The Central Points
Civil Rights (See Cover)
Despite great gains in the past decade, the American Negro is still often denied the most basic right of citizenship under constitutional government --the right to vote.
Last week the Negro's struggle to achieve that right exploded into an orgy of police brutality, of clubs and whips and tear gas, of murder, of protests and parades and sit-ins in scores of U.S. cities and in the White House itself. It was a week in which the potential for further violence was so great that President Johnson signed an order that would have dispatched federal troops to Alabama on a moment's notice. It was a week of intense pressures and back-room dealings, of quick emotionalism and easily achieved righteousness. And it was a very trying week for the foremost leader of the civil rights movement, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Amid the controversy and chaos, it was easy to lose sight of the central point: voting rights. But that was what Selma, Alabama, was all about.
The Bullyboy. Selma is a city of 29,500 people--14,400 whites, 15,100 Negroes. Its voting rolls are 99% white, 1% Negro. More than a city, Selma is a state of mind. "Selma," says a guidebook on Alabama, "is like an old-fashioned gentlewoman, proud and patrician, but never unfriendly." In Selma, Negroes are supposed to know their place. A Selma ordinance of 1852 declared that "any Negro found upon the streets of the city smoking a cigar or pipe or carrying a walking cane must be on conviction punished with 39 lashes"--and the place has not changed much since. Generations-old Greek Revival homes grace the white residential district; the Hotel Albert, built with slave labor and patterned after the Doge's Palace in Venice, is a first-rate inn. But the symbol of Selma is Sheriff James Clark, 43, a bully-boy segregationist who leads a club-swinging, mounted posse of deputy volunteers, many of them Ku Klux Klansmen.
It was in Selma, four years ago, that the Federal Government filed its first voting-rights suit. Other civil rights suits have been filed since, four of them directed at Sheriff Clark personally; but court processes are slow, and Selma Negroes remain unregistered.
Since the desire to dramatize the Negro plight goes hand in hand with the more substantive drive to achieve equal rights, Selma seemed a natural target to Martin Luther King. The city's civil rights record was awful. There was Clark, the perfect public villain. There, too, was Mayor Joe T. Smitherman, 35, an erstwhile appliance dealer, an all-out segregationist, and a close friend of Alabama's racist Democratic Governor George Wallace.
Thus, two months ago, King zeroed in on Selma. A magnetic leader and a spellbinding orator, he rounded up hundreds of Negroes at a time, led them on marches to the county courthouse to register to vote. Always, Clark awaited them, either turning them away or arresting them for contempt of court, truancy, juvenile delinquency and parading without a permit. Those who actually reached the registrars were required to file complicated applications and take incredibly difficult "literacy" tests that few if any could pass. Several times the drive faltered--but each time Clark revived it by committing some new outrage.
The First Martyr. In seven weeks, Clark jailed no fewer than 2,000 men, women and children, including King, who dramatized the situation by refusing to make bond for four days. Still the Negroes came, singing "We shall overcome." In reply, Sheriff Clark pinned a button on his shirt reading "Never!" The city's mood grew ever uglier. Business in town fell off by 50% . From Governor Wallace there came no pleas for peace; he merely ordered new platoons of state cops to Selma and environs.
Then, one night in nearby Marion, 50 state troopers and a band of rednecks routed 400 Negro demonstrators. In the fight, a young woodcutter named Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot in the stomach; he died eight days later, after declaring that a state trooper had gunned him.
Selma's Negroes had a martyr, and King called for a march from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery, 50 miles away. "I can't promise you that it won't get you beaten," cried King to his followers. "I can't promise you that it won't get your house bombed. I can't promise you won't get scarred up a bit. But we must stand up for what is right!" King planned to lead the march himself, but at the last minute was persuaded by aides to stay at his Atlanta headquarters for his safety's sake.
Hard Hats & Gas Masks. The march took place on the afternoon of Sunday, March 7. Ignoring an order from Governor Wallace forbidding the march, 650 Negroes and a few whites assembled at the Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church on Selma's Sylvan Street. Leading them were John Lewis, militant head of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (S.N.C.C.), and Hosea Williams, an official of King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Two abreast, many of them laden with bedrolls and knapsacks, the Negroes filed through the back streets of Selma, turned onto Broad Street, and headed for the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which crosses the Alabama River.
On U.S. Highway 80,400 yards beyond the bridge, was a phalanx of 60 state cops, headed by Colonel Al Lingo, an old crony of George Wallace's and a segregationist of the Governor's own stripe. The troopers stood three-deep across all four lanes of the highway. They wore dark blue shirts, sky-blue hard hats, carried billy clubs, sidearms and gas masks. On the sidelines were Sheriff Clark's possemen, both on horseback and afoot, ready, willing and eager for trouble.
When the Negro columns came within 100 yards, a state police officer ordered the troopers to put on their gas masks. At 25 yards, the Negroes halted. State Police Major John Cloud barked through a bullhorn: "Turn around and go back to your church! You will not be allowed to march any further! You've got two minutes to disperse!"
The two minutes ticked by as the masked troopers stood in stony suspension, feet spread, arms down, holding their clubs at both ends. The Negroes stared at them somberly. Then Major Cloud gave the order: "Troopers--forward!" The patrolmen moved in a solid wall, pushing back the Negroes. The marchers in front began to stumble and fall, and a few troopers tripped.
Smoke & Blood. Suddenly the clubs started swinging. From the sidelines, white townspeople raised their voices in cheers and whoops. Joined now by the possemen and deputies, the patrolmen waded into the screaming mob. The marchers retreated for 75 yards, stopped to catch their breath. Still the troopers advanced. Now came the sound of canisters being fired. A Negro screamed: "Tear gas!" Within seconds the highway was swirling with white and yellow clouds of smoke, raging with the cries of men. Choking, bleeding, the Negroes fled in all directions while the whites pursued them. The mounted men uncoiled bull whips and lashed out viciously as the horses' hoofs trampled the fallen. "O.K., nigger!" snarled a posseman, flailing away at a running Negro woman. "You wanted to march --now march!"
"Please! No!" begged a Negro as a cop flailed away with his club. "My God, we're being killed!" cried another. The Negroes staggered across the bridge and made for the church, chased by the sheriff's deputies and the horsemen. Many Negroes picked up cans and rocks and hurled them at the police. As the deputies crowded in, they were stopped by Selma's Public Safety Director Wilson Baker, a bitter enemy of Clark's who has done his thankless best to keep peace in the city. Said Baker to Clark: "Sheriff, keep your men back." Replied Clark: "Everything will be all right. I've already waited a month too damn long!"
Off the Streets. But Clark did, however grudgingly, disperse his men. Thereafter they amused themselves by stalking along the downtown streets, beating on the hoods of Negroes' cars and ordering "Get the hell out of town. We want all niggers off the streets." Reported the Selma Times-Journal next day: "Thirty minutes after the marchers' encounter with the troopers, a Negro could not be seen walking the streets." All told, 78 Negroes required hospital treatment for injuries.
Rarely in history has public opinion reacted so spontaneously and with such fury. In Detroit, Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh and Michigan's Governor George Romney led a protest parade of 10,000 people. In Chicago, demonstrators blocked rush-hour traffic in the Loop. Nearly 2,000 people marched in Toronto, 1,000 in Union, N.J., 1,000 in Washington. In California and Wisconsin, in Connecticut and New York, citizens streamed onto the streets to express their rage.
President Johnson publicly declared that he "deplored the brutality" in Selma--and urged Selma's opposing sides to cool down. And in Atlanta, Martin Luther King announced that as a "matter of conscience and in an attempt to arouse the deepest concern of the nation," he was "compelled" to lead another march from Selma to Montgomery. He called it for Tuesday, March 9.
"Charge!" The response was phenomenal. In city after city, white clergymen dropped what they were doing and headed for the nearest airport. In Indianapolis, A. Garnett Day Jr., an official of the Disciples of Christ, was about to emplane for New York when he heard that King was calling for help. Day walked back into the terminal, bought a ticket for Alabama. Also in Indianapolis, Jewish Mission Worker David Goldstein had an appointment to seek a salary raise from his boss; he canceled it and headed for Selma. California's Episcopal Bishop James Pike interrupted a trip to New Orleans and flew into Alabama. Methodist Bishop John Wesley Lord, vice president of the National Council of Churches, came from Washington, D.C.; so did Msgr. George L. Gingras of the Roman Catholic archdiocese in the capital, and Rabbi Richard G. Hirsch of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. University of Chicago Divinity School Instructor Jay Wilcoxen arrived home to find that his wife had taken it upon herself to get him a plane reservation. Eight other Chicago faculty members caught the first plane south; two came from Yale's divinity school and at least one from Harvard's. In nearby Roxbury, the Rev. James J. Reeb, whose work was largely with impoverished Negroes, decided that he, too, had to go.
In all, more than 400 white churchmen sped to Selma. Many turned up without so much as a toothbrush or a change of socks, and few had any idea of where they would stay. Some seemed to think it was all something of a lark. Said one clergyman to a colleague as he stepped off the plane in Montgomery: "Fix bayonets! Charge!" Also on hand were secular crusaders, including Mrs. Paul Douglas, wife of Illinois' Democratic Senator, Mrs. Harold Ickes, widow of Franklin Roosevelt's Interior Secretary, and Mrs. Charles Tobey, widow of the former Republican Senator from New Hampshire.
Head It Off. Colonel Al Lingo was in Selma too--this time with 500 state troopers, leaving only about 250 to attend to the rest of Alabama's law-enforcement requirements. FBI agents drifted unobtrusively into town. Straw-bossing federal activities was John Doar, Assistant U.S. Attorney General in charge of civil rights. As a personal mediator sent by President Johnson came LeRoy Collins, onetime Democratic Governor of Florida, now chairman of the Community Relations Service, which was established under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Collins' orders from Johnson were to head off trouble at all costs. He succeeded, for the time being. But in the arrangements to secure peace, it turned out that a lot of the principals' egos were bigger than their principles.
What became essentially a charade started at 4:30 on Monday afternoon. Four attorneys for Martin Luther King appeared in the Montgomery office of U.S. District Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. They wanted him to issue an injunction to keep state and Dallas County police from interfering with the Tuesday march.
Johnson, 46, is a tough-minded jurist and a native Alabamian who attended a state university with George Wallace. The two were once friendly, but have long since fallen out--mostly over civil rights. Wallace, in fact, once referred obliquely to Judge Johnson without actually naming him as an "integrating, scalawagging, carpetbagging liar."
Johnson told the lawyers that he would have to hear evidence on their petition, and scheduled a hearing for Thursday, the first available date. Until the matter was settled, Johnson advised, King should call off the Tuesday march. At 9 o'clock that night, the attorneys called the judge to say that King agreed.
That very night, in the home of a Negro dentist in Selma, King was undergoing intense pressures and conflicts. His instinct was to go along with Judge Johnson and postpone the march. He was fearful of provoking another savage onslaught by state troopers and Sheriff Clark's men. But he was also smarting under criticism for having absented himself from the Sunday march. And he felt an obligation to the out-of-state clergymen and others who had come to march.
During the strategy session, telephone calls were received from U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, urging King to postpone; Katzenbach promised that Government attorneys would help plead King's case before Judge Johnson on Thursday. Finally King came to a half-a-loaf decision: the march to Montgomery would start, but he would stop it before trouble developed.
Early next morning, King's attorneys again appeared before Judge Johnson, announced King's decision. Without another word, Johnson dictated an order enjoining the marchers until after the Thursday hearing. This placed King in an even deeper dilemma: his entire civil rights success has been based on upholding the law of the land and fighting for its observance. Now, if he marched, he would be doing so in direct defiance of a federal court order.
Mapping the Route. Mediator LeRoy Collins provided an answer--of sorts. He had conferred with Selma's Mayor Smitherman, with Top Trooper Al Lingo and Sheriff Clark. They were willing to let the civil rights marchers cross the bridge to the point on Highway 80 where the Sunday march ended in disaster. Then the troopers would turn King and his followers back--and King would leave peaceably. Lingo even drew a rough map of the route that the marchers would be permitted to take. Collins, in turn, showed the map to King, who reluctantly fell in with the plan.
While all these negotiations were going on, the would-be marchers--1,500 strong--congregated in and around the Brown Chapel. Despite the federal court order, sentiment was strongly in favor of marching. A white minister arose to declare: "No matter what happens, we can never get away from Selma, Alabama, again--never!" Princeton University's Religion Professor Malcolm Diamond announced that he would march, quoted Federal Judge Thurgood Marshall, a Negro, as once having said, "I am not defying the sovereignty of my country. I am making witness within the framework of the law of my country."
A Time to Choose. Mrs. Paul Douglas suggested that "it seems if we wait two more days we are losing a great deal of public support." A Roman Catholic priest from Baltimore declared that "it's about time we walked that last mile."
Said Springfield, N.J., Rabbi Israel Dresner: "There is a higher law in God's universe and that is God's law. There is a time when man must choose between man's law and God's law." George Docherty, pastor of Washington's New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, took the floor. "I'm here for three reasons," said he. "One, I think the fundamentals of the Christian church are at stake in this hour. Someone said this is the largest gathering of ministers since the Council of Trent. I'd venture to say it is also just as important. We differ in the way we interpret the Scripture. But at this moment the church is being challenged." Second, "the Constitution of the United States is at stake here. Three, we are in the midst of a revolution regarding human rights. Sunday evening my wife and I watched TV and saw those ghastly scenes--our stomachs turned."
Only a few argued against marching. One was Alabamian Charles Reynolds, a graduate student in ethics at Harvard, who explained that "the civil rights movement owes its life and accomplishments to the good will of the Government of the United States. If it were the truth that there were no hope for the civil rights movement in Federal Government, there might be reason to go against it. For us to march because we are here is not correct."
To the Bridge. Finally, Martin Luther King arrived, having committed himself to the deal proposed by Collins and approved by Smitherman, Lingo and Clark. His unsuspecting listeners settled into a respectful hush as he spoke of his "painful and difficult decision." Said King with great emotion: "I have made my choice. I have got to march. I do not know what lies ahead of us. There may be beatings, jailings, tear gas. But I would rather die on the highways of Alabama than make a butchery of my conscience! There is nothing more tragic in all this world than to know right and not do it. I cannot stand in the midst of all these glaring evils and not take a stand. There is no alternative in conscience or in the name of morality."
Half an hour later, the march began. Down Sylvan Street they trooped. At Water Avenue they turned right and followed the road to the bridge. In the front rank marched four young S.N.C.C. workers, solemn and purposeful. Behind them, arms linked, were King and his brother, the Rev. A.D. William King, James Farmer, head of the Congress of Racial Equality, and others.
At the foot of the bridge, a U.S. marshal sent by Judge Johnson stopped the march, read portions of Johnson's court order. King responded with a brief statement about his moral commitment. The marshal stepped aside, and the march continued.
On the Altar. In his Washington office, Attorney General Katzenbach, shirt sleeves rolled up, studied an enlarged map of Selma. Two telephone lines, fed into an office squawk box, echoed with brisk reports from Aide John Doar on the scene. At 3:56 p.m., Katzenbach phoned Presidential Aide Bill Moyers at the White House. "We're right at the critical moment," said he. "I'll keep you posted."
Doar's voice came over the squawk box: "They were allowed to go over the bridge. Dr. King is there, and several elderly ladies. They're over the bridge. They have halted . . ."
So they had. Confronted by the police barrier, King stopped the procession as planned. Troop Major John Cloud raised his bullhorn and said: "I ask you to stop this march. You will not continue--you are ordered to stop and stand where you are." King asked Cloud if it was all right to "have some of the great religious leaders of our nation lead us in prayer." When permission was granted, King motioned to his longtime friend, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy. As hundreds in the parade knelt in the sunlight, Abernathy intoned: "We come to present our bodies as a living sacrifice. We don't have much to offer, but we do have our bodies, and we lay them on the altar today." Other prayers followed, and when they were over, Cloud turned to his troopers and ordered: "Clear the road completely--move out!" With that, the troopers moved to the sides of the highway, leaving the way to Montgomery wide open.
Walking Back. This was a calculated attempt to embarrass King, who according to the script, was supposed to turn back only because he had been confronted by adamant police power. But King did not rise to the bait. And in Washington, Katzenbach heard Doar's voice: "King is walking back this way. He's asking the marchers to turn back." Katzenbach called the White House and said: "King has turned around." Katzenbach next talked to LeRoy Collins in Selma and phoned the White House again. "It looks very good," he said with obvious relief. "More like the March on Washington than anything. They're going back to the church. John Doar feels this will take away a lot of the bad taste of the brutality on Sunday. It looks O.K. for the moment."
Back at the church, King tried to see victory in the day's work. "At least," he told his people, "we had to get to the point where the brutality took place. And we made it clear when we got there that we were going to have some form of protest and worship. I can assure you that something happened in Alabama that's never happened before. When Negroes and whites can stand on Highway 80 and have a mass meeting, things aren't that bad."
Murder at the Silver Moon. But the fact was that Tuesday's events had so far added up to a distinct setback for Martin Luther King and the civil rights strategy that he espouses. And once again, it took white racists in their blind ferocity to come to the rescue.
Tuesday night three white clergymen dined at a Negro restaurant in Selma. One of them was the Rev. James Reeb. Reeb, who was born in Casper, Wyo., was ordained a Presbyterian minister but converted to Unitarianism in 1959. A slight, energetic, hard-working man, father of four children, Reeb worked for four years at All Souls' Church in Washington, D.C., but he found parish work too limiting. "He had a great love for people and their needs," says a colleague, the Rev. William A. Wendt. "He could not have cared less about whether they were going to heaven. He cared where they were going now."
Last year Reeb gave up his Washington duties and took a job with the American Friends Service Committee in Boston, where he directed the group's low-income housing project, bought a rundown house in Boston's Negro ghetto of Roxbury, sent his children to the local school, where most pupils were Negroes.
Leaving the Negro restaurant in Selma, Reeb and the two other clergymen walked past a scruffy whites-only restaurant, the Silver Moon Cafe. At least four white men came toward them. One called, "Hey, nigger!" Another smashed Reeb on the temple with a club. The hooligans jumped the ministers and beat them mercilessly. From inside the Silver Moon, customers could see the fight--but not one lifted a hand to help. Reeb's friends dragged themselves to their feet, stumbled for 2 1/2 blocks before they found help. As they sped toward Birmingham, their ambulance got a flat; they had to wait for another ambulance to pick them up.
For two days Reeb hovered near death in the hospital. Twice his heart stopped, and twice doctors managed to start it beating again. But Reeb never recovered from his coma.
His wife was at his bedside when he died. President and Mrs. Johnson and Vice President Humphrey spoke to her on the phone. The President sent flowers, dispatched a jet plane to return Mrs. Reeb and her father-in-law to Boston. Within two days, local lawmen had arrested four men, William Hoggle, 36, and his brother O'Neal, 31, R. B. Kelly, 30, and Elmer Cook, 41. Cook, for one, had an impressive police record: 25 arrests, 17 of which were on assault charges.
Protests. At Reeb's death, telegraph wires burned across the country with expressions of outrage. The A.F.L.C.I.O. was "appalled." The American Jewish Committee protested the "shameful exhibition of brutality." The United Steelworkers Union wired Governor Wallace, accusing him and his "storm troopers" of cold violence.
North Dakota's Democratic Governor William Guy sent Wallace a telegram criticizing the "white conscience" of Alabama. Pianist Byron Janis protested by canceling a scheduled concert recital in Mobile. In city after city, civil rights groups mounted protest demonstrations. In Selma, the Negroes stood in nightlong vigils under the wary eyes of police. Selma's Negroes and a growing number of white ministers--and even several white Roman Catholic nuns from St. Louis--demonstrated, but they were kept in check, without resort to passion or clubs, by Public Safety Director Baker.
In Washington Congressmen from all sections of the nation expressed their anger, though only one Southerner did so publicly. "I abhor this brutality," cried Texas Democratic Senator Ralph Yarborough. "Shame on you, George Wallace, for the wet ropes that bruised the muscles, for the bullwhips that cut the flesh, for the clubs that broke the bones, for the tear gas that blinded, burned and choked into insensibility!"
Concerned. The protests flowed like molten lava to Washington. To his dismay, Nicholas Katzenbach found a troop of twelve Negro and white demonstrators parked in the corridor near his office, demanding that he send federal troops to Alabama. Katzenbach talked with them, tried to explain how the Federal Government works through the courts. He got nowhere, permitted the sit-ins to remain till closing time, then had them evicted.
President Johnson was also besieged by calls, telegrams, visiting delegations --and, at one point, by a group of twelve civil rights protesters, who started on a regular White House tour, then plopped down in a ground-floor corridor and refused to budge. At the time, Johnson was playing host to a delegation of Negro newspaper editors. He was, said one editor later, "concerned, perturbed, and frustrated."
The President asked the editors' advice. J. S. Nathaniel Tross, publisher of the Charlotte, N.C., Post, suggested that Lyndon was "obliged to maintain the dignity, prestige and regnancy of the presidency." By no means, added Tross, should the President "prostitute his dignity" to discuss matters personally with the sit-ins. That was all Lyndon wanted to hear. Shortly thereafter, White House guards hauled the sit-ins off to jail. Orders from Johnson followed instantly: from now on, any such demonstrators were to be tossed out without any ado.
Try Harder. In Montgomery, lawyers met in Judge Johnson's courtroom to thresh out the claims and counter claims that had beclouded the week. Hosea Williams testified that on Sunday he had heard Sheriff Clark shouting to his deputies: "Go get them niggers--go get them goddam niggers!" Questioned closely about the charges that bullwhips were used, Williams said that he saw five or six possemen with the whips. Did he know what a bullwhip was? Replied Williams: "I'm a country boy. I know what a bullwhip is."
Selma Lawyer W. McLean Pitts, attorney for Sheriff Clark, demanded that the court cite Martin Luther King for contempt. The judge leveled a cold eye at Attorney Pitts, explained with asperity that contempt is a matter for the court to decide.
Questioning Negro witnesses, Pitts was aggressive to the point that N.A.A.C.P. Lawyer Jack Greenberg, representing King, jumped to his feet to object to Pitts's "insulting manner." Judge Johnson sustained Greenberg. "Everybody in this court, regardless of who he or she is, will be treated with common courtesy," said he.
Pitts sputtered: "I'm trying very hard, but . . ."
Johnson shot back acidly: "Try a little harder."
Condemning the Robbed. On the stand, King described the events of Tuesday, when he was confronted with the federal order to postpone the march. "I was very upset," he explained. "I felt it was like condemning the robbed man for being robbed. I was disturbed. Thousands of people who had come to Selma to march were deeply aroused by the brutality of Sunday. I felt if I had not done it, pent-up emotions could have developed into an uncontrollable situation. I did it to give them an outlet. Maybe there will be some blood let in the state of Alabama before we get through, but it will be our blood and not the blood of our white brothers." He had been assured by LeRoy Collins, King added, that "everything will be all right."
"Is it correct to say that when you started across the bridge," asked the judge, "you knew at that time that you did not intend to march to Montgomery?" Replied King: "Yes, it is."
"You Ought to Be Thinking." As the hearings proceeded, demands for federal action intensified. Lyndon Johnson was concerned. Meeting for four hours with a delegation of 16 civil rights and religious leaders, he rejected suggestions that he send federal troops into Selma. "Everybody talks about my reluctance to use troops in Selma," he said. "And as President, I am reluctant to use the strength of the defense establishment for such a thing. When you sit in this chair, you think three times before you say 'go.' " But he also disclosed that "in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, I signed all the necessary orders to have 700 troops get ready to move into Selma."
By week's end, Johnson was convinced that a presidential statement to the nation was in order, and he determined to make the Government's position unmistakably clear. Governor Wallace, who had remained largely incommunicado during all the ruckus, suddenly surfaced--and provided the President with the perfect opportunity to clear the air. In a telegram to the President, Wallace continued the fiction that "voter registration and voting rights are not the issues," requested a meeting with Johnson at the earliest possible time.
The President replied swiftly: "I will be available in my office." On Saturday morning Wallace entered the White House for a conference that lasted more than three hours. The two had what is politely called a "friendly exchange of views," but there was no doubt that Johnson leaned into Wallace with no mincing of words, telling him, in effect, that the U.S. Government would brook no further interference with the constitutional rights of any of its citizens. The Negro, said Lyndon flatly, was obviously going to win his right to participate in his own Government. Consider history's verdict, added the President. "You ought to be thinking of where you will stand in 1995, not 1965."
Afterwards, Wallace emerged from the White House looking considerably sobered and shorn of his accustomed cockiness. The President went straight to a previously scheduled press conference in the Flower Garden. Never in his 16 months in office was he more in command of the situation.
This week's first order of business, said the President, would be a proposal to Congress for legislation that would guarantee every citizen's franchise. The Administration's bill provides simple machinery for appointment of federal registrars to handle registration for local, state and federal elections in cases where literacy tests have been deliberately rigged to keep Negroes from voting. (Such tests are in notorious use in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.) All bars to voting would be abolished, except those dealing with age, residence, past conviction of a felony and evidence of mental instability. Similarly, literacy tests would be dropped; the applicant would merely be required to be able to read a simple voting application and to fill it in.
"It Is Wrong." Continued the President: "It is wrong to do violence to peaceful citizens in the streets of their town. It is wrong to deny Americans the right to vote. It is wrong to deny any person full equality because of the color of his skin. The promise of America is a simple promise: Every person shall share in the blessings of this land, and they shall share on the basis of their merits as a person. They shall not be judged by their color or by their beliefs, or by their religion, or by where they were born or the neighborhood in which they live.
"Those who do injustice are as surely the victims of their own acts as the people that they wrong. They scar their own lives and they scar the communities in which they live. If we put aside disorder and violence, if we put aside hatred and lawlessness, we can provide for all our people great opportunity almost beyond our imagination."
Then Johnson spoke of his conversation with Wallace. "I advised the Governor of my intention to press with all the vigor at my command to assure that every citizen of this country is given the right to participate in his Government at every level through the complete voting process. We are a nation that is governed by laws, and our procedure for enacting and amending and repealing these laws must prevail. I told the Governor that we believe in maintaining law and order in every county and in every precinct in this land. If state and local authorities are unable to function, the Federal Government will completely meet its responsibilities.
"I told the Governor that the brutality in Selma last Sunday just must not be repeated. I urged that the Governor publicly declare his support for universal suffrage in the state of Alabama and the United States of America."
Even as the President spoke, the hearing before Judge Johnson continued with further testimony about Alabama police brutality. In Selma, other marches started and were swiftly stopped. Outside the White House, pickets blocked Pennsylvania Avenue traffic and chanted: "L.B.J., just you wait--see what happens in '68."
Obviously, the strife in Selma and other trouble spots would not be settled overnight. But President Johnson's strong yet measured words made it perfectly plain that the day was not far off when all American citizens would be equal in the polling place.
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