MY BAPTISMS OF FIRE: SELMA, MARCH 7, 1965

It would come to be known as Bloody Sunday, that day 45 years ago.

Leslie, a colleague from Tuskegee Institute's English department, and I were tooling down the highway to Selma, Alabama in my little four-cylinder, two-cycle SAAB. We were on our way to make plans for demonstrators from Tuskegee to meet up with the demonstrators who were setting out from Selma that day on a march to Montgomery.

The demand in Selma that Negroes be allowed to vote had been stirring Negroes and whites since 1963. And by 1965 it had become the focus of efforts by the wider civil rights movement: organizer James Bevel proposed the town as “an effective testing ground” for a mass movement. Martin Luther King agreed--though he feared there would be “a great potential for violence.” And on January 1, before a “standing, cheering” crowd of 700 in Selma’s Brown Chapel, he made it official.

But by the end of January, after repeated marches and attempts to register at the Dallas County Courthouse, only 57 Negro applicants had been able to get into the registrar’s office, and all had been rejected. The campaign was stalled, and King agreed pressures would be stepped up, including his going to jail.

On Monday February first demonstrations began. Nearly 800 Negroes set out from Brown Chapel, more than 500 of them school kids, who were promptly arrested. The New York Times kept score: 770 “seized” on Monday, 520 more on Tuesday, 500 students on Wednesday in nearby Perry County, and 300 more hauled away in Selma by Jim Clark. King, meanwhile, was composing a dozen political directives in jail, “to keep national attention focused on Selma.”

During the same week Malcolm X spoke at Tuskegee and then showed up the next day in Selma. President Johnson also told a press conference “that all Americans should be indignant when one American is denied the right to vote. . .The basic problem in Selma is the slow pace of voting registration for Negroes.” Exactly what King hoped he would say.

On Friday evening February 26, Bevel took to the pulpit at a mass meeting in Brown Chapel to mourn the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson. Jackson had tried to register in nearby Marion and took two bullets in his stomach, plus a cudgeling, when he tried to protect his mother, who'd been beaten to the floor by state troopers. He would be the first of four demonstrators to die in the Selma area during the voter-registration drive.

Bevel's text was Esther 4:8, in which being warned of an order to destroy the Jews, Esther was charged to go to the king and make a request for her people. The king, Bevel told the Brown Chapel gathering, was now Alabama Governor George Wallace.

“I must go see the king!” he shouted. Soon he had the whole congregation on its feet vowing to go on foot as the Bible said. “Be prepared to walk to Montgomery! Be prepared to sleep on the highway!” King approved the walk to Montgomery to begin Sunday March 7.

I'd been totally out of what had been going on in Selma (some Tuskegee students and teachers had been jailed there in support of the voter registration efforts). But now I was about to receive my first Baptism of Fire.


Leslie and I began our search for someone to make plans with in the little cafe in the Negro part of town where marchers--spilling out onto the sidewalk--were preparing to set out for Montgomery. But not finding anyone to talk to, we went over to Brown Chapel six blocks away, where the march was beginning.

Not long after we began seeing marchers making their way back to the Chapel; many injured by the billy-club beatings, tear gas and pursuits that Sheriff Jim Clark’s posse and state troopers had administered.

I don’t know what moved me to head out for the Edmund Pettis bridge. Certainly not to join the march: perhaps to see what had happened; or how I might help; or maybe just to show my support. But police were keeping people away from the bridge, and all I got to see was posse members and troopers back at the Dallas County Courthouse, standing outside laughing and poking one another like winning athletes returning to the locker room.

But when I saw Sheriff Jim Clark and five of his deputies in hot pursuit of demonstrators running for cover, I decided it might be a good idea for me to get back to Brown Chapel too. The sheriffs were bashing demonstrators on the head all the way back to the very Chapel steps. A few Negro youths began throwing rocks at the Sheriff and his men and they retreated across the street, but demonstration leaders stopped them.

On the way back I was stopped by a young white male, who in the broadest accent asked me, “Y'all one a them?”

“Who?” I asked, trying to appear innocent.

“One a them nigger lovers.”

Eyeing me up and down he appeared to be particularly attracted to the beret I was wearing. That must have done a lot for his suspicions.

“No, no,” I assured him, doing my best job of acting as if I had been unfairly accused. “No, I’m just out here seeing what’s happened.” To my surprise, he let me go. The next day I told my philosophy class about the incident, admitting that I had played "Uncle Tom“ to save my neck. They nodded knowingly, and no one seemed to think I had done a bad thing--at least none looked like they did.

(Uncle Tom was an Åfrican American character in Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 anti-slavery novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly," who demeaned himself before white folks to stay on their good side--though she meant for him to be something of a hero.)

I didn't dare attempt to enter the Chapel, and instead I found refuge in a home in the public housing project next door. Other refugees were there, and we could hear the screams of the marchers and the harsh oaths and orders of the constabulary out in front. We were keeping a low, low profile in the house, figuring it was unlikely that the attackers would invade.

One of those in the group was Rev. James Bevel himself. I knew next to nothing about him at the time-- other than he was among the leaders of the Selma voter registration project; and nothing at all about the part he had played in making the march happen.

He didn’t look like a minister--dressed in the striped bib overalls of a Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee member. He also wore a yarmulke, to honor Jesus and the Old Testament prophets, his heroes. He'd been among the marchers at the bridge. We sat talking for upwards of two hours, and nothing he said gave me a clue as to the remarkable part he played in the civil rights movement.

When the dust settled outside we decided it was safe to go over to the Chapel. I found Leslie and we decided that with the growing darkness it would be best if we got out of town. I left feeling a little guilty--as I always did when I stood by and watched others participate in a cause I embraced.

That evening, at a small de-briefing gathering of Tuskegee people who hadn’t been in Selma, I was startled--and a little embarrassed--when I began to choke up as I tried to describe the events I had witnessed. “It can be a chastening experience,” my Dean commented. Well, that was one way to put it.

A week later, the newspapers in Springfield, Mass., where I'd taught for four years, somehow learned I'd been in Selma, and called me for an interview.

“I was scared as hell. . . horrified,” I told the interviewer. “You see it on TV but being right there makes quite a difference. I couldn’t believe it was happening. We take for granted a peaceful society.” I predicted that Negroes would not stop demonstrating, and “nothing short of direct federal intervention will do anything in Selma.” Protest messages to President Johnson were needed, I added, because he depends on consensus, and “won’t do anything unless there is a widespread demand for it.”

For once I was right on the mark.

The Star-Gazette in Elmira, NY, where I'd become deeply involved in local civil rights activities before taking a teaching position at Tuskegee Institute, also phoned me for an interview, and ran a story across the top of its page 3, with the headline, “Ex-Elmiran After Seeing Selma Events: ‘I Wept.’”

"The reality of the beatings had gotten to me," I told the paper. “You hear the thuds [of the beatings] all around you. I came back from Selma just full of it. It took me some time to work it off. I just sat down and wept.”

The day after Bloody Monday, leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference filed suit to enjoin the state troopers and Jim Clark’s goons from interfering with the attempt to march again on Tuesday. Federal Court Judge, Frank Johnson, agreed to hear the suit the following Thursday, but only if the Montgomery march was cancelled. There was a further condition, however: No demonstrations in Montgomery, and no demonstrations during the hearing.

But Tuskegee student activists were feeling they should mount some sort of public reaction to what happened. They sent two members around to each dorm that night, and most of the residents turned out for a mass meeting. With the $1200 they collected they planned to rent buses that would take a thousand students to Montgomery on Wednesday--the day the Selma marchers had planned to arrive there.

It would be the first time Tuskegee students participated in a public civil rights demonstration. The accomodationist hold of Tuskegee's founder, Booker T. Washington still gripped Tuskegee and its middle-class blacks.

The head of the Montgomery Improvement Assn. was “angry and disturbed” when told about the march; King's group (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) said flatly, “We know what we’re doing. You all don’t, so don’t go down there.”

I had signed up to provide transportation. But something more would occupy me. My second baptism was about to begin.