Pillar of Fire (89 page)

Wilson Baker conceded the same point from the opposite side, denouncing Clark to reporters as “out of control.” Selma's newspaper conceded that the remaining fifty movement prisoners were held under “Charges Named Later.” If Clark had simply allowed the protesters to stand there unmolested one more day, Baker firmly believed, the frustrated registration drive would have moved elsewhere. King took an intermediate position between morale and results. Clark's oppression did raise spirits; more than two hundred marched to arrest on Wednesday in three waves, the first led by Rev. L. L. Anderson of Tabernacle Baptist. However, the movement also needed practical victories, and the hard reality was that not a single Negro who stood all day in the courthouse alley so much as
applied
for admission to the voting rolls, as the registrars managed to be occupied with others.

 

T
HAT
W
EDNESDAY
, January 20, for the inauguration of President Johnson, 1.2 million people gathered on the Washington Mall, a mark that would stand above all capital occasions for at least three decades. The multitude was roughly four times the turnout for the March on Washington, and sixty times the frostbitten crowd of twenty thousand that had braved President Kennedy's inaugural address four years earlier. A White House briefer hailed “the first Inauguration where every operation was integrated from the church to the ballroom,” and racial breakthroughs were absorbed in a landslide breadth of public optimism. Leontyne Price sang “America the Beautiful” at the formal swearing-in on the East Capitol steps. Roy Wilkins and CORE lawyer Floyd McKissick were among a dozen civil rights figures who took honored turns in President Johnson's reviewing stand for the inaugural parade. Bayard Rustin attended one of the gala balls, as did many leaders of the MFDP's ongoing congressional challenge: Fannie Lou Hamer, Edwin King, Victoria Gray, Aaron Henry, E. W. Steptoe, Annie Devine, and the irrepressible arson-and-ambush survivor Hartman Turnbow, who declared his ambition to dance with the Mississippi governor's wife.
Jet
reported King to be “conspicuously absent from all the inaugural ceremonies,” in spite of invitations and Johnson's telegram encouraging him and Coretta to attend. “Informed sources” told the magazine that “the President was concerned about the arrest of 200 Negroes in Dr. Martin L. King Jr.'s voter registration drive in Selma.”

With celebrations ended, President Johnson convened on Friday morning the first confidential working session of his full term. He told congressional leaders that the nation's worst problem was Vietnam, which he “wrestles with all the time, day and night.” While the President did not describe the situation quite as gravely as Ambassador Taylor's secret summary earlier in January,
*
he did say it was not safe for the United States to mount air operations while dependent wives and children remained posted in Vietnam, targets for retaliation. Secretary of State Rusk disclosed that U.S. allies considered South Vietnam too politically unstable to risk helping. In reaction, Senator Russell Long of Louisiana advocated bombing North Vietnam, and Senator Everett Dirksen wanted to yank home the dependents of a “pampered” military mission. “Why do we have to send all our civilization to war?” he asked.

 

A
FTER CLASSES
in Selma, students raced to spread news that the first teacher was sighted at all-Negro Clark Elementary School, holding her toothbrush silently aloft as a badge of resolve. Inside, educators arrived in their best dress to review elaborate preparations and voted to release a few hardship colleagues from signed pledges on the carefully preserved scroll. The remaining 110 formed two abreast and exited the school in a solemn procession of teachers, thirty feet apart, past awed neighbors and clumps of students. Never before in the movement had there been a demonstration by the most vulnerable class of Negro professionals, all of whom owed jobs to white politicians—not in Nashville, Jackson, St. Augustine, or Birmingham at its peak. Some were inspired by the example of Margaret Moore or the pep talks of their elected leader, Rev. F. D. Reese. Others were ashamed to teach civics when they could not vote themselves, or could no longer bear to scold absentee pupils who braved jail and taunted them as slaves.

FBI agents recorded that the head of the line reached the front steps of the courthouse at 3:24
P.M.
Friday, January 22. School board president Edgar Stewart, a former FBI agent, confronted Reese there with word that the registrar's office was closed and that the teachers' written request to register after class had been denied. While Stewart and Reese politely debated whether it would injure or improve school relations for one or more teachers to walk past the closed office as a testament of desire to vote, Sheriff Clark muttered that the teachers were making a “plaything” of the courthouse. “You have one minute to get off these steps!” he told Reese. Clark led deputies with nightsticks in shoving the teachers down the concrete steps to the sidewalk. He then vanished into the courthouse, whereupon “Big Lester” Hankerson—the former seaport gangster who had surrendered his pistols to King in Savannah—supervised the teachers in collecting themselves and ascending the steps again in good order.

Twice more they returned after Sheriff Clark pushed them down the steps. The third time, with the sheriff threatening to arrest the whole group and the teachers clutching their toothbrush jail kits, a Selma lawyer pulled Clark inside the courthouse for precautionary consultations on what it might mean to incarcerate 95 percent of the Negro schoolteachers. The sheriff emerged more incensed than ever, and once more battered the line down the steps. Andrew Young stepped in to call a halt, saying their point was made, and the double column re-formed to march back up Alabama Avenue.

When they turned onto Sylvan Street, the FBI observers recorded, “three hundred Negro children and teenagers gave the returning marchers an ovation.” Reese paraded his jubilant lines straight into Brown Chapel, down to the pulpit and around the perimeter aisles, as inrushing crowds began a spontaneous youth rally with the song “This Little Light of Mine.” Teachers pinched themselves to prove they had gone through with it. Children hugged classroom taskmasters they had scorned as windbags. Movement veterans openly wept. Martin Luther King arrived to preach the first of two emotional tributes in two different churches that night, and Reese declared that if the teachers were not afraid to march for the right to vote,
nobody
should be afraid. The morticians began planning their own march to the courthouse. So did the barbers.

 

M
ALCOLM
X, back from a speaking trip to Canada, fought off a Friday night ambush by three members of the Nation outside his home in New York. On Sunday, he delivered a lecture about the lost cultural identity of Africans in America, partly by analogy with “lost sheep” and “dry bones” stories in the Bible. During the collection, he confirmed to a questioner that he had reacted strongly to a television news clip of the attack on Martin Luther King at Selma's Hotel Albert. “I saw the man knock him in his mouth,” said Malcolm. “Well, that hurt me, I'll tell you, because I'm black and he's black—I don't care how dumb he is.” He read a telegram he had dispatched to Nazi commander Rockwell, warning that he was “no longer held in check by Elijah Muhammad's separationist Black Muslim movement,” and that he would arrange “maximum physical retaliation” upon anyone who attempted “harm to Reverend King or any other black Americans who are only attempting to enjoy their rights….”

“You and I will not get anywhere by standing on the sidelines, saying they're doing it wrong,” Malcolm told his audience. After twelve years of “condemning everybody walking, and at no time were we permitted to get involved,” he proclaimed freedom from artificial constraint: “Okay, I say let's get involved, but let's get involved all the way.” He announced a general program to win voting rights by threat of execution. “Anyone who stops you from trying to register and vote is breaking the law,” he said. “You can waste him. Yes, you can waste him, and there's nothing he can do about it.” However, Malcolm perceived fresh obstacles in the way of actions or tactical experiments. On finances, he announced that the night's collection fell $15 short of the nightly rental due for the Audubon Ballroom. More ominously, he said, organizations trained for violence “will turn all of their anger against each other….” This was his own plight. “A very bad situation has set in and deteriorated to the point,” said Malcolm, “where you have black people trying to kill black people.”

 

O
VER THE WEEKEND
, when the death of Sir Winston Churchill dominated world news, U.S. District Judge Daniel Thomas of Mobile issued a court order in reponse to a lawsuit filed by Amelia Boynton and other Selma plaintiffs. The judge ruled that neither side in the voting rights conflict was behaving “in an orderly and effective manner,” but his remedy offended all parties. Denouncing him as a “segregationist judge,” James Bevel cited his exacting new requirement that applicants line up in the back alley toward Lauderdale Street, as Sheriff Clark desired, and he emphasized the new order's evasive silence on the core issues of pace and fairness in the registration process itself. On the other hand, Dallas County authorities felt betrayed by Thomas's legal finding of “unnecessary arrests” and his detailed rules to guarantee peaceful assembly. James Hare, the courtly but amiable local judge who freely exhibited his distinctive hobby—tracing local Negroes back to the bloodlines of specific tribes in Africa, so as to gauge genetic propensities for trouble or domestication—reacted testily to correction by his judicial friend from neighboring Autauga County. “I don't care what Judge Thomas ordered,” Hare told visitors. “If there are any demonstrations in front of this courthouse…I have ordered the sheriff to put them in jail.” Sheriff Clark bounced miserably between conflicting superiors in the political order. “Y'all don't treat me right,” he told Judge Thomas.

By Monday morning, January 25, when Martin Luther King led 250 people down Alabama Avenue to the courthouse, prevailing local sentiment shifted in favor of Sheriff Clark against outside interference. Clark halted the long double column. Under the new rules from Judge Thomas—which specified that one hundred applicants be assigned numbered places in the alley toward Lauderdale—he requested that Chief Baker clear the city sidewalks of “demonstrators” in excess of the one hundred. When SNCC workers contested this interpretation, Baker ordered one dragged off to jail in the first such arrest by city police. Some of those behind stepped out for a better view of the commotion, which prompted Sheriff Clark to walk briskly down the line pushing strays back behind an imaginary half width of the sidewalk.

He ran into trouble from Annie Lee Cooper, one of the two women fired from Dunn's Rest Home for trying to register on Selma's first Freedom Day. Cooper told Clark not to twist her arm, then staggered him with several roundhouse blows. Hefty and berserk, she more than held her own for a time against officers who rushed to Clark's aid—“I probably hit those other deputies, too,” she said later—and photographers arrived to shoot the moment when three deputies held her down for Clark to club her with his nightstick. Anger flashed among her compatriots in the line, but march leaders restrained them as officers hauled Cooper to jail in double handcuffs. “Don't bother with it!” shouted King.

That night, in the first mass meeting at Tabernacle Baptist Church since the Sam Boynton memorial service of 1963, speakers ardently fought the day's gloom. “They are not just running around harassing people for the fun of it,” said James Bevel, who warned that opponents were trying to do two things: “discourage us” and “make discipline break down.” Justified or not, any speck of Negro violence hurt the movement because “then they don't talk about the registration drive,” said Bevel. “…We want the world to know they ain't registering nobody!” Reverend Anderson presented the incident as both a shortfall in nonviolent devotion and a communal sacrifice by Cooper, who “took a beating today for you and for me.” He coaxed an offering from the crowd with a vivid description of her whipping—“If
that
doesn't make you want to give five dollars, you're not worth a dime”—then presented Martin Luther King.

King preached for nearly an hour. He exhorted the audience to remember that Selma was the “proving ground” for a larger movement that would spread through Alabama and beyond. He played to their mirth over opinion surveys showing that race problems had ended with the civil rights bill. He tried to present the day's setbacks as proof that the opposition was desperate, then speculated on the twin effects of guilt. “I have a psychological theory,” he said, that guilt has “a constructive angle, and that is, it causes you to repent, makes you penitent…and mend your evil,” but also makes you “drown the guilt by engaging more in the very act that brought on the guilt. That's what's happening to some of our white brothers.” They would revert to compulsive hatred “to try to provoke violence in us,” he predicted, and urged Tabernacle listeners to resist with love.

“I'm not talking about emotional bosh,” said King. In a reprise of his early sermons, he described the semantic differences between the three Greek words for love, illustrating romantic
eros
with soaring recitals of poetry by Poe and Shakespeare that titillated, impressed, and finally delighted the crowd into punctuating shouts of approval. (“You know,” King said impishly, “I can remember this because I used to quote it to my wife when we were courting. That's
eros
.”) Setting aside also the friendship devotion of
philios
, he preached on
agape
as the heart of nonviolence. “Theologians would say that it is the love of God operating in the human heart,” he declared. “…You love every man because God loves him…. I think this is what Jesus meant when he said Love your enemies…. Love is understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men.”