A Writer's Life (26 page)

Since becoming the sheriff in 1955, Clark would be reelected regularly through the mid-1960s by the area's southern whites, who saw Selma as a city under siege and saw themselves as needing to be defended against the statutory incursions of the federal government, and against such outside agitators as those sent in by SNCC, and against the national media, which seemed to be sympathetic to the blacks, and against the money changers in distant places who bankrolled the civil rights movement, and against the array of black celebrities, ranging from the comedian Dick Gregory to the writer James Baldwin, who visited Selma on many occasions to encourage the protesters and endorse a list of proposals and demands to which Sheriff Clark had a one-word reply: “Never.” He wore a
NEVER
button on the lapel of the jacket he wore to church, and he displayed it on the front of his brown uniform as he stood guard with his men at the courthouse door, sometimes shoving aside and waving his club at those blacks who moved too slowly after he had ordered them to retreat.

Dr. King knew that he would be crowding in on SNCC if he ventured into Selma at this time, but by the summer of 1964, as the constant disturbances were regularly being reported in the national press, King knew he had no choice but to affiliate his organization with the struggle. He
was
the
messiah of the movement in America. He had been
Time
magazine's Man of the Year in 1963, and he received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1964. He had also been visited in Atlanta by a delegation of local leaders from Selma—J. L. Chestnut, Jr., among them—urging that he take over the leadership of the town's voter-registration campaign.

Chestnut had initially approved of the SNCC-led contentiousness in and around the Selma courthouse, but now he was inclined toward a more lawyerlike approach, and he thought that Dr. King, as a proponent of nonviolence, would approve of what he had in mind. Chestnut's plan was to comply with the latest ruling by a local judge, James A. Hare, that banned future street demonstrations and stand-ins; at the same time, Chestnut would change the battle site from the sidewalks to the courtroom, within which he would file lawsuits against those white officials whose stalling tactics and edicts had so far minimized the number of black registrations. Instead of having four or five hundred black people standing in line and making noise, Chestnut favored selecting four or five black people who were among the better educated and qualified, and after
they
had been prevented from registering to vote, they would become test cases to prove the denial of their constitutional rights. Any of these cases could be directed up to the Supreme Court if necessary; and since Chestnut was now an attorney representing the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York, he knew that there was money available to cover such an undertaking.

But Chestnut failed to persuade Martin Luther King, Jr., who saw Chestnut's approach as excessively time-consuming, and King reiterated that there were occasions when it was morally right to disobey unjust laws, and that such laws now existed in Alabama. He also told Chestnut, “You have neglected to pursue one of your strongest arguments,” and King summarized this argument in two words: “Sheriff Clark.” Chestnut was surprised to hear this. Until now, Chestnut had underestimated, as apparently King did not, the importance of a violent white man to the cause of black liberation. Chestnut knew, of course, that violence easily got the media's attention, but he also saw Sheriff Clark as a low-level thug, and to elevate his importance by making him a catalyst in the cause of black people was perhaps demeaning to the high purpose of the cause. The power that was oppressing black people in Selma, Chestnut told King, was not the sheriff but, rather, a man who was one of the leading members of the town's blue-blooded gentry, namely Judge James A. Hare. Chestnut had gotten to know Judge Hare fairly well in recent years, and as Chestnut would later comment in his book:

Another reason that J. L Chestnut, Jr., had misgivings about using Sheriff Clark to generate publicity was Chestnut's continuing belief that the most civilized means of addressing injustice in America was through the court system and not through commotion in the streets. In order to change the system, one should work within the system, he thought. Just because a person loathed a certain law did not give that person the moral right to disobey the law. Dr. King's thinking regarding Judge Hare's injunction differed on this point. Chestnut would not concede even to such a sagacious spiritual leader as Dr. King the farsighted and clearheaded capacity to know which law was just or unjust. This was for the courts to decide, although Chestnut might acknowledge King's wisdom in wondering where the justice was if people were expected to wait patiently for years and years until some superior court might finally, maybe, overturn an unjust ruling issued by such a racist judge as James A. Hare. But even in American cities where black people had long held the right to vote, there was not yet full justice, Chestnut reminded himself, elaborating in his book: “The white powers let blacks have some power and influence so long as it was kept on the south side of Chicago or Harlem in New York. At best, I thought we might make some sort of arrangement like that in the South. But as far as envisioning black people sitting on county commissions and city councils making decisions that affected white people, that was fantasyland.”

Chestnut's view of himself was that of a realist who was interested in results and also committed to making a success of himself in Selma. He was now thirty-four, the husband of a local black woman with whom he already had four children, and his home, for better or worse, was in Selma. He and his family were part of Selma's full-time population, while Martin Luther King, Jr., and the other endowed activists were transients
who “came and went [while] we faced the problems without letup. When King went to the boondocks, he'd stay a few days, then fly off to Atlanta, Washington, or Los Angeles where he was around people who appreciated and understood what he was doing. The Freedom Riders had each other, and they often went to Atlanta to recharge. We were sunk, by ourselves, in Selma.” When SNCC sent in young Bernard Lafayette in 1963 to jump-start the voter drive, and after Chestnut's mother learned that J.L. had volunteered his support, she told her son, “That boy ought to go home. He's gonna get the white people all stirred up, then he'll run back to Atlanta and we'll be picking up the pieces … stay away from that mess. You can get yourself killed.”

In late February 1965, a black voting-rights marcher named Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot to death one night by a state trooper in Perry County, thirty miles outside Selma. At the funeral, his angry friends insisted that his death be memoralized by a rally that would magnify the outcry against this latest atrocity, and then someone suggested, “Goddamn it, we ought to carry his body over to George Wallace in Montgomery.” This soon was modified into the plan to walk from Selma to Montgomery to deliver an ultimatum to the governor, insisting that he abandon his racist policies toward black voter registration. The petitioners were to commence in Selma sometime during the first week of March, but there was disagreement as to when precisely they should proceed, and who exactly would be going, because there was ongoing disharmony between some members of SNCC and Dr. King's SCLC, and there were also rumors that the Klan would be waiting to ambush the marchers along the highway.

After huddling with his SCLC staff, some of whom feared that he himself might be the main target in an ambush, Dr. King vacillated for a few days in Atlanta, undecided as to whether he should go to Selma to lead the fifty-mile, five-day march to Montgomery, or urge instead that it be temporarily postponed until he had a clearer sense of the situation. The logistical problems alone made it an awesome undertaking—the security arrangements, the campsites, the requisition of food, tents, latrines, medical vehicles, ambulances—and adding to all of this was King's uncertainty about the mental state of the protesters, specifically whether they could restrict themselves to nonviolence after their passions had been inflamed by the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson and while they would be facing an equally impassioned cross section of whites.

When I arrived in Selma on March 5, 1965, two days before the start of the tentatively scheduled procession to Montgomery, there was no sign of Dr. King mingling among the crowds that had been visible for days in and
around Brown Chapel, nor was King necessarily missed by the younger activists who were more in sync with the soft-spoken but tenacious twenty-five-year-old chairman of SNCC, John Lewis, who stood ready to lead the way toward Montgomery.

Lewis was a former Freedom Rider who, while adhering to his definition of “moral urgency” in the early 1960s, never once backed away from the fists, baseball bats, or the guns of the white mobs and the police who objected to his traveling around the South on interstate buses with his fellow activists and then parading through terminal buildings to denounce the signs he saw reading
WHITE MEN, COLORED MEN, WHITE WAITING, COLORED WAITING
, and other designations of discrimination that were an affront to his dignity and his pursuit of an interracial democracy. Lewis had been born in 1940 into an impoverished Alabama share-cropping family in Pike County, nearly eighty miles southeast of Selma, where he attended a rural segregated school when he was not required to labor in the fields, earning less than thirty-five cents for every hundred pounds of cotton he picked. As a teenager, he was inspired by the news of Rosa Parks's assertive behavior on a bus and by the sermons of Dr. King that he heard on the radio. Because the tuition was free at the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, John Lewis applied there with the intention of becoming a preacher. It was while studying comparative religions that he learned of Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence, and he was later guided by this when he joined with other students in desegregating lunch counters in Nashville and then helped to found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In 1963, he was one of the main organizers of the Washington march and also a keynote speaker, along with Dr. King and four others then acknowledged to be national leaders in the civil rights movement (Roy Wilkins, James Farmer, Whitney Young, and A. Philip Randolph). But since Lewis was and would remain an unassuming individual, one who never sought personal attention from the press, he stood off to one side as the photographers in Washington asked the six men to pose together before the start of the parade. When the pictures were published, and Lewis's grave face and diminutive figure were almost out of the frame, one of Lewis's associates at SNCC, James Forman, admonished him: “You've got to get out
front
. Don't let King get all the credit. Don't stand back like that. Get out
front
.”

In 1964, John Lewis was in Mississippi, actively engaged in the statewide voter-registration campaign, and a year later he was similarly involved in Alabama, where he found himself one day marching with twenty other demonstrators toward the Selma courthouse and into a barricade
of state troopers and members of the sheriff's posse, led by Jim Clark himself.

“This is as far as you can go,” said Sheriff Clark. “Turn around and go back. You are
not
going in the courthouse today.”

“The courthouse is a public place,” Lewis replied, “and we have a right to go inside. We will not be turned around.”

“Did you hear what I said?” Clark asked in a louder voice. “Turn around and go back.”

“Did you hear what I said?” Lewis countered. “We are
not
going back.”

Lewis stared impassively up into the big reddened face of the sheriff, who then reacted by moving his jutting jaw down closer and closer, until it was nearly resting on the ridge of Lewis's small bulbous nose. Neither man spoke for several seconds, retaining their positions as the tension built within them and within the men who stood rigidly around them—the black marchers gathered anxiously behind Lewis, and the phalanx of helmeted armed men standing shoulder-to-shoulder behind the sheriff. The only sign of movement anywhere was the twirling of the billy club that the sheriff held in both hands at chest level, below his jaw and above Lewis's nose.

Then a door opened in the federal building across the street, and out walked J. L. Chestnut, Jr. He had been inside arguing motions all morning and most of the afternoon, knowing nothing of Lewis's intentions to lead a parade on this day; he was now stunned to be seeing what he was seeing, and even doubting that he was seeing it: the fearless, runty chairman of SNCC confronting the monstrous sheriff of Selma. Oh, John Lewis is crazy, Chestnut thought, and now he's going to get hurt. A week ago, almost on the same spot, Chestnut had seen the sheriff knock down an elderly black man who had been part of a march; Chestnut wanted to yell out words of warning to Lewis, to urge him to back away from Clark's billy club, but Chestnut was too transfixed to say or do anything but wait and watch—and what he next saw he would later identify as a “born again” moment, a “kind of conversion” that helped him to understand what Martin Luther King, Jr., had meant earlier about the moral right and the Godly might that at times guided one's resistance to unjust laws, and about how, if there's nothing for which you are willing to die, you are not fit to live.