At Canaan's Edge (6 page)

Baker fulminated, threatening to resign. He was a shrewd, sophisticated police leader in the region—a former college professor, mortician, and amateur Bible scholar, known as “Captain Baker” for his commanding presence (offset by a morbid, quirky fear of housecats), and as “The Fat Man” for his nervous compulsion to eat “anything that won't bite back.” When Smitherman expressed a novice mayor's trust in Wallace as his towering political mentor, Baker replied that Wallace could not control Sheriff Jim Clark or his “posse” of volunteer militia if he tried. Clark's primitive itch to attack Negroes was so strong that he had journeyed to Perry County just to be on hand for the night riot of troopers when Jimmie Lee Jackson was killed, and Colonel Al Lingo of the state troopers was as bad or worse in the estimation of Baker, who accused Smitherman of naively abandoning their pact to defeat Martin Luther King by his own nonviolent methods. Their strategy was to defend a kind of progressive segregation by restrained law enforcement, protecting Selma's reputation along with King's demonstrators from the violent propensities of Sheriff Clark. If the Negroes must be stopped, Baker preferred to arrest them with his officers before they could reach Clark's jurisdiction, which included the courthouse and all county areas outside the city limits. For Smitherman, however, that option would require him to break his commitment to Wallace and take on himself the burden of legal and political opposition to King.

A parallel debate raged privately at the governor's mansion, where soundings on the “laughingstock” plan had turned out badly for George Wallace. Legislators bridled at his notion of relying upon weakness and natural privation to vanquish the protesters. Some doubted that Colonel Lingo could safeguard the marchers long enough to fail, and State Representative Bill Edwards specifically advised that his Lowndes County constituents included stoutly independent sharpshooters and dynamite experts who would never defer to any complicated jujitsu plan regarding Negroes. Wallace reconsidered the blockade option just as a counterstroke landed from the opposing camp. From Atlanta about noon on Saturday, Martin Luther King issued a statement that if the Sunday marchers were stopped, they would “lie down in the road” and seek relief from the federal government. While Wallace recognized that this could be a bluff, he recoiled from being drawn into what would be an uneven standoff with President Johnson. To raise the stakes against King, he summoned a four o'clock news conference to forbid a contest of any kind. “There will be no march between Selma and Montgomery,” Wallace announced personally, saying he had instructed Colonel Lingo to “take whatever steps necessary” to prevent it. His aides quickly secured a public endorsement from Mayor Smitherman that “Negroes should not be permitted to make this senseless march.”

O
PTIONS CLOSED
upon President Johnson that Saturday afternoon, March 6, once Secretary McNamara reported that Vietnamese Communist units had been sighted near the new airbase at Da Nang. The Joint Chiefs were expecting two Marine battalions to guard the installation, and McNamara, anxious about vulnerability and blame, pressed for final approval to send them.

“The answer is yes, if there's no other alternative,” the President replied. He consoled himself by reciting one estimate that predicted less than even odds of a big land war in Asia, but fretted to McNamara over the “psychological impact” of landing Marines as the first full combat units in Vietnam. “I know every mother is gonna say, ‘Uh, oh. This is it,'” he complained, adding that Americans pictured the Marine soldier as “a guy that's got a dagger in his hand, and it's going to put the flag up.”

Johnson recalled the firestorm reaction to a White House press announcement that Marines were dispatched into Mississippi the previous June, to search for the three civil rights workers who disappeared on the first day of the SNCC summer project. “I damn near had to evacuate the White House,” he said.

“I know it,” said McNamara.

They had calmed that uproar by swiftly substituting Navy units for the Marines, the President recounted—“When I said the boy with the white jersey is coming in, it was a helluva lot of difference”—and he groped for a comparable gesture in Vietnam. If the Joint Chiefs required Marines for the task, he suggested, perhaps they should soften the name by calling them military police.

“Well, these aren't MPs,” said McNamara. “We can't call 'em that, but we can call 'em security battalions.”

“Well, can't you call 'em security battalion and say ‘similar to MPs'?” Johnson persisted.

“No, sir,” said McNamara. “We can't really say that, but we can say security. That's clear enough. They're quite different from the MPs, and all the press knows it. And it would—we'd just be accused of falsifying the story.”

“All right,” Johnson said glumly. He swallowed with an audible gulp. “Well, we'll just go with it. And we know what we're walkin' into. Rather than havin' it said, ‘well, we wanted protection for our planes and you wouldn't give it to us,' then, my answer is yes but my judgment's no.”

“Well, I agree with you,” said McNamara. He said he had stressed his own reluctance while clearing the move with Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, a strong private opponent of military involvement in Vietnam. “I said, ‘I'm cold as hell to this myself,'” McNamara told the President, “‘and I'm just telling you that the field commanders recommend it, and can't think of any other solution, and I'd like to know what you think.' Said I hate to see this done. And then he, well, we went on, and I was—what I was trying to do was to push him around to reluctantly agreeing, and I got him sort of half-agreed, but he'll fall off it if anybody attacks him. I'm sure of that.”

“When are you gonna issue the order?” Johnson interrupted.

“Well, it should go out this afternoon,” said McNamara. “I'm just so scared something is going to happen out there.”

“When are you gonna announce it?”

“Well, we'll make it late today so it'll miss some of the morning editions,” said McNamara, “and then there's no afternoon edition on Sunday.” He said he would handle the public notice so as to minimize attention.

The President emitted a quiet, loony laugh as McNamara conceded that combat troops inevitably would generate headlines. “You're tellin'
me?”
Johnson moaned as his goodbye. McNamara sent cables spurring pre-mobilized shipments of Marines to land within thirty-six hours, but held back the Pentagon news release until nightfall.

A
T
F
RAZIER'S
café in Atlanta, Friday's SNCC debate about Selma lasted well into Saturday night. Back and forth, amending its draft letter for Martin Luther King, the executive committee swerved from narrow defenses of organizational turf to the broadest misgivings of purpose. Communications director Julian Bond proposed that the letter be stripped of argumentation simply to notify King where SNCC would and would not cooperate with the march to Montgomery. To Courtland Cox, however, the point of the letter was to express the depth of SNCC's ideological dissent, and James Forman sought to spell out a fundamental difference in working technique. Whereas King conducted dangerous street demonstrations for the vote, SNCC was supporting a challenge in the U.S. House of Representatives to unseat Mississippi's five members on the constitutional ground that their elections in 1964 had excluded Negroes. Whereas King tried to negotiate voting rights with the Johnson administration, Silas Norman and others of SNCC proposed for disenfranchised Negroes to submit their own voting bill as a claim of full citizenship.

Forman defined SNCC methods as safer and closer to the people, but critics reminded him that Bob Moses himself had opposed the Mississippi congressional challenge as a siren song, saying it lured grassroots workers into the maw of Washington's publicists, lawyers, and politicians. Others questioned Mississippi as a model when veteran SNCC workers were migrating to other states, weary of contentions there since Freedom Summer. Moses, now calling himself Bob Parris, refused for a time to speak with white people and was disappearing into Alabama—away from the extra, prodigal distractions of holdover white volunteers. Five of them, including Dennis Sweeney of Stanford and Ursula Junk of Germany, had just been jailed with forty Negroes in McComb, Mississippi, and reports to SNCC headquarters indicated that the arresting officers “roughly handled the white workers” with special abuse.

Almost alone at Frazier's, SNCC chairman John Lewis spoke in favor of the march to Montgomery. Steadfast and unassuming, Lewis was respected within SNCC and had been elected national chairman for three consecutive years. Yet opinion crystallized against him as though Lewis somehow personified contradictory arguments about SNCC's nature. He had been a founder of SNCC five years earlier at the age of twenty, coming from a Nashville chapter so steeped in nonviolent commitment that it embodied SNCC's upstart boast through the sit-ins and Freedom Rides into Mississippi—that students stepped forward to risk their lives where King hung back to preach. Bernard Lafayette, Lewis's roommate at ministerial school in Nashville, had established a Selma project for SNCC back in 1962, first sleeping alone in cars when no Negro family would house a civil rights worker. Lewis had been arrested before King in Selma, and more often, and he came from a sharecropping family of ten children in nearby rural Alabama. Lewis was the ideal SNCC representative to oppose King's strategy, but he turned grassroots credentials against his exhausted cohorts instead. “If these people want to march, I'm going to march with them,” he insisted. “You decided what you want to do, but I'm going to march.”

Rancor surged on both sides. SNCC members accused Lewis of defying and misrepresenting his own organization. Wounded, Lewis argued that SNCC was “abandoning these people” in violation of its cardinal commitment to stand with them in danger. Some retorted that King could hoodwink the masses into false moves, and suggested that it was better to melt back among the people as organizers, like trade unionists. While a few called it an ideological retreat to dedicate themselves blindly to the material ambitions of the poor, saying many Negroes wanted only “a house on a hill and two Cadillacs,” others said SNCC now embraced transforming goals from outside the American system. One member asked pointedly “why we bother with the vote at all,” which expressed the disillusionment of young SNCC workers who had suffered for the national promise of equal rights and still felt its rawest shortcomings up close. To hope for fundamental change only “sets the stage” for another letdown, one executive committee strategist wrote in preparation for the meeting. They were still being jailed because of an “emasculated” 1964 Civil Rights Act, added SNCC's research director Jack Minnis, who foresaw no chance that a strong voting rights law could be passed, signed, upheld, and enforced. “Therefore,” he concluded, “I think it illusory to the point of fatuity to suppose that any purpose we avow would be served by trying to get still another voting bill passed by Congress.” Such skepticism about government was the dominant new mood within SNCC, making Lewis too earnest and steadfast by contrast—too much like King—and the religious optimism of his nonviolence had worn too thin to invite another beating in Selma.

Still at an impasse, the executive committee voted toward midnight to disapprove of the march officially but allow workers to participate “as individuals,” so long as they did not imply SNCC's sanction. The committee stopped short of voting Lewis out of the chairmanship, which would have advertised an internal split, and the members knew better than to try to restrain him by persuasion or edict. Lewis, for his part, turned from reproach to the practical problem of getting to Selma by morning on his own, with no help from the executive committee. Lacking a car or driver's license, he managed to recruit Wilson Brown, a young member of the communications staff who had a white Dodge, and also Bob Mants of Atlanta. Mants, during high school, had been drawn to the excitement of the Atlanta SNCC headquarters near his home, first as a volunteer janitor, then as “captain” of posters for the Freedom Hops at the Simpson Road skating rink, and briefly in bone-chilling demonstrations. Now twenty-one, still captivated by movement people, Mants seized the chance to get away from his premed studies at Morehouse College, never dreaming that a Selma weekend would lead him to spend his life in Lowndes County. Escorting Lewis, he and Wilson Brown reached SNCC's Freedom House in Selma by dawn, and napped before the march in sleeping bags on the floor.

March 7, 1965

A
chorus of automobile horns sounded through the Carver housing project at mid-morning on Sunday, March 7, as some two hundred people from Perry County rolled up to Brown Chapel safe, relieved, and ready, many of them veterans of Wednesday's funeral march for Jimmie Lee Jackson. Their arrival soon registered in a room at the courthouse marked by a prominent sign—“Quiet Please, We Are Trying To Monitor Three Radios”—where Sheriff Clark's female deputies relayed reports to city police and Colonel Lingo's state troopers. They wore Confederate flag pins on white blouses, and one of them told a reporter she had taken special pains to be presentable on what figured to be an important day. An incoming transmission crackled: “There's three more cars of niggers crossing the bridge. Some white bastards riding with them.” This bulletin referred to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a hometown Confederate general and U.S. senator, which arched from the edge of the Selma business district over the Alabama River toward Montgomery.

Trepidation rose steadily in Andrew Young as he drove past sheriff's cruisers into Selma with a white Episcopal priest, and it jumped when he saw the large crowds of Negroes milling about Brown Chapel, some with knapsacks and bedrolls. Young quickly sought out Hosea Williams and demanded to know why he had not postponed the march until Monday as Martin Luther King had instructed. Rev. P. H. Lewis, pastor of Brown Chapel, heartily seconded Young. He had been a party on the same late-night conference call and could not fathom why Williams proceeded to whirl around his church all morning with pep talks for arriving marchers. Williams admitted that “Doc” made himself plain against him as the lone holdout—“Hosea, you're not with me, son, you need to pray”—but insisted with his usual swagger that King reauthorized the march once he realized “how well I got this thing organized.” He implored Young to check with Bevel, saying Bevel talked recently with King and would vouch for the change if someone could find him.

Young paused in exasperation, knowing that Williams would not lightly invoke the authority of his bitter rival. Since Birmingham, Williams had aspired to Bevel's position as chief action adviser, disparaging him as unstable and devious, a potential usurper against King, and Bevel just as openly denigrated Williams as a thick-headed former pesticide chemist who had no conception of nonviolent strategy beyond “putting niggers in jail to get on TV.” King deliberately preserved these and other fierce antagonists in his inner council, which was more than enough to guarantee spirited debate, and Young knew Williams would be loath to exaggerate in a way that opened him to contradiction from Bevel. Still, Young recognized a state of combat agitation in Williams that made him wary from personal experience. In 1963, while visiting anti-segregation demonstrations in Savannah, Georgia, where Williams was then a local leader, Young wound up arrested for the first time. In 1964, sent by King with explicit instructions to dampen incipient protests in St. Augustine, Florida, he walked into a mass meeting only to hear Williams invite “the prettiest girl in the church” to join Young in leading a night march—his first—which soon led to a Klan beating. Young realized that these baptismal trials actually raised his commitment to and his standing within the nonviolent movement, above that of mild-mannered church administrator, but he warned sternly that the stakes in Selma were too high for Williams to dissemble again.

Young sent messengers to retrieve Bevel and retreated to the parsonage next door, fending off urgent inquiries about the schedule. Albert Turner, a bricklayer swept into voting protests only a month ago, served notice that his people from Perry County were resolved to march
somewhere
that day, even if only around Brown Chapel, and many raised questions about the white man in a clerical collar who arrived with Young in place of Martin Luther King. Rev. John B. Morris by coincidence had shared a flight from Atlanta and then joined Young for the drive from Montgomery in haste to follow up on the previous day's drama, which the
New York Times
on page one called “the first time an all-white group of Southerners had demonstrated in the streets for Negro equality.” The Ellwanger march came as a welcome surprise to Morris, a founder of the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity (ESCRU), as did the nationwide coverage alongside stories about the upcoming Marine deployment to Vietnam.

Regular notice made Selma part of a new vocabulary that the civil rights movement had pushed forward in public discourse since the 1954
Brown v. Board of Education
decision on schools. There was a photograph of Sheriff Jim Clark in that morning's
New York Times Magazine,
illustrating a published debate from England between writers James Baldwin and William F. Buckley on whether “The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro.” Buckley assailed a tendency to “rush forward and overthrow our civilization because we don't live up to our high ideals,” while Baldwin asserted that “the American soil is full of the corpses of my ancestors” for systemic reasons deeper than hateful excess on the fringes of society. “Sheriff Clark in Selma, Alabama cannot be dismissed as a total monster,” Baldwin told the Cambridge Union Society in February. “I am sure he loves his wife and children and likes to get drunk. One has to assume that he is a man like me. But he does not know what drives him to use the club, to menace with the gun, and to use the cattle prod.”

Sheriff Clark's image also appeared that Sunday morning on national television, explaining that he had started using cattle prods about 1957 and that he had formed his volunteer posse of two hundred men originally to handle labor disputes. To interviewers from the ABC
Issues and Answers
program, Clark asserted that King came to Selma “to satisfy his revenge against me and also to make his personal bank account larger” by stirring trouble over a voting issue that was phony because “nigras are registered pretty much as they desire to.” Clark told the television audience that public harassment had driven him to move his wife and children into the jail for security, though there had been “no attempts on my life as yet.” Locally, every half-hour on Selma radio, his voice urged citizens to stay in their homes that Sunday, and Clark in person—back from taping
Issues and Answers
the previous day in Washington—was driving from the Montgomery airport with Colonel Al Lingo toward a staging ground on the east side of Pettus Bridge, outside city limits, where their men saddled horses and issued equipment that included wide-nozzle tear gas spray guns and launching rifles for tear gas canisters.

Word of the tear gas spread rapidly among the marchers, who tried to calm themselves as they filled out mimeographed notification forms in and around Brown Chapel. Some suggested that they try to elude the troopers by taking a more northerly route on Alabama Highway 14 instead of U.S. 80 over Pettus Bridge, but local ministers L. L. Anderson and F. D. Reese said it was foolhardy to hope that demonstrators on foot could outflank motorized officers. Dr. Alfred Moldovan of New York, one of ten volunteer doctors and nurses from the Medical Committee for Human Rights, gathered prospective marchers for impromptu speeches about the medical properties of tear gas. “It is not a dangerous gas, usually,” he said. “It blinds you temporarily and drives you into a panic. If tear gas hits you, go off to the side of the road and stand quietly. Don't panic.” Frank Soracco, a young white Californian, added a roving speech for nonviolent discipline, saying that panic could make them look like a mob and give the troopers an excuse to do their worst. Having canvassed, improvised, and gone to jail in Selma since December, Soracco resolved that morning to be in the midst of whatever developed—a choice that fell within SNCC's grudging vote of tolerance but isolated him among fellow staff workers, most of whom regarded march preparations with censure from a distance.

S
HORTLY AFTER
noon, John Lewis arrived at Brown Chapel to find Young, Bevel, and Williams darting about in agitated huddles. Bevel had endeared himself for once to Williams (who said later he “could have kissed him”), by confirming that King wanted to supersede the instructions he gave early that morning when he sent Young alone to the Atlanta airport, and now to reauthorize the march. Before a nonplussed Lewis, they debated whether to confirm the change with King in light of the formidable opposition across Pettus Bridge, and if so how to penetrate the screen of Daddy King's loyal deacons at Ebenezer Church where King was preaching in a lengthy service. They all knew that King's father and co-pastor for years had employed a mix of sly ministrations and histrionic bluster to discourage his son from taking movement risks—this time scolding him for neglecting Ebenezer, coaxing him to fulfill his primary duties as a pastor, and finally claiming a sudden illness that Daddy King said rendered him so weak that his son must stay in Atlanta to take his place in the pulpit. Hosea Williams conceded that he lacked the clout to get an emergency phone message to King during worship, but he did manage to pull Ralph Abernathy from his service at West Hunter Street Baptist in Atlanta and beg intercession on behalf of the “thousands” Williams declared had showed up ready to march.

Abernathy in turn pushed through to King by phone during the Ebenezer service, as did Young and Bevel from Selma. They said postponement would be dispiriting, especially for the large turnout from Perry County, which more than offset the advantage of waiting until King could be there on Monday. Bevel reiterated that if five hundred people went to jail today, five hundred more should go tomorrow. No matter what the result, he said, their effort almost certainly would need repeating, and King was better saved for the building phases in days ahead, as in Birmingham. King consented. He stipulated that two of his three deputies should stay out of the march to handle follow-up logistics. They retired to flip coins simultaneously, and Williams, by showing the only heads, became the odd-man-out to lead the march in King's place. Their usual banter defied the solemnity of what was to come. Young congratulated Williams for not hoodwinking him to the front a third time, and Williams accused Bevel of rigging the toss against him.

Hastily, they reviewed contingencies of nonviolent practice for the volunteers assembled in Brown Chapel. If stopped, they would sit in prayer until arrested or tear-gassed, which would provide ample ground to seek relief in federal court. Young told reporters that King decided to stay in Atlanta once Governor Wallace announced his intention to block the march, the better to seek political support in the North. Lewis read a statement about why they were marching. He carried a backpack stocked haphazardly for a short trip to jail, with an apple, an orange, a toothbrush, and a copy of
American Political Traditions.
After a final chorus of “God Will Take Care of You,” Lewis and Hosea Williams led the way from Brown Chapel at 1:40
P.M.
Sunday—only to run into a glowering Wilson Baker, who, having resigned and un-resigned that morning in renewed infighting among segregationists, required them to abide by every scintilla of the parade ordinances until he could bid them good riddance from his jurisdiction. The marchers repaired to the playground of Carver Homes for an anticlimactic interval to form roughly twenty-four squads of twenty-five, each with a staff person to maintain proper spacing, and they stepped off again two abreast at 2:18
P.M.
, followed by a vehicular train that reflected their meager expectation of reaching outdoor bivouac: a flatbed truck with four portable toilets, two ambulances for the medical committee volunteers, and three borrowed hearses for supplies.

S
QUADS CLOSED
ranks as the march line turned out of Selma as never before, climbing on the left sidewalk up the long slope of an empty Pettus Bridge. Police officers held up the ambulances and hearses, saying the roadway was closed to traffic, and a state administrator served notice that the out-of-state volunteers were not licensed to dispense medical care in Alabama. Diane Nash, patrolling the rear of the march line for stragglers, was drawn into a dispute over the legal status of Red Cross armbands and the meaning of “emergency treatment” in one section of the state code, but the support vehicles remained stranded as the front of the line reached the overarching steel girders at the crest of the bridge, nearly a hundred feet above river waters that were choppy from the crisp March winds.

Down the bridge before Lewis and Williams opened a vista of forbidding reception. In the middle distance, a wall of trooper cruisers blocked all four lanes of Highway 80. Closer, a reserve of some 150 troopers, sheriff's deputies, and possemen mingled behind a front line of twenty-five troopers about two hundred yards beyond the foot of the bridge—the possemen in khaki jackets and white helmets, fifteen of them mounted on horseback, the troopers in blue uniforms and blue helmets. Scores of white spectators jammed the parking lot of “Chicken Treat, Home of the Mickey Burger,” some standing on parked cars, across the highway from several dozen Negroes who gathered cautiously behind an old school bus. Near the front line, outside the showroom of Lehman Pontiac, troopers guarded an observation area reserved for journalists and several of the twenty FBI observers scattered around Selma.

With the march line sighted on the bridge, a buzz about rumors and source reports died down in the observation area. FBI communications were sifting two death threats out of Chicago alone, one falsely claiming that a hired gunman spotted King in Selma. A television correspondent who knew better took King's absence as confirmation of his political soundings on “some sort of power struggle” behind the scenes, in which the more militant SNCC students reportedly had imposed the Sunday march upon an unwilling King. At least one network camera operator, without knowing that SNCC's executive committee actually was renouncing the march as King's folly,
*
adapted in his own pragmatic way to the volatile confusion of cross-racial journalism in Selma. He dutifully followed the instructions of troopers and deputies who promised to guarantee his safety, but also wore a new athletic supporter and protective cup to guard against a repeat of earlier attacks from the same uniformed authorities. On foot, and from makeshift perches, the camera crews gathered images that soon obliterated a host of preoccupations while lifting some details into lore—that Hosea Williams claimed under his breath to have captured such bridges in Germany, that one tipsy marcher near the front had to be steadied over the crest, that Lewis and Williams eyed a possible destination below in the Alabama River and confessed softly to each other that neither could swim.