A Writer's Life (29 page)

Along the way, the marchers, dressed in motley multicolored clothing—denim, khaki, clerical black, cashmere turtlenecks, toggle coats, ponchos fashioned from plastic garbage bags—were occasionally greeted by small groups of roadside hecklers: “You can't vote, you son of a bitch—you ain't human yet”; “Get the hell off the grass!”; “Hey, black boy, gettin' any from that Yankee girl?” I also saw, mingling among the onlookers, some sullen-faced members of the Selma police force and the sheriff's posse, including Jim Clark, who was dressed in a business suit and fedora and displayed a
NEVER
button on his lapel.

In compliance with the federal judge's ruling, the fifty-four-mile trek from Selma to Montgomery was to be completed within a five-day period, and no more than three hundred civil rights demonstrators were supposed to occupy the highway in areas where it was limited to two lanes, and they were also directed to stay to the left, keeping the right lane open for motor traffic moving in the opposite direction. Due to the marchers' late start on the first day, and the fact that Dr. King and many others developed foot blisters, only seven and a half miles had been covered when they stopped for the night in a prearranged place—a cow pasture owned by a black farming family that had asked me not to write about them,
hoping that in maintaining a low profile they would minimize the risk of reprisals from Klan members or their cohorts.

I drove on ahead of the marchers throughout the day in search of feature stories or other sidebar material, joining some of my media colleagues as they filed hard news accounts from motels or hotels in Montgomery or its vicinity; and then I returned in the morning to the march route, which moved past farmlands, swamplands, piney thickets, and tall trees densely clustered with Spanish moss. While on the road, Dr. King slept at night in a well-guarded camper, while other security personnel posted themselves in front of the tents that sheltered the rest of the marchers and the volunteer workers who provided water, food, and medicine. Those marchers who were too exhausted or were otherwise unable to remain with the group were transported back to Selma and replaced by those who were physically able and eager to participate.

On the second day, the marchers got an early start and managed to travel seventeen and a half miles before nightfall. King left his followers in the late afternoon in order to catch a flight to Cleveland, where he was the scheduled speaker at a fund-raising event. His place as the march's leader on the following day was taken by the man whose skull had been fractured on Bloody Sunday—John Lewis. It rained heavily on this day, and also during a part of the next, limiting the march's progress to eleven and twelve miles, respectively. But toward the end of the fourth day, as the roadway expanded from two lanes to four and as the marchers' numbers soared from three hundred to more than one thousand, the capital of Alabama was in view. At the campsite that evening on the edge of the city, the marchers' tents and vehicles were arranged to make room for a stage. It was a jerry-built stage formed by borrowed coffin crates, and on them that night were several renowned performers who had come to Montgomery to entertain the crowd—such stars as Harry Belafonte, Mahalia Jackson, Tony Bennett, and Sammy Davis, Jr. Other show business people in New York were planning to support the cause with a one-night theater benefit entitled “Broadway Answers Selma.”

On the fifth and final day of the march, an estimated 25,000 supporters of the civil rights movement had arrived in Montgomery from near and far to participate in the concluding ceremony, which was a massive rally scheduled for noon on the steps of the colonnaded capitol, on the dome of which were flags representing the state of Alabama and the old Confederacy. Adjacent to the building, dangling separately on a staff of its own, was a flag identifying the United States. Anxious municipal authorities, hinting of likely riots or other disturbances, urged all students, black
and white, to remain in school throughout the afternoon and avoid the capitol area, while state employees were given the day off and many downtown shops decided to remain closed until the demonstrators left the city. In response to the mounting concerns of President Johnson, added numbers of federal troops were flown into the city beginning at 4:00 a.m., six hours before Dr. King was to start the march, and members of the city's police force were stationed at each of the 104 intersections that King's legions were to pass as they advanced from their campsite to the steps of the state building. Governor Wallace had no intention of coming down from his office to greet them.

He remained in his executive suite throughout the afternoon, relaxing and joking with his aides and a few trusted southern journalists, not seeming to care that he was loathed by the clamorous crowds who presently jammed the sidewalks and streets that surrounded him and were directing their insults up toward him through their loudspeakers. He was indebted to these people for helping to make him what he had become—a contrarian whose opposition to their proposals had found appeal in Middle America and had propelled him into the limelight as a Democratic presidential contender. White voters in Alabama and throughout the country, and increasing numbers of working-class ethnics in the urban areas, were finding themselves in accord with Wallace's stand on “law and order,” his quarrel with college students protesting the war in Vietnam, his “little guy” feistiness in the face of the nation's corporate elite and intellectuals, and his continuing defense of racial segregation. And even these masses now assembled in Montgomery were inadvertently lending testimony to his stature. How else could one explain that 25,000 people had taken the trouble to come here in order to take issue with him? He interpreted it as a form of flattery, and as he stood behind the venetian blinds of an office window, holding a pair of borrowed binoculars and squinting as he poked them between the slats, he remarked lightly to his companions: “That's quite a crowd.”

The demonstration lasted four hours, featuring many speakers but highlighted by the remarks delivered by Dr. King, who stood on the back of a flatbed trailer parked among the throngs in the street. “[T]oday,” he cried out, “I want to say to the people of America and the nations of the world that we are not about to turn around. We are on the move now. Yes, we are on the move and no wave of racism can stop us … not even the marching of mighty armies can halt us.… Let us march … on segregated schools … on poverty … on ballot boxes until all over Alabama, God's children will be able to walk the earth in decency and honor.…”

After Dr. King and the other speakers had left the site of the demonstration
along with their armed escorts and the media, and as the municipal authorities expressed relief that this tense and muggy afternoon had ended without any instances of the disorder and property damage that they had anticipated, several hundred marchers lined up to be transported back to Selma and other destinations in the buses, vans, and other vehicles driven by dozens of civil rights volunteer workers.

One of these volunteers was a thirty-nine-year-old blond woman from Detroit named Viola Liuzzo, who had left her five children and husband at home a week earlier so she could travel to Selma and partake in the march. Within a few hours of its completion on March 25, Mrs. Liuzzo had delivered one carload of marchers to Selma and was on the way back to Montgomery to pick up a second group, when her car was passed by another vehicle along a slight curve on the two-lane road within the swamplands of Lowndes County. A nineteen-year-old black male civil rights worker sat next to her, but only Mrs. Liuzzo was hit by their gunfire, and she died instantly of head wounds as her car swerved off the road and became entangled in a barbed-wire fence.

The next day, President Johnson announced on national television that Mrs. Liuzzo's murderers were four white men from the Birmingham area who were members of the Ku Klux Klan. “They struck by night,” Johnson said, “for their purposes cannot stand the light of day,” and “because I know their loyalty is not to the U.S. but to a hooded society of bigots,” Johnson said he was forthwith declaring war on the Klan in the form of intensified surveillance and proposed legal punishments that would induce Klan members to quit “before it was too late.” The four Klansmen under arrest were a forty-three-year-old steelworker, a forty-one-year-old retired steelworker on a disability pension, a thirty-one-year-old individual who was unemployed, and a twenty-one-year-old mechanic. Although in the Klansmen's subsequent trials the jurors were unable to come to terms on the issues of murder, the men were ultimately convicted on federal charges of violating Mrs. Liuzzo's civil rights and were sentenced to ten years in jail—all except the thirty-one-year-old. He went free. For six years he had been an informant on the payroll of the FBI.

T
WO MONTHS AFTER THE MARCH
,
IN
M
AY 1965
, I
RETURNED TO
Selma to write a follow-up story for the
New York Times Magazine
. I was curious to see what, if anything, had improved for the local black people in the wake of Dr. King's campaign and while the cause of civil rights continued to command the highest priority in the Lyndon Johnson White House.

After registering at the old Albert Hotel, where I had stayed before, I drove around town in a rented blue Ford sedan amid familiar sights and unfamiliar circumstances—the bridge without marchers, the highway without civil rights music and tear gas, the chapel in the black ghetto without camera crews posted on its front steps, and no hecklers standing downtown along the wide globe light-lined sidewalk of Broad Street. Now on Broad Street there were white teenagers pedaling bicycles, mothers pushing babies in carriages, truckers unloading supplies, traffic cops routinely ticketing improperly parked cars. The business district was crowded with mostly white but also some black pedestrians strolling in and out of two-story office buildings and warehouses and retail shops—the whites and blacks not pausing to chat with one another, or to acknowledge one another with a nod or a smile, but at least they were not insulting and glaring at one another during this undefinable period of cessation approximating an interracial truce.

The white people whom I interviewed told me that, thanks to the departure of Dr. King and his followers, the city was gradually returning to “normal.” They reminded me that Joe Smitherman was still the mayor, Jim Clark was still the sheriff, and Governor Wallace was making no promises to the small group of black petitioners whom he had finally admitted into his office on March 30. And so segregation was still the policy within Selma's school system, its police department, its jailhouse, its public pools and other recreational facilities, and in most of its churches. The restaurants and hotels did not officially list themselves as segregated,
but the white management and staff made black people feel so unwelcome that the latter tended to stay away. “You can't legislate how people feel,” I was told by a white man named Carl Morgan, the president of Selma's all-white city council.

The black people I consulted with said it was yet too early to gauge the civil rights demonstrators' impact on interracial developments in Selma. Even as Congress was about to pass President Johnson's voting-rights bill, and as the black people of Selma remained dedicated to doubling and tripling their registration numbers, it could nonetheless take years for Selma's black population to organize itself politically in ways that would challenge the entrenched white power structure. J. L. Chestnut, Jr., was satisfied meanwhile that the “reign of terror” was over in Selma, and he believed that the successful completion of the five-day march had been a symbolic triumph that would inevitably inspire black people and encourage them to go further because, as he had heard Dr. King phrase it in Montgomery, “We are not about to turn around.” Before the march, Chestnut had admitted to having concerns that the promotion of black people's rights was being politically exploited by the Democrats in the White House in order to allow President Johnson to singularly dominate the daily headlines, and Chestnut was then bothered by the possibility that “King was no longer the number-one civil rights leader in America; Lyndon Johnson was … and we'd been outfoxed and were in danger of being co-opted”—and Chestnut was further discomfitted by the question he asked himself: If President Johnson “became recognized as the man responsible for our civil rights victories and allowed to set our agenda, did this mean the end of the movement?” But the successful completion of the Selma to Montgomery march allayed all of Chestnut's earlier anxieties, and it most particularly made him proud of the fact “that no white person had decided there would be a march or where or how far it would go. These were black decisions. A white judge said, ‘Well, okay, it's legal,' and a white President federalized the National Guard, but they were reacting to a situation created by black people. Blacks were in charge, and there were whites in the march who clearly agreed with this arrangement and were there to play a supporting role. The march to Montgomery was the first enterprise I'd ever seen involving black and white people where the black people set the agenda and ran the show.”

But during my stay in Selma for the
Times Magazine
, I saw no signs of black people running anything; all I saw was evidence to the contrary. Without the presence of King's forces and the media, it seemed clear to me that the situation here had reverted to what the white locals called “normal,” meaning that they were controlling things and the traditionally
subordinate local blacks (with certain rare exceptions, such as the optimistic J. L. Chestnut, Jr.) were sitting back and hoping that entitlements and their prayers and the higher conscience of the nation would eventually liberate them from their bondage.

Perhaps I was reacting with impatience and insufficient insight into the uplifted souls of these postmarch black residents of Selma, and yet as an exploring journalist I was influenced by what I saw, and what I now saw on display in the black quarter was an absence of energy and direction, a laid-back attitude everywhere I looked—teenagers lounging around within a housing project's social center, listening to pop music on a jukebox; women with their arms folded, chatting casually among themselves across their front porches or near the curbs of unpaved streets; men seated around a table behind a Coke machine in a corner grocery store, playing cards.