This post was gonna have two parts — some history and then personal impressions — but it took so long to put this together, I’ll send personal impressions separately.
Did you know that there were two cancelled marches from Selma prior to the completed, successful one to Montgomery?
Background— January, 1965
“Martin Luther King with SCLC joined SNCC,* the Dallas County Voters League, and other local …activists in a voting rights campaign in Selma where, in spite of repeated registration attempts by local blacks, only two percent were on the voting rolls. SCLC had chosen … Selma because they anticipated that the notorious brutality of local law enforcement …would attract national attention and pressure President Lyndon B. Johnson and Congress to enact new national voting rights legislation.” King Institute at Stanford.
Spoiler alert: it worked.
February, 1965
Alabama state troopers broke up a protest in nearby Marion in February with vicious beatings. One cop shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, a young church deacon, as he tried to protect his mother from a billy club. He died eight days later (also from King Institute).
March, 1965
The first march attempt, on March 7, was organized in response to the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson. However, it didn’t get past the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Troopers advanced against the crowd and brutally beat and gassed them. Cameras were rolling. John Lewis was among the injured.
This violent melee became known as “Bloody Sunday” and was aired on national news.
Governor Wallace used the pretext of preserving safety to deny the protesters all manner of support and a local judge put out a restraining order to prevent the march for a few more days.
As Andrew Young described in the PBS series Eyes on the Prize, since no state or federal support was forthcoming, ‘we sent out the call to people of goodwill.’
That’s when 450 white pastors, nuns, and others committed to social justice arrived from the north.
Rather immediately thugs started harassing them too. On March 7, a group of locals beat the shit out of James Reeb, a Unitarian minister from Massachusetts. Reeb died two days later.
This was galvanizing which was a good thing but it was also controversial since it made people wonder why Jimmie Lee Jackson’s death hadn’t garnered a similar response.
The second march started in spite of the judicial ban and the lack of protection but, probably for both of those reasons, it ended before even crossing the bridge. This was quite a moment. Backed by more than 2,000 protestors, Reverend Martin Luther King stopped and then knelt down to pray. The crowd behind him followed suit. He then stood, turned around, and led people off the bridge and away.
At this point in the PBS Show Bridge to Freedom, I learned that MLK had never before violated a federal order and was reluctant to do so. Also around then, President Johnson was pressuring Governor Wallace to do the right thing. When it became clear that he wouldn’t, Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard.
[Aside: in Ava DuVernay’s powerful telling in Selma, some of the most dramatic moments were the conversations between President Johnson and MLK and the president and Wallace].
March 15
President Johnson addressed Congress with an impassioned speech about the “crippling legacy of bigotry” and called on members to draft voting rights legislation (you know — that landmark law that the Roberts court has been systematically dismantling).
President Johnson’s use of the language of liberation (“we shall overcome”) at the speech’s end was heard loud and clear and cheered by Black citizens.
MLK had been asking and asking for this legislation and Johnson kept putting him off. The time wasn’t right. He couldn’t do it so soon after the Civil Rights Act, etc. But the shared experience of watching the shameful and shocking violence on national news changed the equation.
[Aside: Think about today, where we don’t watch the same channel, making it hard for a single event to galvanize the nation. A recent exception: the nine minute video of Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd].
The day after Johnson’s address to Congress, ‘demonstrators submitted a … march plan to Judge Johnson, who approved the demonstration and enjoined Governor Wallace and local law enforcement from harassing or threatening marchers.’ (the Stanford King Institute).
March 17
Johnson submitted voting rights legislation to Congress.
March 21
On this the third try, the march began and continued all the way to the state capitol, Montgomery. Fifty four miles. Four days. According to the King Institute, by the end there were 25,000 participants.
BTW — you know that iconic image of MLK linked arm in arm at the front of the march, with others wearing suits? That was by design. Credible death threats against King were circulating at the time and so, since ‘they can’t tell us apart’ (Andrew Young interview, Eyes on the Prize), it was decided to dress many of the men out front like the Reverend.
Sources:
The movie Selma by Ava DuVernay (Netflix)
Eyes on the Prize, Season One: The Bridge to Freedom. (you can watch on PBS. Or Prime, I think)
National Geographic article full of history about the March from Selma to Montgomery, voter registration efforts, and the Montgomery bus Boycott.
You can read or listen to an interview with Andrew Young from the PBS show here.
*SCLC = Southern Christian Leadership Conference
SNCC = Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee