Marching On
Before they marched, they kneeled and prayed at Browns Chapel Methodist. “And then we set out, nearly six hundred of us,” John Lewis recalled. “We walked two abreast, in a pair of lines that stretched for several blocks,” prepared to make the journey from Selma to the Capitol Building in Montgomery, Alabama, a distance of fifty-four long miles.
It was mid-afternoon on Sunday, March 7, 1965, a day that would be to the civil rights struggle what the day of infamy had been to Franklin Roosevelt in the Second World War.
Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination based on race (and other factors), Selma, as with countless other pockets of stubborn prejudice, refused to accept the death of segregation and racial discrimination. White terror—“Gestapo-like,” Martin Luther King, Jr., said—ruled the city. Fewer than one percent of Black voters were registered, a fact that Jim Clark, the city’s openly white supremacist sheriff, praised, having resolved that Black Americans were “the lowest form of humanity.”
A place isolated and stuck, it seemed, in the 19th century, Selma was the psychological epicenter of white supremacy’s dying gasps, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) saw in it an opportunity to renew the struggle for freedom and equal justice.
The marchers set out without the expectation of the horror that would transpire. Governor George Wallace had issued an order prohibiting the march out of “public safety” concerns. (Wallace was more activist than law-keeper; he declared in his January 1963 inaugural address, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”)
“We expected a confrontation,” Lewis recalled. They’d likely be stopped, arrested, and perhaps mildly roughed up by police. “We did not expect anything worse than that.”
A man involved in countless marches, Lewis felt that something was different about this one. “There was something holy about it,” he recalled, “as if we were walking down a sacred path.”
Within minutes, the marchers reached Edmund Pettus Bridge, then proceeded solemnly to the crest. “I stopped dead,” Lewis recalled. Facing the marchers on the opposite side of the bridge “stood a sea of blue-helmeted, blue-uniformed Alabama state troopers,” under orders to prevent their advance. Behind them stood another force: Sheriff Clark’s boys—some standing, some on horseback, all carrying clubs.
A white crowd, many hollering and waving Confederate flags, stood and watched as both sides stood opposed as if ready for battle.
The river some hundred feet below was still and brown. “Can you swim?” Lewis asked Hosea Williams. “No,” he replied. “Well,” Lewis said, “Neither can I,” to which Williams replied grimly, “We might have to.”
“You are ordered to disperse,” an officer shouted over a bullhorn. “You have two minutes to turn around and go back to your church.”
Those two minutes passed quicker than the marchers expected. “Troopers,” the officer shouted, “Advance!”
They “swept forward as one, like a human wave,” Lewis recalled. A trooper rushed Lewis, hitting him across the side of the head with a club; he fell and was struck again. Others fled, chased and beaten. “I could hear shots and screams,” Andrew Young recalled, located blocks away.
“Get those goddamned niggers!” Clark yelled. “And get those goddamned white niggers.” Then came the tear gas. “This is it,” Lewis thought, choking and coughing. “I’m going to die here.”
“Fifteen or twenty nightsticks could be seen through the gas,” Roy Reed wrote for The New York Times, “flailing at the heads of the marchers.” Many who fell were kicked and beaten.
When the gas settled and the clubs put away, seventeen Black marchers were hospitalized, including Lewis with a skull fracture, and some forty more suffered minor injuries.
United Press International reported that police had “chased the screaming, bleeding marchers nearly a mile to their church, clubbing them as they ran.” Ambulances carried “hysterical men, women, and children suffering head wounds and tear gas burns.” It was a grim report from the land of the free.
That night, Americans across the nation saw a window into a dark reality as ABC’s premiere of the film Judgment at Nuremberg, portraying the post-war Nazi war crimes trials, was interrupted by the violent footage of police chasing and beating unarmed, peaceful marchers as white onlookers cheered. The press called it “Bloody Sunday.”
In Washington, D.C., Lyndon Johnson was roused to action, issuing a statement condemning the “brutality” of Selma and announcing the drafting of federal legislation to enforce civil rights protections.
That same day, underscoring the severity of Selma, the 38-year-old white Unitarian minister from Boston, James Reeb, a member of the SCLC, was attacked and beaten outside a restaurant. He fell into a coma and died from head injuries two days later.
On Monday, March 15, the same day King eulogized Reeb, Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress. “I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy,” the president said in his “slow Southern accent.”
“At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.”
An “American problem,” Johnson announced a solution: legislation—the Voting Rights Act—“designed to eliminate illegal barriers to the right to vote.”
“Their cause must be our cause, too,” Johnson said of the marchers. “Really, it’s all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”
The marchers at last made it to Montgomery on Thursday, March 25. “We are on the move now,” King declared to a crowd of 25,000 from the steps of the Capitol Building, where Wallace lurked behind the closed curtains of his office. “Yes, we are on the move and no wave of racism can stop us.”
In a climactic ending, King resounded, “Our God is marching on. / Glory, Hallelujah! / His truth is marching on.”