Pillar of Fire (94 page)

 

O
VER THE WEEKEND
in Selma, secret talks at the Hotel Albert produced a deal whereby Wilson Baker granted a parade permit for Monday the fifteenth—the second and last courthouse registration day of the month—and movement leaders in return agreed to confine their ranks to voting-age adults. The permit secured a record turnout of some fifteen hundred, stretched nearly ten blocks from the courthouse on Lauderdale Street. More than four hundred of these signed the appearance book for a future place in the registration line; ninety of those with early numbers completed applications to register. After classes, Selma's Negro schoolteachers marched to the end of the line. Thirty laborers filed in behind them in uniforms reading, “Henry Brick Company.” Eight hundred students paraded by in salute.

Reporters followed when King broke away to the neighboring county seat of Camden, where he walked along a line of seventy aspiring registrants from Gee's Bend—mostly Petteways, from the extended rural clan that had first tried to register with Bernard Lafayette in 1963. Asked how they were faring, Monroe Petteway told King, “I filled out the form like I have three times before, but I can't get nobody to vouch for me.” Under Alabama law, a new voter had to obtain a signed reference from one current voter in the county, and there were no registered voters among the Negro majority in Wilcox County. King led observers across the courthouse lawn to ask Sheriff P. C. “Lummy” Jenkins whether he would vouch for Monroe Petteway, and Jenkins replied that doing so would not “look right” for him in local politics. King's roving party drove back to Selma by way of Marion, where “about 150 Negroes were so inspired by Dr. King's visit that they refused to leave the courthouse at the end of the day,” reported the
New York Times
. Deputies shoved them out with nightsticks after dark.

When the registration board closed the appearance book for lunch on Tuesday, C. T. Vivian tried to lead a line of Negroes inside the courthouse to seek shelter from the rain. Sheriff Clark blocked him with a row of deputies who shoved the line down the steps Vivian kept climbing, preaching defiantly, until one of them slugged him in the mouth. They hauled him away, bleeding. By the time King tried to visit Vivian that afternoon at Good Samaritan Hospital, he had been treated and removed to the county jail. Nuns crowded around King in the white habits of the Sisters of Saint Joseph, eager to pose one by one for pictures. King tried to visit Vivian in the county jail, but was refused. That night, over vehement security objections from the staff, he addressed a voting rally in the rural wilderness of Gee's Bend. There were late-night arguments about why no one could find a church in Lowndes County willing to host a mass meeting.

Tensions rose on both sides. Segregationist sentiment shifted against the spectacle of authorized Negro marches, while movement leaders chafed over the negligible return in actual registered voters for so much effort. The Citizens Council published a full-page ad comparing the Communist party's racial equality platform of 1928 with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, ending, “The similarity will certainly shock you.” Editors of the
Selma Times-Journal
, who had upbraided Sheriff Clark for violence, warned in a front-page editorial that the tolerant attitudes of the past month—“the ultimate expression of good faith by our white citizens”—were at risk because “outside forces” and “showmen” under King had pushed “all sound-thinking citizens perilously near the breaking point.” King, meanwhile, took ill with a fever. Chicago's
Daily Defender
ran a banner headline: “Virus Fells King.” An FBI wiretap picked up Ralph Abernathy borrowing $500 from Harry Wachtel, saying King was sick and “completely broke.” On his way to Atlanta for home rest, King stopped by the Wednesday night mass meeting at Brown Chapel. “Selma
still
isn't right!” he cried, in a speech reporters called his strongest to date. “We must engage in broader civil disobedience to bring the attention of the nation on Dallas County,” King declared. “It may well be we might have to march out of this church at night….”
*

At a strategy meeting of white people that night in Marion, irate sentiment prevailed to the extent that two substantial citizens were shouted down and physically assaulted for suggesting negotiations with local demonstrators. Perry County officials called upon Alabama state troopers for reinforcements, and sheriff's deputies arrested SCLC project leader James Orange Thursday morning for contributing to the delinquency of young marchers. In response, Albert Turner of the Perry County Voters League urgently sought a big-name movement speaker from Selma to build the crowd for an evening mass meeting. He requested C. T. Vivian, whom Judge Thomas had just ordered released. Vivian replied that he could not risk jail again, being on weekend duty in King's absence, but he finally agreed to drive over for a quick sermon. His audience overflowed Mount Zion Baptist, a small clapboard church off Marion's courthouse square. The much-discussed plan was to walk to the jail less than a block away, sing a freedom song for the incarcerated James Orange, and disperse.It was a quick but dangerous venture in view of the darkness. Network news correspondents told their crews to return film cameras to their cars, so as not to provoke the hostile crowds milling outside. C. T. Vivian, who slipped out a rear door into a waiting car, noticed on the drive to Selma a number of flashing police lights speed by in the opposite direction.

At 9:30
P.M.
, Albert Turner and Rev. James Dobynes of Marion led four hundred people two abreast from Mount Zion. They proceeded less than half a block before halting at a blockade of state troopers and other law enforcement officers. Over a bullhorn, Police Chief T. O. Harris ordered the marchers to disperse or return to the church. When Reverend Dobynes knelt to pray before retreat, a state trooper struck him in the head with a club and two others dragged him by the feet toward jail. Reporters, confined across the square, heard struggles in the darkness. Network news correspondents instantly sent crews to retrieve cameras, but bystanders clubbed down NBC's Richard Valeriani with a severe head wound before they returned. Bystanders also beat two UPI photographers, destroyed their cameras, and sprayed the lenses of arriving film crews with black aerosol paint. No photographs survived. Streetlights went dark, and
New York Times
correspondent John Herbers reported by ear: “Negroes could be heard screaming and loud whacks rang through the square.”

Only the first quarter of the march line had left the church. Those who fled back inside collided at the door with those rushing outside to see the commotion. Panic drove the ones trapped outside to flee toward buildings behind the church. Fifty state troopers overtook many of them, including eighty-two-year-old Cager Lee, who stumbled bleeding into Mack's Cafe to find his daughter Viola and grandson Jimmy Lee. In utter chaos, some troopers chased two dozen marchers into the cafe while ten others pushed inside to chase them out. They expelled one crippled customer unharmed, overturned tables, smashed lights, dishes, customers, and marchers. The cafe owner saw troopers attack Cager Lee again in the kitchen. For trying to pull them off, Viola Jackson was beaten to the floor. Her son Jimmy Lee Jackson lunged to protect her. One trooper threw him against a cigarette machine, another shot him twice in the stomach, and then they cudgeled him back outside toward the bus station, where he collapsed. Jackson was the only gunshot victim among ten Negroes who were hospitalized. Several others lay injured in jail, including George Baker, an SCLC volunteer from Illinois. Reporters on the Marion square were surprised to come upon Sheriff Clark among the officers imported from other counties. He quipped that things had been too quiet for him in Selma.

King wired Attorney General Katzenbach from Atlanta late that night: “This situation can only encourage chaos and savagery in the name of law enforcement unless dealt with immediately.” Katzenbach replied the next morning that an FBI investigation was under way. At the White House, Press Secretary Reedy mildly told reporters that the President was keeping informed. The
Alabama Journal
of Montgomery reacted more intensely, calling the Marion attack “a nightmare of State Police stupidity and brutality.” In Marion, all-day church services offered prayers for the recovery of Jimmy Lee Jackson—a twenty-six-year-old pulpwood worker, high school graduate, youngest deacon at Saint James Baptist Church, who had applied for the vote five times without success. In Selma, where Jackson was under treatment at Good Samaritan, Hosea Williams collected all potential weapons down to pocket combs and preached a congregation at Brown Chapel into a frenzy for a Friday night march on the courthouse. Wilson Baker stopped him on the church steps to warn that troopers and hotheads and assorted posses were spoiling for night violence downtown. He argued for postponement to protect the town and the marchers themselves, but Williams—glassy-eyed—shouted that he had given himself over to march. Baker had him arrested instead, to the relief of some terrified movement people standing uncertainly behind.

 

A
DAM
C
LAYTON
P
OWELL
had the misfortune to pick that Thursday, February 18, to launch an update of his 1960 speeches on police corruption in the New York rackets—“naming the places and the numbers,” asking why “police officers can receive $3,000 per drop in Harlem every month and to whom does it go.” Having just lost an appeal to the Supreme Court of the $210,000 Esther James libel judgment, he asked the House of Representatives to “forget about Mississippi for a while.” His legal predicament guaranteed more press but no more respectful attention, and Powell was swamped by bigger news from Vietnam to Harlem.

Minority Leader Everett Dirksen set the tone that day for the first bruising Senate debate about Vietnam. On behalf of President Johnson, he rebuked Senator Frank Church of Idaho as a “sunshine patriot” for a lengthy address in which Church, citing a lack of strategic interest or political support in “these former colonial regions,” had argued for negotiated withdrawal. (“As the beat of the war drums intensifies, and passions rise on both sides,” said Church, “I recognize that negotiation becomes more difficult.”) Dirksen bemoaned “a chorus of despair sung to the tune of a dirge of defeat.” He said he was “grieved but not surprised” to hear in the Senate chamber, “which echoes with the courageous words of brave men now gone, the opinion that we cannot win….” George Smathers of Florida among other senators rose to support him. “To negotiate in South Vietnam while Communist aggression is spreading…,” Dirksen declared, “is like a man trying to paint his front porch while his house is on fire.”

At the White House, President Johnson was hosting another congressional briefing on Vietnam. As usual, he spoke convincingly of his personal worry over the safety of each American pilot in the recent air retaliations. (“I stay awake all during the night to see whether my planes come back or not.”) When asked, “what's necessary to win that war,” Johnson told them confidentially of his consultations on Wednesday with former President Eisenhower. “I asked him how he settled Korea,” he said, and repeated Eisenhower's response that he had forced the North Koreans to bargain by aerial punishment. “There are no sanctuaries,” Johnson said, affecting Eisenhower. “I am going to bomb wherever I damn please. And we been spending a lot of money on bombs for a number of years, and there is no use of having them if you don't use them.” Johnson said the air attacks would be fitting, they would be measured, they would be adequate. He said that if the other side would pull back, he would withdraw U.S. forces “tomorrow morning,” as quickly as he had evacuated dependents the previous week. Until then, his course would be fixed by guerrilla attacks at Pleiku and since. “I decided if they were going to get real rough and tough and come into white men's barracks and start picking out our own units in our own compounds in our own billets,” he said, “those men had no business with the women and children around. I'd better get them on home, because this is going to be choose up and the winner take it. And that's what we've done.”

Under general orders approved February 13, long-range bombers and carrier supports were converging upon the South China Sea. On Friday the nineteenth, one day before the regimen of sustained reprisals was scheduled to begin, South Vietnamese army units arrested General Nguyen Khanh in another coup. The unwelcome news and giant headlines (“Khanh Is Deposed”) intruded upon a White House ceremony at which Johnson announced that Head Start, a preschool experiment, would begin hurriedly that summer as the first initiative of his War on Poverty. He swiftly approved Ambassador Taylor's cabled recommendation that airstrikes be postponed “in view of the disturbed situation in Saigon.” Saigon plots and counterplots carried into the next week what Taylor secretly called a “condition of virtual non-government,” rendering impossible any concurring go-ahead from South Vietnamese allies. On Thursday, February 25, Ambassador Taylor put Khanh on an airplane into exile, securing replacement leaders who would last until June. Final bomb clearance began promptly the next day under the code name ROLLING THUNDER, taken from the theme hymn of the Billy Graham revival crusades. By the time the air war ended after eight years, divided almost evenly between Presidents Johnson and Nixon, “the United States had dropped on North Vietnam, an area the size of Texas, triple the bomb tonnage dropped on Europe, Asia and Africa during World War II,” according to Vietnam historian Stanley Karnow.