The Selma March was peaceful thanks largely to extensive police and military protection, but it was preceded by a period of prolonged violence, and ended with a Ku Klux Klan murder.

Since 1963, The Student Non-Violent Co-coordinating Committee (SNCC) had been quietly conducting voter registration classes in Selma and Dallas County where only one percent of the 15,000 eligible blacks had managed to pass the draconian voter registration tests. But in January 1965, Martin Luther King, fresh from Oslo and his Nobel Peace Prize, targeted Selma for very public voter registration demonstrations.

SNCC’s experience at the voter registration office in Selma had not been positive. The office was open only two days out of the month, and the registrars mostly arrived late, took long lunch hours and left early. Those few blacks that managed to complete the forms usually “failed” the mandatory literacy test. Meanwhile, Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark and his posse patrolled the court house, expelling any black voter applicant who stepped out of line and arresting SNCC workers who attempted to bring them food or water. Clark had a photographer take pictures of those in line. The pictures were published in the local newspaper and many of the applicants lost their jobs.

In early January 1965, Martin Luther King preached at Brown’s African Methodist Episcopal Chapel in Selma to an overflow crowd of 700. “We will seek to arouse the federal government by marching by the thousands [to] the places of registration,” King said. “When we get the right to vote, we will send to the statehouse not men who will stand in the doorways of universities to keep Negroes out [a reference to Alabama Governor George Wallace], but men who will uphold the cause of Justice. Give us the Ballot.”

King’s presence attracted the national press to Selma, and on January 18^th and 19^th, he led groups of local blacks to the courthouse to register. On the 19^th sixty demonstrator were arrested and Sheriff Clark was filmed violently pushing Amelia Boynton, a local black leader with his club. The footage was aired on national television that evening and focused the attention of the nation on Selma. The next day three groups of demonstrators were arrested, and two days later 100 black schoolteachers marched on the courthouse, and were threatened by Clark and his men. The action of the teachers, highly respected and normally conservative members of the black middle class, galvanized the black population of Selma and Dallas County. Now everybody got into the act. Children marched, beauticians marched, and even the undertakers marched.

On February 1^st, King led a group to the courthouse and was arrested, as was his plan. With King in jail much of Selma followed. Five hundred school children marched the next day and were arrested, then 100 more, and then 300 more schoolchildren. With the jails overflowing and reports of unsanitary and abusive jail conditions reaching Washington, a delegation of 15 congressmen visited Selma. Legislators in the nation’s Capitol began to speak of the need for a new law to guarantee voting rights in the South, and President Lyndon Johnson held a press conference to announce his intention to secure the right to vote for all Americans. Released from jail, King flew to Washington to meet with Johnson, but nothing definite was agreed upon.

Then on February 15^th, C.T. Vivian, a Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLS) leader, had a confrontation with Sheriff Clark on the courthouse steps. Vivian compared Clark’s racist tactics to Hitler and Clark, losing his temper attacked Vivian in front of television cameras, knocking him down the steps and breaking his own hand in the process. The next day Vivian told his story to a church meeting in the nearby town of Marian where a nighttime march, an extremely dangerous tactic, was planned. As 400 marchers left the church the streetlights went out and groups of white toughs, auxiliary police and state troopers attacked the marchers. In the ensuing chaos, 82-year-old Cager Lee was beaten severely and took refuge in a nearby café. Troopers followed him into the café, beat him some more, and then beat his daughter, Viola Jackson, who tried to come to his rescue. When her son, Jimmy Lee Jackson, tried to protect her, the troopers shot him twice in the stomach, beat him, and dragged him outside where he collapsed. He died in hospital a week later.

“We was infuriated to the point that we wanted to carry Jimmy’s body to George Wallace and dump it on the steps of the Capitol,” said Albert Turner, a Marion civil rights leader. “We had decided that we were going to get killed or we was going to be free.”

Speaking at Jackson’s funeral, King supported the idea of a march that would carry a petition demanding voting rights to Governor Wallace in Montgomery, but Wallace refused a permit for the march and put the highway patrol on alert. On the basis of its long experience in Selma, SNCC believed a march would be too dangerous, and when it failed to persuade SCLC of its position, declined to participate as an organization while still offering minimal logistical support.

The march began as scheduled on Sunday, March 7. Six hundred people assembled at Brown’s Chapel and ascended the Edmund Pettus Bridge at the outskirts of Selma. King, who had elected to skip the beginning of the March, was preaching to his congregation in Atlanta. In his place were SCLC leader Hosea Williams, who had won a coin flip, and SNCC Chairman John Lewis. As they reached the apex of the bridge, they saw below them a swarm of Alabama Highway patrolmen and mounted troopers, armed with Billy clubs and tear gas. Williams asked Lewis if he could swim. Lewis looked down at the cold river below and answered, “No.”

As they reached the bottom of the bridge, they were ordered to halt, and almost before they had time to consider, the troopers charged them, bowling over the first of the marchers, firing tear gas and clubbing them to the ground. Amelia Boynton was clubbed unconscious. “The horses were more humane than the troopers,” she later recalled. “They stepped over fallen victims.” That evening television networks broke into their regular programming with footage of the troopers’ charge. ABC interrupted a showing of Judgment at Nurenburg and many viewers, confused by the juxtaposition, thought the violence depicted Nazis beating Jews.

In Atlanta, King fired off telegrams to clergy around the nation asking them to join him for a ministers’ march that Tuesday, March 9^th. There followed several days of legal maneuvering. SCLC asked U.S. District Court Judge Frank Johnson to forbid Governor Wallace from interfering with the march. Johnson scheduled a hearing for Thursday and enjoined SCLC from marching until after the hearing. But Selma was filling with supporters who had come from around the country, and King decided to press on. Meanwhile, the Justice Department sent former Florida Governor LeRoy Collins to persuade King to hold off. When King refused, Collins told him there would be no violence if the marchers turned back when they reached police lines.

On Tuesday morning King led 1500 protestors from Brown’s Chapel across the Pettus Bridge. The phalanx of state troopers awaited them as before, and when the marchers were ordered to stop, King knelt in prayer. Then, to the surprise of almost everyone, he turned and led the marchers back across the bridge to the Chapel. Many movement activists felt betrayed by the retreat – some even accused King of selling out. But King later maintained that his commitment was to press forward only until violence was imminent, and then, having made his point, to disengage.

Later that evening three white ministers were attacked by locals as they left a soul food restaurant in Selma. Rev. James Reeb was struck on the head with a club and died two days later. Reeb’s death roused the nation to anger as Jimmy Lee Jackson’s had not. President Lyndon Johnson called what happened in Selma “an American tragedy,” and announced that he would send a voting rights bill to Congress. Speaking before a television audience of 70 million, Johnson said: “Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it’s not just Negroes, but it’s really all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And,” he concluded, “we shall overcome.”

Hearing the President use those words – the phrase every supporter of civil rights had sung and knew so well – was electrifying for many movement people. To some it was a signal the federal government had abandoned its cautiously measured response to the suffering of southern blacks and had embraced the cause of voting rights for once and for all.

Whatever the message, on Friday Judge Johnson ruled that the protestors had a legal and constitutional right to march from Selma to Montgomery. But Governor Wallace still refused to provide protection, leading President Johnson to federalize the 1,800-member Alabama National Guard and to throw in 2000 regular Army troops, 100 U.S. Marshals and 100 FBI agents as well.

With the way cleared, the Selma to Montgomery March got underway on Sunday, March 21^st. Four thousand people left Brown’s Chapel, and by the time they reached Montgomery five days later, their number had swelled to 22,000. The march was entirely peaceful, but in the aftermath, a housewife from Detroit, Viola Liuzzo, was ferrying marchers back to Selma. On the return trip to Montgomery, her car was overtaken by four Klansmen who pulled alongside her and shot her fatally twice in the face.

[Exhausted from five days of marching and shooting, I was returning along highway 80 that evening when I encountered a car down in the ditch and several highway patrol cars ranged along the embankment, their flashers spinning. I fingered my cameras for a moment and then decided: Naah – it’s just a highway accident – and drove on.]

Matt Herron

This account is based on Juan Williams’ Eyes On The Prize, and Taylor Branch’s Pillar of Fire.