Remembering Selma 1963 With The Selma Bridge Jubilee: All Boots on the Ground

They are calling this year’s commemoration The Selma Bridge Crossing Jubilee--All Boots on the Ground which will mark the 61st anniversary of Bloody Sunday—the day on March 7, 1965, that day in Selma, Alabama when  massed Alabama State Police attacked peaceful demonstrators attempting to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on a march from Selma to the state capital at Montgomery to protest suppression of voting rights.

Alabama State Police beat SNCC march leader John Lewis, on ground center, after charging voting rights marchers trying to cross Edmund Pettus Bridge from Selma on the way to the state capitol in Montgomery in 1965.

Members of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had been conducting voter registration drives in the area since 1963 and had encountered escalating violence.  After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, efforts stepped up.  On July 6 of that year SNCC leader John Lewis attempted to lead a march on the county courthouse to register voters.  He and other marchers were beaten and arrested.  A few days later a local judge handed down a sweeping injunction against more than two people assembling to even talk about voter registration.  

Two SCLC organizers arrived to join the voter registration effort.  Diane Nash like John Lewis was a veteran of the Nashville public accommodation sit-in campaign of 1960.  Her husband, Rev. James Bevel was also a seasoned non-violent activist.  Together they were two of the best the organization had.

SNCC leaders appealed to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).  SCLC leaders including the Rev. James Bevel, who had been conducting his own voter registration projects, and his wife, Diane Nash, a SNCC founder who cut her teeth in the Nashville youth crusade sit-ins with Lewis, came to Selma to join the effort.  But the national organization, busy with other efforts, had not yet committed.

Finally, on January 2 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Selma bringing with him the national spotlight and officially launched a new Selma Voting Rights Movement.  Marches on court houses resumed there and in surrounding counties. 

The body of Jimmie Lee Jackson, first martyr of the Selma campaign.  After leading a night march to the Perry County Court House in Marion, Jackson was shot trying to protect his mother and grandfather from a beating by police who charged into a cafe where they had taken refuge.  His death galvanized the campaign locally but attracted little national press attention.

On February 18 a young man, a Baptist elder who had tried four times to register, Jimmie Lee Johnson was shot trying to defend his mother and grandfather from police clubs after a night march on the Perry County Courthouse in Marion.  When Johnson died of his wounds days later, Bevel called for a protest march on the state capital from Selma on March 7.  

On the day of the march John Lewis, the Rev. Hosea Williams of the SCLC, and local leaders like Amelia Boynton led about 600 marchers.  When they attempted to cross the bridge, they were met by massed troopers and ordered to disperse.  Lewis attempted to speak to the commanding officer but was shoved to the ground and beaten.  Police charged the crowd with clubs and gas.  Mounted officers attacked from the flanks.  Scenes of horrific violence were captured on film and soon broadcast on television helping to swing public sympathy to the marchers. 

King responded with a call to rally in Selma for a second march.  Hundreds from around the country, including many clergy, responded to the call.  Lawyers appealed to Federal Judge Frank Minis Johnson, who was suspected to be sympathetic, to lift the local ban on marches.  The judge took the issue under advisement but issued a temporary restraining order against resuming the march until he could make his ruling. 

With thousands gathered, King felt he had to move but did not want to alienate the judge.  On March 9 he led about 7,000 to the bridge but then knelt in prayer and turned the crowd back, a move that was harshly criticized by SNCC leaders. 

Rev. James Reeb, a young Unitarian Universalist minister, was with two others when he was beaten to death by Klansmen in Selma on the eve of a second march.  The death of a white minister did grab attention and President Lyndon Baines Johnson used it to advance the Voting Right Act of 1965.

That evening three Unitarian Universalist ministers, James Reeb, Clark Olsen, and Orloff Miller who responded to King’s call were attacked and beaten outside a Selma cafe known to be a hangout for Klansmen.  Reeb died of his wounds on March 11 in Birmingham after the Selma hospital refused to treat him. 

On hearing of Reeb’s death the Board of the Unitarian Universalist Association meeting in Boston voted to adjourn and re-convene in Selma.  UUA President Dana McLean Greeley and eventually half of the active ministers in the Association headed to the South.

The death of a white minister galvanized public opinion in a way that Jimmie Johnson’s had not.  A shaken President Lyndon Johnson submitted a Voting Rights Act to Congress on March 15 after failing to get Governor George Wallace to back off from attacks on demonstrators. 

A week after Reeb’s death Judge Johnson finally issued the long-anticipated ruling upholding the First Amendment rights to assemble and protest.  

John Lewis, Rosa Parks, Ralph Abernathy, Juanita Abernathy, Ralph Bunche, Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King, Frederick Reese and Hosea Williams lead the March through Montgomery to the Capitol.

On March 21 the final and successful march on Montgomery set off with King, Lewis, Bevel, and Williams leading the way with a bevy of national clergy. They were protected by 2,000 Federal troops and U. S. Marshalls on the four-day march through hostile territory to the capitol. 

After a triumphant rally on the capitol steps, Viola Liuzzo, a young Detroit mother and U.U. laywoman was driving a black marcher back to Selma, when she was shot by Ku Klux Klan members.  A federal informant was in the Klansmen’s car.  She was the final fatality in the Selma campaign.  

Tennessee born Viola Liuzzo, a white U.U. laywoman and mother from Detroit marched from Selma to Montgomery often barefoot as in this photo.  She was murdered driving a Black Marcher back to Selma after the final rally at the State Capital.  She was the third of four of the Martyrs of Selma who also included Episcopal seminarian Jonathan Myrick Daniels who was shotgunned to death on August 30 after spending a week in jail for a Lowndes County, demonstration, a part of the greater Selma campaign.

The Voting Rights Act passed Congress and was signed into law by the President on August 6.  Within a year 7000 new Black voters were enrolled in Selma’s Dallas County. 

In 1966 Sheriff Jim Clark, who was responsible for much of the early violence in Selma, lost his bid for re-election.  John Lewis went on to be elected to Congress.  The Edmund Pettus Bridge is now marked as part of the Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights Trail, a National Historic Trail. 

The 50th Anniversary march included President Barack Obama and his family, Congressman John Lewis and other veterans of the original march and former President George W. Bush and his wife Laura.  Always outspoken, Diane Lewis boycotted the reunion march to protest Bush's inclusion. 

In the 50th Anniversary year of 2015, tens of thousands joined Congressman Lewis and other veterans of the original marches along with President Barack Obama, his family, and former President George W. Bush and his wife Laura in a symbolic and triumphant march across the Bridge.

The same year the film Selma directed by Ana DuVernay and starring David Oyelowo, Carmen Ejogo, Tom Wilkinson, and Oprah Winfrey opened to high praise, great reviews, and a slew of awards and nominations.

Ana DuVernay's acclaimed film Selma was an accurate depiction of the voting rights campaign and marches.  Unlike earlier popular movies about the Civil Rights campaigns, there was no white savior and the vision was unfiltered by white eyes.  The film also honored the work and sacrifice of ordinary folk as well as Martin Luther King and other marquee movement names.  

In 2020 Congressman Lewis, who was battling pancreatic cancer was joined by four Democratic presidential candidates—Senators Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg for the march.  In his comments Congressman Lewis said:

Fifty-five years ago, a few of our children attempted to march ... across this bridge. We were beaten, we were tear-gassed. I thought I was going to die on this bridge. But somehow and some way, God almighty helped me here…We must go out and vote like we never, ever voted before…

I’m not going to give up. I’m not going to give in. We’re going to continue to fight. We need your prayers now more than ever before.  We must use the vote as a nonviolent instrument or tool to redeem the soul of America…

To each and every one of you, especially you young people ... go out there, speak up, speak out. Get in the way. Get in good trouble. Necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.

The Bitter Blues of Birmingham Sunday

 

Four Little Girls:  Ada Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Denise McNair, and Cynthia Wesley.

Note—Murderous hatred is not new to the U.S.  It never really went away and is making a strong comeback today.

Of all of the many battlegrounds for Civil Rights in the South, Birmingham, Alabama stood out for the level of sheer ferocity and brutality of opposition to change.  Then, on September 15, 1963 the already blood-soaked city was rocked by a Sunday morning bomb blast at the 16th Avenue Baptist Church.  When the dust and smoke cleared, four young girls were dead and 22 other people were injured.  It was a crime of such sickening brutality that shocked the nation.  If it happened today, it would be called what it surely was then—an act of terrorism.

 

Birmingham was not a rural backwater.  It was one of the South’s major industrial centers, the self-proclaimed Miracle City that grew in an economy based on steel production.  After a war time boom, the city settled into a period of prosperity in the 1950’s—a prosperity that the approximately one third of its population, Blacks, did not fully share in.  The large White working class population of the city, mostly no more than a generation or so from rural poverty themselves, were particularly fearful of competition from Blacks for jobs and resources.  That fueled a culture that was as resistant to change as any in the South.

 

Local Blacks, led by the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth of the Bethel Baptist Church, began to organize protests in the mid 1950’s.  After the State of Alabama outlawed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), of which Shuttlesworth was state Membership Chair, in 1956, the minister organized the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights to continue the work.  On Christmas Day that year a bomb made of 16 sticks of dynamite nearly destroyed Shuttlesworth’s parsonage home.  He survived and defied threatening warnings by police to leave town.  The next day he launched an attempt to desegregate the city bus system.  He and 21 others were arrested and launched a law suit as a result.

 

 

Tenacious and pugnacious the Rev. Fred Shuttelsworth drove Birmingham Civil Rights campaigns with a righteous fury and was the target of bombs, mob attacks, attempted assassination, and repeated jailings. 

 

It was just the beginning.  In January, 1957 Shuttlesworth joined Martin Luther King, Jr., Joseph Lowery, Ralph Abernathy, Bayard Ruskin, and other to establish what would become the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC).  The pugnacious Shuttlesworth sometimes bedeviled King and other leaders while pressing for more aggressive action.  He said that “flowery speeches” were empty unless acted upon.

 

Shuttlesworth continued to act.  When trying to register his children at an all white school later that year the minister and his wife were attacked by a mob of known Ku Klux Klansmen with police notable for their absence.  Shuttlesworth was beaten unconscious with chains and his wife stabbed.  The next year he survived another bombing attempt.  He organized and participated in lunch counter sit-ins in 1960 and was part of the Freedom Rides in 1961.

 

Through it all, his most visible opponent was Police Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor an ardent and outspoken segregationist who frequently arrested Shuttlesworth and other civil rights leaders while his department refused to investigate the many attacks that by 1960 had earned the city the nickname Bombingham.  Connor was supported by most of the local establishment under the banner of a local White Citizen’s Council.  Businessmen and professionals who showed any tendency to toward compromise were threatened and harassed themselves.  And behind everything was a large, if sometimes fractured, Ku Klux Klan, which included many sworn police officers, ready to do almost anything.

 

 

 

Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor ran virtual parallel city government, commanded Police and Fire Departments riddled with Klansmen, and vowed never to give an inch to Civil Rights protestors.  As the Birmingham campaign leaders expected, he became a nationally visible symbol Jim Crow violence.
 

In 1961, the Bethel Church, which itself had been bombed twice, grew tired of Shuttlesworth’s obsession with the Civil Rights movement at the expense of regular pastoral duties.  The minister left town to take up another pulpit in Cincinnati but returned regularly and continued to lead the Birmingham movement.

 

In 1962 local Black leaders, with the encouragement of Shuttlesworth, began a boycott of major downtown business to demand equal access and employment opportunity.  Enforced by community patrols, the boycott successfully reduced sales downtown by as much a 40%.  Business leaders, led by the Chamber of Commerce, sought a compromise.  They fielded a candidate for mayor against Bull Connor, who was running for the same office, in the November 1962. 

 

When their candidate won the election, however, Connor asserted that his term as the almost completely independent Police Commissioner did not expire until 1965 and he retained the support of other lame duck Commissioners.  The city essentially operated with two city governments—but Connor’s side had the guns and muscle.

 

After the Easter shopping season was ruined, many took the Whites only and Colored only signs out of their windows only to be threatened by Connor with the revocation of their business licenses. 

 

At this point Shuttlesworth and other boycott leaders decided to call in Dr. King and the SCLC.  The new initiative was dubbed Plan C.  Devised by SCLC leader Wyatt Tee Walker, the plan was to defy Connor and fill the jails with daily protests that would inevitably result in brutal suppression by Connor leading to public condemnation around the country.  They also felt that they had to keep local business leaders’ feet to the fire to give them courage to defy Connor. 

 

There were daily demonstrations including lunch counter sit-ins, kneel-ins at white-only churches, demonstrations at libraries and other segregated city facilities, and, perhaps most frightening of all, a march to register voters at the Jefferson County Court House.  The aggressiveness of the campaign frightened and alienated even many in the Black community, but leaders were undeterred. 

 

Connor played his role as predicted.  On April 10 he got a blanket injunction against all demonstrations from a state judge.  He began to arrest anyone even attempting to demonstrate and held them on bonds of $1,200 each.  The King and SCLC leaders who had obeyed an injunction during an earlier failed campaign in Albany, Georgia, struggled with what to do.  Shuttlesworth and others accused King of being indecisive and his closest aides reported that he was “more troubled than they had ever seen him” about the prospects of leading a march directly into Connor’s brutal hands.  After prayer, however, he decided to go ahead.

 

On April 12, Good Friday, King, Abernathy, and 50 Birmingham residents were arrested.  At first King was held without being able to see a lawyer and was not allowed to communicate with his family, including wife Coretta Scott King who had just given birth to her fourth child.  Mrs. King received a call from President John F. Kennedy the following Monday.  

 

 

 

Dr. Martin Luther King behind bars wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail for an audience of squeamish white moderates and sit-on-their-hands liberals. 

 

On Tuesday King released his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which berated White moderates for failing to act.  Publicity surrounding King’s jailing and the letter alarmed the owners of several major national chain stores with businesses downtown who urged Kennedy to intervene to resolve the problem.  On April 20 King was released.

 

Demonstrations and arrests continued, but finding more volunteers for abuse and incarceration was getting harder.  The campaign was in danger of collapse until James Bevel, the SCLC's Director of Direct Action and Nonviolent Education, devised a plan for a Children’s Crusade.  After getting King’s reluctant approval, Bevel began to recruit and train high school students, local Black college students, and even elementary age children.  He thought them the basics of non-violence and shared films of earlier Civil Rights confrontations.  He counted on the social cohesion of students to stay together.

 

On May 2 more than 1000 students skipped school and gathered at the 16th Street Church.  Marching in disciplined small groups and coordinated with walkie-talkies, the students set out at intervals on different routes, each group assigned a target.  The first group was to attempt to meet with the new Mayor.  Others were to go to various stores and public facilities.  Astonished by the discipline of the students, Connor arrested more than 600 on the first day swelling the total number of demonstrators incarcerated in the city jail to more than 1,200, far exceeding the maximum capacity of 900.

 

 

 

The use of fire hoses and dogs against Rev. James Bevel's Children's Crusade marchers shocked the nation. 

 

On the May 3, Connor first used high pressure fire hoses against the marching students and then attacked demonstrators and bystanders alike with police dogs.  The whole scene was captured on film for national television and dramatic still photographs splashed across the papers nationwide the next day. 

As leaders knew it would, the ghastly images moved national opinion. New York Senator Jacob Javits, with bi-partisan support of Republicans and Democrats announced support for a new Civil Rights Act to cover public accommodations.  Kennedy ordered the Justice Department to open an investigation and sent Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall to try to mediate a solution.  Under pressure from Connor, downtown business leaders refused to budge and civil rights leaders refused to call off daily protests.

Although the youthful demonstrators were disciplined, onlookers, including parents, often became enraged and there were incidents of bottles and rocks being thrown at police despite the pleas of Bevel and organizers that, “if any police are hurt, we lose.” 

On May 6, Connor converted the Fair Grounds to an open air jail to hold those arrested.  More were arrested that day as they attempted to worship at some White churches, although Catholic, Episcopal, and Presbyterian houses of worship did admit the demonstrators.  Connor attempted to prevent marches by blocking the doors of Black churches with demonstrators still inside and even blasting the interiors with fire hoses.

 

The next day, Monday May 7, the situation reached crisis levels.  Connor was out with hoses and dogs again, but hundreds of new recruits marched on city center.  Rev. Shuttlesworth was hit and injured by a fire hose.  Connor told reporters that he regretted that he had not seen it and the minister had not been killed.  More than 1000 were arrested, yet protests continued.  More than 3000 protestors made it to the downtown district and occupied stores.  No business of any kind could be conducted downtown that day. 

 

On May 8, business leaders capitulated on virtually all of the demonstrator’s demands but claimed that they could not control the actions of the city.  The campaign continued until King and Shuttlesworth announced an agreement with the city to officially desegregate public facilities within 90 days.  Those held in jail would be released on their own recognizance. Connor and his ally the outgoing Mayor opposed the settlement.

 

Just as it seemed that the crisis might be passed, the Gastonia Motel, where King and SCLC leaders stayed was destroyed by a powerful bomb on May 11 and the home of King’s brother, A. D. King, was damaged in another blast.  Fire and police responding to the explosions were pelted with rocks by local residents. Over the objections of Alabama Governor George Wallace, President Kennedy dispatched Federal Troops to restore order and Dr. King returned to Birmingham to plead for peace. 

 

The Alabama State Supreme Court ruled that “moderate” Albert Boutwell could take office on May 21 replacing Connor ally Art Hanes.  Connor was also stripped of his position and tearfully told reporters “This is the worst day of my life” as he picked up his last paycheck. In June the Jim Crow signs regulating segregated public places were taken down.  Although many businesses dragged their feet in complying with the new reality, and King and others were criticized for not continuing the demonstrations until all promises were fulfilled, the crisis seemed over.

 

King’s prestige as a leader was reaching his high point.  President Kennedy drafted Civil Rights legislation that was soon tied up in a Senate filibuster.  The March on Washington August would gain even more wide spread public support.

 

 

 

                                John F. Kennedy addressed the nation about Civil Rights on June 11, 1963 largely in response to the events in Birmingham.
 

 But bitter Whites, led by the active Ku Klux Klan, began a virtual guerilla campaign against local civil rights leaders and white “race traitors” who accommodated them.  A tear gas canister was thrown into Loveman’s Department Store when it complied with the desegregation agreement and twenty people required hospital treatment.  The home of NAACP attorney Arthur Shores was bombed injuring his wife.

 

Tensions rose again when city schools were desegregated in September.  Governor Wallace’s vow to resist with Alabama National Guard troops was foiled when Kennedy nationalized the Guard and ordered them to stand down.  Still, most white students shunned the newly integrated schools.

 

On Sunday morning September 15 a white man driving a white and turquoise Chevrolet was seen placing a box under the steps of the 16th Street Church.  A bomb exploded as students were filing into a basement room for Sunday school.  The bomb killed 11 year old Denise McNair and Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, all 14 years old.

 

 

Surveying the bomb damage to the 16th Street Baptist Church.   

 

Rev. King spoke at the funeral for three of the girls. More than 8,000 mourners, including 800 clergymen of all races, attended the service. No city officials attended. 

Outrage over the bombing and other atrocities paved the way for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson the following summer.

Ku Klux Klan member Robert Chambliss was later identified as the man who left the package.  He was soon arrested and 122 sticks of dynamite were found in his home matching the forensic pattern of the explosives used in the bomb.  Despite overwhelming evidence, including an eyewitness, a local jury acquitted Chambliss of murder and convicted him of a minor charge of possessing explosives.  He was fined $100 and sentenced to six months in local jail, where he was safely separated from Black inmates and treated as a hero by jailers. 

 

 

Defiant Klansman Robert Chambliss who planted the bomb was confident and defiant outside of the court house during his state trial for murder.  Despite overwhelming evidence an all white jury acquitted of that charge and convicted him of a minor possession of explosives charge.  He would ultimately be brought to justice decades later and died in prison.

 

The verdict shocked and outraged the nation.   But it was not until 1977 when young Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley reopened the case that anything like justice began to be done.  Baxley secured a conviction of Chambliss despite not having access to FBI files which were denied him because the agency feared that the extent of its infiltration of the Klan—and possible advance knowledge of the bombing plot—might be exposed.  Chambliss was sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in an Alabama prison on October 29, 1985. 

In May of 2002 the FBI finally made public its files on the case and said that Klansmen Herman Cash, Thomas Blanton, and Bobby Cherry had conspired with Chambliss on the bombing.  Cash was dead.  Blanton and Cherry were charged with murder and eventually convicted in separate trials.  Cherry was identified as the ring leader and the man whose military training made him familiar with explosives.  Cherry died in prison in 2004.  Blanton remains in prison.

Richard Fariña wrote Birmingham Sunday, a haunting ballad recorded by his sister in law Joan Baez on her 1964 album Joan Baez/5 and was used as the theme song of the 1997 Spike Lee documentary about the bombing, 4 Little Girls.