Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (86 page)

King then resolved to dramatize the cause by organizing a protest march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery, fifty-six miles to the east. There the demonstrators were to petition Governor Wallace for protection of blacks who wished to register. King hoped to start the march on Tuesday, March 9, by which time he expected that federal judge Frank Johnson would have voided an order by Wallace to ban it. Younger militants, however, determined to march on Sunday, March 7. Selma police were sure that violence would occur, but when the mayor told them that Wallace had promised there would be peace, they made no effort to stop the marchers when they moved out of their church headquarters on the 7th. Lewis and SCLC leader Hosea Williams led the 600 black demonstrators to the Edmund Pettis Bridge at the edge of town. Many toted sleeping bags for the lengthy march to come. Across the bridge waited helmeted state troopers wearing gas masks, as well as Sheriff Clark and his men, mounted on horseback.
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There followed one of the most frightening confrontations in the history of the civil rights movement. A state police major shouted through a bullhorn, "Turn around and go back to your church." He gave the marchers two minutes to turn back. Williams asked for a "word" with the police but was told, "There is no word to be had." One minute later the troopers obeyed an order to advance. They tore forward in a flying wedge, swinging their clubs at people in the way. Lewis stood his ground, only to be cracked on the head. He suffered a fractured skull. With white onlookers cheering, the troopers rushed ahead, hitting the demonstrators and exploding canisters of tear gas. Five women were beaten so badly that they fell down near the bridge and lost consciousness. Sheriff Clark's horsemen then joined in the assault. Charging with rebel yells, they swung bullwhips and rubber tubing wrapped in barbed wire. More demonstrators fell, seventy of whom were later hospitalized. The rest were driven back to the church where they had started.
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The violence of Bloody Sunday, as demonstrators called it, outraged millions of Americans who saw it shown (repeatedly) on national television. Editorials in northern papers angrily denounced Wallace, Clark, and the troopers and demanded federal intervention. White supporters of civil rights, mostly from the North, began descending on Selma to help the demonstrators. From that point on it was virtually inevitable that Congress would have to take action—and soon.
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Bloody Sunday unleashed especial fury among militants at the scene. As Lewis left for a hospital, he cried, "I don't see how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam . . . and can't send troops to Selma, Alabama." He added, "Next time we march, we may have to keep going when we get to Montgomery. We may have to go to Washington. "
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King, returning to Selma from Atlanta (where he had gone to preach on Sunday), started organizing a march for Tuesday, March 9. Judge Johnson, however, indicated that he wanted the march postponed pending a hearing on Wallace's request for a ban on the march. LBJ, too, applied pressure for delay. Militants, however, were eager to march on Tuesday, even if that meant violating a court order from Judge Johnson. King, caught in the middle, engaged in all-night arguments with other civil rights protestors over strategy.

Unwilling to defy a federal court, King finally accepted an arrangement devised in concert with federal mediators. He would lead a token march across the bridge, thereby demonstrating the determination of his followers, but then would turn around and go back to his headquarters in Selma. Alabama police promised not to hurt the marchers. King told only a few trusted aides of his plan, however, and most of the 1,500 people (now including whites) who marched that day assumed they were going to challenge the authorities. When King got across the bridge, he prepared to turn about. But state troopers standing there had been informed of his plans and suddenly wheeled out of the way, leaving (or so it seemed) a clear path to Montgomery.
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This move of the authorities, reportedly ordered by Wallace, was obviously designed to embarrass King. Militants on the march, including James Forman and Cleveland Sellers of SNCC, had already been highly critical of King—"de Lawd." They chafed to go ahead on the now open road. But King had promised to turn around, and turn around he did, thereby aborting the march. The episode fractured already delicate coalitions within the movement. In the complicated events that followed, SCLC and SNCC barely managed to cooperate.

Militants who questioned LBJ's commitment, however, misjudged him. After Bloody Sunday the President knew he must take a stand. Overriding advisers who urged restraint, he went to Capitol Hill on Monday, March 15, to press for a strong new voting rights law. Millions of people watched on prime-time television as he spoke carefully but with great emotion. Members of Congress, outraged by the events at Selma, forty times interrupted his address with applause. Johnson closed by raising his thumbs, fists clenched, and proclaiming, "Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And, we shall . . . overcome." His speech, especially the final peroration, moved many in the movement, including King, whose eyes filled with tears.
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Two days later Judge Johnson sided with the demonstrators by striking down Wallace's request for a ban on a march. Johnson conceded one of Wallace's arguments—that a march on a state highway might impede traffic—but he held that the demonstrators had a right, given the "enormous" wrongs that they had suffered, to assemble and to march in a peaceable and orderly manner. The judge barred state and local officials from interfering with the marchers. Wallace was outraged, having already called Judge Johnson a "low-down, carpetbaggin', scalawaggin', race-mixin' liar." Vindicated, King and his aides set March 21 as the starting date for the march—at last—to Montgomery.

At this point the President again intervened to assist the movement. When Wallace warned darkly that he could not guarantee the safety of the marchers, LBJ called him to Washington for three hours of The Treatment, during which he threatened to send in federal troops if necessary. The session between the President and the governor featured profane and earthy language from both parties. Wallace departed impressed by Johnson. When he was asked how LBJ compared to JFK, he replied, "Johnson's got much more on the ball." He added, "If I hadn't left when I did, he'd have had me coming out
for
civil rights."
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The march that began on March 21 proved to be an especially memorable event in the history of the civil rights movement. Although King did not walk the whole way, he started out at the head of a throng of thousands of people, most of them emotionally committed local blacks. Significant numbers of whites from the North joined in. Other leaders—Ralph Abernathy, John Lewis, King's executive secretary Andrew Young—circulated actively amid the marchers as they walked. Federal marshals and the Alabama guardsmen flanked and protected both sides of the highway. Helicopters circled overhead to look out for danger.
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After four days the marchers reached the outskirts of Montgomery, where they stopped for an evening of entertainment. The folksingers Peter, Paul, and Mary led the throng in Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a-Changin'." The black comedian Dick Gregory delighted the crowd with jokes about Selma and the segregationist mentality. The next day King and other national leaders—Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, Whitney Young of the Urban League, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin—stood at the steps of the capitol (where the Confederate flag flew over the dome). As he had at the March on Washington nineteen months earlier, King closed an inspirational series of speeches with a powerful and uplifting oration. The crowd, now 25,000 strong, sang out the anthem of the movement, "We Shall Overcome," modifying it triumphantly, "We
have
overcome today."
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To an extent, they had. But that evening four members of the KKK tracked the movements of Viola Liuzzo, a white Detroit housewife who had been transporting demonstrators to and from Selma in her car. As she drove along a deserted stretch of the highway, the Klansmen drew even with her car and shot her to death. They stopped to inspect the wreckage, failing to see a young black activist who lay still in the car. Because one of the Klansmen was an FBI agent (who said he had fired in the air), the crime was solved, and convictions were later obtained. Liuzzo's killing, however, exposed the still powerful poison that contaminated race relations and left a bitter taste in the midst of satisfaction.
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Compared to the drama at Selma, subsequent action on Capitol Hill moved deliberately. Johnson and his aides, having derived enormous sustenance from the conflict in Alabama, applied unrelenting pressure for passage of a voting rights bill. It received strong bipartisan support save among congressmen from the South. The House approved it overwhelmingly, 333 to 85. Southerners filibustered in the Senate but lost on a vote for cloture, 70 to 30, after twenty-five days of debate.
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The measure then passed, 77 to 19. For the signing of the bill on August 6 Johnson assembled a large audience of civil rights leaders and congressmen in the President's Room at the Capitol—the same place where Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation. "Let me say to every Negro in this country," he said. "You
must
register. You
must
vote. . . . The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls that imprison men because they are different from other men."
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The 1965 Voting Rights Act greatly extended federal power in the United States. A frankly regional measure, it took aim at Deep South states by stipulating that the Justice Department could intervene to suspend discriminatory registration tests in counties where 50 percent or fewer of the county's voting-age population had been able to register. If that failed to work, the department could send in federal registrars to take over the job. The law covered state and local as well as federal elections and protected not only the right to register but also the right to vote. Two days after the bill became law, federal registrars turned up in Selma as well as in eight other counties in three southern states. Within a year the strong arm of the federal government had helped to increase the registration of eligible Negroes in the six southern states wholly covered by the law from 30 to 46 percent. One of the many white office-holders defeated by the surge in black voters was Sheriff Jim Clark of Dallas County, Alabama. He was beaten in a Democratic primary in 1966.
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Many years later critics complained of longer-range consequences of the voting rights law of 1965. Some southern states, prevented by the law from discriminating against black voters, gerrymandered and created at-large congressional districts so as to damage the political aspirations of black candidates. In 1982 Congress amended the act so as to require that blacks and other minorities be given greater opportunity to elect one of their own to Congress and state legislatures. Reapportionment following the 1990 census gave substance to this amendment and led to the election in 1992 of sixteen new black lawmakers on Capitol Hill. These developments, the critics maintained, amounted to a special entitlement for blacks that legislators in 1965 had not intended. The result, they added, was a manipulable system of representation that catered to
groups
, or blocs, of voters, rather than a color-blind system that protected
individuals
from discrimination.
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These developments, however, were unintended consequences of the act of 1965. They arose from a later, different politics that reflected the onward sweep and redefinition of rights-consciousness and entitlements in the United States. Long-run outcomes of the voting rights act, as of much legislation, could not be foreseen at the time.
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What might have been more clearly predicted were the limitations of voting rights, even in a democracy like the United States. The right to vote had a special cachet in American history dating to the eighteenth century. It was a wondrous magnet for oppressed people throughout the world. But as women had recognized after getting the suffrage in 1920, the franchise could not work wonders. Johnson exaggerated in claiming that the vote was "the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice." As he intoned these words, he knew that the right to vote, however fundamental, could do only so much for black people, who faced deep socio-economic disadvantages rooted in racism and discrimination. The future proved this point. Nearly thirty years following passage of the voting rights act, the median household income of blacks in Selma was $9,615, compared to $25,580 for whites. More than half of blacks in the area lived in poverty in 1994.
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Daniel Moynihan, an Assistant Secretary of Labor in Johnson's administration, had already identified these economic disadvantages in a report,
The Negro Family: The Case for National Action
, that he had completed in April 1965. The Moynihan Report, as it became known, pointed to rapidly increasing rates of unemployment, family break-up, and welfare dependency among black people in the United States.
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LBJ relied on the report as the core of a major speech on racial problems at Howard University in early June. Johnson emphasized that blacks in the United States needed not only equality of opportunity but also "equality as a fact and equality as a result." Moving beyond liberal quests for opportunity, he promised significant activity to improve the socio-economic condition of blacks, the next frontier for civil rights, later in the year.
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