After the Tall Timber Read online

  Around two o’clock, as the middle ranks of marchers passed an intersection just outside Lowndes County, a female bystander apparently could stand it no longer. “They’re carrying the flag upside down!” she screamed to the nearest trooper. “Isn’t there a law against that? Can’t you arrest them? Look at them so-called white men with church collars that they bought for fifty cents! And them devirginated nuns! I’m a Catholic myself, but it turns my stomach to see them. They said there was thousands yesterday, but there wasn’t near a thousand. Them niggers and them girls! I’ve watched the whole thing three times, and there isn’t a intelligent-looking one in the bunch. I feel sorry for the black folks. If they want to vote, why don’t they just go out and register? Oh, honey, look! There goes a big one. Go home, scum! Go home, scum!” The procession began to sing a not very hearty version of “A Great Camp Meeting in the Promised Land.”

  Not all the bystanders along the road were white. At the boundary of Lowndes County (with a population of fifteen thousand, eighty per cent of them blacks, not one of whom had been registered to vote by March 1, 1965), John Maxwell, a black worker in a Lowndes County cotton-gin mill (at a salary of six dollars for a twelve-hour day), appeared at an intersection.

  “Why don’t you register to vote?” a reporter from the Harvard Crimson asked Mr. Maxwell.

  “They’d put us off the place if I tried,” Mr. Maxwell said.

  In the town of Trickem, at the Nolan Elementary School— a small white shack on brick stilts, which had asbestos shingles, a corrugated-iron roof, six broken windows, and a broken wood floor patched with automobile license plates—a group of old people and barefoot children rushed out to embrace Dr. King. They had been waiting four hours.

  “Will you march with us?” Dr. King asked an old man with a cane.

  “I’ll walk one step, anyway,” said the man. “Because I know for every one step I’ll take you’ll take two.”

  The marchers broke into a chant. “What do you want?” they shouted encouragingly to the blacks at the roadside. The blacks smiled, but they did not give the expected response—“Freedom!” The marchers had to supply that themselves.

  Late in the afternoon, as Route 80 passed through the swamps of Lowndes County, the marchers looked anxiously at the woods, covered with Spanish moss, which began a few yards back from the road. They reached Rosa Steele’s farm at sunset. Many of them seemed dismayed to find that the campsite lay right beside the highway. Fresh rumors began to circulate: a young man had been seen putting a bomb under a roadside bridge; twenty white men, with pistols and shotguns, had been seen prowling through a neighboring field; testing security, a representative of the Pentagon had managed to penetrate the security lines without being asked to show his pass. Mr. Rosenthal again put these fears to rest. “The field has been combed by Army demolition teams,” he said. “If anyone from the Pentagon had made it through unchecked, you can bet there would have been one hell of a fuss. And as for the man under the bridge, it was a little boy who got off his bicycle to relieve himself. The troopers found out these things. It’s nice to know that they are this aware.”

  As darkness fell, Dr. King held a press conference. A black woman lifted up her three-year-old son so that he might catch a glimpse of Dr. King. She soon grew tired and had to put him down. “I’ll take him,” said a white man standing beside her, and he lifted the boy onto his shoulders. The boy did not glance at Dr. King; he was too busy gazing down at the white man’s blond hair.

  Again the night was cold and damp. At the entrance to the field, there was so much mud that boards and reeds had been scattered to provide traction for cars. Most of the marchers went to sleep in their four tents soon after supper, but at Steele’s Service Station, across the highway, a crowd of blacks from the neighborhood had gathered. Some of them were dancing to music from a jukebox, and a few of the more energetic marchers, white and black, joined them.

  “This is getting to be too much like a holiday,” said a veteran of one of the earlier marches. “It doesn’t tell the truth of what happened.”

  At about ten o’clock, the last of the marchers crossed the highway back to camp. Shortly afterward, a fleet of cars drove up to the service station and a group of white boys got out. Two of the boys were from Georgia, two were from Texas, one was from Tennessee, one was from Oklahoma, one was from Monroeville, Alabama, and one was from Selma. The Reverend Arthur E. Matott, a white minister from Perth Amboy, New Jersey, who was a member of the night patrol, saw them and walked across the highway to where they were standing. “Can I help you fellows?” Mr. Matott asked.

  “We’re just curious,” the boy from Monroeville said. “Came out to see what it was like.”

  “How long are you planning to stay?” said Mr. Matott.

  “Until we get ready to leave,” the boy said.

  A black member of the night patrol quietly joined Mr. Matott.

  “I cut classes,” said the boy from Tennessee. “Sort of impulsive. You hear all these stories. I wondered why you were marching.”

  “Well, you might say we’re marching to get to know each other and to ease a little of the hate around here,” Mr. Matott said.

  “You don’t need to march for that,” said one the boys from Texas. “You’re making it worse. The hate was being lessened and lessened by itself throughout the years.”

  “Was it?” asked the black member of the guard.

  “It was,” the Texas boy said.

  “We never had much trouble in Nashville,” said the boy from Tennessee. “Where you have no conflict, it’s hard to conceive . . .”

  “Why don’t you-all go and liberate the Indian reservations, or something?” said the boy from Monroeville. “The Negroes around here are happy.”

  “I don’t think they are,” said Mr. Matott.

  “I’ve lived in the South all my life, and I know that they are,” the boy from Georgia said.

  “I’m not happy,” said the black guard.

  “Well, just wait awhile,” said the boy from Monroeville.

  An attractive blond girl in a black turtleneck sweater, denim pants, and boots now crossed the highway from the camp. “Do you know where I can get a ride to Jackson?” she asked the black guard.

  “This is Casey Hayden, from SNCC. She’s the granddaughter of a Texas sheriff,” said the minister, introducing her to the group.

  A battered car drove up, and three more white boys emerged.

  “I don’t mean to bug you,” the black whispered to the girl, “but did you realize we’re surrounded?”

  “You fellows from Selma?” Miss Hayden asked, turning to the three most recent arrivals.

  “Yeah,” said one, who was wearing a green zippered jacket, a black shirt, and black pants, and had a crew cut.

  “What do you want?” Miss Hayden asked.

  “I don’t know,” the boy answered.

  “That’s an honest answer,” Miss Hayden said.

  “It is,” the boy said.

  “What do you do?” Miss Hayden asked.

  “Well, Miss, I actually work for a living, and I can tell you it’s going to be hard on all of them when this is over,” the boy said. “A lot of people in town are letting their maids go.”

  “Well, I don’t suppose I’d want to have a maid anyway,” Miss Hayden said amiably. “I guess I can do most things myself.”

  “That’s not all, though,” said another boy. “It’s awfully bad down the road. Nothing’s happened so far, but you can’t ever tell. Selma’s a peace-loving place, but that Lowndes County is something else.”

  “I guess some of these people feel they haven’t got that much to lose,” Miss Hayden said.

  “I know,” said the boy.

  “Do you understand what they’re marching about?” Miss Hayden asked.

  “Yeah—fighting for freedom, something like that. That’s the idea, along that line. It don’t mean nothing,” the boy said.

  “And to make money,” the third young man sa
id. “The men are getting fifteen dollars a day for marching, and the girls are really making it big.”

  “Is that so?” said Miss Hayden?

  “Yeah. Girl came into the Selma hospital this morning, fifteen hundred dollars in her wallet. She’d slept with forty-one.”

  “Forty-one what?” Miss Hayden asked.

  “Niggers,” the young man said.

  “And what did she go to the hospital for?” Miss Hayden asked.

  “Well, actually, Ma’am, she bled to death,” the young man said.

  “Where did you hear that?” Miss Hayden asked.

  “In town,” the young man said. “There’s not much you can do, more than keep track of everything. It’s a big mess.”

  “Well,” Miss Hayden said, “I think it’s going to get better.”

  “Hard to say,” said one of the boys as they drifted back to their cars.

  At midnight in the camp, Charles Mauldin, aged seventeen, the head of the Dallas County Student Union and a student at Selma’s Hudson High School, which is black, was awakened in the security tent by several guards, who ushered in a rather frightened-looking black boy.

  “What’s going on?” asked Charles.

  The boy replied that he was trying to found a black student movement in Lowndes County.

  “That’s fine,” said Charles.

  “The principal’s dead set against it,” the boy said.

  “Then stay underground until you’ve got everybody organized,” Charles said. “Then if he throws one out he’ll have to throw you all out.”

  “You with SNCC or SCLC, or what?” the boy asked.

  “I’m not with anything,” Charles said. “I’m with them all. I used to just go to dances in Selma on Saturday nights and not belong to anything. Then I met John Love, who was SNCC project director down here, and I felt how he just sees himself in every Negro. Then I joined the movement.”

  “What about your folks?” the boy asked.

  “My father’s a truck driver, and at first they were against it, but now they don’t push me and they don’t hold me back,” Charles said.

  “Who’ve you had personal run-ins with?” the boy asked.

  “I haven’t had personal run-ins with anybody,” Charles said. “I’ve been in jail three times, but never more than a few hours. They needed room to put other people in. Last week, I got let out, so I just had to march and get beaten on. In January, we had a march of little kids—we called it the Tots’ March—but we were afraid they might get frightened, so we joined them, and some of us got put in jail. Nothing personal about it.”

  “Some of us think that for the march we might be better off staying in school,” the boy said.

  “Well, I think if you stay in school you’re saying that you’re satisfied,” Charles said. “We had a hundred of our teachers marching partway with us. At first, I was against the march, but then I realized that although we’re probably going to get the voting bill, we still don’t have a lot of other things. It’s dramatic, and it’s an experience, so I came. I thought of a lot of terrible things that could happen, because we’re committed to nonviolence, and I’m responsible for the kids from the Selma school. But then I thought, If they killed everyone on this march, it would be nothing compared to the number of people they’ve killed in the last three hundred years.”

  “You really believe in non-violence?” the boy asked Charles.

  “I do,” Charles said. “I used to think of it as just a tactic, but now I believe in it all the way. Now I’d just like to be tested.”

  “Weren’t you tested enough when you were beaten on?” the boy asked.

  “No, I mean an individual test, by myself,” Charles said. “It’s easy to talk about non-violence, but in a lot of cases you’ve got to be tested, and re-inspire yourself.”

  By 2 A.M., hardly anyone in the camp was awake except the late-shift night security patrol and a group of radio operators in a trailer truck, which served as a base for the walkie-talkies around the campsite and in the church back in Selma. The operators kept in constant touch with Selma, where prospective marchers were still arriving by the busload. Inside the trailer were Norman Talbot, a middle-aged black man from Selma who had borrowed the trailer from his uncle and was serving as its driver (“I used to work in a junk yard, until they fired me for joining the movement. I’ve got a five-year-old daughter, but after that I made it my business to come out in a big way”); Pete Muilenberg, a nineteen-year-old white student on leave of absence from Dartmouth to work for COFO, the Congress of Federated Organizations, in Mississippi; and Mike Kenney, a twenty-nine-year-old white student who had quit graduate school at Iowa State to work for SNCC.

  “SNCC isn’t officially involved in this march,” Mr. Kenney said to a marcher who visited him in the trailer early that morning. “Although individual SNCC workers can take part if they like. They say Martin Luther King and SNCC struck a bargain: SNCC wouldn’t boycott this march if SCLC would take part in a demonstration in Washington to challenge the Mississippi members of Congress. We didn’t want to bring in all these outsiders, and we wanted to keep marching on that Tuesday when King turned back. Man, there are cats in Selma now from up North saying, ‘Which demonstration are you going to? Which one is the best?’ As though it were a college prom, or something. I tell them they ought to have sense enough to be scared. ‘What do you think you’re down here for? For publicity, to show how many of you there are, and to get a few heads bashed in. Nobody needs you to lead them. SCLC has got plenty of leaders.’ People need SNCC, though, for the technicians. Some of us took a two-day course in short-wave-radio repair from one of our guys, Marty Schiff, so we could set up their radios for them. Then, a lot of SNCC cats have come over here from Mississippi, where the romance has worn off a bit and it’s time for our experts to take over—running schools, pairing off communities with communities up North, filing legal depositions against the Mississippi congressmen and against the worst of the police.

  “We’re called agitators from out of state. Well, take away the connotations and agitation is what we do, but we’re not outsiders. Nobody who crosses a state line is an outsider. It’s the same with racial lines. I don’t give a damn about the Negro race, but I don’t give a damn about the white race, either. I’m interested in breaking the fetters of thought. What this march is going to do is help the Alabama Negro to break his patterns of thought. It’s also going to change the marchers when they go back home. The students who went back from the Mississippi project became dynamos. It’s easier to join the movement than to get out. You have this commitment. There will be SNCC workers staying behind to keep things going in Selma. We were here, working, a year and a half before SCLC came in. Man, there’s a cartoon in our Jackson office showing the SNCC power structure, and it’s just one big snarl. Some of us are in favor of more central organization, but most of us believe in the mystique of the local people. We’re not running the COFO project in Mississippi next summer, because of the black-white tensions in SNCC. Some of the white cats feel they’re being forced out, because of the racism. But I can understand it. The white invasion put the Negro cats in a predicament. Not even their movement was their own anymore. I’m staying with it, though. Every SNCC meeting is a traumatic experience for all of us, but even the turmoil is too real, too important, for me to get out now. It’s what you might call the dramatic-results mentality. Some of the leaders may be evolving some pretty far-out political philosophy, but it’s the workers who get things done—black-white tensions, left-right tensions, and all.”

  Later that morning, Tuesday, it began to rain, and the rain continued through most of the day. When the first drops fell, whites at the roadside cheered (a Southern adage says that “a nigger won’t stay out in the rain”), but it soon became apparent that, even over hilly country, the procession was going at a more spirited pace than ever. Jim Letherer, on his crutches, appeared to be flagging. John Doar walked beside him for a while, joking and imperceptibly slowing hi
s pace. Then Mr. Doar said, “Jim, come to the car a minute. I want to show you something back down the road.” Jim disappeared from the march. In twenty minutes, he was walking again.

  Back in Selma, thousands of out-of-towners had arrived and had been quietly absorbed into the black ghetto. On the outskirts of town, a sign had appeared showing a photograph of Martin Luther King at the Highlander Folk School and captioned “Martin Luther King at Communist School.” Lying soggily upon the sidewalks were leaflets reading “An unemployed agitator ceases to agitate. Operation Ban. Selective hiring, firing, buying, selling.” The Selma Avenue Church of Christ, whose congregation is white, displayed a sign reading “When You Pray, Be Not As Hypocrites Are, Standing in the Street. Matt: 6:5,” and the Brown Chapel Church displayed a sign reading “Forward Ever, Backward Never. Visitors Welcome.” Inside the church and its parsonage, things were bustling. There were notes tacked everywhere: “If you don’t have official business here, please leave,” “All those who wish to take hot baths, contact Mrs. Lilly,” “Don’t sleep here anymore. This is an office,” “Please, the person who is trying to find me to return my suit coat and trenchcoat, not having left it in my Rambler . . .”

  “Everyone here in town is getting antsy,” Melody Heaps, a white girl who had come in from Chicago, said to a reporter. “We’re not allowed to march until Thursday, and there’s nothing to do. On the other hand, we’re giving the Selma Negroes a chance to take it easy. They know what they’re doing, and we don’t, so they can order us around a little.”

  “You know what just happened?” said a white clergyman from Ontario. “Some of those white segs splashed mud all over us. It was so funny and childish we just howled.”

  A little later, two clergymen picked up their luggage and left the church for the home of Mrs. Georgia Roberts, where, they had been told, they were to spend the night.