Authors:
Historic Era: Era 9: Postwar United States (1945 to early 1970s)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February/March 2000 | Volume 51, Issue 1
Authors:
Historic Era: Era 9: Postwar United States (1945 to early 1970s)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February/March 2000 | Volume 51, Issue 1
One of my early assignments as a rookie civil rights worker was to stay close to Dr. King when we filed through the streets of Selma, Alabama. Three or four of us shared this duty, and together we kept him pretty much surrounded, blocking the aim of any sniper who might be crouched on a nearby rooftop.
I had arrived in Selma less than a month before, white and fresh from college in Colorado. Hundreds of us were set to march that day, February 1,1965. Our ostensible destination was the Dallas County Courthouse downtown, to renew a protest against the exclusion of almost all of the county’s black citizens from the voting rolls. But no one expected to get that far; everybody knew we wanted to provoke arrests.
After barely nibbling breakfast, afraid and exhilarated at the same time, I donned my movement uniform: stiff new denim overalls, a matching jacket, and, incongruously, a yarmulke. One of Dr. King’s staffers, who understood how important the support of Jewish groups was to the movement, had distributed them to us. Properly decked out, I headed across town to the Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Red brick with two squat steeples, Brown Chapel sat on Sylvan Street in the middle of the George Washington Carver Homes, Selma’s neat, generally well-kept black housing project. People were standing around on the steps, and, inside, the benches were full. There was a “mass meeting” that morning to get everybody into the right frame of mind for the day’s events. The elements were basic and familiar: preaching, praying, singing, clapping. But in those days in that place the combination was unforgettable and overwhelming.
After a concluding prayer and a round of “We Shall Overcome,” we lined up outside, watching our breath in the chilly morning air, and then stepped off, clapping and singing, up Sylvan Street toward the courthouse nine blocks away.
I took my place near Dr. King at the head of the column. We hadn’t gone far before we were stopped by a man in a dark business suit and a fedora hat, standing in the middle of the street with his hands in his pockets. This was Wilson Baker, Selma’s public safety director. Baker was a good and smart man, a disciple of Police Chief Laurie Pritchett of Albany, Georgia. Pritchett had outmaneuvered a vigorous protest campaign in Albany three years earlier by figuring out how to handle the pack of Yankee reporters that showed up wherever Dr. King did. Coming into a Southern town with cameras, microphones, and notebooks, they expected to see crude redneck cops and sheriffs beating up peaceable, noble Negroes. Pritchett spoke politely and made sure his policemen arrested the marchers quietly and without fanfare. The Yankee reporters soon became bored and moved on.
Baker had Pritchett’s strategy down cold. If King was determined to get arrested, Baker would accommodate him, but he would also make sure that the reporters saw nothing