The autobiography of martin luther

erhood would be a reality for all men.

1

26

SELMA

In Selma, we see a classic pattern of disenfranchisement typical of

the Southern Black Belt areas where Negroes are in the majority.

FEBRUARY 1, 1965

King is jailed with more than two hundred others after voting rights

march in Selma, Alabama

FEBRUARY 26

Jimmie Lee Jackson dies after being shot by police during

demonstration in Marion, Alabama

MARCH 7

MARCH 11

MARCH 25

hours afterward, Klan night riders kill Viola Gregg Liuzzo while she

transports marchers back to Selma

When I was coming from Scandinavia in December 1964, I

stopped by to see President Johnson and we talked about a

lot of things, but finally we started talking about voting.

And he said, "Martin, you're right about that. I'm going to do it

eventually, but I can't get a voting rights bill through in this session

of Congress." He said, "Now, there's some other bills that I have

here that I want to get through in my Great Society program, and I

think in the long run they'll help Negroes more, as much as a voting

rights bill. And let's get those through and then the other."

I said, "Well, you know, political reform is as necessary as any-

thing if we're going to solve all these other problems."

"I can't get it through," he said, "because I need the votes of the

Southern bloc to get these other things through. And if I present a

voting rights bill, they will block the whole program. So it's just not

the wise and the politically expedient thing to do."

I left simply saying, "Well, we'll just have to do the best we can."

I left the mountaintop of Oslo and the mountaintop of the

White House, and two weeks later went on down to the valley of

Selma, Alabama, with Ralph Abernathy and the others. Something

happened down there. Three months later, the same President who

told me in his office that it was impossible to get a voting rights bill

was on television singing in speaking terms, "We Shall Overcome,"

and calling for the passage of a voting rights bill in Congress. And it

did pass two months later.

The President said nothing could be done. But we started a

movement.

"The ugly pattern of denial"

Selma, Alabama, was to 1965 what Birmingham was to 1963. The

right to vote was the issue, replacing public accommodation as the

mass concern of a people hungry for a place in the sun and a voice

in their destiny.

In Selma, thousands of Negroes were courageously providing

dramatic witness to the evil forces that bar our way to the all-impor-

tant ballot box. They were laying bare for all the nation to see, for

all the world to know, the nature of segregationist resistance. The

ugly pattern of denial flourished with insignificant differences in

thousands of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and other Southern

communities.

The pattern of denial depended upon four main roadblocks.

First, there was the Gestapo-like control of county and local gov-

ernment by the likes of Sheriff Jim Clark of Selma, and Sheriff

Rainey of Philadelphia, Mississippi. There was a carefully cultivated

mystique behind the power and brutahty of these men. The gun, the

club, and the cattle prod produced the fear that was the main barrier

to voting—a barrier erected by 345 years' exposure to the psychol-

ogy and brutality of slavery and legal segregation. It was a fear rooted

in feelings of inferiority.

Secondly, city ordinances were contrived to make it difficult for

Negroes to move in concert. So-called parade ordinances and local

laws making public meetings subject to surveillance and harassment

by public officials were used to keep Negroes from working out a

group plan of action against injustice. These laws deliberately ig-

nored and defied the First Amendment of our Constitution.

After so many years of intimidation, the Negro community had

learned that its only salvation was in united action. When one Negro

stood up, he was run out of town; if a thousand stood up together,

the situation was bound to be drastically overhauled.

The third link in the chain of slavery was the slow pace of the

registrar and the limited number of days and hours during which

the office was open. Out of 15,000 Negroes eligible to vote in Selma

and the surrounding Dallas County, less than 350 were registered.

This was the reason why the protest against the limited number of

opportunities for registration had to continue.

The fourth link in the chain of disenfranchisement was the liter-

acy test. This test was designed to be difficult, and the Justice Depart-

ment had been able to establish that in a great many counties these

tests were not administered fairly.

Clearly, the heart of the voting problem lay in the fact that the

machinery for enforcing this basic right was in the hands of state-

appointed officials answerable to the very people who believed they

could continue to wield power in the South only so long as the

Negro was disenfranchised. No matter how many loopholes were

plugged, no matter how many irregularities were exposed, it was

plain that the federal government must withdraw that control from

the states or else set up machinery for policing it effectively.

The patchwork reforms brought about by the laws of 1957, I960,

and 1964 had helped, but the denial of suffrage had gone on too

long, and had caused too deep a hurt for Negroes to wait out the

time required by slow, piecemeal enforcement procedures. What was

needed was the new voting rights legislation promised for the 1965

session of Congress.

Our Direct Action Department, under the direction of Rev. James

Bevel, then decided to attack the very heart of the political structure

of the state of Alabama and the Southland through a campaign for

the right to vote. Planning for the voter registration project in Selma

started around the seventeenth of December, 1964, but the actual

project started on the second of January, 1965. Our affiliate organi-

zation, the Dallas County Voters League, invited us to aid and assist

in getting more Negroes registered to vote. We planned to have Free-

dom Days, days of testing and challenge, to arouse people all over

the community. We decided that on the days that the county and

the state had designated as registration days, we would assemble

at the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church and walk together to the court-

house. More than three thousand were arrested in Selma and Mar-

ion together. I was arrested in one of those periods when we were

seeking to go to the courthouse.

"Selma Jail"

When the king of Norway participated in awarding the Nobel Peace

Prize to me he surely did not think that in less than sbcty days I

would be in jail. They were little aware of the unfinished business in

the South. By jailing hundreds of Negroes, the city of Selma, Ala-

bama, had revealed the persisting ugliness of segregation to the na-

tion and the world.

When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, many decent

Americans were lulled into complacency because they thought the

day of difficult struggle was over. But apart from voting rights,

merely to be a person in Selma was not easy. When reporters asked

Sheriff Clark if a woman defendant was married, he replied, "She's

a nigger woman and she hasn't got a Miss or a Mrs. in front of her

name."

This was the U.S.A. in 1965. We were in jail simply because we

There was a clear and urgent need for new and improved federal

INSTRUCTIONS FROM SELMA JAIL TO MOVEMENT ASSOCIATES

Do following to keep national attention focused on Selma:

1. Joe Lowezy: Make a call to Florida Governor Leroy Collins and urge

him to make a personal visit to Selma, to talk with city and county au-

thorities concerning speedier registration and more days for registering.

2. Walter Fauntroy: Follow through on suggestion of having a congres-

sional delegation to come in for personal investigation. They should also

make an appearance at a mass meeting if they come.

3. Lowery, via Lee White: Make a personal call to President Johnson

and urge him to intervene in some way (send a personal emissary to

Selma, get the Justice Department involved, make a plea to Dallas and

Selma officials in a press conference).

4. Chuck Jones: Urge lawyers to go to the 5th Circuit if Judge Thomas

does not issue an immediate injunction against the continued arrests and

speed up registration.

5. Bernard Lafayette: Keep some activity alive every day this week.

6. Consider a night march to the city jail protesting my arrest. Have

another march to the courthouse to let Clark show true colors.

7. Stretch every point to get teachers to march.

8. Clarence Jones: Immediately post bond for staff members essential

for mobilization who are arrested.

9. Atlanta Office: Call C. T. Vivian and have him return from Califor-

nia in case other staff is put out of circulation.

12. Local Selma editor sent a telegram to the President calling for a

Congressional committee to come out and study the situation of Selma.

We should join in calling for this. By all means, we cannot let them get

the offensive. I feel they were trying to give the impression that they

were orderly and that Selma was a good community because they inte-

grated public accommodations. We have to insist that voting is the issue

and here Selma has dirty hands. We should not be too soft. We have the

offensive. We cannot let Baker control our movement. In a crisis, we

needed a sense of drama.

13. Ralph to call Sammy Davis and ask him to do a Sunday benefit in

Atlanta to raise money for the Alabama project. 1 find that all of these

fellows respond better when I am in a jail or in a crisis.

February 1965

legislation and for expanded law enforcement measures to finally

eliminate all barriers to the right to vote.

A brief statement I read to the press tried to interpret what we

sought to do:

For the past month the Negro citizens of Selma and Dallas County

have been attempting to register by the hundreds. To date only 57 per-

sons have entered the registrar's office, while 280 have been jailed. Of

the 57 who have attempted to register, none have received notice of

successful registration, and we have no reason to hope that they will be

registered. The registration test is so difficult and so ridiculous that even

Chief Justice Warren might fail to answer some questions.

In the past year Negroes have been beaten by Sheriff Clark and his

posse, they have been fired from their jobs, they have been victimized

by the slow registration procedure and the difficult literacy test, all be-

cause they have attempted to vote.

Now we must call a halt to these injustices. Good men of the nation

cannot sit idly by while the democratic process is defied and prostituted

in the interests of racists. Our nation has declared war against totalitar-

ianism around the world, and we call upon President Johnson, Gover-

nor Wallace, the Supreme Court, and the Congress of this great nation

to declare war against oppression and totalitarianism within the shores

of our country.

If Negroes could vote, there would be no Jim Clarks, there would be

no oppressive poverty directed against Negroes. Our children would not

be crippled by segregated schools, and the whole community might live

together in harmony.

This is our intention: to declare war on the evils of demagoguery.

The entire community will join in this protest, and we will not relent

until there is a change in the voting process and the establishment of

democracy.

When I left jail in Selma on Friday, February 5, I stated that I

Would fly to Washington. On Tuesday afternoon I met with Vice

President Hubert H. Humphrey in his capacity as chairman of the

newly created Council for Equal Opportunity and with Attorney

General Nicholas Katzenbach. My colleagues and I made clear to the

vice president and the attorney general our conviction that all citi-

zens must be free to exercise their right and responsibility to vote

without delays, harassment, economic intimidation, and poUce bru-

tality.

I indicated that while there had been some progress in several

states, new crippling legislation had been instituted since 1957 pre-

cisely to frustrate Negro registration. At a recent press conference

President Johnson stated that another evil was the "slow pace of

registration for Negroes." This snail's pace was clearly illustrated by

the ugly events in Selma. Were this pace to continue, it would take

another hundred years before all eligible Negro voters were regis-

tered.

Negroes registered to vote. This slow pace was not accidental. It was

the result of a calculated and well-defined pattern which used many

devices and tactics to maintain white political power in many areas

of the South. I emphatically stated that the problem of securing vot-

ing rights could not be cured by patchwork or piecemeal legislation

y programs. We needed a basic legislative program to insure proce-

dures for achieving the registration of Negroes in the South without

delay or harassment. 1 expressed my conviction that the voting sec-

tions of the 1957, 1960, and 1964 Civil Rights Acts were inadequate

to secure voting rights for Negroes in many key areas of the South.

I told Mr. Humphrey and General Katzenbach how pleased I was

that the Department of Justice had under consideration legislation

pertaining to voting which would implement President Johnson's

State of the Union declaration, namely: "I propose we eliminate

every remaining obstacle in the right and opportunity to vote."

I asked the attorney general to seek an injunction against the

prosecution of the more than three thousand Negro citizens of

Selma, who otherwise would face years of expensive and frustrating

litigation before the exercise of their guaranteed right to vote was

vindicated. Moreover, to the extent that existing laws were inade-

quate or doubtful to accompHsh this all-important purpose, I asked

the vice president and the attorney general to include in the admin-

istration's legislative program new procedures which would invest

the attorney general and private citizens with the power to avoid the

oppression and delays of spurious state court prosecution. *

In a meeting with President Johnson, Vice President Humphrey,

Attorney General Katzenbach, and Florida Governor LeRoy Collins,

chairman of the newly created Community Relations Service, I

urged the administration to offer a voting rights bill which would

secure the right to vote without delay and harassment.

"Events leading to the confrontation"

During the course of our struggle to achieve voting rights for Ne-

groes in Selma, Alabama, it was reported that a "delicate under-

standing" existed between myself, Alabama state officials, and the

federal government to avoid the scheduled march to Montgomery

on Tuesday, March 9.

On the basis of news reports of my testimony in support of our

petition for an injunction against state officials, it was interpreted in

some quarters that I worked with the federal government to throttle

the indignation of white clergymen and Negroes. I was concerned

about this perversion of the facts, and for the record would like to

sketch in the background of the events leading to the confrontation

of marchers and Alabama state troopers at Pettus Bridge in Selma,

and our subsequent peaceful turning back.

The goal of the demonstrations in Selma, as elsewhere, was to

dramatize the existence of injustice and to bring about the presence

of justice by methods of nonviolence. Long years of experience indi-

cated to us that Negroes could achieve this goal when four things

occured:

constitutional rights;

2. racists resist by unleashing violence against them;

3. Americans of good conscience in the name of decency de-

mand federal intervention and legislation;

4. the administration, under mass pressure, initiates measures of

immediate intervention and supports remedial legislation.

The working out of this process has never been simple or tran-

quil. When nonviolent protests were countered by local authorities

with harassment, intimidation, and brutality, the federal govern-

ment always first asked the Negro to desist and leave the streets

rather than bring pressure to bear on those who commit the crimi-

nal acts. We were always compelled to reject vigorously such federal

requests and relied on our allies, the millions of Americans across

the nation, to bring pressure on the federal government for protec-

tive action in our behalf. Our position always was that there is a

wrong and right side to the questions of full freedom and equality

for millions of Negro Americans and that the federal government

did not belong in the middle on this issue.

During our nonviolent direct-action campaigns we were advised,

and again we were so advised in Selma, that violence might ensue.

Herein lay a dilemma: of course, there always was the likelihood

that, because of the hostility to our demonstrations, acts of lawless-

ness may be precipitated. We realized that we had to exercise ex-

treme caution so that the direct-action program would not be

conducted in a manner that might be considered provocative or an

invitation to violence. Accordingly, each situation had to be studied

in detail: the strength and the temper of our adversaries had to be

estimated and any change in any of these factors would affect the

details of our strategy. Nevertheless, we had to begin a march with-

out knowing when or where it would actually terminate.

How were these considerations applied to our plans for the march

from Selma to Montgomery?

My associates and friends were constantly concerned about my

personal safety, and in the light of recent threats of death, many of

them urged me not to march that Sunday for the fear that my pres-

ence in the line would lead to assassination attempts. However, as a

matter of conscience, I could not always respond to the wishes of

my staff and associates; in this case, I made the decision to lead the

march on Sunday and was prepared to do so in spite of any possible

danger to my person.

In working out a time schedule, I had to consider my church

responsibilities. Because 1 was so frequently out of my pulpit and

because my life was so full of emergencies, I was always on the horns

of a dilemma. I had been away for two straight Sundays and there-

fore felt that 1 owed it to my parishioners to be there. It was arranged

that I take a chartered plane to Montgomery after the morning ser-

vice and lead the march out of Selma, speak with a group for three

or four hours, and take a chartered flight back in order to be on

hand for the Sunday Communion Service at 7:30 P.M.

When Governor Wallace issued his ban on the march, it was my

view and that of most of my associates that the state troopers would

deal with the problem by arresting all of the people in the line. We

never imagined that they would use the brutal methods to which

they actually resorted to repress the march. I concluded that if I were

arrested it would be impossible for me to get back to the evening

service at Ebenezer to administer the Lord's Supper and baptism.

Because of this situation, my staff urged me to stay in Atianta and

lead a march on Monday morning. This I agreed to do. I was pre-

pared to go to jail on Monday but at the same time I would have

met my church responsibilities. If I had had any idea that the state

troopers would use the kind of brutality they did, I would have felt

compelled to give up my church duties altogether to lead the line. It

was one of those developments that none of us anticipated. We felt

that the state troopers, who had been severely criticized over their

terrible acts two weeks earlier even by conservative Alabama papers,

would never again engage in that kind of violence.

I shall never forget my agony of conscience for not being there

when I heard of the dastardly acts perpetrated against nonviolent

demonstrators that Sunday, March 7. As a result, I felt that I had to

lead a march on the following Tuesday and decided to spend Mon-

day mobilizing for it.

The march on Tuesday, March 9, illustrated the dilemma we often

face. Not to try to march again would have been unthinkable. How-

ever, whether we were marching to Montgomery or to a limited

point within the city of Selma could not be determined in advance;

the only certain thing was that we had to begin, so that a confronta-

tion with injustice would take place in full view of the millions look-

ing on throughout this nation.

The next question was whether the confrontation had to be a

violent one; here the responsibility of weighing all factors and esti-

mating the consequences rests heavily on the civil rights leaders. It

is easy to decide on either extreme. To go forward recklessly can

have terrible consequences in terms of human life and also can cause

friends and supporters to lose confidence if they feel a lack of re-

sponsibility exists. On the other hand, it is ineffective to guarantee

that no violence will occur by the device of not marching or under-

taking token marches avoiding direct confrontation.

On Tuesday, March 9, Judge Frank M. Johnson of the federal

district court in Montgomery issued an order enjoining me and the

local Selma leadership of the nonviolent voting rights movement

from peacefully marching to Montgomery. The issuance of Judge