|
Chude Pam Parker Allen Hardy Frye Miriam Glickman Bruce Hartford |
Phil Hutchings Don Jelinek Betita Martinez Mike Miller |
Willie B. Wazir Peacock Jimmy Rogers Jean Wiley |
Additional comments from:
(See Selma, Lord, Selma and
March to Montgomery for photos.)
| If you participated in the Southern Freedom Movement, and are listed in the Veterans Roll Call you can add your comments to this discussion by emailing them to webmaster@crmvet.org. If you are not listed, please add your name and information to the Roll Call. |
Bruce: At the end of the Mississippi & MFDP discussion, I said that I believe SCLC's Selma voting-rights campaign grew out of the betrayal of the MFDP in Atlantic City by the Democratic Party and the liberal establishment.
And that as a result of that betrayal, the kind of non-violent tactics used by the [Southern] Movement up to that point changed significantly. Up until Atlantic City, non-violent tactics had been predominantly what I would call a "moral witness" kind of non-violence, an appeal-to-the-conscience-of-the-nation type of non-violence. This type of non-violence was designed to make people aware of what was really going on, and [the assumption was] they would say "We can't have this, this has got to be stopped," and they would put pressure on the politicians, and the politicians would take action.
In a sense, that's what was done during the MFDP challenge to the white-only Mississippi delegation to the party convention in Atlantic City. We did everything that we were supposed to do [according to the Party rules], went through the whole process, risked everything to gather information, try to register, endured the hardships and reprisals, testified before the convention, and ended up stabbed in the back by Johnson, Humphrey, Mondale, & other liberals.
I think that for those of us who were still committed to non-violent tactics that betrayal had a profound effect. (And for a lot of people it ended their commitment to non-violence period, I think.) But for those who were still committed to non-violence as a tactic, it shifted the non-violence from "moral witness" tactics to "create-such-disruption-that-they-are-be-forced-to-do-something" tactics. To what I would call "coercive" non-violence.
To see how this [change in non-violent tactics] connects to Selma, we need to go back to the Birmingham church bombing. Diane Nash and [James] Bevel were very deeply involved in Birmingham. And after the bombing, Diane came up with what she called the "Alabama Project," and she got Bevel to support it. And the project was to have mass disruptive non-violent demonstrations blocking streets, blocking the airport, blocking the railroad stations in Montgomery around issues of voting rights and segregation.
Don: Montgomery or Birmingham?
Bruce: Montgomery. Go to Montgomery and tell Wallace and the [Alabama] legislature, "You're not going to be able to do business in Montgomery until you deal with these issues."
Diane and Bevel brought the plan to King, and as I heard it told, — I heard all of this, I wasn't there, — King never said "No," but he never said "Yes" either. As I understand it, the reason he didn't agree to do the Alabama Project was that first of all he was very uncomfortable with this whole concept of disruptive, coercive non-violence as opposed to the moral witness kind that had been used up to then.
Second of all, he knew, — everybody knew, — that to do that kind of provocative non-violent direct action in Alabama was going to be hideously dangerous and that people were gonna get killed. And there would be mass arrests for which there might not be any bail, with heavy charges and serious prison terms.
And third, he was the CEO, — so to speak;— of SCLC, and since the NAACP had effectively been banned as an organization in Alabama for the crime of supporting Authrine Lucy's unsuccessful effort to integrate the University of Alabama, Lord knew what would happen to SCLC as an organization if the [mass civil-disobedience] campaign did not succeed. So he did not say "Yes."
But, as I heard it, Diane and Bevel kept pushing it all through late '63, they came back in the Spring of '64, they pushed it again during Freedom Summer, and he kept not saying "Yes." It was never his way to just directly say "No," he said "No" by not saying "Yes."
Until the betrayal of the MFDP challenge, at which point as soon as the election was over and Johnson was re-elected he turned 180 degrees and not only said "Yes we're going to do it," but that pretty much every staff member in SCLC was going to be sent in. All of SCLC's financial resources were going to be committed to it. I don't think people today realize that SCLC bet the farm on Selma. That if it had failed, the organization could have been banned in Alabama, certainly would have been broke, certainly would have been in a world of hurt.
Anyway, by this time the original plan had evolved to concentrate totally on voting rights because the 1964 Civil Rights Act had already passed. So the plan that was put into effect in December of '64 adapted the idea of the MFDP Congressional challenge, — remember SNCC & MFDP after the challenge in Atlantic City, went to Congress and said, "The Mississippi delegation to Congress was elected fraudulently and should be unseated." So the plan for Selma was to build up the demonstrations first in Selma, expand out to the Blackbelt counties, build a huge non-violent, direct-action force, and then in April, bring that force into Montgomery and shut down Montgomery on the demand that the Alabama legislature had been elected fraudulently and should not be allowed to take office. And there would be a Freedom Vote and Freedom Registration similar to what the MFDP had done in Mississippi. Of course, as it happened, the March to Montgomery intervened and the campaign took that route rather than challenging the legislature in April.
So what I'm saying is that what happened in Selma starting in December of 64, was a direct outgrowth of what happened in Atlantic City in August of 64, just a few months earlier.
Jean: Why Selma?
Bruce: Jim Clark.
Jean: Well he wasn't unusual. I mean, [other] crazies were running around —
Don: Yeah, he was [unusual]. He was seen as about the most pathological sheriff in the deep South, and the one that —
Jean: More than Bull Conner?
Don: Oh yes, the one that couldn't be controlled by the White Citizen's Council or anybody. He was just, borderline psychotic.
Bruce: Over the border line. Did I ever tell you the story about his kids? One time I was in jail, and he threw me in with this guy who had been a member of Clark's posse before being arrested himself. So after a while, this kid, this little pudgy 12 year old, comes walking down the aisle between the cells and starts to throw stuff at the prisoners. Cigarette butts and wadded up toilet paper. And then he's joined by a little girl who's also corpulent, maybe 10 or 9.
I asked the posse guy, "Who are these kids?"
He told me they were Jim Clark's kids. At night we could hear them, they were living in a cell down the hall, and we could hear them playing and watching television and so on. I asked what's going on? He said "Well, Jim Clark knows that the n*****s, are out to kill his kids and so he keeps them, — he's raising the kids in the jail and he will not let them out of the jail unless they're escorted by one of his armed deputies at all times." Clark was raising his children in the jail. He was crazy.
Jean: I guess I find your [Bruce's] analysis interesting but strangely I don't find it persuasive in terms of what I saw when I was there. But I'm a firm believe that things move, lead into other things, as you know their basic connections. But that was hard to see while you were down there. The connection between the MFDP challenges, both of them, and the SCLC moving into Selma were hard to see.
Mike: I think what we're hearing is an insider's SCLC account. I mean it's a particular to SCLC account. Because a) SNCC was always interested in power, in political power, going back to '61 and '62. And I don't remember SNCC people talking about moral witness. A handful did, but that was not the dominant [attitude], even for people who were not just tactically non-violent. Maybe John Lewis, Charles Sherrod, a few people like that, but that was not the dominant discourse that we're making a moral witness to appeal to the conscience of the nation, which will get translated into congressional action.
Bruce: I don't disagree that SNCC — and for that matter SCLC, — were interested in power. I know that SNCC went into Mississippi and other places to build political power by organizing the communities. What I'm comparing is two types of non-violent tactics. The focus of the challenge in Atlantic City was to educate people about what was going on in Mississippi in the expectation that when the truth was known they would do the right thing. As contrasted to tactics of non-violent disruption, — blocking the entrance, moving the vigil inside the convention, and so on. The original "Alabama Project" plan was based on disruptive non-violent tactics, blocking roads and airports, and filling the jails.
[
Jean: My understanding is that SNCC was in Selma before SCLC, trying
to, — and I don't know how
successfully, — trying to do some pretty heavy organizing
and using Selma as sort of the locus of organizing in the surrounding
counties. Although they did not try Lowndes County early
on. So I always assumed that SCLC chose Selma because there was some
heavy organizing going on anyhow, and had been for I guess a
considerable time.
Bruce: Bernard and Colia LaFayette went in there in February of '63 [for
SNCC]. Later Bernard went back to school, and then joined the SCLC
staff. Prathia Hall came [for SNCC] after the LaFayettes left, and John
Love too.
Mike: Silas Norman [of SNCC] was there too.
Jean: Silas was there when I got there.
Wazir: John Love was there, and then Silas Norman came. And then some
other SNCC people came.
Don: Before "Bloody Sunday" takes place, you have SNCC functioning in
Selma, but not accomplishing a great deal. It's not working. It's a very
difficult city. You have enormous resources [against you] and you got
Clark, who is just terribly dangerous. And things aren't functioning
that well.
Don: Background point, there was another reason for Selma. And I don't
really know, I think your points are fascinating Bruce. I don't know the
connections between the MFDP and SNCC and SCLC in Selma. But the one
other advantage that Selma had, was a very militant white church, the
Fathers of St. Edmund, a Jesuit Church.
Bruce: That was Father Oulette's church?
Don: That's right. It was then banished as a result of the March [to
Montgomery] by the Archbishop. But that church had been the mainstay of
SNCC when SNCC first arrived. It was the one place that truly was a
sanctuary, the one place they could go, they could eat, sleep, and when
I was there it was a source of mimeograph machines and telephones and
every resource imaginable. And the priests themselves were extremely
militant. This was a religious organization that was banished from
France [a 100 years earlier] for sedition, and moved to Vermont.
In the 1930s, Pope Pius asked Catholic religious to come down to the
South and now I'm going to paraphrase it, "To help the poor coloreds
have a better life within segregation." though he didn't say it that
way. [The Pope] certainly had no desire to integrate. And I think the
Fathers of St. Edmunds were the only ones who agreed to go. So
Archbishop Toolen [Archbishop of Alabama] allowed them in by sufferance.
They had no right to be there but he allowed them in and they built up
their school, built up a hospital, —
Bruce: That was the St. Jude's hospital?
Don: that's right. And they also came with the sisters of St. Elizabeth.
And it was one big, like a U-shaped rectory and nunnery. And little by
little, first they were really interested in saving souls and more than
that, providing the external care that was needed, no other hospital was
available, no real school was available. But then, strange things
happened. One brother in the group, went for a haircut into a Black
barbershop. And he got arrested, pulled right out of the chair. And he
was put in jail.
Bruce: Because he was white?
Don: Well, because he violated the segregation laws. No whites allowed,
you know. And so they threw him in jail and of course they quickly
bailed him out and there was a multitude of phone calls with the
Archbishop and that was the moment they told me, where they started to
tilt. It takes the personal experience to see what segregation is like
and they didn't do an awful lot about it until SNCC arrived. And SNCC
had the need and they had the desire and they then meshed. So, when SCLC
came in, not only was there a religious group to meet with, but all the
other [white] churches were segregated and hostile. And so it was a
perfect blend, and of course the priests and nuns that you see on the
bridge were from that parish.
Archbishop Toolen, — just to jump ahead of
it, — he ordered Father Oulette, who was the pastor, to
not allow any of the religious to participate in the march [to
Montgomery on Bloody Sunday] that was seemingly coming. [Oulette] didn't
tell Toolen, but he [disobeyed].
Meanwhile SNCC tried to arrange for the priests and nuns to march in the
first rank. And Oulette refused that also. He said, "I'm not sending
them out to be your sacrificial lambs, — just in to
participate." Of course, when the horses came, it didn't matter what
rank you were in. (laughter)
And as soon as the [March to Montgomery] was over, Toolen announced that
Father Oulette was banished. He had to leave Alabama immediately. The
other fathers and sisters met to leave with him in protest, but he
convinced them that their work was so important they should remain. And
they did, and kept on what they were doing. But they were a
little-known, yet major force in everything that went on in civil rights
in Selma. In fact, I heard from SNCC people that if not for the church,
it's not likely they would have stayed in Selma [in earlier years].
Because they couldn't make any contacts at all. Ironically the link to
the Black community was through the white Jesuits. And resources as
well. And then of course for SCLC as well.
Mike: So in this period there are no Black Baptists or AME or CME
churches or AME Zion churches involved at all in this period that Don's
talking about?
Jean: I think so. SNCC people who were there early have always said how
difficult Selma was, and how unwelcoming most of the Black churches
were. So I had heard about this church [St. Edmunds]. But thanks for the
detail, I had no idea.
Bruce: I think that when Bernard first came to Selma in '63 what Don and
Jean are saying sounds right. I do know that by the late fall of '64,
when SCLC started to move into Selma to do the Alabama
Project, — the big voting rights
campaign, — there were at least three Black churches
involved. There was Tabernacle Baptist, which was the first church to
hold a Movement meeting and Sheriff Clark surrounded it with deputies
and tried to intimidate everyone. Then by the time I came to Selma, both
Brown Chapel and 1st Baptist Church farther on down Sylvan Street were
also deeply involved. Both were big churches and because of their
location they became Movement centers. Those three were the only
churches I ever attended any meetings at, but there may have been others
supporting the Movement that I didn't know about.
Don: Now I can't make the connection why Dr. King wanted to come here,
except Clark and a few other things. But once Dr. King came in, there
was tremendous resentment on the part of SNCC, and part of the statement
was that King is going to do what he always does, he's going to come in,
get everybody involved, get everybody injured, killed, out of work, and
then get the publicity and then he'll leave. Leaving
SNCC, —
Hardy: That was the argument, yeah.
Don: On the other hand, King was aware, and I don't think anybody knows
this for a fact, but seemingly, Lyndon Johnson had told him that his
ability to pass a voting rights act would require something very
dramatic.
Bruce: That's not the way I heard it. As the only SCLC person
here my understanding is a bit different. My understanding is that after
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, President Johnson told King
that there had been enough civil rights legislation. No more civil
rights legislation could be passed for a couple of years, things had to
be quieted down, particularly because it would affect the campaign
against Goldwater. Remember the phrase "Cooling off period?" So Johnson
told King that he was not going to do any more civil rights acts for the
foreseeable future. And the reason King decided to do the Selma campaign
was to force Johnson, — to create such a public
pressure and turmoil, — that Johnson would be forced to
act. It was not that Johnson asked him to do it, — it was
in opposition to Johnson.
And I think that this issue of SNCC saying King will do what King always
does, which is come in, get the publicity and then leave, is partly
true, — but it is also the fundamental difference between
SCLC, King's outlook and SNCC's outlook.
Don: Absolutely
Bruce: SNCC had the community organizing outlook. King's and SCLC's
outlook was to get national legislation passed. We needed a national
Civil Rights Act, and that was their goal in Birmingham. We needed a
national Voting Rights Act, and that was their goal in Selma. Not to
organize a permanent community organization in Selma. So King was doing
what King normally did. And he was right, — we did need
national legislation, — and the mass actions in
Birmingham and Selma was the only way it was going to happen.
Don: On this part we're not differing.
Bruce: What I'm saying is that I don't think SNCC's antagonism to King
coming in to create something that would force through national
legislation, — I don't think that SNCC's fury at that is
entirely justified. I think King had a point. I think that without the
voting rights act, —
Jean: But he didn't sit down and say, "look you guys in SNCC, you've
been working here for years, and we've got this plan." He didn't do
that. To my knowledge, he didn't do that to anybody. One. That's the
first thing.
Bruce: My understanding is that Bevel did meet with SNCC people
— John Love, I was told, — about the
Alabama Project plan in November or December of 1964, but SNCC opposed
the plan. They were focusing on the MFDP's Congressional challenge and
wanted all efforts put into that. But SCLC did talk to them about it
beforehand.
Jean: The second thing is, it's a stretch of my imagination. It would be
out of character, wouldn't it, for King to have decided that whether
Johnson liked it or not, he was going to push this. I mean, it wouldn't
have been out of character for Bevel or Diane. But wouldn't it have been
out of character for King?
Bruce: No, I don't agree. I don't think it was out of character for King
[to force something on Johnson]. But let me make one caveat. You guys
can all talk about SNCC because you were SNCC. But there
were two different SCLCs. There was the SCLC of the field
workers, people like James Orange, Annelle Ponder, Andrew Marrisett,
people like that. And then there was the King, Andy Young, Bevel, Hosea,
Blackwell, level. And unlike SNCC, those of us down on the field level,
never really knew exactly what was going on in that upper level. I can't
really speak about what they did. I can only guess about that level...
Don: There's a famous line of Franklin Roosevelt where he said to some
pressure group that came, he said: "Okay, you've convinced me, now make
me do it."
Mike: He said it to John L. Lewis.
Don: And that's the implication of what I've been led to believe. That
Johnson was saying certainly not until after the election, but after the
election, you know he wanted a voting rights act.
Bruce: All I'm saying is that the SCLC field staff were told that this
[the Selma campaign] was to force Johnson to do something he did not
want to do. That [the Selma campaign] was to force Johnson to pass
voting rights legislation that he did not want to do after the Civil
Rights Act of '64.
Hardy: Look, there's nothing wrong with presenting a triad, three prong
or four prong argument in this debate. Because I think it's exactly what
was going on. There's no way I could have known what was going on inside
of SCLC, very little I could know what was going on with TIAL, you
couldn't know what we were talking about in Mississippi.
Don: As Bruce was saying, he couldn't know what was going on in SCLC
[either]. (laughter)
Wazir: MFDP ended up in Atlantic City, — that was
the big climax. After that we rode the buses and whatever mode of
transportation back from Atlantic City to Mississippi. And it became a
question of, "What now?"
What to do with all these organizers? These organizers had expended
their wad, you know. Of getting all of that together from beginning in
the Spring of '63 up until this [the challenge at the Democratic
convention] was pulled off.
Mike: As to why SNCC had such a big presence in Alabama, it was
in part because the people who were from Mississippi felt that it was
very hard to have space to do anything in Mississippi [after Freedom
Summer] because on the one hand you had this huge number of whites who
were remaining, and on the other hand you had Guyot and Aaron Henry
coming back even after the defeat [of the MFDP challenge in Atlantic
City] saying now we've got to mobilize the vote for Lyndon Johnson. And
so there was a push factor, pushing people out, and there was a pull
factor, pulling people in to Alabama.
Wazir: Whatever I was doing in the 2nd Congressional District of
Mississippi, after the summer project of '64, I just didn't see any
place where I could plug in and begin to pull that work back together.
Mississippi wasn't exactly happening any more and the only active,
really new frontier where people could get back to doing what they had
been accustomed to doing, — that's
organizing, — would be Alabama. Alabama became the most
obvious place to go. And the place to first get your footing in Alabama
would be Selma because we already had people who had done some ground
work there.
[For myself] I thought about what I could do. I went to graduate school
at Tuskegee, because they had a strong science base and had the
veterinary medicine school and I could take some courses there and get
myself back up to speed to perhaps go on and finish medical school.
And lo and behold, the Movement found me. By the time I got there, Jean
and all these people were there, she was [faculty] advisor to TIAL
(Tuskegee Institute Advancement League) and the next thing I know I was
back in the mix. At first I wasn't, but SNCC people kept coming to the
campus. And the TIAL group, some of them [would] wise ass, "So you were
one of them?" You know I kind of got pulled in. I wasn't going to
Alabama to do any organizing, that's what I'm trying to say, but it just
ended up happening.
Tuskegee was on the road going to Atlanta. People in Mississippi like
[Laurence] Guyot and all of them people, they knew I was at Tuskegee so
they would stop by the campus and see me. So the next thing I know I was
spending weekends in Selma. And I began to take a few students down
there, Sammy Younge, George Parish, Wendell Parish, Simuel Schutz, and
all of those other people, — and I was back in it.
Mike: From what I knew of Mississippi people, when Guyot was in
charge of MFDP he was really still moving as the Lyndon Johnson
Democratic Party. And the people who didn't want to do that either had
to dig deep into very local stuff in their own county, or go to Alabama.
Because there wasn't all that much you could do then in Mississippi.
Wazir: Yeah, I'd like to speak to that just a little bit. The
truth was out by then, — that Aaron Henry had been down
on LBJ's ranch a week or two before the Democratic Convention in
Atlantic City. Because he immediately come up with this position, that
in so many ways kind of denigrated and belittled the party [MFDP] that
he had been a part of for not being so political astute, you know. So,
the ones who left Mississippi was highly pissed off and felt sold out.
If they were going to stay [in Mississippi] then there was going to be a
split working against what Guyot and Aaron Henry and so forth had
accepted and were going to sell the rest of the leadership of MFDP.
That's an important piece to add to this.
Bruce: This was after the election on Johnson in November? So
after that, Guyot continued to move the MFDP in the direction of the
regular Democratic Party?
Mike: I think all the way into '65, it was my recollection.
Jean: It's pretty much what I've heard.
Wazir: After school was out at Tuskegee [summer of '65, after the
Selma to Montgomery March], I went back to Mississippi. And Guyot, Miss
Devine, Victoria Gray, and Hazel Palmer and all of them people were
still moving with the MFDP. And they had representations with, they had
key places back in Southern Mississippi, McComb, the Delta, Greenwood,
Greenville, Clarksdale. I didn't know what was happening at the time but
there was a plan to bring this thing about, [merging with the regular
Democratic Party]
But what I did, I came back in Mississippi, I organized what is called
the Community Cultural Revival Program, because what I noticed in the
Movement was Black people, churches and all that, had alienated people
from their own culture, blues and jazz, everything. And so I found that
there was a lot of those people of the era of John Lee Hooker and those
kind of people were still around. We knew them guys, we played with
them, and before he passed away I thought he should be showcased. That's
basically how the Delta Blues Festival got started.
[
Wazir: In Selma we were having mass meetings and all that at the
churches there, and Dr. King helped us. SCLC was there. Began, from what
I can remember, in the late fall of 64 and then right on through.
Malcolm X came to the [Tuskegee] Lyceum program to
speak, —
Jean: That was early '65.
Wazir: Then somebody in SNCC wanted him to come on down to Selma. And he
was met there, Malcolm was met by [SCLC's] Andrew Young and a few other
of Martin's lieutenants, who just said, "Look, we're trying to do a
certain thing here and whatever you're going to
say, — your presence even, — is going to
kind of mess up whatever we're doing." They didn't say "mess up," but
you know, it's going to interfere. And I wasn't in Selma that weekend, I
don't know how they did that, but somehow, Malcolm agreed not to speak
there.
Bruce: No, he did speak. He addressed the mass meeting at Brown
Chapel. King was still in jail, but he met with Correta King.
Wazir: Malcolm didn't come to be disagreeable. He'd come to cooperate,
he'd come to be of any service that helped. That's the gist I got from
whoever told me this. And so, he went on and spoke.
Hardy: I was driving through Birmingham [a couple of weeks later] going
somewhere, maybe I was going to Selma, but that's when I heard on the
car radio that Malcolm had been killed. It was a Sunday afternoon I
believe.
Wazir: Whenever they had the meeting at the Audubon. It's on a Sunday,
that's right. On a Sunday.
[
Hardy: In and around that time was when Jimmie Lee Jackson was killed,
right?
Wazir: Jimmie was killed shortly after, and I know from that point,
there was no going back. Things got hot. In Selma, and in outlying
collateral areas of Alabama. Because there was enough organizing to
start reaching out into what Bevel and them had talked about, [Selma]
became a hub. I don't know whether they was trying to follow a script or
not, but it was just natural for it to become the hub.
[In Selma, SNCC] had contact with previous organizers being there from
Prathia Hall on up through John Love and then Silas Norman and so on.
There were places people could stay. Lots of places, and [we] had a big
old house, there was a big house, that would hold a whole lot of people.
And that's where we would stay when we came down from Tuskegee on the
weekends.
One thing that comes to mind, I don't know what the time frame was
between the time that Malcolm came and Jackson got killed. Because we'd
be cramming so much activity into each day or week during that time, but
I do know things just got to rolling and just one thing after the other,
one thing after the other, and we went down to Montgomery, in early
Spring.
The next thing you know, SCLC and all were talking about marching to
Montgomery already. It seems that the concentration of the organizers in
Alabama was not negative, you know. It some how or other, we all worked
together.
Don: And at that point SCLC called for something other than organizing
the community, but the big marches, demonstrations that would attract
the cameras and would bring about that kind of attention that would make
up for some of the lag that had been going on. At that point, the
question of SNCC joining with SCLC in march #1 ["Bloody Sunday"] was a
big topic.
And the whole thing with the priests and all of that is going on at the
same time. And then the decision is made to do the 1st march [to
Montgomery]. Nobody seriously expected to get past the bridge. That
surely Clark would block it, but nobody really believing that he would
attack. Especially with all the cameras there. Even Clark. Nobody
believed it.
Bruce: Right, everyone expected the marchers would be arrested as had
been the case on the previous marches to the Courthouse.
Don: Okay, This is going to be one of [our] great
discussions, — like MFDP was, — that goes
on for months. But you're going to have a lot of trouble writing this
one up because you have to break it down into the four units without
which nothing makes sense. There's the pre-March 1. There's March 1
[Bloody Sunday]. March 2 [Turn-Around Tuesday]. And March 3 [March to
Montgomery]. Unless you talk within each category you can't figure out
what happened.
[
[
Wazir: Because of [President] Johnson and [Attorney General] Robert
Kennedy talking to [King] that day, that's why he wasn't there in the
first place to lead the march. The people had packed their things and
had their little bedrolls and everything, ready to march to Montgomery,
the first time. And Martin didn't come. John Lewis was in Atlanta. And
he says: "Martin will come." John flew over so he could get there and be
in solidarity with the Selma people, so that they wouldn't get
discouraged.
Chude: I have a question? Suppose I'm a local person. You're organizing
me to go on this march [Bloody Sunday]. Do I know that I'm risking my
life and my body for a national thing?
Bruce: Yes.
Don: No.
Bruce: Yes. Look, Bevel and them talked about creating a national crisis
that would bring about a voting, a voting rights act with teeth in it.
And they said that in the mass meetings. The MCHR doctor gave the
marchers instructions on what to do if they were tear-gassed. And you
could not live in Selma without knowing that you were putting your body
on the line, your life on the line, to march out against Jim Clark after
Wallace had publicly pronounced the march "illegal" and ordered that the
cops halt it.
[
Don: You see, all of this is based upon nobody dreaming what Jim Clark
was going to do in front of the television cameras which changed the
entire dynamic of civil rights. Once that footage...
Bruce: Well, I think that they [SCLC] went into Selma because they
did expect that Clark would do something like that.
Don: Not like that.
Hardy: I think you're right, but we got to place this thing in the
social context of what happened. Because I didn't know until the day
later they kept showing it [Bloody Sunday] on the news. Because we [SNCC
staff in Mississippi] didn't know, we didn't see it. We just heard
they'd been beat up. But you got to understand what happened. This was
placed on the American people's dinner table on that Sunday afternoon
news. And it looked horrendous. Horses and shit riding over people...
Don: Cops on horseback with clubs knocking down priests and nuns.
Hardy: And beating John Lewis in the head and all that kind of stuff.
Don: Nobody cared about John Lewis at that point. (laughter) It was the
priests and nuns.
Hardy: But what I'm saying is that created, — you're
right in the sense that that created a kind of national thing around
this. That forced people to say, "This is out of control." This would
probably be analogous to the firehoses in Birmingham in '63. That's what
it would be analogous to. I mean, you just cannot believe this shit.
Jean: From what I experienced, — well I always thought
Selma was an accident, — to tell you the truth. Not the
early organizing, but I just thought the whole Selma events, and then
the Selma march, was an accident. I mean nobody knew what would happen
if they were allowed to cross the bridge. It was weird from my
viewpoint, and I can get into that later. But SNCC did not seem prepared
at all to me, and actually really seemed resistant.
And the hard-core field organizers were not happy with James Forman
when Forman put out that call to all field staff to come into Alabama.
[Later] when the students at Tuskegee got jammed and had to face the
horses, and the mob police, and then somebody sends out the call. Now I
assumed it was Forman just because when they got there, when the
Mississippi staff got to Montgomery, they were truly pissed. They were
outraged! Outraged at Forman for pulling them out [of Mississippi] when
John [Lewis] had never had any authority to be in the [Bloody Sunday]
march in the first place. So he got beat up and now everybody's got
to, — They were not pleased with that.
Wazir: Yes.
Hardy: I was a part of that. Here's what happened. We were having a
statewide meeting of SNCC field organizers in Jackson [MS]. And it was
on the weekend. And oh, about 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon, somebody
came into the meeting and said, "They've been beat up in Selma."
And then there was a whole discussion about should we go or not. And I
would say by 5:00 or 6:00 in the afternoon, we were heading for Alabama
and we wind up not even going back to our projects. We wind up going to
Selma. That's how I got to Selma. And it must have been at least 3 or 4
carloads of us or more. And we went to Alabama and we pulled in that
night, it took maybe a four-hour drive.
So as a consequence for SNCC, — I don't know about SCLC,
I don't know nothing about it, — but for SNCC it also
begins to create the split. Because Carmichael was pissed. We who drove
over to Mississippi [were all pissed]. This is the beginning of the
split between the Carmichael faction and John Lewis. Because as I
remember, John was not at the meeting of SNCC in Jackson.
Bruce: No he'd been on the march. He was in the hospital.
Hardy: He was in the march, he was in the hospital. And part of that
whole discussion [in Jackson] was, "Oh they're doing that shit again,
why are we over there, why are we going over there? They're marching,
they're going to do the kind of thing of TV coverage, and then they're
going to leave." That was the discussion. And then we went anyway. I
don't know if we voted or what, but everybody went.
Bruce: Well, that's what Movement people do.
Hardy: And we were just kind of laying around there. We were
hanging around Brown Chapel, and our argument was that we were going to
go across that bridge again. And there was a big debate, and we led two
little marches [from Brown Chapel], we would start off and march,
marched about four or five blocks and then they'd call us back, and it
was all being negotiated behind the scene, and we were kind of pissed.
We were having marches around the neighborhood. We were marching, we
were later marching around Brown Chapel, because the projects are right
across the street, and we went through the projects and grabbed some
people, we just didn't go to the bridge.
Bruce: Well, you tried and were blocked. There were several times
when we tried to march out of the projects, ...
Hardy: You're right...
Bruce: ... and a whole caravan of State Trooper cars, 20 or 30 of
them, each filled with Troopers, would come screaming with their sirens
to block us off, and they would jump out, and then we'd try to march a
different direction.
Hardy: That was the first and only time I think I've seen Martin
Luther King in the South when he actually came to Brown Chapel that
night.
[
Hardy: Here's what I remember. We have to understand who [Judge] Frank
Johnson was. He was a southern liberal.
Don: They bombed his father's home.
Hardy: Yeah, he was the son of a liberal. And he had been supported by
groups like the Alabama Democratic Conference, and all those groups.
Which was the base, interestingly enough, of E.D. Nixon [in Montgomery]
and people like that. So Johnson was the person that all the earlier
Black people, — before King got
there, — went through.
Don: He was the best federal Judge in the entire South on
integration. Then he switched over to be the most anti-Black-militant
judge in the entire zone, and he's the one that caused Dr. King the
enormous crisis of the 2nd march [Turn-Around Tuesday] when he issued an
injunction against them which was outrageous even among the racist
judges. So the fact that somebody would be good on the segregation line
does not mean they have the same feelings when it came to Black
militancy. And those are the battles that went on all the way through.
Hardy: There's a whole other set of people that's also playing a
role in this thing that we at least ought to mention was there, that we
don't know about. I bet you Virginia Durr was involved in that, I bet
you Clifford Durr was involved in that, all those people.
Mike: [Judge Johnson] was an Eisenhower appointee wasn't he?
Don: That's where Johnson's power came from, because he had this
integrationist label, that everybody trusted him. But as soon as Black
militancy came in he just turned around 180 degrees. I'd be happy to
tell what he did to Jim Forman, and what he did to me, and a bunch of
other people.
Bruce: What was his relationship to [Governor] Wallace?
Don: He was Wallace's greatest enemy. He grew up in Winston
County, almost at the tip of North Alabama. Which was a place
where there was infertile soil and therefore no use to have
slaves. And it refused to secede [from the Union] and they
actually fought for the union [in the Civil War].
Judge Johnson's father was elected to the state legislature as
the only Republican, — remember the Republicans
were the good guys at that point, — the only
Republican in the state legislature. Johnson worked for the
Eisenhower campaign, and then Eisenhower eventually appointed him
the federal district judge in Montgomery three weeks before the
Montgomery bus boycott began.
So all these things are coming together at the same time. He
became the most prominent de-segregationist judge in the United States.
He was on the three-judge panel that declared the Montgomery Bus
segregation unconstitutional, bringing an end to that. He de-segregated
107 school systems, buses, bus terminals, parks, museums, mental
institutions, jails, prisons, airports, libraries, I mean he was the
ultimate integration judge. He was on the cover of Time Magazine,
he was the great white hope...
Jean: Yeah, he was a liberal.
Don: He was the absolute dream judge in the South. And he paid a price
for it. His mother's home was bombed. He and his wife were socially
ostracized, they never would invite them to community gatherings. He
used to teach Sunday school but nobody would come. He stopped going to
church when people would move to a different pew the minute he sat down.
His son committed suicide around the enormous harassment that he went
through in the school systems. And after his son died, he was quoted,
"How would you like to grow up with a father as controversial as Frank
Johnson?"
So he had a lot going for him. But he was adamant. He believed in the
NAACP Legal Defense Fund approach. He believed you do it lawfully, you
do it in stages through the courts. And he was obsessed against anybody
that dealt with civil disobedience. Dr. King was really his greatest
enemy until SNCC surpassed King in [Johnson]'s mind.
Bruce: By civil disobedience you mean any kind of direct action,
not necessarily...
Don: Any breaking of the law. If you broke the law to accomplish
an end, it didn't matter to him that the law was illegal,
unconstitutional, ...
Bruce: But picketing was against the law. Any kind of direct
action was against the law.
Don: And he slapped down anybody who was convicted of it when the
various appeals went into the federal system. In fact I reversed him on
a number of occasions where he was just blinded to the
facts, — violating the law, that's all that mattered [to
Johnson]. And to reverse Johnson was quite a thing, given his
reputation. But the Fifth Circuit was far more sophisticated than he was
and they knew the difference.
He was totally, — he thought that Dr. King was a
menace to the future of the South becoming an integrated place.
That [King] would bring back the torrent of bad feelings, by
instead of going slow and very NAACP-style legally through the
courts. Remember, Thurgood [Marshall], one of the most courageous
people I think, — I can't imagine going down [to
the South] in the 30s and 40s and doing what he did. I just can't
imagine it. But he never did anything illegal. And this was the
credo [of Judge Johnson].
And so Johnson, — I know when SNCC came along, and
Black Power, — Johnson was just livid. And that
set the framework for all that happened on the Selma march
[because it] occurred within his jurisdiction. And all the federal
relief has to come from him.
When the Forman cases came on a year and a half later, he
still, — Forman had made a statement attacking Johnson. I
asked Johnson to recuse himself. He refused. He said, "There's nothing
personal about me, this is about a federal court order." And then he
just ignored what we pled and we ended up reversing it. And finally,
remember [NAME WITHHELD]?
Jimmy: Do I!
Don: By this time I was barred from the Alabama state courts, but
I still had the federal courts. And Attorney [NAME WITHHELD]
introduced me the first time I was before Johnson, which you have
to do.
Jimmy: [NAME WITHHELD] was the most horrible lawyer I've ever
seen.
Don: Most horrible. So we go before Johnson, and [NAME WITHHELD]
introduces me and says he's a lawyer and he's admitted in the
Fifth Circuit and here's the whole list. And Johnson says happy
to have you, welcome you to participate in my court, all over
with, perfunctory.
About three weeks later, I get an order to show cause why I
should not be cited for contempt or prosecuted or barred from the
federal system because of having committed fraud in my
representations to Judge Johnson. Of course, I had no idea what
they were talking about, nothing had been said as far as I could
see, it was just a "hello." (laughing)
I called [NAME WITHHELD] and I say, "Do you know anything about
this?" And he wasn't going to tell me. He said, "I've been told
not to discuss this."
So we get before Judge Johnson and he says, "I have here a record that I
got from Washington DC that says you are not admitted to practice before
the U.S. Supreme Court." Now, if I wanted to be admitted, I just send
them $5 and I'd be admitted. That's all it takes. (laughing)
But he now claims that I represented to him that I am authorized to
practice before the Supreme Court and [NAME WITHHELD] says, "Yeah,
that's what I heard, that's what I heard." And on the strength of that,
they hold me in contempt, charge me with fraud on a federal court and
start potential criminal proceedings against me in Alabama, and where
I'm licensed in New York. So I mean they throw the whole bucket and it
was Johnson's attempt to get me out of the federal system as well as the
state system.
Bruce: Because you were representing SNCC?
Don: That's right. That was a big thing. Kuntsler and Kinoy and
Tony Amsterdam, they all wrote this great stuff [for me], and
finally we got passed that. But [Johnson] did nothing short of
framing me, — overtly. For him to make a mistake
like that, it's too dramatic. The words "U.S. Supreme Court,"
don't come loosely from your lips. And like I said, anytime I've
gone to argue a case at the Supreme Court I send them the $5 and
get my certificate. But there was no reason to have one if wasn't
arguing a case there. That was Johnson. (laughing)
[
Bruce: People call this march, "Turn-Around Tuesday." To distinguish it
from "Bloody Sunday."
Don: There's already been a temporary injunction, then there's the
hearing, Johnson makes the so-called preliminary
injunction, — no marching allowed in the name of peace
and tranquility, — and King apparently had conversations
with one of the federal marshals, which is quoted in a number of places,
where he said something about that he would stop at the other side of
the bridge and not attempt to go past Clark's troops.
Hardy: And that's where [the marches] were stopped. It didn't stop on
the top of the bridge it stopped near the step off of the bridge.
Don: But [King] didn't communicate to anyone [that the march was going
to turn around].
Hardy: We didn't know
Jean: That was devastating.
Don: And as a result, all the people marched across the bridge, gearing
up for this violent, — maybe you were going to die
situation, but we're willing to sacrifice our lives to do it, not
knowing that it was already prearranged...
Hardy: Right. But it wasn't a complete march all the way across
that bridge. I was on that one. We marched to about I don't know, within
a few feet from the end [of the bridge], but we didn't [completely]
cross the bridge.
Bruce: The reason the march stopped where it did, and the reason the
Bloody Sunday march was attacked where it was, is that Selma City had
police jurisdiction up to the other side of the Alabama River. And as
soon as you were one step over the Alabama River you were in Dallas
County, which is Jim Clark's territory. And the injunction had something
to do with you could march in the city, but you couldn't march on the
county highway, and the moment you crossed over the Alabama River you
were out of the city, onto the highway, and into Clark's jurisdiction.
Hardy: When we walked over that bridge on that day we were
getting ready to go, everybody was getting ready for the fight. We were
waiting for the shit to get on. We were ready for the rumble. Somebody
walks up to King, they kneel down at the front of the march on the down-
slope of the bridge. They kneel down and somebody must have whispered in
Martin Luther King's ear and they turned around and said we're going to
go back to the church.
Going into a confrontation the second day wouldn't have being nothing
new for us in SNCC in Mississippi. It wouldn't have been a big thing. I
mean, because we had gone through that shit all along. We would go and
get beat, and then we would go back. I mean, I got arrested, drug out, a
lot of people got arrested and drug out, and got beat. None of us,
including myself, had experience working with King. SCLC wasn't big in
Mississippi, as compared to COFO, and they weren't a big part of COFO,
but we knew who they were.
The [people were saying], "Let's go, let's go," and [the leadership]
were saying, "No." And then we heard about that we weren't going [to
continue towards Montgomery]. And people were like just standing around.
We were mad, we were all ready to get our ass kicked that afternoon. And
we marched back to Brown Chapel. It was not only SNCC people. There were
ministers, some Catholic priests, they were mad because they thought
they were going to be martyrs for the cause that morning.
Don: And they were facing banishment, all of them.
Bruce: All right, I was on that, that was basically the first thing I
did for SCLC was to be on that march.
Jean: Did you know that that march wasn't going to happen?
Bruce: No. I did not know that there had been a plan to turn
around. And I was furious when we turned around because I geared up to
face...
Wazir: We didn't know
Bruce: We didn't know. And everybody was furious, and the
criticism of King and the top SCLC people for not telling people why
this decision had been made in advance is valid criticism that I
completely agree with. But, later on, after talking with SCLC people I
understood why they had made the decision [to turn around]. And I agreed
with them, even though at the time I was furious. Yes, they should have
told the people we were going to do that march and turn around and they
should have told them why. But the decision itself to turn around was
right.
Chude: Tell the people before hand.
Bruce: Yes, before hand. In the church. The reason as it was explained
to me, — and I think it's credible, — is
that from SCLC's point of view, from King's point of view, the whole
point of Selma was to get a voting rights act passed and to get it
enforced. And they had counted up the votes in the Senate and without
Republican support, they could not pass it. And the key to Republican
support was Senator Dirksen, — I forget what state he's
from, the Republican senator Dirksen...
Hardy: Illinois, I think.
Bruce: Right, without Dirksen from Illinois and other Republican
Senators, the bill could not pass.
[
Bruce: SCLC knew they had a majority, in the Senate, but
they had to get two-thirds to end the filabuster. And they
knew that to get those 66 votes they had to have Republican
support, — particularly Dirksen, a staunch "law & order"
Republican, — which they could not get if they were in a
position of violating a federal injunction and being federal law
breakers. It was hard enough to get Dirksen to stomach the fact that
they had violated local Alabama segregation laws, but they [the
Republicans] would balk [if King] violated a federal judge's order.
Don: Particularly this federal judge.
Bruce: Particularly this federal judge. And they knew they could not get
a cloture vote to end the filabuster if the southern white Democrats
could portray them as lawless, — violating not just
Alabama law, but federal law.
Don: A bona fide law.
Bruce: Second, passing the voting rights act was just the first
step because you then had to get it enforced, and the people who would
have to enforce the federal voting rights act were the federal judges.
And if you piss off the federal judges by slapping them in the face by
violating their sacred [injunction], — and they're a
bunch of arrogant sons of bitches, — then SCLC was afraid
that the voting rights act would just languish like a lot of other laws
that were never enforced.
And third, they knew that that injunction [against marching to
Montgomery] was going to be lifted, — that it was a
temporary injunction, — and that they would [eventually]
get the permission to march.
Don: Bruce, I have a question for you. What if Johnson had issued
a final injunction that [any march to Montgomery] is against public
safety and there will be no march, period. What would have happened
then?
Bruce: Well, a final order saying you can not march or petition
for redress of grievances, [King] might have been willing to violate
that, having first gone through and exhausted the process. I don't know,
I don't think anyone can know. But I think they would have
made the decision from the perspective of what they thought was the best
strategy to get the bill passed.
Don: So do you think it is possible that [on Turn-Around-Tuesday]
they thought it was better not to defy [the injunction] because they
expect [the march] will happen in a week or two, but if it was
absolutely not going to happen, it would politically be difficult not to
do it?
Bruce: I think so. I think if that Judge Johnson had said there
will never, ever be a march to Montgomery, I think the pressure on SCLC
leadership to defy that federal injunction would have been unbearable.
Jean: And that pressure would have been in Selma? Where would it
have been from?
Bruce: From the people in Selma, and from all the people who had
come to Selma. But from everything I've read, SCLC had been assured that
there was no chance that Judge Johnson would make that kind of ruling.
My understanding is that they had been assured by
everybody, — including representatives speaking on behalf
of Judge Johnson, — that there was no chance that he
would flat-out rule against any kind of march. That's where this whole
idea of the "done deal" came in, they knew Johnson was going to
eventually allow a march. Or they were convinced of it. And that's what
they say in the books.
So those were SCLC's reasons for doing turning around the march that
Tuesday. But they didn't tell anyone.
Wazir: And that was their mistake
Bruce: Not telling people, that was the mistake.
Don: Another thing that's rather significant is Dr. King then had to
face contempt charges before Judge Johnson. The reason there was an
injunction against the second march [Turn-Around Tuesday], was that SCLC
had asked for an injunction protecting the marchers [and forcing the
police to allow the march to Montgomery]. Johnson who would always do
anything he could to hurt a civil disobedient or militant movement,
turned it around and stopped all activity.
[Because of that] when Dr. King did march [on Tuesday], there was an
agreement between him and Justice Dept people that he would march only
up to [the end of the bridge] where he stopped. Nonetheless, the next
day [Wednesday], Judge Johnson cited him for contempt and ordered him to
come to a hearing. The reason Johnson did that is he wanted Dr. King to
be forced to go on the record and talk about the arrangement that had
been made with the Justice Dept so as to put a real break between [King]
and the other movements. And then once King told Johnson what he already
knew [about the agreement], then Johnson dismissed the charges and
declared him not in contempt.
Jean: This was trying to discredit [King].
Don: Yes, discredit him, and also separate him from SNCC and the other
groups, knowing the reaction that did occur would occur because Johnson
was politically sophisticated. So Judge Johnson was really the puppeteer
who was calling a great deal of the shots while all this was going on.
King & SNCC [had to face Judge Johnson's] enormous reputation. You
talked, Bruce, about the problems of violating a federal injunction at a
time when you're asking the Congress to pass the voting rights act. Dr.
King would have had to violate an injunction, — a federal
injunction of Frank Johnson, — and that was a bigger
problem because then you're really dead if you're going against this guy
who is the ultimate "good guy."
And so [Johnson] set this trap for Dr. King by kind of nudging him into
"There's a way of getting around this, untill we have some time," and
then the moment it happened, citing him for contempt so he'd be forced
to go public with the very information that would cause this great split
between the movements.
Bruce: Sort of a liberal CoIntelPro.
Don: That's right. That's right. Very well said.
[
As Civil Rights Director for the National Student Association, I
accompanied a contingent of staffers from the Commission on Religion and
Race of the National Council of Churches to Selma immediately after
Bloody Sunday. We spent the night at a motel in Atlanta before flying to
Montgomery and driving to Selma the next day. Part of this group was a
Wall Street lawyer who served as legal counsel to the NCC contingent. To
our astonishment, he explained that NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Inc.
attorney Jack Greenberg had already filed a petition in federal court
for an injunction authorizing Dr. King and others to march across the
Edmund Pettus Bridge and that Judge Frank Johnson had restrained all
such marches until a hearing could be conducted. (Johnson was known for
taking such a deliberate approach.) The attorney observed sadly that he
would have filed the petition just before marching onto the bridge
instead of the day before so Johnson wouldn't have had time to restrain
the march. His analysis depressed everyone in the room.
The next day, in Selma, I waited outside Brown Chapel with hundreds of
other volunteers for a decision on whether we would march. Suddenly, Dr.
King appeared accompanied by Bob Spike, Director of the Commission on
Religion and Race, Jim Farmer, and a few other heavyweights. They had
just finished meeting in a private home to decide what to do. Spike told
me that King had been under tremendous pressure from the White House to
postpone the march, but refused. I happened to be standing right behind
King when LeRoy Collins, former Florida governor and head of the
Community Reconciliation Service, elbowed his way through the crowd and
handed King a piece of paper with a map drawn on it. "If you follow
this," Collins said. "I think you'll be all right."
SCLC put all of the celebrities present — mostly high
ranking church officials — in front and we marched
through the posse and onto the bridge where a phalanx of Alabama Highway
Patrol cars and uniformed officers greeted us. An AHP official announced
that we were violating Judge Johnson's order and told us to leave, but
he granted us a few minutes to conduct a prayer service, so we all knelt
while King prayed aloud. One AHP officer pointed his billy club at a
church official and said, "That one's mine." Then, to our complete
surprise, King turned us around and led us back to Brown Chapel. I
walked off the bridge — in a state of shock and
disappointment like many others — with Jim Forman, Maria
Varela, and Casey Hayden who were wryly amused and disappointed, but not
really surprised. SCLC staff quickly started spinning this retreat at
Brown Chapel because so many marchers — including those
who had never demonstrated before — were upset. (I would
say that about half of those present returned home the next day.) We ate
dinner at a local Holiday Inn side-by-side with a large number of AHP
officers who were also eating there — a surreal
experience if ever there was one. Jim Farmer said, "I would have
marched" while discussing that day's events.
I don't believe there was any kind of understanding between King and the
White House. King was between a rock and a hard place. He couldn't kill
the march before it even started because of the tremendous pressure that
SNCC and those present were focusing on him. (And the whole world was
watching them.) But he didn't want to violate Judge Johnson's
restraining order especially since Johnson was perhaps the most
progressive federal judge in the south. I suspect that King finally
resolved this conflict — and his own
ambivilance — by turning the march around at the last
possible moment when we were all on the bridge. His great failure in
this regard was not making a decision earlier and announcing it at Brown
Chapel before we left. Any back-channel communication and agreement may
have been conducted by Attorney General Katzenbach and Jack Greenberg,
which would explain why Greenberg filed his petition so early. But not
between King and the White House.
[
Bruce: Gwen Patton, who was ...
Wazir: She was President of the Tuskegee student body.
Bruce: She wrote a history of that time (Insurgent Memories), which she sent
us recently and it's now posted on the website. And as I recall, what
she wrote was that Tuesday night, — after Turn-Around
Tuesday," — there was a TIAL meeting and they decided
then to go into Montgomery the next day, Wednesday. That there had been
earlier TIAL meetings planning to go meet the march when it arrived in
Montgomery. But when the Tuesday march turned around is when they
decided to go into Montgomery regardless of whether the Selma march had
arrived or not. People should read her article, it's a really good.
[
Jean: It is, I read it. The first idea [before Bloody Sunday],
was to meet the marchers. To meet them, buoy them up and meet them
halfway coming in to the city, — it was all worked out.
But we knew on Bloody Sunday, by six o'clock, that we were going to
Montgomery [whatever happened in Selma], — we did know
that.
Wazir: At that time [after Turn-Around Tuesday], the students and
us at Tuskegee couldn't take no damn more. There in Tuskegee the general
feeling was that [the Selma] people are going to get totally
discouraged. The leadership, — like Martin and
all, — has deserted them and they even got beat up bad on
the Edmund Pettus Bridge for nothing. And [King] is sitting in Atlanta
contemplating as to whether or not he should march. So we were kind of,
kind of pissed.
My feeling as an organizer was, — knowing how it is after
a while, — you get the momentum of the people in the
community built up. But if you keep doing stuff like that [turning the
march around], it's going to fizzle out and you will have a hard
time, — SNCC and SCLC combined, — a hard
time getting the people in Selma involved [again]. You got them now, and
you got to hold them. That's what I'm saying, that the ante is up. And
so I was able to convince Jean and the other people that we needed to
march. We needed to get students ready to go, we need to go down there
otherwise King wasn't going to ever...
I said [to the TIAL meeting] the night that we were making a final
decision that we must go to Montgomery because the way things had
fizzled out in Selma, "They're [SCLC] going to get those people hurt up
there [in Selma], they drop to their knees and say a prayer and go
back..." And it seemed for a minute that there was not going to be a
march [to Montgomery], that's what it seemed. And the townspeople [of
Selma] they were up in arms, and this cannot be, you can't leave those
people hanging like that because they had put everything on the line in
Selma.
"We need to do something, — what should we do?" And I
suggested that we need to force this march [to Montgomery from Selma].
Somebody's got to do some marching to Montgomery. That's the way we was
feeling about it.
Somebody said: "Well, we should wait to see what Dr. King is going to
do. My argument was, "With all due respect for Dr. King," I said, "we
got to help him with some pressure, because somebody else is talking to
him." And I named LBJ and Robert Kennedy. I said, "We need to go and
pressure to make this march happen, — we need to go
[now]." In other words, we and the other students were really highly
peeved about that kneel-down. We [had been planning on] going there
anyway [to meet the march from Selma], but now we [had] an added reason
to go to Montgomery even before they started marching [from Selma],
because it looked like it wasn't going to happen.
[
Bruce: I think opening up a second front in Montgomery made
brilliant strategic sense for all but one of the reasons you said. And
for a reason you didn't say, — which is it forced
[Governor] Wallace and Colonel Lingo to split the state troopers who had
been totally concentrated, — every state trooper in
Alabama had been concentrated in Selma, — and now they
had to split them between Montgomery and Selma. Which meant that their
forces were halved. And it also meant that the jails which had been
filling up all over Alabama from Selma and Marion and Wilcox County, now
had more people flooding into them from Tuskegee and Alabama State.
The one place where I disagree, — and I've said this
before, — King always intended to march. I
think what the TIAL students did was great, and I know you felt that you
needed to do that because he was vacillating, but I don't think that's
true. I think that SCLC always intended to march to Montgomery after
Bloody Sunday. But King felt he had to wait until the federal injunction
against marching was lifted.
Hardy: The key here, I think, is what happened in that Tuesday
night meeting between SCLC and SNCC [after the march turned around],
over at the funeral home, up there above the funeral home. There was a
knock down, drag out fight, and it had to do with strategy. The big
[SNCC] muckety-mucks, — Carmichael, Jim
Forman,, — John's in the hospital, — all
of them were upstairs having this meeting on the 2nd floor with Bevel
and Andy Young [of SCLC]. Now I don't know what they were sharing,
because I wasn't privileged to being in the room [but] there was a
tremendous argument.
Hardy: They met for hours above this funeral home. Part of the
argument, I think, might have been the difference between SCLC and SNCC
about should we organize the city or should we march? The rest of us
were looking for liquor. Most of us was hanging out, we just wind up in
Selma, and the shit was going on, and we weren't invited to the meeting
upstairs, and we didn't go, and we were hanging out outside. But it was
a raucous meeting.
Mike: So do you know whether Bevel was up in that meeting?
Hardy: I don't know for sure.
Mike: I think that's an important piece of information because I
think if Bevel had been up there he would have been for doing whatever.
I mean he was kind of a crazy man in terms of direct action and stuff.
(laughter)
Hardy. I think there's another important point here, there was a
different strategy of how we sell things. A key part of SNCC's strategy
coming out of Mississippi was that local people had to have the right to
march whenever they wanted, to march or do whatever they wanted to do.
And a [part of] the discussion around that week was waiting for all
those people who were going to come from all over, the TV cameras and
all that shit.
But we didn't like it, because our position was, — we
[would be] out there leading a march into Holly Springs [MS] or
something, we didn't have no TV, we didn't have nothing. We just had
straight-out local folk confronting the power structure. When we marched
down the street, we never had a TV camera. The best thing we hoped for
was one reporter coming from the Memphis Commercial Appeal.
Otherwise we got our ass kicked. All right? And we were being asked, we
had been drug into something that we didn't want to do in the first
place, nobody asked us to come, we went, and somebody called us and told
us to go over there. We had been drug into something, so our whole mind
set was "Okay, let's get it on." And we marched to the bridge and we
didn't go.
So what I'm saying is that if there's something missing in this
conversation, we need to know more about what was discussed at the
meeting between Andy and Jim Forman and those people the night that the
young man was killed. Because there was a shouting match, it was a
argument we could hear from downstairs.
And then about 10:00pm somebody got hurt [Rev. Reeb], somebody had been
out in the street and I think somebody got beat up or killed or
something. That beating gotta be the one thing that I think brought that
meeting to an end that particular night. Because people were at each
others throats, — they weren't coming out of the room. We
was all sitting around waiting, somebody says, "Hey man, they beat the
shit out of some minister." And we went up and told them that this guy
had been killed out here. And Jim [Forman] came and said, "We got to go
to Montgomery." But I don't think Forman would have just jumped up and
said, "Let's go to Montgomery," unless he knew that something else was
going on.
The SNCC field organizers out of Mississippi, we were just kind of
waiting for, — "We're here now, what the hell do we do?"
We had a set of people who in fact were sitting around to a certain
extent grumping and growling and talking to Jim "Hey, man, what the hell
is going on. Why the hell are we over here, we're not doing to do this
shit." And nobody ever told us anything. And we were just like soldiers
that were told get ready to go to Montgomery. And we're going to open up
a new front. By Forman. So the idea of what the strategy was, was never
shared.
And so I think what happened was that Forman all of a sudden found
himself with ...
Jean: An opportunity!
Hardy: An opportunity to use. Forman found himself with an
opportunity. If he knew about the TIAL students coming to Montgomery, he
had these veterans of a whole summer of fights and wars and conflicts
from all over [Mississippi], — pissed off because we [had
been ordered to Selma] in the first place, — and then we
get there and we were so damned arrogant we said that, "There they go
again, they're getting in trouble, they're calling for us to help." That
was the big thing we were saying, you know? And we didn't want to go.
But between eight cars we all drove to Alabama.
I'm going to tell you something that confuses all of this. [This was]
the beginning of the fracture in SNCC between the Carmichael faction and
the John Lewis faction. John Lewis had gotten beaten up, and he had been
our leader, and he had been beaten up, — and as I
remember, he was still in the hospital, right? [Agreement]
And so the argument was, here you got these people from the field
who had been going up against the cops all the time. And we had
by this time ingrained in us this whole notion, "That the people
have to be able to the march."
And when we get there, there is a high-level political debate going on
somewhere, saying they're compromising about the voting right bill. I
had never even heard us discuss the voting right bill. There hadn't been
any discussion I had been in Mississippi, about this voting right bill.
Now it might be true, but it wasn't being discussed.
Wazir: No it wasn't.
Hardy: So when we came in there, that might have been, that
argument that night had to have been around the strategy that you
[Bruce] were talking about. And I can just see Jim [Forman] screaming
and hollering and shit. And I can easily see Jim saying, "Okay, we're
going to out-flank them," and he found an opportunity with the students
coming to [Montgomery], and he grabbed about ten of us or whoever it
was, and said, "Let's go to Montgomery."
Mike: Plus if SNCC went to Montgomery [from Selma], you then
would have no fight with the SCLC people, because they're all
preoccupied with the march in Selma. So it makes a great deal of sense
that you avoid being in a public internal fight with King and the SCLC
entourage, and you go to where your natural constituency is, students
and young people in Montgomery. Plus you can use it to leverage the
people over in Selma that they better do something, or the credit and
the leadership is all going to shift over to SNCC.
Betita: I just want to ask, why do you think Jim Forman thought
it was time to build a second front? Because it seemed like there was a
whole lot of stuff going against that. Do you think he was wrong?
Wazir: I don't know, like Jean said, we didn't even know they
[SNCC] were coming. We had no idea that SNCC was going to be connected
any kind of way, it was a TIAL decision. We made to go, 1500 strong, to
force King, to give him leverage to break with Robert Kennedy and LBJ
and say, "I have to march," and he finally did say we have to march.
Bruce: I think the strategic conflict actually started back in
the previous October and November, because after the Atlantic City
challenge in August, SNCC then developed a strategy of the Congressional
Challenge.
Hardy: Right, that's what we worked on.
Bruce: Right, and that was SNCC's focus. SCLC developed the
strategy of the Voting Rights Bill, and that was SCLC's focus. And there
were arguments between SCLC leaders and SNCC leaders all that November,
December, January, because Forman wanted to have SCLC support the
Congressional Challenge and I'm sure that SCLC wanted SNCC to support
the Voting Rights Bill, — there were two rival
strategies, both focused on Washington in the sense of doing something
on the national government, and both with a different strategy. So I'm
sure that fed into the fight above the funeral parlor on Turn Around
Tuesday.
Hardy: You may be right, because Frank Sirocco was to
represent, — he came to California to talk to Congressman
John Maltz, who was the Democratic whip in the United States Congress at
the time, and we had all these liberals who were going to support the
Congressional Challenge, because that whole fall and that winter all we
did in Mississippi was work on the challenges.
Bruce: The testimony ....
Hardy: The testimony, and the witnesses....
Bruce: Maybe that's why you didn't hear anything about the Voting
Rights Bill, because you were doing this other strategy.
Wazir: In this negotiation with LBJ, [SCLC] didn't want to share
a space at the table with COFO that we still were a part of, and bring
them to the Goddamn table when they're making this deal. And that's the
cause of this problem.
Bruce: Why do you think they felt that? Why did they not want to
have COFO and SNCC at the table when they made the deal?
Wazir: The deal that nobody knew about, that's the Voter Rights
[bill], that's what I'm talking about. There were reputable people from
SNCC that could have been brought to that table. There was Bob Moses,
and there's the Chairman, John Lewis, and Forman, that should have been
at the table when that deal was being cut.
That they were going to work on passing a civil rights bill, [President]
Johnson that's what I'm talking about. The one that they're [SCLC] is
trying to protect, — so they say, — the
one you said they trying to protect. I think they just didn't want
nobody else to have that credit for making that deal with LBJ behind the
scenes. The way preachers operate.
And another element is that class thing coming in, the class of
preachers, they didn't think enough of anybody that should be... We're
talking about a movement, a civil rights movement with other civil
rights organizations. They didn't even have the right to go there by
themselves and talk to LBJ about a Voting Rights Act without talking
to...
Bruce: My understanding is that they did not have a deal on the
table with LBJ until after Bloody Sunday.
Wazir: Okay.
Bruce: And that in October and November and December, they did
meet with SNCC about the voting rights bill strategy, which they saw was
in opposition to President Johnson, because LBJ, after the Civil Rights
Act of 1964, had told SCLC, SNCC, CORE, NAACP, everybody, that that was
enough civil rights bills for a while, that we needed a "cooling off"
period and that there would be no civil rights legislation in 1965. So
SCLC designed the Selma campaign to put pressure on LBJ. And they met
with SNCC, and SNCC said our strategy is the Congressional Challenge.
And they fought about it. So SNCC did know about this [the Selma
campaign].
Wazir: Well I didn't know about this, all of SNCC didn't know
about it.
Bruce: I have read in the books that they say that SCLC met with
Worth Long, they met with John Lewis, they met with Forman, and they had
arguments over should we do the Congressional strategy or should we do
the Voting Rights Bill strategy.
Wazir: But they don't say anything to us about it. You sure don't
get much kudos from the SNCC staff if you don't... See, one of the
things you have to understand about Jim [Forman], what frustrated Jim
all of his life to be working [within SNCC]. You couldn't make a
decision for SNCC like that, you couldn't do that, and be successful.
You could get some stuff thrown back in your face.
Bruce: Did Forman tell SNCC when they were talking about the
Congressional Challenge, did he say that there's this other strategy
that's being proposed, and we're disagreeing with it?
Wazir: No, because he couldn't say that because there was a
culture of support for the MFDP, — if MFDP, which was the
local people of Mississippi, wanted a Congressional Challenge, that's
what had to be, that's SNCC with them, that's what had to be.
Bruce: So was that from Guyot or from Forman to have that
Congressional Challenge?
Wazir: It probably wasn't either of them. It probably was from
the people like Fannie Lou Hamer and Victoria Gray, Miss Andy Devine and
Miss Palmer. And a whole host of other women who was strong up in MFDP.
Don: It's a logical extension of the whole...
Jean: Yes, it is. But also this is the first I've ever heard
anybody, anybody in those days, thought that they were in competition
with each other. They don't look to be in competition to me.
Bruce: Who?
Jean: The Voting Rights Act and the Congressional Challenge.
Bruce: They were in competition for resources and energy and
media coverage.
Hardy: What I mean is what you get around Selma, is you get
all these points of view coming together, and it gets nasty, it gets
confusing, and only the historians can figure out and write it up. But I
think it's interesting because what I remember, and what Bruce
remembers, and what you remember, which I didn't know nothing about at
all, that this all came together which makes me think that that must
have been a very long heated argument upstairs, (lots of laughter). I
don't know if anything's been written about that meeting.
Wazir: Of course, this is going to bring it out.
[
Don: And it [the attack on Rev. Reeb] also triggers, eventually the
national surge to Selma.
Bruce: Well Bloody Sunday did that. And it was accelerated by the
killing of Rev. Reeb.
[
Bruce: What I remember happening immediately after Turn-Around
Tuesday was the mass meeting in Brown Chapel the next day. And then we
went out to march again, but the cops blocked the march and stretched a
rope across Sylvan Avenue that people called that the "Berlin Wall." And
that starting 24-hour round-the-clock, people pressing up against that
rope for days and days and days. Sometimes it was
raining, — remember this is early March, and the rain was
cold, — and we had these sheets of plastic that were
really good at keeping the rain off you, except that at random moments
it would dump a waterfall down your back as the water had pooled up on
the plastic.
But people really were there around the clock, — 24
hours, — just, any kind of weather, there was always a
crowd pushing up against the cops, like a vigil but not silent. Singing,
constantly singing, except when someone felt like making a speech at the
cops. And that's the main activity that a lot of the folks flooding into
Selma participated in after the Turn-Around Tuesday march.
During this time, between Turn-Around Tuesday and the march that
actually went to Montgomery, the state troopers, — there
would be four or five of them in a car, — and there would
be like 15 or 20 cars in a caravan. Several times, — the
SNCC people did this a lot, — they would say, "Okay we
got people lined up against the rope, let's get another group of people
to go out in a different direction" [to try to reach downtown with a
march]. They would start to march out of the projects and this whole
caravan of state trooper cars with sirens going would scream up and down
the streets to try and block them. It was like a guerrilla war kind of a
thing.
Meanwhile, what SCLC was doing at that time was moving the marches out
of Selma to the surrounding counties. They'd already done it in Marion,
which was Perry County. I went on one in Wilcox County, the county seat
is Camden. And Camden made Selma look like a big city. (laughing)
We had this march there, and Dorothy Cotton was leading it. Who
as I said before in another context was really denied her place
in history because SCLC tended to put her leadership in a shadow.
But she led this march up against the cops, the horses, the tear
gas. Then we had to retreat to this little church, sort of down
in a swampy area, and people were injured. She led this singing
that was just unbelievable. I'll never forget that.
But that kind of action was going on in all of the surrounding counties.
Demopolis, which was the big city of Marengo County, they had
marches, — brutally, violently attacked marches. And of
course, the Tuskegee students, and Alabama State students, and SNCC
folk, were marching in Montgomery at that time. So that everywhere you
looked this was just a whole time of ferment and boiling and bubbling up
all over the Black Belt of Alabama.
Bruce: Wherever you went [within the Black community in Selma] at
that time, people would give you rides. If they saw you were there for
the Movement, people with cars would say, "You need a ride anywhere?"
The only other place I ever saw spirit like that was in Grenada during
the Grenada Movement.
Jean: I was there for some of [the Berlin Wall vigil]. I can't
remember very well, though. I just remember the mass meetings in
Selma. And since I hadn't been to Mississippi, I was really
struck by how frequent they were, how well attended they were,
how high the energy was, how much singing there was.
It was really my first time to see any of that in the rural South, so it
gave me a sense of what Mississippi must have been like. And it was both
thrilling on the one hand, but very foreign to me. I mean it was new. I
just remember feeling, this, it was just foreign. Everything from the
style of singing, for example. I remember that well, that I hadn't heard
this style of singing before, — ever. But that's a rural
southern style, and so if I hadn't been there, I hadn't been there. So
it was exciting, and a lot of Tuskegee students went to those mass
meetings at the various churches.
Bruce: When you say [the singing] was unique, yeah, it was
absolutely unique, — but I'm not sure it was because it
was rural southern. Yes, it was rural southern, but it was rural
southern in the midst of a mass uprising in a way that maybe Birmingham
and St. Augustine was like that. Maybe Albany, Jackson, a few cities
that really had more than just civil rights workers and Movement
activists doing stuff. When you really had the whole community involved.
What I'm saying is that the singing in Selma and Grenada was different
even from the singing in other, — less
embattled, — rural southern counties.
The excitement, and the understanding, and awareness of the Movement was
so high at that period that when organizers wanted to call a special,
short-notice, mass meeting, there was always kids, — I
mean down to Cheyenne Webb and Rachel West in age who were like 8 and
9 — and older. They were hanging around [Brown Chapel]
and the organizers would say, "All right we need to have a mass meeting
in an hour," and they would start marching around through the [George
Washington Carver] projects singing freedom songs. And people know that
was the signal that a special mass meeting was called.
Jean: I remember Brown Chapel but wasn't there another church?
Jimmy: First Baptist [which] was a good-sized church too.
Bruce: And Brown Chapel was a big church too and had this
balcony, it was packed, it was always packed.
Jimmy: Standing room only.
Bruce: Standing room only, yeah. It was incredible.
Jean: The other thing that struck me was the sense that in the midst of
all of this danger and the terrorism all around us that
people, — I mean local people, — were
having fun. It wasn't that they were unaware that there were nuts in
white robes running around with shotguns, but that it was fun. It was
the place to be. Why would you be anywhere else? (laughing) And that was
all ages, I thought. Which I hadn't expected to see.
Wazir: That was very much the case in the South, especially in
Greenwood [MS]. When Sam Block and I arrived there before any of
the action started [1962], people were partying hardy, you know.
And after things got moving, they never stopped. They would do
what they had to do during the day with the Civil Rights Movement
and stuff, and then those who wasn't in jail, they partied. They
never stopped having a good time. They never were intimidated by
night riders and all that kind of stuff to go and do what we what
they wanted to do. Neither were Sam and I. We walked where we
wanted to go.
But Greenwood was so organized, — there was not
one block that we couldn't have, — it was like
guerrilla war, we could stop anywhere and duck out of sight, go
into somebody's house. At every block in the Black neighborhood.
So that's one thing that kept us alive 'cause they would see us
at night and the cops would think it was an opportunity to get
us, speed up and try to turn around. When they turned around we'd
be watching out a window somewhere, see them come back to try to
find us.
Jimmy: Yeah, but what about people like Greene, George Greene and
Freddy Greene? Their house getting blown up all the time.
Wazir: Oh, yeah, that happened, that really kicked off a
big, — when they went directly at, in the open, after a
local person, a local person who had standing in the community, like Mr.
Greene and his house. He had leadership. He was part of the Elks, the
Shriners, and all that kind of stuff. When they did
that, — it was in February of
'63, — that's when things just started blowing apart,
things just crescendoed, and never did stop. And I think something like
that happened in Selma too, you know. They went after, they went after
somebody trying to stop things, and they went after the wrong person at
the wrong time, and things just bloomed.
Chude: I have a question. Which is that you
mentioned, — a couple of you, — about
people being brutalized, people having their homes bombed. Violence from
Klansmen, or the white citizens council, or the police, or the sheriffs.
People being brutalized. And you say this in one sentence, and then the
next sentence, — or even in the same
sentence, — you're talking about how much energy there is
and how high everybody is. Explain that. Explain why it is that there
are certain moments in history where repression does not push people
down; but somehow sparks even more movement and there is this feeling of
hope, and this feeling of this energy surge. Why is it that people being
brutalized, doesn't make people give up?
Wazir: One thing I would say, the oppressors, they forget about the
human spirit. We as human beings we're trying, we're in desperation, and
you compromise some things for it to just go away. But after so many
compromises if the one who's oppressing, or repressing down, don't go
away, then the human spirit rises to the occasion to throw 'em off their
back.
And that's what's happening around the world right now. People,
you can't threaten them with any kind of, — it
doesn't matter what kind of destruction, disruptive power you
have. We definitely in Mississippi, Greenwood, and all, we were
definitely outgunned, outmanned,
out-whatever, — you know. We had one little
raggedy vehicle, they had all kinds of vehicles, plus they had
the Sovereignty Commission, and the state tax budget that was
pouring in. But when it came to time that people had had
enough, —
[Movement leaders] talked about whether or not to do the Freedom Summer
project, because people were going to start getting killed. Well, that
didn't fly with me and a lot of the SNCC staff who were Mississippians,
because people were being killed like mad before it was hitting the
press, before the Movement started. So we said, "No, Bob [Moses], less
people are getting killed now than before. Much less people are getting
killed and thrown in the river."
And so, that's my input here that it was like some of the older people
throughout Mississippi would say, "There's nothing left for them to do
now but killing, there's nothing left for them to do now but start
eating us. And they can't eat us."
Bruce: I want to follow up on that. I think that when people read
about the Civil Rights Movement and about the brutality, and people were
shot, or were beaten up, or thrown in jail, there's a tendency to forget
that in that area, that was not unusual whether you were in the Movement
or not.
Jimmy: Yeah, that's true.
Bruce: I remember, probably I had been in Selma like four days or
something like that. Brown Chapel was sort of the Movement headquarters.
And First Baptist was the place where the Medical Committee for Human
Rights had set up their emergency health aid station in the basement.
And the food was distributed out of there and so forth. And we went down
in the basement one morning and a woman was there with an infant,
probably 2 or 3 weeks old. And the baby was deadly sick. And she had
been living on a plantation not far from Selma. Ten miles, something
like that. She had wanted to take the baby to the doctor because it was
dying. But the plantation owner had told her she could not leave the
bounds because she would get contaminated with the Movement, and that if
she tried to do it he would kill her, and kill the baby.
And so she had had to sneak [off the plantation] carrying the baby. Make
it to Selma on foot in the night. Like an escaping slave. She'd gotten
there early in the morning. We got the baby to the St. Jude's in
Montgomery, and we had to hide her because she knew that this guy
would, — she felt that this guy would probably try and
kill her. Now, I mean obviously that wasn't going to happen in the
middle of thousands of people in Selma, but that was the norm, you know,
of before the Movement came.
I think what happened with what you're asking Chude is that kind of
repression could keep people down as long as they had no hope of
anything ever changing. But when the Movement came to Greenwood, or when
it came to Selma, and people said "Okay, yeah they may beat me, they may
kill me, but there is hope of change so I will DARE.." Suddenly that
hope kind of, — it didn't end the
fear, — but it ended the, "I won't do anything because of
the fear." You see what I'm saying?
And I think what everybody in Selma was feeling was this enormous
upwelling of spirit that came with the hope. And even though the
violence was heavy, because of the media, because people were coming
from all over the country, because there was this mass activity, because
they weren't alone there was hope.
And by not being alone, I mean not alone also in terms of the
other [Black folk] in Selma and Dallas County. You know, the
first couple of people who went down to register were alone. But
when you had 100 or 200 or 300 every day daring the beatings and
the arrests just to try and register to vote, they weren't alone
any more. So it was the hope I think that countered the violence.
Jean: I'd like to add to what you're both saying. It seems to me
there's probably something about defiance that is exhilarating.
It's liberating and it's standing up and saying, "This is me,
this is where I'm standing now." It's exhilarating to people.
I have always been a people watcher and faces in those mass meetings and
in those mass demonstrations were very different, were very animated,
were very spirited, were, — they were almost
unrecognizable from a face that you might see on a country road, you
know the next day, plowing the field. There was something real energetic
about it, and I really do believe it's the hope and it's also the
feeling of finding, "I can do this. I can do this."
And it's another aspect of that person that they probably haven't
seen before. And of course it helped to have people coming from
all parts of the country to help establish that hope, and show
people that they weren't alone, and to speed things up. I mean I
have no doubt that it would have happened anyway, but it would
have taken 40 or 50 more years maybe for Jim Crow and
desegregation and all of that to end, I believe.
But so there's the defiance. There's also, — you reminded
me of a phrase that used to amuse me because I never quite understood it
until I left the South. But each place you went, whether it was a campus
or church, or somebody's house, in Mississippi or Alabama, the
phraseology that people always used was, "When the Movement came" to
Greenwood. "When the Movement came" to Selma.
"When the Movement came to," Albany, wherever. People were talking about
it. And I used to find that very striking. What's behind that? I still
don't have it entirely figured it out, but there's a sense that when you
ventured off to Mississippi, people were waiting for something. And all
they needed was that spark, of that something. And they could not have
defined it because it wasn't really known. They didn't know that
Thurgood Marshall would have liked to have broken every law in the book,
because he didn't break them. But there was a readiness in people that
had been considered to be, — which is why I hate the word
"apathetic," — the most apathetic and downtrodden people
on the planet, you know. And that wasn't the case at all.
But it did need the spark. I think it did need it from the outside. And
I think it did need young people. I don't think it could have happened
without young people, or it would have happened very, very, very
differently, and more slowly. It needed all of that coming together.
Jimmy: I agree with Jean completely there, because the young people made
up of a whole segment of the population that was not going
to be intimidated. In fact, if things would have gone on, I think they
would have become the intimidators. Because they were just as capable of
doing to the people that were oppressing, as they were doing. And I know
in Lowndes County, in that one demonstration that I participated in down
in Fort Deposit, I don't think any of the local people were 30 years
old, or maybe even 25 years old, they were all under 25 years old. And
they were willing to do anything to get what they wanted.
Jean: Not that they always knew what they wanted, but what they
definitely wanted was to stand defiant.
Jimmy: That's right.
Jean: And they would ask you, you know, "Okay, all of this stuff
about voter registration, but when are we going to march?" (lots
of laughter) "When are we going downtown?"
Don: The Movement is coming, what does the word mean, "moving?" Moving.
You know, a wonderful question Chude, and you really put your fingBACKGROUND: In February of 1963 when SNCC workers Bernard and Colia
LaFayette first come to Selma, Dallas County sheriff Jim Clark's vicious
racism and violent suppression of any effort on the part of Blacks to
improve their lives is already legendary. Poor and rural, Selma and
Dallas County can not afford big police forces, so Clark recruits a
large posse of white volunteers, — many of them Klan
members, — to repress and destroy the fledgling Movement.
The Alabama KKK is strong in the surrounding counties, terrorizing
Blacks with cross-burnings, beatings, fire-bombs, and shootings. The
local White Citizens Councils is organized to ensure that any Black who
attempts to register to vote will be fired, evicted, or economically
destroyed.
In June of '63, Bernard is brutally beaten by the Klan as part of
a simultaneous attempt to assassinate Movement leaders in 3 states. That
same night, Medger Evers, — who Colia Lidell LaFayette
had once worked with, — is murdered in Mississippi.
Against this massive resistance, it is slow going for the
LaFayettes and the small number of SNCC workers who come to Selma after
them. The few mass meetings and Freedom Days they are able to organize
are brutally repressed, and the severe retaliation that follows
maintains the climate of terror and fear that pervades the Alabama
"Black Belt" counties.
When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is enacted, Selma judge James
Hare issues an illegal injunction prohibiting more than 3 Blacks from
gathering together at any one place or time. His buddy Sheriff Clark
eagerly enforces it against any and all who dare to march, hold
meetings, or otherwise challenge the established order.
In December of 1964 when SCLC begins sending organizers into
Selma, Montgomery, and adjacent counties, no more than 2% of Dallas
County's 15,000 eligible Blacks have managed to register. In some of the
nearby rural counties such as Lowndes, Hale, Wilcox, and Perry, Blacks
far outnumbered whites, but no Blacks at all are registered, while white
registration is 110% or higher. More whites can be registered than
actually live in the county because when whites die or move away their
names are kept on the voter rolls, and every election day they somehow
manage to vote for the candidates favored by the entrenched power
structure.
]
SNCC And the Jesuits
SNCC and SCLC in Selma
From Mississippi to Alabama
Demanding the Right to Vote
BACKGROUND: In the first days of January, 1965, SCLC and SNCC
workers begin going door-to-door along the unpaved streets of Selma's
Black neighborhoods, and the muddy red-dirt lanes of the outlying
counties, organizing ward meetings and committees, and encouraging folk
to attend the mass meetings at First Baptist and Brown Chapel where Betty Mae Fikes and the other students lead
the adults in songs of hope, courage, and defiance.
The Voter Registrar office is only open two days per month. On
registration day in mid-January more than 400 Blacks march to the
courthouse to try to register. Sheriff Clark forces them into an alley
where they are held behind barriers and not allowed to reach the
registrar. The next day many return to the courthouse, this time lining
up at the front entrance. Clark arrests them. Day after day, increasing
numbers of Blacks march to the courthouse to register and Clark jails
and harasses them. Even the Black teachers in the segregated school
system risked their jobs and careers by marching to the courthouse to
register behind Rev. Frederick Reese, the President of the Dallas County
Voters League (DCVL) and himself a teacher at Hudson High School.
By the later part of January the daily marches to the courthouse
have become too large for Clark and his posse to control, and Governor
Wallace sends in an army of state troopers to reinforce Clark's defense
of segregation.
On the first day of February, — the next "official"
registration day, — Dr. King leads 250 men & women
towards the courthouse to register. All are arrested. Shouting
"Freedom," Black students pour out of the schools to protest, and
hundreds of them
are arrested along with the adults. With the Selma jails full, the
students are taken to "Camp Selma" a state prison farm. Day after day,
mass arrests continue as students and adults march and picket. More than
3000 are arrested in the first week of February. And voter-registration
marches, — and mass arrests, — now begin
to occur in the outlying rural counties. Across Alabama, the jails are
filling up as prisoners are shunted from place to place to make room for
ever more arrestees. ]
Malcolm X in Selma
In his book Selma 1965:
The March That Changed the South, Charles Fager quotes Malcolm
as saying to Correta: "Mrs. King, will you tell Dr. King ... I want Dr.
King to know that I didn't come to Selma to make his job difficult. I
really did come thinking I could make it easier. If the white people
realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to
hear Dr. King."
The Murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson
BACKGROUND: On the night of February 18, 400 people in Marion,
the county seat of rural Perry County, march out of Zion's Chapel
Methodist church to protest the continued denial of voting rights and to
demand their constitutional right of free speech. Suddenly all of the
street lights go dark and a swarm of state troopers and possemen attack
the marchers, beating both demonstrators and reporters with clubs, and
shocking them with electric cattle-prods.
The marchers try to retreat back to church but many are cut off
and surrounded. When they take shelter in a cafe, the troopers and
badge-wearing posse thugs follow them inside, smashing the lights out,
and continuing to savagely whip heads. When 27 year old Jimmy Lee
Jackson, tries to shield his mother and grandfather, a trooper guns him
down.
Jimmy Lee is a deacon in his church, and along with his mother and
grandfather had been one of the first to try to register to vote. He
dies 8 days later, though not before Colonel Al
Lingo, — commander of the Alabama State
Troopers — serves him with an arrest warrant for
"assault" on a police officer. No one is ever arrested or charged for
Jimmy Lee's murder. ]
19 Days in March
BACKGROUND — Chronology:
3/7 Sunday.
"Bloody Sunday" march in Selma
SNCC's Mississippi staff comes to
Selma
3/8 Monday. Injunction against marching to
Montgomery
3/9 Tuesday.
"Turn-Around Tuesday" march in Selma
Tuskegee students call for "2nd Front"
SNCC vs SCLC Meeting
Ministers beaten, Rev. Reeb hospitalized
3/10 Wednesday.
"Berlin Wall" stops marches in Selma
Tuskegee students & SNCC arrive in
Montgomery
Students march on Montgomery Capitol
building
3/11 Thursday.
Rev. Reeb dies from the beating on Tuesday
"Berlin Wall" vigil continues in Selma
Confrontation At Dexter Church
3/12 Friday. "Berlin Wall" vigil continues in Selma
3/13 Saturday.
Boycott pickets in Selma
"Berlin Wall" vigil continues in Selma
3/14 Sunday.
"Berlin Wall" vigil continues in Selma
LBJ's "We Shall Overcome" speech calls for
Voting Rights bill
3/15 Monday.
Court overturns "Berlin Wall,"
Reeb memorial mass march in Selma
Student march in Montgomery
3/16 Tuesday.
Student march attacked in Montgomery
Forman's angry speech to mass meeting in Montgomery
3/17 Wednesday.
Mass march to Montgomery courthouse
Student pickets arrested in Montgomery
Injunction against March to Montgomery lifted.
3/18. Thursday.
March to Montgomery organization & preparation
Demonstrations continue in Selma and Montgomery
3/19. Friday.
March to Montgomery organization & preparation
Demonstrations continue in Selma and Montgomery
3/20. Saturday.
March to Montgomery organization & preparation
Demonstrations continue in Selma and Montgomery
3/21-3/24 Sunday-Wednesday.
The March to Montgomery
3/25 Thursday.
March and rally at the Alabama Capitol building
Murder of Viola Liuzzo
Bloody Sunday
BACKGROUND: At a memorial service for Jimmy Lee Jackson in
Marion, SCLC leader James Bevel calls for a march to Montgomery to bring
their protests to the seat of state power. The call is taken up and the
decision made.
Governor Wallace declares the march illegal and orders that it be
stopped. On Sunday, March 7th, 1965, — "Bloody
Sunday," — the marchers gathering in Brown Chapel know
that Wallace will halt the march before they get far, and they
prepare as best they can to face the worst, — arrests or
attack. A Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) doctor gives
instructions on protecting eyes and lungs against tear gas and MCHR's
volunteer medics pack the first-aid kits they will carry on the march.
On a cold, gray Sunday
600 marchers follow
Rev. Hosea Williams of SCLC and Chairman John Lewis of SNCC out of Brown
Chapel. Immediately behind them march Al Turner, SCLC's Alabama
director, and Bob Mants of SNCC. Formed in a disciplined column of twos
on the sidewalk, the protesters head towards the Edmund Pettus bridge
that spans the Alabama River on the road to Montgomery.
On the other side of the bridge a horde of State Troopers wearing
gas masks block the highway, while Sheriffs deputies, and Clark's
possemen, — many on horseback, —
lurk in ambush along Selma's side streets.
As the front of the march comes down off the bridge, the troopers
halt the line. John and Hosea kneel to pray, and the
troopers attack, charging into the peaceful line of marchers with
flailing clubs and drenching them with clouds of choking tear gas.
Local Movement leader
Amelia Boynton is viciously clubbed to the ground and knocked
unconscious. As the protesters try to retreat, the mounted possemen ride
down on them, lashing out with bullwhips and rubber hoses wrapped in
barbed-wire. Meanwhile, Selma police block the MCHR ambulances,
preventing them from coming to the aid of the injured.
Carrying their wounded with them, the marchers retreat back over
the bridge, back to the church with the troopers and posse
attacking them all the way; clubbing, whipping, and gassing not just the
protesters but Black bystanders as well. John Lewis and more than 50
other wounded are rushed to hospital, many lying bleeding on the
corridor floors because the beds are occupied by those who were hurt the
worst.]
National Reaction to Bloody Sunday
BACKGROUND: That night, after the Bloody Sunday attack, SCLC
calls for another march to Montgomery on Tuesday the 9th, and decides to
seek an injunction in Federal court to force Alabama to permit the
march. From offices in Selma and Atlanta, the word goes out across the
nation, calling on supporters to come to Selma, to come to Selma and on
Tuesday to march across the Edmund Pettus bridge on the road to
Montgomery.
The same evening, national and international TV news reports broadcast
film of the brutal police assault against peaceful marchers in Selma,
and on Monday it is the front-page story around the world. Response is
visceral and immediate. Washington SNCC supporters occupy the Attorney
General's office demanding that the federal government enforce the
constitutional guarantees of freedom of assembly and the right to vote.
After being dragged out of the building by federal police, they stage an
around-the-clock mass picket line in front of the White House that day
after day grows larger and angrier.
Tens of thousands protest and many are arrested at Federal
buildings in Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles,
Philadelphia, Detroit, St. Louis, and hundreds of other cities across
America. Similar angry protests occur at U.S. embassies and consulates
around the world.
And thousands answer Dr. King's call, flooding in to Selma that
Sunday night, all day Monday, and throughout Monday night. Movement
activists, supporters, ministers, rabbis, nuns, labor leaders, community
organizers, entertainers, and ordinary citizens come to Selma to take
their stand alongside the Black folk of Alabama. They come to Selma to
march on Tuesday, to face the deputies and their whips and clubs and
baseball bats, to face the troopers and their tear gas, to face the
possemen on their horses. Said a white Methodist Bishop, "We heard
the Macedonian call. We heard the call of God from
Selma, — and we came."]
SNCC's Response to Bloody Sunday
Judge Frank Johnson
BACKGROUND: On Monday morning after Bloody Sunday, SCLC lawyers
petition federal judge Frank Johnson for an immediate court order
forcing Alabama authorities to permit the march to Montgomery the next
day that SCLC has publicly announced. But the Judge refuses to grant
immediate relief, instead he orders a hearing for Wednesday the 10th,
and issues an injunction against holding the march
scheduled for Tuesday the 9th.]
Turn-Around Tuesday
Judge Johnson's injunction creates a crises for Dr. King. The
Black communities of Selma and the surrounding counties are ready to
march on Tuesday, and thousands of supporters have come to join them.
But Dr. King has never violated a Federal court order, and he fears
risking federal support for the national voting rights legislation that
is the ultimate goal of the Selma campaign.
Dr. King decides to hold the march. But under pressure from
President Johnson and Attorney General Katzenbach, he agrees that when
police order the march to halt in compliance with the judge's order, he
will obey.
Few of the 3,000 thousand or so marchers who fill the street as
they march over the bridge know what to expect. The day before 150
carloads of additional State Troopers, — practically the
entire Alabama force, — had arrived to reinforce the
horde that had attacked the march on Bloody Sunday. Again they block the
highway, this time lining both sides of the road to surround the
protesters on 3 sides. They order the marchers to halt and return to
Brown Chapel. Dr. King leads the protesters in a brief prayer service,
and then leads them back to the church. Many of those on the march are
angry at King's decision to turn around, others are relieved that there
has been no police attack and no one injured.]
BACKGROUND: The rules of the U.S. Senate allow a
senator, — or a group of senators, — to
talk as long as they want, about anything they want, at any time they
want. So long as a senator holds the floor (talks), no votes can be
taken. So senators can block any piece of legislation from coming to a
vote by simply talking forever. This is known as a "filabuster."
Only a "cloture" vote can stop a filabuster. In 1965, it took a
two-thirds vote (66) to pass a cloture vote. (In 1975 that number was
reduced to 60 votes.)
So at the time of the Selma voting rights campaign, a minority of
35 of the 100 senators can forever block any civil rights legislation
simply by voting against cloture of the inevitable Southern filabuster
against civil rights for Blacks. This means that a senator does not have
to go on record as voting against civil rights to oppose the bill, he
can spin his vote against cloture as a vote for "free-speech" and "open
debate."
As a practical matter, the math is daunting. There are 16 Southern
states that actively discourage or prevent Blacks from registering to
vote. With Black voters suppressed in those states, it is political
suicide for Southern senators to support civil rights legislation even
if they want to, — and few want to because most have been
elected on segregationist platforms. So this "Southern Bloc" has a sure
32 votes against cloture. All they have to do is find THREE
additional votes to oppose cloture, and no civil rights bill can pass.
Put another way, those in favor of the Voting Rights Bill have to win
the support of 66 out of the 68 senators who are
not part of the Southern Bloc.
Just nine months before the Selma march, the cloture vote to end
the southern filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been so
close that California Senator Clair Engle, — who was
dying of a brain tumor, — had to be carried into the
Senate chamber on a stretcher. Unable to speak, he slowly lifted his
crippled hand to touch his eye, — signifying an "aye"
vote for cloture. He died shortly thereafter.]
Email addition from Steven
McNichols, August 19, 2007]
Tuskegee Students Call for a "Second Front"
BACKGROUND: In February, as the Selma crises grows ever more
tense, Tuskegee students organize themselves into the Tuskegee Institute
Advancement League (TIAL), with Jean Wiley as the faculty
advisor.]
Email addition from Gwen Patton:]
Tuskegee (TIAL) early-on was thinking outside the box. I remember a
teach-in with Bill Kuntsler who was discussing in-side-strategy to
change policy. We dismissed this as a strategy for TIAL though we
respected an inside-outside strategy. We determined that we were the
"outside the box strategists."
Email addition from Gwen Patton:]
I am convinced that if we Tuskegee students hadn't left Tuskegee to
march to the Capitol there never would have been a march from Selma to
Montgomery. A quiet deal would have been attempted, but would have
failed. However, it would appear that LBJ would be the "great white
hope" to fight for Black people's voting rights, nullifying the struggle
and deaths and human rights of Black people's Movement. There was a need
to "show" a demonstration of determination to gain 1st class
citizenship, symbolized by the right to vote, led by Black folks.
SNCC vs SCLC Meeting
Murder of Rev. Reeb
BACKGROUND: On Tuesday evening after the march turned around,
Rev. James Reeb and two other white Unitarian ministers who had come to
Selma to support the voting-rights campaign are attacked and savagely
beaten by a gang of white racists while they are walking towards the
SCLC and SNCC offices above the funeral parlor.
Rev. Reeb dies of his injuries a day and a half later.
President Lyndon Johnson sends a message of condolence to Rev.
Reeb's wife and provids a jet to bring her to the Birmingham hospital
where he is dying. Later the widow and Rev. Reeb's body are flown on Air
Force One back to Boston for burial. The media provids extensive
coverage of Reeb's death and his memorial services which are attended by
dignitaries and thousands of mourners. All of this is in stark contrast
to the public and official silence in response to the murder of Jimmie
Lee Jackson, — a Black man, — just a few
days earlier.]
The "Berlin Wall"
BACKGROUND: On Wednesday, Rev. Anderson of Tabernacle Baptist
Church, — the first Black church in Selma to open its
doors to the Movement, — leads hundreds of protesters out
of Brown Chapel towards the Courthouse to protest the continued denial
of voting rights and the attack on Rev. Reeb who is slowly dying in a
Birmingham hospital bed. Police halt the march on Sylvan Street only a
few yards from the church, ordering that no more marches of any kind are
to be permitted.
When first march is blocked, a second group leaves First Baptist,
trying to reach the courthouse by another route, but troopers race to
block them in a column of cars with sirens screaming. Soon the area
around Brown Chapel and First Baptist is surrounded by patrolling police
cruisers making sure that no protesters reach the Courthouse or the
downtown shopping district. The geographic heart of the Selma Movement
is now surrounded around the clock by armed police.
The cops stretch a rope across Sylvan
Street, — today it's Martin Luther King
Street, — and say that no marchers are permitted beyond
that barrier on pain of arrest, beating, or worse. The marchers dub it
the "Berlin Wall" and press up against it as a living show of their
determination to register to vote and exercise their rights of free
speech. Around the clock, 24/7, for six days and six nights, in freezing
rain and blazing sun they stand vigil at the "Berlin Wall." Finally, on
March 15, a federal judge orders the Selma police to permit them to
march to the Courthouse and hold a memorial service for Rev.
Reeb.]
The Spirit of the People