The Selma to Montgomery marches was three marches in 1965 that marked the political and emotional peak of the American civil rights movement. They grew out of the voting rights movement in Selma, Alabama, launched by local African-Americans who formed the Dallas County Voters League (DCVL). In 1963, the DCVL and organizers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) began voter-registration work. When white resistance to Black voter registration proved intractable, the DCVL requested the assistance of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who brought many prominent civil rights and civic leaders to support voting rights.
Planning the First March
With civil rights activity blocked by Judge Hare's injunction, the DCVL requested the assistance of King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Three of SCLC's main organizers— Director of Direct Action and Nonviolent Education James Bevel, Diane Nash, and James Orange— had been working on Bevel's Alabama Voting Rights Project since late 1963, a project which King and the executive board of SCLC had not joined. When SCLC officially accepted Amelia Boynton's invitation to bring their organization to Selma, Bevel, Nash, Orange and others in SCLC began working in Selma in December 1964. They also worked in the surrounding counties along with the SNCC staff that had been active there since early 1963.
The Selma Voting Rights Movement officially started on January 2, 1965, when King addressed a mass meeting in Brown Chapel in defiance of the anti-meeting injunction.
Over the following weeks, SCLC and SNCC activists expanded voter registration drives and protests in Selma and the adjacent Black Belt counties. In addition to Selma, marches and other protests in support of voting rights were held in Perry, Wilcox, Marengo, Greene, and Hale counties.
On February 18, 1965, C. T. Vivian led a march to the courthouse in Marion, the county seat of Perry County. State officials had received orders to target Vivian specifically, and so a line of Alabama state troopers waited for the marchers at the Perry County courthouse.[7] All the street lights in that location turned off at once, and the state troopers rushed at the protesters and attacked them. One of the protesters with Vivian, Jimmie Lee Jackson, fled the scene with his mother to hide in a nearby café. Alabama State Trooper, Corporal James Bonard Fowler, followed Jackson into the café and shot him as he tried to protect his mother. Jackson died eight days later, of an infection resulting from the gunshot wound, at Selma's Good Samaritan Hospital.[8] Jackson was the only male wage-earner of his household, which lived in extreme poverty. Jackson's father, wife and children were left with no source of income. After bringing this story to the attention of the SCLC, James Bevel called for a march from Selma to Montgomery to confront Governor Wallace directly about this death. On 10 May 2007, 42 years after the homicide, Fowler was charged with first degree and second degree murder for the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson and subsequently surrendered to authorities.[2] Fowler pleaded guilty to one count of second-degree manslaughter on November 15, 2010.[1] Mr. Fowler apologized for the shooting but insisted that he had acted in self-defense, believing that Mr. Jackson was trying to grab his gun.[1] Fowler was sentenced to six months in prison.
Response to the Second March
Blacks in Dallas County and the Black Belt mourned the death of Rev. Reeb as they had earlier mourned the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson. But many activists were bitter that the media and national political leaders expressed great concern over Reeb's murder, but had paid scant attention to the killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson. SNCC spokesman [Stokely Carmichael] was reported as saying "What you want is the nation to be upset when anybody is killed… but it almost [seems that] for this to be recognized, a white person must be killed."
The third march spread the marchers' message without harassment by police and segregation supporters. These factors, along with more widespread support from other civil rights organizations in the area, made the march an overall success and gave the demonstration greater impact.
U.S. Representative William Louis Dickinson made two speeches to Congress on March 30 and April 27 seeking to slander the movement by making spurious charges of alcohol abuse, bribery, and widespread sexual debauchery at the marches. Religious leaders present at the marches denied the charges, and local and national journalists were unable to substantiate his accounts. The allegations of segregation supporters were collected in Robert M. Mikell's pro-segregationist book Selma'
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Historical Impact
The marches shifted public opinion about the Civil Rights movement. The images of Alabama law enforcement beating the nonviolent protesters were shown all over the country and the world by television networks and newspapers. The visuals of such brutality being carried out by the state of Alabama helped shift the image of the segregationist movement from one of a movement trying to preserve the social order of the South to a system of state-endorsed terrorism against non-whites.[23]
The marches also had a powerful effect in Washington. After witnessing TV coverage of "Bloody Sunday," President Lyndon Baines Johnson met with Governor George Wallace in Washington to discuss with him the civil rights situation in his state. He tried to persuade Wallace to stop the state harassment of the protesters. Two nights later, on March 15, 1965, Johnson presented a bill to a joint session of Congress. The bill itself would later pass and become the Voting Rights Act. Johnson's speech in front of Congress was considered to be a watershed moment for the civil rights movement; Johnson even used the movement's most famous slogan "We shall overcome".
Even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause, too, because it is not just Negroes but really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.[23]
Many in the Civil Rights movement cheered the speech and were emotionally moved that after so long and so hard a struggle, a President was finally willing to defend voting rights for blacks. According to SCLC activist C.T. Vivian, who was with King when the speech was broadcast,
...I looked over... and Martin was very quietly sitting in the chair, and a tear ran down his cheek. It was a victory like none other. It was an affirmation of the movement.[23]
The bill became law at an August 6 ceremony attended by Amelia Boynton and many other civil rights leaders and activists. This act prohibited most of the unfair practices used to prevent blacks from registering to vote, and provided for federal registrars to go to Alabama and other states with a history of voting-related discrimination to ensure that the law was implemented.
In Selma, where more than 7,000 blacks were added to the voting rolls after passage of the Act, Sheriff Jim Clark was voted out of office in 1966 (he later served a prison sentence for drug smuggling).[24]
In 1960, there were just 53,336 black voters in the state of Alabama; three decades later, there were 537,285,[25] a tenfold increase.
On March 22 and 23, 300 protesters marched through chilling rain across Lowndes County, camping at three sites in muddy fields. At the time of the march, the population of Lowndes County was 81% black and 19% white, but not a single black was registered to vote.[13] At the same time there were 2,240 whites registered to vote in Lowndes County, a figure that represented 118% of the adult white population (in many southern counties of that era it was common practice to retain white voters on the rolls after they died or moved away).
On the morning of the 24th, the march crossed into Montgomery County and the highway widened again to four lanes. All day as the march approached the city, additional marchers were ferried by bus and car to join the line. By evening, several thousand marchers had reached the final campsite at the City of St. Jude, a complex on the outskirts of Montgomery.
That night on a makeshift stage, a "Stars for Freedom" rally was held, with singers Harry Belafonte, Tony Bennett, Frankie Laine, Peter, Paul and Mary, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Nina Simone all performing.
On Thursday, March 25, 25,000 people marched from St. Jude to the steps of the State Capitol Building where King delivered the speech "How Long, Not Long." "The end we seek," King told the crowd, "is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. ... I know you are asking today, how long will it take? I come to say to you this afternoon however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long."[14]
References
1. ^ Davis, Townsend (1998). Weary Feet, Rested Souls. W.W. Norton. 2. ^ a b Selma — Cracking the Wall of Fear ~ Civil Rights Movement Veterans 3. ^ Are You "Qualified" to Vote? The Alabama "Literacy Test" ~ Civil Rights Movement Veterans 4. ^ Freedom Day in Selma ~ Civil Rights Movement Veterans 5. ^ Zinn, Howard (1965). SNCC The New Abolitionists. Beacon Press. 6. ^ The Selma Injunction ~ Civil Rights Movement Veterans. 7. ^ Halberstam, David. The Children, Random House, 1998, p. 502. 8. ^ Fleming, John (6 March 2005). "The Death of Jimmie Lee Jackson". The Anniston Star 9. ^ National Park Service 10. ^ "The wire photo of her left for dead on Edmund Pettus Bridge, which went around the world on the news that night, helped spark the outpouring of support for the civil rights movement..." 11. ^ See Walker v. City of Birmingham, 388 U.S. 307 1967), citing Howat v. Kansas, 258 U.S. 181 (1922). 12. ^ Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail - National Park Service 13. ^ Cobb, Charles E. (2008). On the Road to Freedom. Algonquin Books. 14. ^ Selma to Montgomery March - King Research & Education Center at Stanford University