At Canaan's Edge (16 page)

Forman caught himself instantly and nodded with sheepish, ingrained respect for the nuns present, but a single obscene word dominated his message. Observers shivered with delight or disapproval over the lapse from the movement's wholesome public discipline, ending a day that Forman later marked as a watershed—“the last time I wanted to participate in a nonviolent demonstration.” King came behind him with a fiery speech that concealed the breach. “The cup of endurance has run over,” he declared, then steered outrage over the horseback brutality into enthusiasm for massive nonviolent witness behind him and Forman the next day.

E
ARLY
W
EDNESDAY,
Attorney General Katzenbach called to prod Judge Frank Johnson on the case that had bottled up the long march from Selma for eight days running. Now that the President had announced the government's position, and a voting rights bill was being delivered just then to Congress, Katzenbach pushed to relieve rather than contain the pressure. He asked when the Justice Department could expect a ruling.

“It won't be forthcoming,” the judge replied—not until he felt certain the order would be backed.

“Backed?” said Katzenbach. “Well, I think we can back it.”

“I don't care what you think,” the judge said sternly. He wanted a guarantee of enforcement to bind the contending parties, lest his imposed settlement fail in a vacuum of finger pointing between the various levels of government. “It won't be fair to the court and to the people to have an order that does not have support,” he added.

“All right, you have my assurance,” said Katzenbach. Washington would fill any default of duty by state or local officials.

“I don't want your assurance, Mr. Katzenbach,” insisted the judge. “I want it from the president. I want to know before I issue this order.”

Katzenbach signed off to call the White House.

Not far from Judge Johnson's chambers in Montgomery, King, Forman, and Silas Norman led nearly two thousand people on a mile-long walk to Sheriff Butler's office at the county courthouse. Students clustered around King as a human shield from the threat of snipers, but rows of police officers guarded the long procession in a stark reversal. For the third time in March, following Bloody Sunday and the attack on James Reeb, a spasm of national publicity put Alabama on the defensive and masked strains within the civil rights movement. Two large photographs on the front page of the
New York Times
showed “mounted possemen” and “club-wielding deputies” pounding integrated ranks of young demonstrators. Other photographs on an inside page were captioned, “Taking Refuge” and “Cry for Help.” Wednesday's
Washington Post
carried eleven separate dispatches on the Alabama crisis. One of the few unrelated stories on its front page told of South Korean diplomats who apologized to guests turned away from a formal luncheon for their visiting foreign minister, saying they had sent invitations without realizing that Washington's National Press Club banned females from the dining room.

In Montgomery, a chagrined local prosecutor already had excused the previous day's rampage as unworthy of the capital city, saying, “We are sorry there was a mix-up and a misunderstanding of orders.” He invited King and Forman into the courthouse to negotiate new protest procedures with local officials, including Sheriff Butler, who had discarded his cowboy hat. John Doar observed for the Justice Department. The crowd waited outside through the whole afternoon, upbeat and singing in spite of a steady rain. “Police protection was thoroughly organized” against aggressive hecklers on the sidewalks, wrote one astonished demonstrator. Fifty miles away in Selma, meanwhile, FBI agents counted 586 people who braved the elements for an outdoor prayer rally. Half-inch hailstones fell as Hosea Williams exhorted the mix of travelers and local stalwarts to hold on. “I'm not interested in criticizing Sheriff Clark,” he shouted. “I'm interested in
converting
Sheriff Clark!”

In Montgomery, emerging at 5:15
P.M.
on Wednesday, King and Forman shared a megaphone to deliver a progress report from the steps of the courthouse. Local officials had agreed to sign a statement of regret for Tuesday's violence, they said, and to forswear the use of the unaccountable possemen for law enforcement. They thanked the rain-soaked crowd for putting a “historic occasion” within reach, and urged them all to find shelter as talks continued into the night. “There are points that we agree on, and there are still points that we must negotiate,” King announced, then paused as Andrew Young pushed through to speak in his ear. His face changed. News cameramen expectantly buzzed reporters near him to clear the view—“get the mike down, get the mike down.”

“Let me give you this statement which I think will come as a source of deep joy to all of us,” King called out. “Judge Johnson has just ruled that we have a legal and Constitutional right to march from Selma to Montgomery!” Rolling cheers erupted over the last words.

March 17–20, 1965

J
UDGE
Johnson advised stunned lawyers for Alabama that they could catch a plane to New Orleans within the hour to seek an emergency stay in the Fifth Circuit. He assumed rightly that they would hurry, because his order prescribed a window of little more than a week to complete the fifty-mile march. Rushing just as hard to get started, King fixed Sunday for the third attempt to cross Pettus Bridge. This allowed movement workers only three days to improvise bivouac logistics along Highway 80.

On Thursday, as Governor Wallace's lawyers argued their appeal to block them, the U.S. Senate debated and passed an extraordinary resolution to send the day-old voting rights bill to the Judiciary Committee with instructions to report it back for floor action no later than April 9, the hundredth anniversary of Appomattox. “I am opposed to every word and every line in the bill,” declared Judiciary chairman James Eastland of Mississippi, protesting the usurpation of his traditional prerogative to set the timetable for legislation. Against him rose the leadership of both parties, with Vice President Humphrey formally presiding and many senators praising the Selma demonstrators for steadfast commitment to democratic principles. “As American citizens, they have faith in America,” said Republican John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, “and we must sustain that faith.” Only thirteen senators voted against the resolution, including one—Republican Margaret Chase Smith of Maine—who opposed sending the bill to committee even for three weeks.

A Soviet cosmonaut burst into news bulletins as the first human to walk in space. “I didn't experience fear,” Colonel Alexei Leonov said on reentry to his orbiting spacecraft, Voshkod 2, “only a sense of infinite expanse and depth of the universe.” At the White House, once a graceful response was framed for the latest setback in the space race, Johnson delegated to his confidential go-between Buford Ellington the task of securing from Governor Wallace a commitment to protect the Selma march as ordered by the court, but Attorney General Katzenbach soon interrupted with bad news from Ellington that the elusive Wallace was asking for help. With Deputy Defense Secretary Cyrus Vance, who was preparing U.S. troop deployments in case Alabama balked altogether, Katzenbach and Ellington coached Johnson for a showdown phone call calculated to draw upon his mesmerizing personal dominance of Wallace on Saturday.

The governor came on the line at full gallop against marchers “pourin' in from all over the country…nuns and priests, and got hundreds of bearded beatniks in front of my capitol now.” Just two days ago, he said, “it was James Forman suggesting in front of all the nuns and priests that if they, anybody went in the café and they wouldn't serve 'em, to kick the fuckin' legs of the tables off…that kind of intemperate remarks, and inflames people, you know…and I'm gonna do everything that I can, but now, all I want to say quite frankly is that they've been stirred up by a lot of things, and I know you don't want anything to happen that looks like a revolution, but if these people keep pouring in here…why, it's gonna take you, it's gonna take everybody in the country to stop something.”

President Johnson worked in a calming volley of words about cooperating peacefully with the march as ordered by the court. “Let's get it over as soon as we can,” he said. “And let's don't, uh, when you talk about a revolution, that uh, that really, that really upsets us all.”

Wallace made sure Johnson knew he meant polar threats from two kinds of revolutionaries: outsiders who pressed for the Negro vote by “wantin' the federal government to take the state over,” and Alabamians on his side who wanted to annul federal authority on issues touching race. “Of course, if I was a revolutionary, I probably could invite a quarter of a million people to come help us,” he said. “But of course I don't want anything like that at all. I don't want people to get hurt.”

“I know,” Johnson said.

The President seemed chastened by the blunt talk of revolution, and Wallace resumed the offensive with tales of white Alabama as victim rather than oppressor, suffering nearly unbearable cases of interracial flirting. “A Negro priest yesterday asked all the patrolmen what their wives were doing,” he told Johnson. “Uh, reckon some of their friends could have dates with their wives, you know, tryin' to provoke 'em, those kind of things, you know, and we're tellin' 'em just
take
all that stuff.” The marching and agitating in Selma had been getting worse for eight weeks, Wallace complained, rushing hotly to warn again that “if this matter continues on and on and on…if they're gonna just stay in this state eight weeks and congregate fifty thousand strong a day, then uh, we're going to have a revolution.” He checked himself. “Well, I don't mean that, as you say, [to] use the word ‘revolution,'” he said. “We just gonna have trouble.”

Johnson pleaded several times for Wallace to call out the Alabama Guard so the federal government would not have to intrude, but Wallace parried with a steady refrain. “Here's what I'll do,” he said. “I will, we're gonna keep
close touch
with the situation.”

The President brought Katzenbach, then Ellington, on the phone to push in tandem for a more definitive commitment. “George, are you by yourself?” asked Ellington, suspecting that Wallace might not want political colleagues to hear him pledge to protect race mixers under federal pressure.

When Wallace parried again, Johnson tried an edge of disgust. “You don't need to talk to me any more,” he announced, saying he had a Treasury nomination to finish before he flew home to Texas that afternoon. “I thought Governor Ellington and y'all had kind of, had a, uh a meeting of the minds on it,” he added in a plaintive tone.

“Well, we'll have a meeting of the minds, Mr. President,” said Wallace, giving ground. “I'll do whatever it takes. If it takes ten thousand Guardsmen, we'll have them. I'll use—do whatever is necessary. And I won't uh, wait too late. Of course, you know—”

“That's okay,” said Johnson, pouncing. “That's good. And you keep in touch with Buford.” Wallace signed off with two hours left to prepare an address to the Alabama legislature.

I
N
M
ONTGOMERY
, legislative leaders escorted Governor Wallace into the House chamber precisely on cue for live statewide television at 6:30
P.M
. His speech needed only sixteen minutes to draw from many wells of emotional resistance, beginning with ridicule. He read a long list of mobile support equipment already requested by the Selma organizers, including nine three-hundred-gallon water trailers and two rubbish trucks, then denounced the marchers as a mob. “And it is upon these people, and upon their anarchy,” said Wallace, “that a federal judge, presiding over a mock court, places a stamp of approval.” Nurtured by the “collectivist press,” they served a “foreign philosophy” that aimed to “take all police powers unto the central government,” he declared. “And sadly, the Negroes used as tools in this traditional type of Communist street warfare have no conception of the misery and slavery they are bringing to their children.”

Wallace turned from “words of alarm, not that I have anything against proper alarm,” to the poignant retreat of the Lost Cause. “I do not ask you for cowardice,” he said, “but I ask you for restraint in the same tradition that our outnumbered forefathers followed.” He urged Alabamians to “exercise that superior discipline that is yours,” obey the order “though it be galling,” and leave the march alone. “Please stay home,” he pleaded. “Let's have peace.” He presented scornful forbearance as the utmost patriotic sacrifice, but he could not bring himself to allow protection by any Alabama authority. “The federal courts have created this matter,” he declared, and therefore he would call on Washington to “provide for the safety and welfare of the so-called demonstrators.” Thunderous cheers answered his concluding appeal—“I have kept faith with you…”—for voters to stand behind the people's governor. The
Montgomery Advertiser
recorded that “several women in the audience were in tears.” Friday's
Birmingham News
proclaimed, “Wallace Has Finest Hour.”

Flashes from Montgomery kept the Marine helicopter stalled on the White House lawn. “I've been leavin' since 3:30, messing with that son of a bitch,” President Johnson fumed to Buford Ellington after nine o'clock Thursday night, “and he is absolutely treacherous.”

Ellington vowed never to speak to Wallace again. “Well, you know I
told
you—”

The President interrupted to quote from the speech. “I'm, I'm not going to be double-crossed this way,” he told Ellington. “I'm gonna issue a statement here that kinda burns his tail.”

Wallace struck first. Johnson called Attorney General Katzenbach at ten, sputtering with frustration that he had been about to summon reporters when “in comes this goddam wire” asking the President to police the march with five thousand civilian federal workers, such as marshals and prison guards.

The request was “ridiculous,” said Katzenbach, “as Governor Wallace knows perfectly well,” but the maneuver neatly sidestepped all National Guard options as political poison in Alabama. If Wallace called out the Guard himself, he would assume defense of Negroes he demonized to popular acclaim; if he refused, he would invite federal command and with it blame for surrender. If Johnson now suggested that Wallace was “reneging” on his commitment to use the Guard as necessary, the governor would simply reply that he preferred civilians. “That's what he'll say,” Katzenbach predicted. He advised Johnson to scrap his statement of rebuke and compose a straightforward reply: that federal civilian employees were unprepared and unsuited for the emergency, being scattered in assorted agencies nationwide, whereas the ten thousand members of the Alabama National Guard were on hand, “trained and equipped for this purpose.”

“Uh, and if he won't call them out, we will,” the President suggested.

“And uh, if he's unable to maintain law, we will,” Katzenbach added.

Johnson shouted for his secretary Marie Fehmer to get on the line for dictation that bounced back and forth for ten minutes before he took off for Andrews Air Force Base. He called the FBI from the plane “in a highly agitated condition about the situation in Alabama,” Director Hoover advised his executives, and the President reached the LBJ Ranch before two o'clock Friday morning.

F
OR
K
ING
, Wallace's speech was background radio news in a long night of related collisions. With the victory of Judge Johnson's order, pressure spiked on many fronts, including where to camp Sunday on the first night out of Selma. No sooner did a volunteer at last offer a farm near the highway than Dallas County officials rushed James Minter to court with an ironclad argument that Anderson Watts was merely his sharecropper of twenty years and could not grant such permission. The Selma courthouse swarmed with word of imminent suits by the city and the local bus company to collect massive damages from Negro leaders over the economic effect of demonstrations. Familiar signs of spite hollowed optimism among movement veterans who had learned to be wary on the brink of hard-won public success. Retaliatory violence had charred celebrations consistently in the past, with bombs detonated soon after the bus boycott, sit-ins, Birmingham campaign, and March on Washington.

The usual infighting rubbed so raw as to provoke a rare eruption of temper from King, against SNCC's Willie Ricks in Montgomery. With James Forman, Ricks had organized student pickets that held ground outside the capitol for several hours Thursday, menaced by a larger “Niggers Go Home” counterdemonstration of whites. When police arrested eighty-four of the students for sitting down on the sidewalk, three hundred new demonstrators—mostly travelers on their way to Selma—marched to the courthouse to denounce the jailing as a violation of the new protest agreement. At midnight, the most persistent thirty-six were jailed themselves, joining the others, and arguments seethed into the morning over the priority of this crisis.

What upset King was a passing encounter with three female students from Alabama State who wore helmets from the huge batch that Forman had imported for SNCC's “second front” campaign. When he complimented the distinctive look, one of them replied, “You need one.” Another added, “You better get you one.”

King stopped. “Willie Ricks told you to say that,” he said. When he pressed the students to confirm his guess, they ran off instead to Ricks, whom they knew, saying King was a paranoid celebrity who thought Ricks controlled his fate.

Hours later, King spotted Ricks on a fringe of the marathon strategy session. “Come here, son,” he said, pulling him close. “I've been out here fighting a long time, and I know what I'm doing. You can't hurt me.” His tone hushed the room. King preached that Cain had killed Abel but Ricks couldn't hurt him. “Remember that,” he said. “I was Martin Luther King before you were Willie Ricks, and I'll be Martin Luther King long after you're gone.”

Ricks stood silent as King “went off on me,” but his SNCC colleagues lit into King's surrogates. Forman accused Andrew Young of undermining SNCC's militancy in order to please Washington. He said King's SCLC staff sacrificed integrity even to get creature comforts for the march, such as port-o-potties and walkie-talkies. “I've known people who sold out for a car or money,” he shouted, “but never for toilets!”