What follows is an excerpt from “The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation,” by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff. The passage describes events in Selma, Ala., where Martin Luther King Jr. kicked off the voting rights campaign in January 1965. Shortly after being honored by the city of Atlanta, King returned to Selma amidst rising racial tension and violence.
King returned to Selma, where the tempo increased in February as the number of jailings surged past the 3,000 mark, far more than the city could handle. The New York Times truncated Roy Reed‘s orientation by an entire month and hustled him off to join John Herbers in watching not only the Dallas County courthouse but new demonstrations that were developing in neighboring black belt counties.
Jack Nelson joined the Los Angeles Times on February 1, and he, too, went to Selma, only to discover that his editors were not quite prepared for southern coverage. Nelson heard Sheriff Clark order his deputies to “get those niggers off the courthouse steps” and quoted him precisely in his story. “You can’t use the word ‘nigger’ in the L.A. Times,” an editor told Nelson in an urgent phone call.
“You mean that you want me to quote Jim Clark as saying, ‘Get those KNEE-GROES off the courthouse steps?’ ” an astonished Nelson shot back. Nelson prevailed.
Among those now in jail was King, who, as he had in Birmingham, dispatched a letter from his cell. “This is Selma, Alabama,” he wrote. “There are more Negroes in jail with me than there are on the voting rolls.”
The courthouse scene, meanwhile, was becoming a familiar one on the nation’s television sets. Clark seemed ever present, and near him was the volunteer posse he had deputized for the emergency. They seemed to be competing over how many weapons they could hang from their belts: guns, cattle prods, nightsticks, ropes. In one confrontation, Clark jabbed his nightstick repeatedly into the abdomen of James Bevel, one of King’s key organizers. In another, he and his posse rounded up 165 teenage demonstrators and forced them to run for miles into the country. Later the teenagers told reporters, who had been kept at a distance by the posse, that they had been jolted with cattle prods when they slowed their pace or attempted to rest.
This touched off a new wave of criticism, some of it local, against the sheriff. The Selma Times-Journal assailed him in an editorial. White businessmen called for restraint. Clark, for his part, seemingly chastened, checked himself into a hospital for treatment for exhaustion. Blacks kneeled in front of the courthouse and prayed for his recovery “in mind and in body.”
With the sheriff on the defensive, the voting rights movement lost momentum. Much of the reporting made it clear that Selma was not monolithically behind Clark, and it could readily be seen on television that many of those lining up to register at the courthouse were under voting age. Black adults had livings to earn and could not spend their lives in registration lines; but still the images were not as crisp as the movement would have liked.
UPI’s Leon Daniel heard a sickening sound like a watermelon being struck by a baseball bat, and saw Richard Valeriani of NBC crumple to the ground, blood spewing from his head.No one understood the power of vivid images better than King, and he fretted over every lost opportunity. At one point in Selma, Flip Schulke of Life magazine saw Clark’s posse shove children to the ground. He stopped shooting photographs and began pushing the men away. King heard about the incident and reminded Schulke about his “duty as a photographer.”
“The world doesn’t know this happened, because you didn’t photograph it,” King told Schulke later. “I’m not being cold-blooded about it, but it is so much more important for you to take a picture of us getting beaten up than for you to be another person joining in the fray.”
With Wilson Baker on the case, the chance of a photographer getting a playable photograph anywhere but the courthouse was slim. Journalists such as Herbers had seen racist towns such as Philadelphia, Mississippi, and were beginning to wonder if Selma, apart from the courthouse, was raw enough to sustain the movement. On February 14, in a (New York Times) news analysis, he predicted that Selma was “not likely to become another Birmingham.”
Two days later, the Reverend C. T. Vivian, a member of the SCLC board, volunteered to take charge of the demonstrations and see if he could breathe new life into them. Clark was now out of the hospital, and Vivian openly baited him. Clark couldn’t resist. In full view of television cameras, he punched Vivian in the mouth, knocking him down the courthouse steps.
Meanwhile, as journalists scrambled to help their battered colleagues, a group of troopers chased blacks into a cafe, turned over tables, and began striking them.Having gotten Selma back into the news, Vivian moved next to Marion, a town of 3,800 just twenty-three miles northwest of Selma. Now it was the Alabama state troopers who couldn’t resist. As demonstrators marched out of a nighttime church rally and into the street, about fifty troopers stopped them and ordered them back into the church. Suddenly, the streetlight flickered out. Troopers began clubbing the marchers with nightsticks, and white bystanders assaulted journalists standing nearby. Two UPI cameramen were beaten as troopers looked on. UPI’s Leon Daniel heard a sickening sound like a watermelon being struck by a baseball bat, and saw Richard Valeriani of NBC crumple to the ground, blood spewing from his head. No one could survive that kind of blow, he thought. “I really thought he was hit hard enough to die,” Daniel said years later.
At the peak of the violence, Herbers spotted Sheriff Clark, wearing sports clothes and carrying a nightstick, in Marion. ” ‘Don’t you have enough trouble of your own in Selma?’ someone asked the sheriff,” Herbers wrote.
” ‘Things got a little too quiet for me over in Selma tonight and it made me nervous,’ he replied.”
Meanwhile, as journalists scrambled to help their battered colleagues, a group of troopers chased blacks into a cafe, turned over tables, and began striking them. Witnesses said one trooper clubbed a woman and then shot her son, Jimmie Lee Jackson, in the stomach when he rushed to protect her.
Valeriani survived his injuries and, still groggy from sedatives and with his head stitched and bandaged, talked on camera from his hospital bed the next day about the violence in Marion. The twenty-six-year-old Jackson was not so fortunate; he died eight days after he was shot.
The voting rights movement held rallies and vigils for Jackson, but his death did not ignite a national outpouring of protest. Civil rights workers speculated openly as to why. Was it because he was black? Was it because the assault on him, at night and off to the side of the demonstration, had not been recorded by cameras? Or was the public’s attention focused on Selma, and not the outlying counties?
… not until they reached the bridge’s crest did they realize what awaited them on the other side of the river: Alabama troopers, row upon row, all in blue shirts and white helmets, as many of them as marchers.James Bevel, the SCLC strategist who had rekindled activity in Birmingham by recruiting children, believed that whatever the reason, it could be overcome with drama. He urged demonstrators to march to Montgomery, fifty-four miles away, carrying Jackson’s body in a casket. Jackson’s family opted instead for a prompt burial. But many of Selma’s blacks thought a long march was worth trying.
Obviously, something was needed. Journalists were still in town, but editors — especially TV editors — were losing interest. Selma and Alabama’s black belt made NBC’s “Huntley-Brinkley Report,” for example, seventeen times between February 1 and February 19, for a total of thirty-two minutes, thirty-five seconds, but only three times, for a total of three minutes, forty nine seconds, in the next thirteen days.
In desperation, and with no better idea on the table, King embraced the march and scheduled it for Sunday, March 7. Governor George Wallace‘s press secretary, Bill Jones, saw an opportunity to make King and the movement “the laughing stock of the nation and win for us a propaganda battle.” He figured there was no way that King, Bevel, or any of the other civil rights figures could walk all the way to Montgomery. He persuaded Wallace to order state troopers to step aside when the marchers approached, then ban all vehicles on the highway, essentially forcing the protesters to either keep walking or be shown on national television bluffed down from their moral high ground.
But Wallace changed his mind and countered King by publicly ordering troopers “to use whatever measures are necessary to prevent a march.”
During the weekend, King himself had second thoughts. He decided to delay the march and return to his home base in Atlanta. But five hundred demonstrators showed up Sunday afternoon at Brown Chapel, the African Methodist Episcopal church that served as the movement headquarters. They were ready to go. After a hurried telephone conversation with King, Hosea Williams, a key SCLC organizer, and John Lewis, the chairman of SNCC, led the demonstrators away from the church, toward the Edmund Pettus Bridge and Highway 80 to Montgomery. It was to be mainly a gesture of unity and seriousness of purpose, as few of the marchers were carrying enough camping gear or food for a multi-day trek.
… before the cloud finally hid it all, there were several seconds of unobstructed view. Fifteen or twenty nightsticks could be seen through the gas, flailing at the heads of the marchers.Roy Reed of The New York Times and Leon Daniel of UPI were on the arching bridge, across the median strip from the marchers; not until they reached the bridge’s crest did they realize what awaited them on the other side of the river: Alabama troopers, row upon row, all in blue shirts and white helmets, as many of them as marchers. They looked battle-ready. Behind them were several dozen of Sheriff Clark’s khaki-dressed posse men, some on horseback, many wielding clubs as large as baseball bats. And alongside the road were about a hundred whites waving Confederate flags, laughing and spoiling for a bloodbath.
At the foot of the bridge, Major John Cloud pronounced with his bullhorn that the march was an “unlawful assembly” and ordered the marchers to disperse within two minutes. Lewis and Williams, the leaders, knelt in prayer; Reed and Daniel could see the ripple in the march column as others knelt with them.
Not more than a minute had passed, Reed calculated, when the troopers suddenly charged, forming a flying wedge as they ran. This, Reed wrote, is what happened:
The wedge moved with such force that it seemed almost to pass over the waiting column instead of through it.
The first 10 or 20 Negroes were swept to the ground screaming, arms and legs flying, and packs and bags went skittering across the grassy divider strip and on to the pavement on both sides.
Those still on their feet retreated.
The troopers continued pushing, using both the force of their bodies and the prodding of their nightsticks.
A cheer went up from the white spectators lining the south side of the highway.
The mounted posse men spurred their horses and rode at a run into the retreating mass. The Negroes cried out as they crowded together for protection, and the whites on the sideline whooped and cheered.
The Negroes paused in their retreat for perhaps a minute, still screaming and huddling together.
Suddenly there was a report, like a gunshot, and a grey cloud spewed over the troopers and the Negroes.
“Tear gas!” someone yelled.
The cloud began covering the highway. Newsmen, who were confined by four troopers to a corner 100 yards away, began to lose sight of the action.
But before the cloud finally hid it all, there were several seconds of unobstructed view. Fifteen or twenty nightsticks could be seen through the gas, flailing at the heads of the marchers.
The Negroes broke and ran. Scores of them streamed across the parking lot of the Selma Tractor Company. Troopers and posse men, mounted and unmounted, went after them.
Suddenly viewers were watching — not Nazi Germany but segregationist Alabama. The juxtaposition struck like psychological lightning in American homes.When the tear gas cleared from his eyes, Reed walked to the spot where the march leaders had knelt. He saw John Lewis and Amelia Boynton sprawled unconscious on the ground. Later, in his room at the Albert Hotel, Reed watched the CBS footage of the mayhem and marveled at how close Laurens Pierce had managed to get with his heavy camera. The NBC coverage was also gripping. But it was the number three network, ABC, that would have the greatest impact on the nation.
At 9:30 p.m., ABC interrupted its Sunday Night Movie and, with Frank Reynolds narrating, showed fifteen minutes of footage of the assault and its aftermath. The movie was “Judgment at Nuremberg,” a dramatic study of how Germans had ignored, or acquiesced in, the horrors of Nazism. Suddenly viewers were watching — not Nazi Germany but segregationist Alabama. The juxtaposition struck like psychological lightning in American homes. Sheriff Clark’s voice could be heard directing his posse: “Get those goddamned niggers. And get those goddamned white niggers.”
The ranks of Gunnar Myrdal’s newly “shocked and shaken” multiplied overnight. The next day, religious, business, and political leaders from Atlanta to Trenton to Sacramento expressed outrage, issued statements, and passed resolutions condemning Alabama law enforcement. By the second day, there were sit-ins in Los Angeles, traffic blockades in Chicago, and a 10,000-person march in Detroit. Sympathy protests, pickets, and demonstrations erupted in so many towns and cities that The New York Times was able to fill column after column of summaries from across the nation and Canada; more than a dozen young people gained entry to the White House, sat down, and refused to leave.
In San Francisco, one television viewer, deeply disturbed by the ABC report, immediately made plans to fly to Selma, realizing only the next day that “at that same moment, people all up and down the West Coast were feeling what my wife and I felt; that at various times all over the country that day … and that night, hundreds of these people would drop whatever they were doing; that some of them would leave home without changing clothes, borrow money, overdraw their checking accounts; board planes, buses, trains, cars, travel thousands of miles with no luggage, get speeding tickets, hitchhike, hire horse-drawn wagons; that these people, mostly unknown to one another, would move for a single purpose: to place themselves alongside the Negroes they had watched on television.”
Editor’s Note: This passage is excerpted from pages 382-387 of “The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation,” by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff. Copyright Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, 2006. Published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House.
