust treatment of black people by saying, “Their cause 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. Johnson was also adamant about his position on the passage of a heavy-duty civil rights bill.
If Johnson’s position on civil and human rights, voting rights, and the brutal beating of marchers in Selma was not clear before his address to Congress and the nation, afterwards, there was no doubt where the President of the United States of America stood, when he ended his historic address with the words, “We Shall Overcome,” the core lyrics from the signature freedom song most associated with the Civil Rights Movement.
At an ongoing Federal hearing pertaining to the legality of another march, along with seeking a remedy of protection, Lewis recounted the brutal details of the attack on him and other innocent marchers during “Bloody Sunday”. “Major Cloud ordered the troopers to advance,” recalled Lewis at the hearing, according to the National Archives, Southeast Region, Morrow, Georgia, Records of District Courts of the United States. “They came rushing in, knocking us down and pushing us. I was hit on my head. I was hit with a billy club, and I saw the state trooper that hit me. I was hit twice, including once when I was lying down and was attempting to get up.”
At the conclusion of the hearing on March 17, and just two days after Johnson’s riveting speech, Federal Judge Frank Johnson ruled that demonstrators in Selma had a right to march to Montgomery, under the auspices of the United States Constitution, to peacefully express disdain over voting obstructions and denials.
Wasting no time, King and others set Sunday, March 21, 1965 as the date for the third attempt to march from Selma to Montgomery. With President Johnson federalizing thousands of Alabama National Guards to monitor and protect marchers, King, with his wife Coretta at his side, along with a recovered and determined John Lewis and other civil rights activists, led the five-day march of thousands of protesters to Montgomery.
While many marched, others were transported to Montgomery, not only from Selma, but from other locales around the nation, especially from cities and town across the south. When the long march had ended at the State Capitol building on March 25th, more than 40,000 people, inclusive of whites, stood in the shadow of the historic structure, which adorned the Confederate flag waving in the wind.
Just 19 months after King had delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington, here he stood on the Capitol steps in Montgomery and rendered a brilliant oration that resonated with power. “I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment,” said King. “However frustrating the hours, it will not be long, because truth pressed to earth shall rise again. How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever.”
On August 6 1965, the Voting Rights Act was signed by President Johnson after Congress passed the law. Following the signing of the Act, Johnson addressed the nation. “I speak tonight for the dignity of man…should we defeat every enemy, and should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue,” Johnson said. “Then we shall have failed as a people and as a nation…there is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem.”
The new law exponentially transformed the numbers of blacks registering across the South. In Alabama alone, the number of blacks registering to vote elevated from 66,000 in 1960 to 250,000 in 1966. This law did what African Americans thought the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was legislated to do, when on July 2, 1964, President Johnson, with Dr. King looking on, signed into law measures to outlaw discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, while enforcing desegregation of schools and “the right to vote”, the latter of which was described in Title One of the Act.
While, neither the Voting Rights Act, nor the Civil Rights Act could ever stop all discrimination in America against black people, both were extremely important foundations in the advancement of African Americans on many levels. However, any progress made for African Americans must be sustained. “Evidence proves there are forces in this country that willfully and intentionally trample on the voting rights of millions of Americans,” Congressman Lewis wrote in an article published in the Washington Post on February 25, 2013, and is archived on his official website. “That is why every president and every Congress, regardless of politics or party, have reauthorized Section 5. The right to vote is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have in a democracy. I risked my life defending that right. Some died in the struggle. If we are ever to actualize the true meaning of equality, effective measures such as the Voting Rights Act are still necessary requirements of democracy.”
In essence, the trilogy of the 1965 historic marches brought major national and international focus on the fact that America wasn’t living up to the words of its fabled national anthem, the “Star Spangled Banner” and its lyrics…“…the home of free.” The marches also demonstrated what African Americans were willing to still do in the face of adversity to achieved equal rights.
“You get knocked down, you get beaten, and you get patched up,” said Lewis in the book Freedom Riders, written by Ann Bausum. “And you come back for the fight…You just continue to come back. You have to.”
The three Selma marches proved Lewis’ position on keep coming back, as they paved the important way for blacks to show up, voice their choice, and be represented at the ballot box, after a long, hard, and often deadly fight for the right to vote as citizens of the United States of America…for which it stands.
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