After the Tall Timber Page 5

  “I guess I can put you up,” Mrs. Roberts said when they arrived. “Last night, I put up fourteen. I worked as a cook at the Selma Country Club for thirteen years, before they fired me for joining the movement. I’ve been friendly to all the other guests, so I guess you’ll find me friendly, too. I never thought I’d see the day when we’d dare to march against the white government in the Black Belt of Alabama.”

  At the Tuesday-night campsite, a farm owned by the A. G. Gastons, a Birmingham black family who had become millionaires in various businesses, the ground was so wet that the marchers could walk through the clay-like mud only by moving their feet as though they were skating. A black family living in the middle of the property had received several intimidating phone calls during the day, and as a consequence, they barred their house to marchers. They held a party in their little front garden to watch the goings on.

  The marchers had by then been joined by Mrs. Ann Cheatham, an English housewife from Ealing, who had flown across the Atlantic just to take part in the last two days of marching. “It seems to me an outrage,” she said. “I saw it on the telly—people being battered on the head. I came to show that the English are in sympathy. I can see there are a lot of odd bods on this march, but there were a lot in the marches on Aldermaston and Washington. This appalling business of barring white facilities to Negro children! People say it’s not my business, but I would deny that. It’s everybody’s business.”

  In the early evening, a clergyman became violently ill, and doctors blamed the marchers’ water supply. The marchers had all along complained that the water tasted of kerosene, and, upon investigation, it turned out the water was in fact polluted, having come from a truck that was ordinarily used for draining septic tanks. (Fortunately, no other marchers seemed to suffer from the contamination.) Later, the singer Odetta appeared at the campsite, and found all the marchers, including another singer, Pete Seeger, fast asleep.

  Wednesday, the fourth and last full day of marching, was sunny again, and the marchers set out in good spirits. In the morning, a minister who had rashly dropped out at a gas station to make a telephone call was punched by the owner, and a freelance newspaper photographer was struck on the ear by a passerby. (Although he required three stitches, he was heartened by the fact that a Montgomery policeman had come, with a flying tackle, to his rescue.) There seemed, however, to be fewer segregationists by the side of the road than usual—perhaps because the Montgomery Advertiser had been running a two-page advertisement, prepared by the City Commissioner’s Committee on Community Affairs, imploring citizens to be moderate and ignore the march. The coverage of the march in the Southern press had consistently amused the marchers. “Civil Righters Led by Communists” had been the headline in the Birmingham weekly Independent; the Selma Times-Journal, whose coverage of the march was relatively accurate, had editorialized about President Johnson, under the heading “A Modern Mussolini Speaks, ‘We Shall Overcome,”’ “No man in any generation . . . has ever held so much power in the palm of his hand, and that includes Caesar, Alexander, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Franklin D. Roosevelt”; and the Wednesday Advertiser’s sole front-page item concerning the march was a one-column, twenty-one-line account, lower right, of the Alabama legislature’s resolution condemning the demonstrators for being “sexually promiscuous.” (“It is well known that the white Southern segregationist is obsessed with fornication,” said John Lewis, chairman of SNCC. “And that is why there are so many shades of Negro.”) At 9 A.M., Ray Robin announced over radio station WHHY, in Montgomery, that “there is now evidence that women are returning to their homes from the march as expectant unwed mothers.” Several marchers commented, ironically, on the advanced state of medical science in Alabama.

  By noon, most of the marchers were sunburned or just plain weather-burned. Two blacks scrawled the word “Vote” in sunburn cream on their foreheads and were photographed planting an American flag, Iwo Jima fashion, by the side of the road. Flags of all sorts, including state flags and church flags, had materialized in the hands of marchers. One of the few segregationists watching the procession stopped his jeering for a moment when he saw the American flag, and raised his hand in a salute. The singing had abated somewhat, and the marchers had become conversational.

  “This area’s a study in social psychopathology,” said Henry Schwarzschild, executive secretary of LCDC (the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee). “In a way, they’re asking for a show of force like this, to make them face reality.”

  “And there’s the ignorance,” said another civil-rights lawyer. “A relatively friendly sheriff in Sunflower County, Mississippi, warned me, confidentially, that my client was a ‘blue-gum nigger.’ ‘Their mouths are filled with poison,’ he said. ‘Don’t let him bite you.”’

  “And what did you say?” asked a college student marching beside him.

  “What could I say?” the lawyer replied. “I said I’d try to be careful.”

  “The way I see this march,” said a young man from SNCC, “is as a march from the religious to the secular—from the chapel to the statehouse. For too long now, the Southern Negro’s only refuge has been the church. That’s why he prefers these SCLC ministers to the SNCC cats. But we’re going to change all that.”

  “I’m worried, though, about the Maoists,” said the student.

  “What do you mean by that, exactly?” asked another marcher.

  “A Maoist. You know. From the Mau Mau.”

  In the early afternoon, Dr. King and his wife, who had dropped out for a day in order for him to go to Cleveland to receive an award, rejoined the procession. The singing began again. Marching behind Dr. King was his friend the Reverend Morris H. Tynes, of Chicago, who teased Dr. King continuously. “Moses, can you let your people rest for a minute?” Mr. Tynes said. “Can you just let the homiletic smoke from your cigarette drift out of your mouth and engulf the multitude and let them rest?” Dr. King smiled. Some of the other marchers, who had tended to speak of him half in joking, half in reverent tones (most of them referred to him conversationally as “De Lawd”), laughed out loud.

  A Volkswagen bus full of marchers from Chicago ran out of gas just short of the procession. “Now, we all believe in nonviolence,” one of the passengers said to the driver, “but if you don’t get this thing moving pretty soon . . .”

  “Are you members of some sort of group?” asked a reporter, looking inside the bus.

  “No,” said the driver. “We’re just individuals.”

  At last, on the outskirts of Montgomery, the marchers reached their fourth campsite—the Catholic City of St. Jude, consisting of a church, a hospital, and a school built in a style that might be called Contemporary Romanesque. The four tents were pitched by the time they arrived, and they marched onto the grounds singing “We Have Overcome.” They also added two new verses to the song—“All the way from Selma” and “Our feet are soaked.” Inside the gates of St. Jude’s, they were greeted by a crowd of Montgomery blacks singing the national anthem.

  “What do you want?” the marchers chanted.

  This time, the response from the onlookers was immediate and loud: “Freedom!”

  “When do you want it?”

  “Now!”

  “How much of it?”

  “All of it!”

  On its fourth night, the march began to look first like a football rally, then like a carnival and a hootenanny, and finally like something dangerously close to a hysterical mob. Perhaps because of a new feeling of confidence, the security check at the main gate had been practically abandoned. Thousands of marchers poured in from Selma and Montgomery, some of them carrying luggage, and no one had time to examine its contents. The campsite was cold and almost completely dark, and a bomb or a rifle shot would have left everyone helpless. Word got out that doctors on the march had treated several cases of strep throat, two of pneumonia, one of advanced pulmonary tuberculosis, and one of epilepsy, and because of the number and variety of sick and handicapp
ed who had made the march a macabre new joke began to go the rounds: “What has five hundred and ninety-nine legs, five hundred and ninety-eight eyes, an indeterminate number of germs, and walks singing? The march from Selma.”

  An entertainment had been scheduled for nine o’clock that night, but it was several hours late getting started, and in the meantime the crowd of thousands churned about in the mud and chanted. A number of people climbed into trees near the platform where the entertainment was to take place. On the outskirts of St. Jude’s, in a section normally set aside as a playground, a few children spun the handpowered carrousel, or climbed over the jungle gym in the dark. In the wires of the telephone poles around the field, the skeletons of old kites were just visible in the dim lights from the windows of St. Jude’s Hospital.

  A minister, who had been seeking for several hours to clear the platform, wept with chagrin. “Betcha old Sheriff Clark and his troopers could clear it!” someone shouted. In the darkness, there were repeated cries for doctors, and a soldier stood on top of the radio trailer and beamed a flashlight into the crowd, trying to find the sources of the cries. Thousands crowded around the platform, and several of them were pressed against it and fell. Several others, mostly members of the special group of three hundred marchers, fainted from exhaustion. A number of entertainers, each of whom had been given a dime to use for a phone call in case of an emergency, and all of whom had been instructed to stand in groups of not fewer than six, appeared on the platform. Among them were Shelley Winters, Sammy Davis, Jr., Tony Perkins, Tony Bennett, and Nina Simone. A number of girls in the crowd collapsed and, because there was no other lighted space, had to be carried onstage, where Miss Winters did her best to minister to them. Before long, twenty people, none of them seriously ill or seriously injured, were carried off to the hospital on stretchers. A large group started an agitated march within the campsite.

  “I’m tired,” said a white college student. “If only I could walk someplace and get a cab!”

  “Man, that’s not cool,” said a black. “There are a lot of hostile people outside that gate.”

  “Inside it, too, for all I know,” said the student. “See any white sheets?”

  Finally, the entertainment got under way, and the situation improved. Tony Perkins and a few others spoke with well-considered brevity. The crowd clapped along with the singers as they sang folk songs and songs of the movement, and it laughed at the comedians, including Dick Gregory, Nipsey Russell, Mike Nichols, and Elaine May. (“I can’t afford to call up the National Guard,” said Mike Nichols, impersonating Governor Wallace. “Why not?” said Elaine May, impersonating a telegraph operator. “It only costs a dime.”)

  At 2 A.M., the entertainment and speeches were over, and the performers left for a Montgomery hotel, which was surrounded for the remainder of the night by shouting segregationists. Most of the crowd drifted off the field and headed for Montgomery, and the tents were left at last to the marchers. Suddenly security tightened up. At one point, the Reverend Andrew Young himself was asked for his credentials. The hours before dawn passed without incident.

  On Thursday morning, the march expanded, pulled itself together, and turned at once serious and gay. It finally seemed that the whole nation was marching to Montgomery. Signs from every conceivable place and representing every conceivable religious denomination, philosophical viewpoint, labor union, and walk of life assembled at St. Jude’s and lined up in orderly fashion. A Magic Marker pen passed from hand to hand, and new signs went up: “The Peace Corps Knows Integration Works,” “So Does Canada,” “American Indians” (carried by Fran Poafpybitty, a Comanche from Indiahoma, Oklahoma), “Freedom” in Greek letters (carried by a black girl), “Out of Vietnam into Selma” in Korean (carried by a white girl), “The Awe and Wonder of Human Dignity We Want to Maintain” (on a sandwich board worn by a succession of people), and, on two sticks tied together, with a blue silk scarf above it, a sign reading simply “Boston.” A young white man in a gray flannel suit hurried back and forth among the platoons of marchers; on his attaché case was written “D. J. Bittner, Night Security.”

  Near the tents, Ivanhoe Donaldson and Frank Surocco (the first a black project director for SNCC in Atlanta, the second a white boy, also from SNCC) were distributing orange plastic jackets to the original three hundred marchers. The jackets, of the sort worn by construction workers, had been bought for eighty-nine cents apiece in Atlanta, and jackets like them had been worn throughout the march by the marshals, but for the marchers the orange jacket had become a singular status symbol. There was some dispute about who was entitled to wear one. There was also a dispute about the order of march. Some thought that the entertainers should go first, some that the leaders should. Roy Wilkins, of the NAACP, demurred on behalf of the leaders. Odetta said, “Man, don’t let the morale crumble. The original three hundred deserve to be first.” The Reverend Andrew Young was served with a summons in an action by the City of Selma and the Selma Bus Lines protesting the operation of buses in competition with the Selma company.

  Finally, after another session of virtually inaudible speeches, the parade was ready to go. “Make way for the originals!” the marshals shouted, forming a cordon to hold back the other marchers and the press. Behind the three hundred came Martin Luther King, Ralph Bunche, A. Philip Randolph, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, the Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth, Charles G. Gomillion, the Reverend F. D. Reese, and other civil-rights leaders; behind them came the grandfather of Jimmie Lee Jackson, the black boy who had been shot in nearby Perry County, and the Reverend Orloff Miller, a friend of the Reverend James Reeb’s, who had been beaten with Reeb on the night of Reeb’s murder; and behind them came a crowd of what turned out to be more than thirty thousand people. “We’re not just down here for show,” said Mr. Miller. “A lot of our people are staying here to help. But the show itself is important. When civil rights drops out of the headlines, the country forgets.”

  Stationed, like an advance man, hundreds of yards out in front of the procession as it made its way through the black section of Montgomery and, ultimately, past a hundred and four intersections was Charles Mauldin, dressed in his Hudson High sweat shirt and blue jeans and an orange jacket, and waving a little American flag and a megaphone. One pocket of his denims was split, and the fatigue in his gentle, intelligent face made him seem considerably younger than his seventeen years. “Come and march with us!” he shouted to black bystanders. “You can’t make your witness standing on the corner. Come and march with us. We’re going downtown. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Come and march with us!”

  “Tell ’em, baby,” said Frank Surocco, who was a few yards back of Charles.

  “Is everything safe up ahead?” asked the voice of Ivanhoe Donaldson through a walkie-talkie.

  “We watching ’em, baby,” said Surocco.

  “Come and march with us!” said Charles Mauldin, to black and white bystanders alike.

  In midtown Montgomery, at the Jefferson Davis Hotel, black maids were looking out of the windows and the white clientele was standing on the hotel marquee. Farther along, at the Whitley Hotel, black porters were looking out of windows on one side of the building and white customers were looking out of windows on the other. Troopers watched from the roof of the Brown Printing Company. The windows of the Montgomery Citizens Council were empty. Outside the Citizens Council building, a man stood waving a Confederate flag.

  “What’s your name?” a reporter asked.

  “None of your goddam business,” said the man.

  At the intersection of Montgomery Street and Dexter Avenue (the avenue leading to the capitol), Charles Mauldin turned and looked around. “They’re still coming out of St. Jude’s,” a reporter told him. And when the vanguard of the march reached the capitol steps, they were still coming out of St. Jude’s. “You’re only likely to see three great parades in a lifetime,” said John Doar to a student who walked beside him, “and this is one of them.” A brown dog had joined the cr
owd for the march up Dexter Avenue. On the sidewalk in front of the capitol, reporters stood on the press tables to look back. Charles and the rest of the orange-jacketed three hundred stood below. Behind them, the procession was gradually drawing together and to a halt. Ahead, a few green-clad, helmeted officers of the Alabama Game and Fish Service and some state officials blocked the capitol steps, at the top of which, covering the bronze that marks the spot where Jefferson Davis was inaugurated President of the Confederacy, was a plywood shield constructed at the order of Governor Wallace—”to keep that s.o.b. King from desecrating the Cradle of the Confederacy,” according to a spokesman for the Governor. Martin Luther King had managed to draw a larger crowd than the leader of the Confederacy a hundred years before.

  Onto a raised platform—erected by the marchers for the occasion—in a plaza between the crowd and the steps climbed a group of entertainers that included, at one point or another, Joan Baez; the Chad Mitchell Trio; Peter, Paul, and Mary; and Harry Belafonte. As Alabamians peered from the statehouse windows, black and white performers put their arms around each other’s shoulders and began to sing. Although the songs were familiar and the front rank of the three hundred mouthed a few of the words, none of the crowd really sang along. Everybody simply cheered and applauded at the end of each number. Then Len Chandler, a young black folk singer who had marched most of the way, appeared on the platform. He was dressed peculiarly, as he had been on the road—in a yellow helmet, a flaglike blue cape with white stars on it, and denims—and the crowd at once joined him in singing:

  “You’ve got to move when the spirit say move,

  Move when the spirit say move.

  When the spirit say move, you’ve got to move, oh, Lord.

  You got to move when the spirit say move.”

  In the subsequent verses, Mr. Chandler changed “move” to “walk,” “march,” “vote,” “picket,” “cool it,” and “love,” and the crowd kept singing. Joan Baez, wearing a purple velvet dress and a large bronze crucifix, even broke into a rather reverent Frug.