A Writer's Life (28 page)

“Hey, you're blocking the road,” an officer said to me from the open window of his vehicle. “Move that damned car of yours.…”

“We're trying to, Officer,” McNamara replied, leaning across me as he spoke in a loud voice, “but these guys are stopping us.”

The policeman looked at the three men but said nothing. The red-bearded man was grinning at the cop in a way that told me they were acquainted. Then the bearded man and the two others slowly backed away from the door and, as if on cue, suddenly ran toward it and slammed it shut with their booted feet and the palms of their hands so forcefully that McNamara and I went reeling sideways, careening against each other on the other side of the car.

“Now you can get your damned car out of here,” the police officer said.

After I had readjusted myself behind the wheel and shifted into the driving gear, I began to move forward. As I pulled away, heading toward Brown Chapel, I heard the red-bearded men yelling after us, “We shoulda kicked yo' ass. You come down here, you start all this trouble, and you don't know shit about Alabama.…”

A
FTER
I
HAD TYPED AND RETYPED MY ARTICLE
,
COMPLETING IT
two minutes before the end of the deadline, I dictated it by telephone from my hotel room to one of the recording transcribers in the
Times
news department in New York, dissatisfied, as I so often was, with what I had written and wishing that there had been more time for me to interview more people, to rephrase my sentences and think of better words to describe what I had seen—even though, in a fully understood and enduring sense, I was not really sure what I had seen, beyond the sadism and suffering along the highway, which the television networks had made the most of, interrupting their prime-time Sunday-night programs to show film clips of the lawmen clubbing people amid the screaming and the excruciating smoke, scenes that were rebroadcast on the following day and throughout the week, prompting thousands of appalled white and black citizens from all parts of the nation to accept Dr. King's invitation to visit Selma and accompany him on the next march, one that he likened to the pilgrimage of the ancient Israelites out of Egypt.

With all respect for the magnetism of Dr. King, I believe that most of those people who came pouring into Alabama did so because they were horrified by what they had been shown on television and felt compelled to register their disapprobation and disgust personally. I also believe that
these film clips from Selma, so starkly vivid in their depictions of inhumanity and so uncomplicatedly clear in their differentiation between good and evil—black angels and white devils engaged in five minutes of graphic interaction culminating a century of post-Reconstruction wrath—reaffirmed how persuasive television news reporting had become in projecting imagery and attitude in ways that could immediately mold and mobilize public opinion. Television's influence was being discharged not only from Alabama but from all parts of the nation in 1965, a polemical year, in which advocates and detractors—appearing in television studios or in front of cameras on campuses and in the streets—debated such subjects as whether leading athletes should compete in South Africa while its government continued to practice apartheid, or whether First Amendment protection should be extended to the vociferous students of Berkeley's Filthy Speech Movement, or whether the United States should withdraw its military forces from Vietnam. Whatever the topic, the television news shows strived to be succinct, pictorially graphic, and ingrained with whatever might induce people to stay tuned; and the newsmakers themselves (the people the news cameras focused upon) often performed for the cameras in order to accommodate the cameras' need for visual expression and animation and their
own
need to be seen and heard on television and thus spread their message far and wide to the masses. It was not that television was slanting the news but that the newsmakers were slanting themselves to television, were falling to the ground as the police broke up their demonstrations and thereby forcing the police to drag them to patrol wagons, prolonging the scene for the cameras and illustrating at greater length their willingness to suffer for their cause.

I had been reared within the perimeters of print journalism, and when television reporters first entered the field during my early years on the
Times
, they were scorned by my older colleagues as a breed of illegitimates who were embarrassing to the profession. They were said to be superficial in outlook, all surface and no substance; and save for such notable exceptions as Walter Cronkite (who had worked as a foreign correspondent during World War II for the United Press), the television anchormen and assignment editors lacked the training and experience to properly evaluate and to comprehensively communicate in a balanced and reliable manner the serious events of the day. The preeminent figures in American journalism when I joined the
Times
were men who augustly personified the power of the printed word. Among this group of individuals was the venerable syndicated columnist Walter Lippman, not a
Times
man,
and also my elder colleague at the
Times
, James Reston, the paper's Washington bureau chief and its top writer (and a man so famous that he was once the subject of the lead story in
Time
magazine, with his photo on the cover); in addition, there were at least half a dozen star nonfiction writers on the staff of
The New Yorker
whom I admired and whose articles I clipped and filed away as examples of journalism that was both literary and historically relevant.

One article that I saved was a reprint of a piece that had totally occupied the editorial space of
The New Yorker
issue of August 31, 1946. It was an article by John Hersey entitled “Hiroshima,” and it described the devastation of the first atomic bomb from the viewpoint of six people in Japan who had survived the blast a year earlier. Hersey conducted hundreds of interviews with these survivors and other people in Japan and then produced a work of art that re-created for me the horror of that moment (8:15 a.m., August 6, 1945) in human terms so riveting and transcending as to soar beyond what I could imagine while viewing the film clips of the poisonous cloud mushrooming on the horizon.

The
New Yorker
issue featuring Hersey's article sold out hours after reaching the newsstands, and on four successive nights the American Broadcasting Company canceled its regular radio broadcasts so that “Hiroshima” could be read to millions of its listeners. I was thinking about that piece and its effect on the pretelevision public while I was on assignment in Selma, and I wondered what examples of great contemporary reportage in magazines and newspapers were currently being filed away by young students of nonfiction in this video age, when the television newsmen were zooming in and communicating to the home audience an intimate sense of being at the red-hot center of history. It was not that I was foreseeing the obsolescence of the print media due to the mobile cameras and the more competitive initiatives of television newsmen, and I certainly could not conceive of a day when my own newspaper would no longer stand as America's “paper of record”; moreover, I believed, and would continue to believe, that what the
Times
's editors each day saw fit to print would be the dominant daily guide for the assignment editors at the networks. But at the same time, the general public was now receiving most of its breaking news from television, and this inveigling visual medium was to some degree heightening or altering or reflexively relating reality as it offered pictorial evidence of its existence, and it was impacting upon the public more immediately and dramatically than the print journalism I was practicing in Selma.

After I had finished filing my story, I went down to the hotel bar to
rejoin McNamara, and a
Newsweek
correspondent named William J. Cook, and also the television crew from NBC, the latter being in a gleeful and self-congratulatory frame of mind.

“Oh, what great stuff we got today,” one of them was saying, having already heard from New York that the film clips of the highway bludgeoning had been terrific and would be featured during prime time. When I saw the clips that night on television and again the following morning, I had a closer visual sense of the lawmen's ferocity and the victims' capitulation than I'd had when watching from the highway. Still, I was surprised by how quickly these film clips caused Selma to be singled out and condemned nationwide for the atrocities of its lawmen. Police brutality, after all, could be found almost anywhere. I would live to see the day when policemen in New York would bring a black suspect into a precinct house for questioning and then sodomize him with a broomstick. But Selma in the spring of 1965 was demonized like no other place in America because the most abominable moments of its lawmen had been exposed on national television; and President Lyndon Johnson called attention to Selma's notoriety as he urged Congress on March 15 to pass a new voting-rights bill. It would, among other things, suspend literacy tests, install federally appointed registrars in places like Selma where black registrations were customarily obstructed, and it would impose federal scrutiny over all election procedures in order to ensure that blacks would no longer be subjected to racist tactics of intimidation, discouragement, and delay.

“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,” President Johnson told Congress. “So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.”

It seemed to me that President Johnson's reference to Appomattox, Virginia, was an overly optimistic comparison to the situation in Selma; at Appomattox the Confederate army had surrendered in the spring of 1865 to their northern conquerors, whereas at the time of Johnson's speech the civil rights demonstrators were still being blocked from advancing along the highway to Montgomery, and Dr. King's main accomplishment since arriving in Selma within hours of hearing about the “Bloody Sunday” incident was in promoting his cause before the television cameras. When he led his people from Brown Chapel through downtown Selma across the bridge on Tuesday, March 9, it was essentially a media event, a situation staged for the cameras, rather than an authentic follow-up to the first attempt to reach Montgomery two days earlier. Although his rank-and-file supporters were unaware of it, Dr. King on
March 9 was operating in accord with a privately agreed-upon deal with federal and state authorities that would permit him to move forward but not beyond the point on the highway that had been barricaded on Bloody Sunday and was still being blocked off.

Dr. King's marchers in Selma now included, or would soon include, hundreds of out-of-state white people who were responding to his appeal for added companionship along the “highway up from darkness.” Among the respondents were ministers from New England, hippies from San Francisco, postdebutantes from Philadelphia, labor leaders from New York, a blind man from Atlanta, a one-legged social worker from Saginaw, Michigan, the wife of a U.S. senator from Illinois, the widow of a senator from New Hampshire, and a thirty-nine-year-old mother of five children who was married to a Teamster agent from Detroit. Few of these people had ever before walked arm in arm with black people, or had joined in the singing of Negro spirituals, or had been overnight guests in the homes of black families (such hospitality was necessary, since the town's few hotels and motels were fully booked), or had felt safer and more secure in black neighborhoods than in those where the residents were white. When Dr. King's integrated mile-long parade approached the barricade on March 9, a police officer with a bullhorn proclaimed that the march was illegal, being in violation of an injunction upheld by a federal judge in Montgomery. King then halted his people and asked them to kneel with him on the highway and join him in prayer. Moments later, as television crews memorialized the scene, he gestured for his legions to rise and withdraw and return with him to Brown Chapel.

“This is what happens when we get white people involved,” a young black minister named James Bevel told me as I walked with him and a few other black activists back over the bridge into town. The lean Alabamaborn Rev James Bevel, wearing an Iranian skullcap and neatly pressed overalls, was essentially saying that Dr. King had been restrained because of his concern for the well-being of these white newcomers to his ranks. While disappointed with King's reticence, Bevel was not as critical of the civil rights leader as were many members of SNCC, who declared that King had lost his nerve, and they later referred to this day, frequently and facetiously, as “Turn-Around Tuesday.”

But J. L. Chestnut, Jr., King's local legal consultant in Selma, thought that King's strategy was wise and proper. Another bloody day in this town would achieve nothing. Evidence of Selma's racism had already been exposed on national television, and Chestnut believed that now was the time for King to reassert his image as a proponent of peace, as a law-abiding man of God patiently awaiting the day when the injunction
would be lifted and the marchers would be allowed to proceed beyond the outskirts of Selma and onward to Montgomery.

The day of advancement finally occurred on March 21. But even though the federal judge had now provisionally sanctioned the march, the continuing rumors of violence and death to the participants meant that President Johnson felt obliged to provide them with a vast and heavily armed escort. One of Dr. King's white supporters had already lost his life in Selma. A Unitarian minister from Boston, James Reeb, had been clubbed by a white mob on the evening of March 9 after leaving a restaurant reserved for black people, and he died of head injuries two days later. And so President Johnson was unstinting in the security arrangements that he authorized for the procession to Montgomery that commenced on the afternoon of March 21—500 soldiers from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and hundreds more from other military installations in the South, plus the 1,863 members of the Alabama National Guard. In addition, there were 100 FBI agents, 75 federal marshals, and a pair of military helicopters that hovered over the 2,500 blacks and the 500 whites who walked eight abreast through downtown Selma and across the bridge before reducing their numbers as they left town and headed southeast toward the old country roads adjoining what had once been slavelaboring plantations.