Harold Titus's Blog - Posts Tagged "albert-turner"
Civil Rights Events -- Selma Voting Rights Movement -- The Killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson
In 1962, when civil rights organizer Albert Turner persuaded some black residents of Marion to try and register to vote, an elderly farmer named Cager Lee was one of the first in line at the courthouse.
Standing with Lee was his daughter, Viola Lee Jackson, and her son Jimmie Lee Jackson. They were not permitted to register. When Jimmie Lee Jackson saw his frail 80-year-old grandfather rudely turned away from the registrar’s office, he became angry. He knew that he must be a part of the movement for civil rights.
Years earlier, when he was a proud high school graduate of 18, Jimmie Lee Jackson had made plans to leave rural Alabama for a better life in the North. He abandoned those dreams when his father died, leaving him to run the family farm. Determined to make the most of his life, Jackson took logging work in addition to farming, and he became active in a local fraternal lodge. At age 25, he was the youngest deacon ever elected at his church.
After the incident at the courthouse, Jackson saw the chance for real change in his hometown of Marion. He wrote a letter to a federal judge protesting the treatment of black voter applicants. He attended civil rights meetings, participated in boycotts of white businesses, and joined others in marching for the right to vote (Jimmie 1-2).
On Tuesday, February 18, [1965] carloads of Alabama State Troopers led by its commander, Al Lingo, swarm into Marion, Perry County, to suppress Black defiance. SCLC project director James Orange is spotted walking on the street and is arrested for "contributing to the delinquency of minors" (by encouraging students to march around the courthouse singing freedom songs).
James Orange is immensely popular among both young and old in Perry County's Black community, and that night tiny Zion Methodist Church is packed to overflowing as word spreads of his arrest. The lockup where Orange is being held is just a block and a half away. The plan is for a short night march so they can sing freedom songs outside his cell window and then return. If the troopers block them, they plan to kneel in prayer and then go back to the church.
Albert Turner and local minister, Rev. James Dobynes, lead 400 marchers out of the church and up Pickens Street two-by-two on the sidewalk. They are halted by Lingo's troopers. Jim Clark and some of his Selma posse are also present, along with an angry mob of local whites. As planned, Dobynes kneels and begins to pray. Suddenly, all the street lights go dark. The mob savagely attacks news reporters covering the protest. Richard Valeriani of NBC is clubbed, his head bloodied. Some of the mob have come prepared with cans of spray paint they use to sabotage camera lenses. Others smash the TV lights. No photos are taken of the troopers, deputies, and possemen wading into the line of marchers with hardwood clubs and ax-handles flailing, beating men, women, and children to the ground.
SCLC field secretary Willie Bolden described his experience.
The cameras were shooting. All of a sudden we heard cameras being broken and newsmen being hit. I saw people running out of the church. ... The troopers were in there beating folks while local police were outside beating anyone who came out the door. ... A big white fella came up to me and stuck a double-barreled shotgun, cocked, in my stomach. "You're the nigger from Atlanta, aren't you? Somebody wants to see you," he said, and he took me across the street to this guy with a badge and red suspenders and chewing tobacco. "See what you caused," he said, and he spun me around, "I want you to watch this." There were people running over each other and trying to protect themselves.
One guy was running toward us. When he saw the cops he tried to make a U-turn and he ran into a local cop. They just hit him in the head and bust his head wide open. Blood spewed all over and he fell. When I tried to go to him, the sheriff pulled me back and stuck a .38 snubnose in my mouth. He cocked the hammer back and said, "What I really need to do is blow your God damned brains out, nigger." ... I was scared to death! He said, "Take this nigger to jail." So they took me, and they hit me all over the arms and legs and thighs and chin. There were others there got beaten the same. ... There were literally puddles of blood leading all the way up the stairs to the jail cell.
Albert Turner of SCLC recalled the beating and death of Reverend Dobynes.
They started beating Reverend Dobynes who was on his knees at that point praying, and they carried him to the jail by his heels. And beat him on the way to the jail. Really the public doesn't know, but Dobynes died also as a result of the beating. He did not die immediately, but he really never did recuperate from it. He died roughly a year later, but his head was severely damaged, and he just never did survive it, but nobody says that he really was murdered or killed from that... that demonstration.
Marchers desperately try to retreat to the church; many are cut off. Some of the fleeing marchers take refuge in Mack's Cafe, a small Black-owned jook joint. Among them are Cager Lee, 82, his daughter Viola Jackson, and her son, military-veteran Jimmie Lee Jackson 26. Jimmie Lee is a church deacon who has tried to register five times and has been denied each time. Troopers follow them in, smashing out the lights, over turning tables, and beating people indiscriminately. They attack Cager in the kitchen. His daughter tries to come to his aid and they knock her to the floor. Jimmie tries to protect his mother and one trooper throws him up against the cigarette machine while another [James Bonard Fowler] shoots him twice, point-blank in the stomach. They club him again and again, driving him out into the street where he collapses.
Albert Turner narrates: After shooting him then they... then they ran him out of the door of the cafe, out of the front door of the cafe. And as he run out of the door, the remaining troopers, or some of the remaining troopers, were lined up down the sidewalk back toward the church, which he had to run through a corridor of policemans standing with billy sticks. And as he ran by them they simply kept hitting him as he kept running through. And he made it back to the door of the church, and just beyond the church he fell.
A reporter encounters Jim Clark prowling the streets with some of his possemen. When asked why he's in Marion, Clark replies, "Things got a little too quiet for me over in Selma tonight. It made me nervous."
Perry County has no hospital and the local infirmary is swamped with serious injuries. An unknown number of others lie wounded in jail. The infirmary is not equipped to care for gunshot wounds, so Jimmie Lee Jackson is rushed 30 miles by ambulance to Selma in adjacent Dallas County. Since the "white" public hospital there won't treat Black protesters, he's brought to the Catholic-run Good Samaritan Hospital (Shooting 3-6).
NEW YORK: On Sunday evening, February 21st 1965, Malcolm X is assassinated in Harlem under circumstances that remain controversial to this day. His death hits the Civil Rights Movement hard. Despite tactical differences over integration and nonviolence, he is seen as a courageous and forthright Black leader in the fight against white-supremacy. John Lewis attends his funeral and later says: "I had my differences with him, of course, but there was no question that he had come to articulate better than anyone else on the scene — including Dr. King — the bitterness and frustration of Black Americans."
ALABAMA: Governor Wallace issues an unconstitutional order barring all night-time marches everywhere in the state and assigns 75 troopers under Lingo to enforce his version of "law and order" in Selma. At a rally of the Dallas County White Citizens Council, former Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett tells some 2,000 whites that they face, "... absolute extinction of all we hold dear unless we are victorious." After the shooting of Jimmie Lee Jackson and the murder of Malcolm X, hope begins to waver and the mood of Alabama Blacks turns increasingly bleak.
SELMA: Day after day, vigils for Jimmie Lee Jackson are held outside Good Samaritan, and mass meetings in Black churches around the state condemn the shooting and pray for his recovery. Despite their anguish and sorrow, grimly determined groups continue marching to the Dallas County courthouse in Selma to add their names to the appearance book. DCVL leader Amelia Boynton calls on Blacks to expand the economic boycott to all white- owned businesses as well as the city buses that still require Blacks to sit at the rear.
…
… over in "Bloody Lowndes" to the east, where no Black in living memory has been registered to vote, James Bevel, now out of the hospital, tries to stealthily infiltrate, "like Caleb and Joshua," seeking — without success — a church that will host a voting rights meeting.
LOWNDES COUNTY: Every fourth Sunday, Rev. Lorenzo Harrison of Selma preaches to tiny Mount Carmel Baptist Church in Lowndes County a few miles from Hayneville, the county seat. Word of Bevel's effort leaks back to the white power-structure and a rumor spreads among whites that Harrison intends to speak about Black voting rights. Carloads of Klansmen armed with rifles and shotguns surround the church. Members of the little congregation recognize Tom Coleman, son of the sheriff and an unpaid "special deputy," who in 1959 was known to have murdered Richard Lee Jones at a chain-gang prison camp. (Soon he will kill again.) Another is a plantation owner with 10,000 acres who had once shot to death a Black sharecropper because he seemed too happy at the prospect of being drafted out of the fields and into the Army. Mount Carmel Church has no phone they can use to call for help — few Blacks in Lowndes have telephone service and those that do suspect their calls are monitored and reported to authorities. With quiet courage, Deacon John Hulett manages to smuggle Harrison to safety.
SELMA: On Tuesday the 23rd, Al Lingo serves an arrest warrant for "assault and battery" on Jackson (Tension 1-5).
Jimmie Lee Jackson appeared to be on the way to recovery. At 9pm, [February 25] as Dr. William Dinkins recalled, Jackson was sitting up in his bed talking and in good spirits. Thirty minutes later, Dinkins received a call from the hospital that another doctor had decided Jimmie needed to undergo further surgery. Dinkins argued against it but eventually was forced to proceed. During surgery, Jackson was under a safe dose of anesthesia. Minutes later, his blood turned dark and Dr. Dinkins stated to the other doctor that Jackson should be put on 100% oxygen. Instead the doctor decided to increase the levels of anesthesia and in minutes [February 26] Jimmie Lee stopped breathing and died. Dr. Dinkins was adamant that Jimmie Lee Jackson could have survived had this second surgery not occurred (Jones 2-3).
Three days before Jackson’s death the Alabama state legislature had passed a resolution supporting the state troopers’ actions in Marion. Dodging an indictment from a grand jury, Fowler does not suffer punishment or disciplinary action. He is allowed to continue in his job.
PERRY COUNTY: Voter registration offices will be open again on Monday, March 1, and over the weekend SCLC and SNCC organizers concentrate on mobilizing Blacks in Dallas, Perry, Wilcox, Marengo, and Hale counties to honor Jimmie Lee Jackson and demand their right to vote. At a Sunday memorial service and voter registration rally in Marion, James Bevel preaches from the Book of Esther and tells the congregation: "We must go to Montgomery and see the king! Be prepared to walk to Montgomery! Be prepared to sleep on the highway!" By this he means not a march in Montgomery, but a march on the state capitol to present to Governor Wallace a demand for justice in the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson and also their call for voting rights. Old Cager Lee and Jimmie Lee's mother, Viola Jackson, bandages still covering their injuries, are ready to join him.
…
SELMA and MARION: The rain is still coming down on Wednesday, the day of Jimmie Lee Jackson's funeral. In Selma, R.B. Hudson High is practically empty as the students boycott class for his memorial service. Two thousand mourners file past the coffin in Brown Chapel where a banner reads, "Racism killed our brother." In Marion, where 400 manage to jam themselves inside Zion church for Jackson's service and 600 wait outside in the rain, Dr. King asks: "Who killed him?"
“He was murdered by the brutality of every sheriff who practiced lawlessness in the name of law. He was murdered by the irresponsibility of every politician from governors on down who has fed his constituents the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism. He was murdered by the timidity of a federal government that is willing to spend millions of dollars a day to defend freedom in Vietnam but cannot protect the rights of its citizens at home. ... And he was murdered by the cowardice of every Negro who passively accepts the evils of segregation and stands on the sidelines in the struggle for justice” (Tension 6-7).
It wasn't until 2007, 42 years after Jackson’s death, that [James] Fowler was arrested and charged with first and second degree murder. Fowler initially maintained that he had acted to defend himself, but eventually accepted a plea bargain for misdemeanor manslaughter. He received a six-month jail sentence, but served only five months and was released in July 2011 because of health problems. In 2011, the FBI began investigating Fowler’s role in the 1966 death of Nathan Johnson, another black man, who Fowler had fatally shot after he stopped Johnson for suspicion of drunk driving. Fowler died of pancreatic cancer on July 5, 2015 at the age of 81 (Jimmie Biography 4).
ATLANTA: Dr. King endorses Bevel's proposal for a march from Selma to Montgomery. But SNCC opposes the SCLC plan. They see it as a dangerous grandstand play by King that will do nothing for the local people. John Lewis disagrees, "I knew the feelings that were out there on the streets. The people of Selma were hurting. They were angry. They needed to march. It didn't matter to me who led it. They needed to march. Lewis stands alone and is outvoted. The SNCC meeting does agree that SNCC members can participate in the march as individuals, but not as SNCC representatives. SNCC sends a letter to King stating: We strongly believe that the objectives of the march do not justify the dangers ... consequently [SNCC] will only live up to those minimal commitments ... to provide radios and cars, ... and nothing beyond that (Tension 8).
Works cited:
“Jimmie Lee Jackson.” Teaching Tolerance. Web. https://www.tolerance.org/classroom-r...
“Jimmie Lee Jackson Biography.” The Biography.com. Web. https://www.biography.com/people/jimm...
Jones, Ryan M. “Who Mourns for Jimmie Lee Jackson?” National Civil Rights Museum. Web. https://www.civilrightsmuseum.org/new...
“The Shooting of Jimmie Lee Jackson.” Selma Voting Rights Campaign (Jan-Mar). Civil Rights Movement History 1965: Selma & the March to Montgomery. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis65.h...
“Tension Escalates.” Selma Voting Rights Campaign (Jan-Mar). Civil Rights Movement History 1965: Selma & the March to Montgomery. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis65.h...
Standing with Lee was his daughter, Viola Lee Jackson, and her son Jimmie Lee Jackson. They were not permitted to register. When Jimmie Lee Jackson saw his frail 80-year-old grandfather rudely turned away from the registrar’s office, he became angry. He knew that he must be a part of the movement for civil rights.
Years earlier, when he was a proud high school graduate of 18, Jimmie Lee Jackson had made plans to leave rural Alabama for a better life in the North. He abandoned those dreams when his father died, leaving him to run the family farm. Determined to make the most of his life, Jackson took logging work in addition to farming, and he became active in a local fraternal lodge. At age 25, he was the youngest deacon ever elected at his church.
After the incident at the courthouse, Jackson saw the chance for real change in his hometown of Marion. He wrote a letter to a federal judge protesting the treatment of black voter applicants. He attended civil rights meetings, participated in boycotts of white businesses, and joined others in marching for the right to vote (Jimmie 1-2).
On Tuesday, February 18, [1965] carloads of Alabama State Troopers led by its commander, Al Lingo, swarm into Marion, Perry County, to suppress Black defiance. SCLC project director James Orange is spotted walking on the street and is arrested for "contributing to the delinquency of minors" (by encouraging students to march around the courthouse singing freedom songs).
James Orange is immensely popular among both young and old in Perry County's Black community, and that night tiny Zion Methodist Church is packed to overflowing as word spreads of his arrest. The lockup where Orange is being held is just a block and a half away. The plan is for a short night march so they can sing freedom songs outside his cell window and then return. If the troopers block them, they plan to kneel in prayer and then go back to the church.
Albert Turner and local minister, Rev. James Dobynes, lead 400 marchers out of the church and up Pickens Street two-by-two on the sidewalk. They are halted by Lingo's troopers. Jim Clark and some of his Selma posse are also present, along with an angry mob of local whites. As planned, Dobynes kneels and begins to pray. Suddenly, all the street lights go dark. The mob savagely attacks news reporters covering the protest. Richard Valeriani of NBC is clubbed, his head bloodied. Some of the mob have come prepared with cans of spray paint they use to sabotage camera lenses. Others smash the TV lights. No photos are taken of the troopers, deputies, and possemen wading into the line of marchers with hardwood clubs and ax-handles flailing, beating men, women, and children to the ground.
SCLC field secretary Willie Bolden described his experience.
The cameras were shooting. All of a sudden we heard cameras being broken and newsmen being hit. I saw people running out of the church. ... The troopers were in there beating folks while local police were outside beating anyone who came out the door. ... A big white fella came up to me and stuck a double-barreled shotgun, cocked, in my stomach. "You're the nigger from Atlanta, aren't you? Somebody wants to see you," he said, and he took me across the street to this guy with a badge and red suspenders and chewing tobacco. "See what you caused," he said, and he spun me around, "I want you to watch this." There were people running over each other and trying to protect themselves.
One guy was running toward us. When he saw the cops he tried to make a U-turn and he ran into a local cop. They just hit him in the head and bust his head wide open. Blood spewed all over and he fell. When I tried to go to him, the sheriff pulled me back and stuck a .38 snubnose in my mouth. He cocked the hammer back and said, "What I really need to do is blow your God damned brains out, nigger." ... I was scared to death! He said, "Take this nigger to jail." So they took me, and they hit me all over the arms and legs and thighs and chin. There were others there got beaten the same. ... There were literally puddles of blood leading all the way up the stairs to the jail cell.
Albert Turner of SCLC recalled the beating and death of Reverend Dobynes.
They started beating Reverend Dobynes who was on his knees at that point praying, and they carried him to the jail by his heels. And beat him on the way to the jail. Really the public doesn't know, but Dobynes died also as a result of the beating. He did not die immediately, but he really never did recuperate from it. He died roughly a year later, but his head was severely damaged, and he just never did survive it, but nobody says that he really was murdered or killed from that... that demonstration.
Marchers desperately try to retreat to the church; many are cut off. Some of the fleeing marchers take refuge in Mack's Cafe, a small Black-owned jook joint. Among them are Cager Lee, 82, his daughter Viola Jackson, and her son, military-veteran Jimmie Lee Jackson 26. Jimmie Lee is a church deacon who has tried to register five times and has been denied each time. Troopers follow them in, smashing out the lights, over turning tables, and beating people indiscriminately. They attack Cager in the kitchen. His daughter tries to come to his aid and they knock her to the floor. Jimmie tries to protect his mother and one trooper throws him up against the cigarette machine while another [James Bonard Fowler] shoots him twice, point-blank in the stomach. They club him again and again, driving him out into the street where he collapses.
Albert Turner narrates: After shooting him then they... then they ran him out of the door of the cafe, out of the front door of the cafe. And as he run out of the door, the remaining troopers, or some of the remaining troopers, were lined up down the sidewalk back toward the church, which he had to run through a corridor of policemans standing with billy sticks. And as he ran by them they simply kept hitting him as he kept running through. And he made it back to the door of the church, and just beyond the church he fell.
A reporter encounters Jim Clark prowling the streets with some of his possemen. When asked why he's in Marion, Clark replies, "Things got a little too quiet for me over in Selma tonight. It made me nervous."
Perry County has no hospital and the local infirmary is swamped with serious injuries. An unknown number of others lie wounded in jail. The infirmary is not equipped to care for gunshot wounds, so Jimmie Lee Jackson is rushed 30 miles by ambulance to Selma in adjacent Dallas County. Since the "white" public hospital there won't treat Black protesters, he's brought to the Catholic-run Good Samaritan Hospital (Shooting 3-6).
NEW YORK: On Sunday evening, February 21st 1965, Malcolm X is assassinated in Harlem under circumstances that remain controversial to this day. His death hits the Civil Rights Movement hard. Despite tactical differences over integration and nonviolence, he is seen as a courageous and forthright Black leader in the fight against white-supremacy. John Lewis attends his funeral and later says: "I had my differences with him, of course, but there was no question that he had come to articulate better than anyone else on the scene — including Dr. King — the bitterness and frustration of Black Americans."
ALABAMA: Governor Wallace issues an unconstitutional order barring all night-time marches everywhere in the state and assigns 75 troopers under Lingo to enforce his version of "law and order" in Selma. At a rally of the Dallas County White Citizens Council, former Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett tells some 2,000 whites that they face, "... absolute extinction of all we hold dear unless we are victorious." After the shooting of Jimmie Lee Jackson and the murder of Malcolm X, hope begins to waver and the mood of Alabama Blacks turns increasingly bleak.
SELMA: Day after day, vigils for Jimmie Lee Jackson are held outside Good Samaritan, and mass meetings in Black churches around the state condemn the shooting and pray for his recovery. Despite their anguish and sorrow, grimly determined groups continue marching to the Dallas County courthouse in Selma to add their names to the appearance book. DCVL leader Amelia Boynton calls on Blacks to expand the economic boycott to all white- owned businesses as well as the city buses that still require Blacks to sit at the rear.
…
… over in "Bloody Lowndes" to the east, where no Black in living memory has been registered to vote, James Bevel, now out of the hospital, tries to stealthily infiltrate, "like Caleb and Joshua," seeking — without success — a church that will host a voting rights meeting.
LOWNDES COUNTY: Every fourth Sunday, Rev. Lorenzo Harrison of Selma preaches to tiny Mount Carmel Baptist Church in Lowndes County a few miles from Hayneville, the county seat. Word of Bevel's effort leaks back to the white power-structure and a rumor spreads among whites that Harrison intends to speak about Black voting rights. Carloads of Klansmen armed with rifles and shotguns surround the church. Members of the little congregation recognize Tom Coleman, son of the sheriff and an unpaid "special deputy," who in 1959 was known to have murdered Richard Lee Jones at a chain-gang prison camp. (Soon he will kill again.) Another is a plantation owner with 10,000 acres who had once shot to death a Black sharecropper because he seemed too happy at the prospect of being drafted out of the fields and into the Army. Mount Carmel Church has no phone they can use to call for help — few Blacks in Lowndes have telephone service and those that do suspect their calls are monitored and reported to authorities. With quiet courage, Deacon John Hulett manages to smuggle Harrison to safety.
SELMA: On Tuesday the 23rd, Al Lingo serves an arrest warrant for "assault and battery" on Jackson (Tension 1-5).
Jimmie Lee Jackson appeared to be on the way to recovery. At 9pm, [February 25] as Dr. William Dinkins recalled, Jackson was sitting up in his bed talking and in good spirits. Thirty minutes later, Dinkins received a call from the hospital that another doctor had decided Jimmie needed to undergo further surgery. Dinkins argued against it but eventually was forced to proceed. During surgery, Jackson was under a safe dose of anesthesia. Minutes later, his blood turned dark and Dr. Dinkins stated to the other doctor that Jackson should be put on 100% oxygen. Instead the doctor decided to increase the levels of anesthesia and in minutes [February 26] Jimmie Lee stopped breathing and died. Dr. Dinkins was adamant that Jimmie Lee Jackson could have survived had this second surgery not occurred (Jones 2-3).
Three days before Jackson’s death the Alabama state legislature had passed a resolution supporting the state troopers’ actions in Marion. Dodging an indictment from a grand jury, Fowler does not suffer punishment or disciplinary action. He is allowed to continue in his job.
PERRY COUNTY: Voter registration offices will be open again on Monday, March 1, and over the weekend SCLC and SNCC organizers concentrate on mobilizing Blacks in Dallas, Perry, Wilcox, Marengo, and Hale counties to honor Jimmie Lee Jackson and demand their right to vote. At a Sunday memorial service and voter registration rally in Marion, James Bevel preaches from the Book of Esther and tells the congregation: "We must go to Montgomery and see the king! Be prepared to walk to Montgomery! Be prepared to sleep on the highway!" By this he means not a march in Montgomery, but a march on the state capitol to present to Governor Wallace a demand for justice in the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson and also their call for voting rights. Old Cager Lee and Jimmie Lee's mother, Viola Jackson, bandages still covering their injuries, are ready to join him.
…
SELMA and MARION: The rain is still coming down on Wednesday, the day of Jimmie Lee Jackson's funeral. In Selma, R.B. Hudson High is practically empty as the students boycott class for his memorial service. Two thousand mourners file past the coffin in Brown Chapel where a banner reads, "Racism killed our brother." In Marion, where 400 manage to jam themselves inside Zion church for Jackson's service and 600 wait outside in the rain, Dr. King asks: "Who killed him?"
“He was murdered by the brutality of every sheriff who practiced lawlessness in the name of law. He was murdered by the irresponsibility of every politician from governors on down who has fed his constituents the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism. He was murdered by the timidity of a federal government that is willing to spend millions of dollars a day to defend freedom in Vietnam but cannot protect the rights of its citizens at home. ... And he was murdered by the cowardice of every Negro who passively accepts the evils of segregation and stands on the sidelines in the struggle for justice” (Tension 6-7).
It wasn't until 2007, 42 years after Jackson’s death, that [James] Fowler was arrested and charged with first and second degree murder. Fowler initially maintained that he had acted to defend himself, but eventually accepted a plea bargain for misdemeanor manslaughter. He received a six-month jail sentence, but served only five months and was released in July 2011 because of health problems. In 2011, the FBI began investigating Fowler’s role in the 1966 death of Nathan Johnson, another black man, who Fowler had fatally shot after he stopped Johnson for suspicion of drunk driving. Fowler died of pancreatic cancer on July 5, 2015 at the age of 81 (Jimmie Biography 4).
ATLANTA: Dr. King endorses Bevel's proposal for a march from Selma to Montgomery. But SNCC opposes the SCLC plan. They see it as a dangerous grandstand play by King that will do nothing for the local people. John Lewis disagrees, "I knew the feelings that were out there on the streets. The people of Selma were hurting. They were angry. They needed to march. It didn't matter to me who led it. They needed to march. Lewis stands alone and is outvoted. The SNCC meeting does agree that SNCC members can participate in the march as individuals, but not as SNCC representatives. SNCC sends a letter to King stating: We strongly believe that the objectives of the march do not justify the dangers ... consequently [SNCC] will only live up to those minimal commitments ... to provide radios and cars, ... and nothing beyond that (Tension 8).
Works cited:
“Jimmie Lee Jackson.” Teaching Tolerance. Web. https://www.tolerance.org/classroom-r...
“Jimmie Lee Jackson Biography.” The Biography.com. Web. https://www.biography.com/people/jimm...
Jones, Ryan M. “Who Mourns for Jimmie Lee Jackson?” National Civil Rights Museum. Web. https://www.civilrightsmuseum.org/new...
“The Shooting of Jimmie Lee Jackson.” Selma Voting Rights Campaign (Jan-Mar). Civil Rights Movement History 1965: Selma & the March to Montgomery. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis65.h...
“Tension Escalates.” Selma Voting Rights Campaign (Jan-Mar). Civil Rights Movement History 1965: Selma & the March to Montgomery. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis65.h...
Civil Rights Events -- March to Montgomery -- Bloody Sunday
MONTGOMERY: Declaring that the march is "Not conducive to the orderly flow of traffic and commerce," Governor Wallace issues an edict forbidding it. "[The] march cannot and will not be tolerated." He orders the state troopers to "Use whatever measures are necessary to prevent a march."
SELMA: On Friday the 5th, Hosea Williams asks the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) for doctors and nurses in case of violence. Led by Dr. Al Moldovan, six MCHR doctors and three nurses arrive in Selma on Saturday. The march is scheduled to leave Selma on Sunday, March 7th.
Anticipating that their march will not be allowed out of Selma, SCLC leaders make few logistic preparations for a 50-mile trek to Montgomery over 4 or 5 days. They assume everyone will be arrested for violating Wallace's edict. The plan is to kneel and pray when ordered to turn around or disperse. By refilling the jails, they will maintain pressure on Washington and the federal courts. Though he [Martin Luther King] had previously said he would lead the march, SCLC leaders convince him to remain in Atlanta — he is more valuable out of jail speaking and mobilizing support than sitting in a cell. It's a decision that infuriates SNCC field workers in Selma who condemn it as a betrayal of the local marchers (though they themselves are still refusing to participate in the march) (Tension 9).
Here is a different accounting of King’s absence.
On Saturday, March 6, King was back in Atlanta, where he decided to postpone the march until the following Monday. On a conference phone call with his aides in Selma, he explained that for two straight Sabbaths he had neglected his congregation—he was co-pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church—and that he really needed to preach there the next day. He would return to Selma on Monday to lead the march. All his staff agreed to the postponement except Hosea Williams, a rambunctious Army veteran with a flair for grass roots organizing. “Hosea,” King warned, “you need to pray. You’re not with me. You need to get with me.”
On Sunday morning, though, King’s aides reported that more than five hundred pilgrims were gathered at Brown Chapel and that Williams wanted permission to march that day. In his church office King thought it over and relayed word to Brown Chapel that his people could start without him. Since the march had been prohibited, he was certain that they would get arrested at the bridge. He would simply join them in jail. He expected no mayhem on Highway 80, since even the conservative Alabama press had excoriated Lingo’s troopers for their savagery in Marion (Oates 20).
SELMA: Sunday, March 7, dawns cold and raw. Tension grips the city. The air is pregnant with potential violence. Carloads of white thugs prowl the streets looking for trouble. Just over the Edmund Pettus bridge on the road to Montgomery, a swarm of state troopers, sheriff's deputies and mounted possemen, wait impatiently. They are itching for action. John Carter Lewis, a Black dishwasher, is stopped on his way home from work. He's guilty of being Black in the wrong place. Two troopers attack him, striking him with their clubs, breaking his arm and bloodying his head.
After Sunday services, some 400 marchers gather at Brown Chapel. Some are still in their Sunday suits and dresses; others carry knapsacks and rolled up blankets tied with rough twine. Their mood is somber but determined. There is little of the spirited singing that buoyed previous protests.
John Lewis recalled: We expected a confrontation. We knew that Sheriff Clark had issued yet another call the evening before for even more deputies. Mass arrests would probably be made. There might be injuries. Most likely, we would be stopped at the edge of the city limits, arrested and maybe roughed up a little bit. We did not expect anything worse than that.
The MCHR medical team sets up a first aid station at Brown Chapel — a table, a mattress, and some basic medical supplies.
Charles Bonner, a Selma student leader, remembered: Even though we had been demonstrating for two years now, we had the uneasiness that this was going to be a different day — uneasiness is to put it mildly, if not euphemistically, because frankly it was a fear, it was a terror that was going through us all. We were scared, because we didn't know what was going to happen.
With horns blaring, a caravan of cars filled with 200 marchers from Perry County rolls in and unloads. Off to the side, SCLC divides its field workers into two groups, those who will march and presumably end up in jail, and those who will stay behind to mobilize a follow-on protest. James Bevel, Andrew Young, and Hosea Williams flip coins to decide who will lead the march in King's absence. Hosea is the odd man out.
It is mid-afternoon when the 600 or so marchers line up two-by-two and head for the bridge. Leading the line are Hosea Williams and John Lewis, behind them are SCLC leader Albert Turner of Marion and Bob Mants of SNCC. (It is SNCC policy that no one is allowed to go into danger alone, so he volunteers to accompany John despite SNCC's opposition to the march.) A few rows behind them are two of Selma's indomitable leaders, Amelia Boynton and Marie Foster. A handful of white civil rights workers and Movement supporters are mixed in among the Black students, teachers, maids, laborers, and farmers who make up most of the marchers. Behind them is a flatbed truck with some rented portable toilets and a couple of ambulances staffed by MCHR medics. (All but one of the ambulances are actually hearses owned by Black funeral parlors.)
Police roadblocks have closed the bridge to vehicles. The MCHR ambulances are blocked. Gangs of possemen on foot lurk nearby. The marchers remain on the sidewalk as they start up the bridge rise. When the leaders reach the crest, they see what awaits on the other side. State trooper cars, their lights flashing, are parked across the highway. A phalanx of more than 200 troopers and sheriff's deputies are lined up two and three deep to bar the march. To one side is a band of possemen in their khaki uniforms and construction helmets. More than a dozen of them are mounted on horses and they carry long leather bullwhips. White thugs armed with bats and pipes and waving Confederate battle flags crowd the burger-joint parking lot.
As the marchers start down the bridge slope toward the waiting cops, Hosea Williams looks over the rail at the cold, choppy waters of the Alabama River 100 feet below. "Can you swim," he asks John Lewis. "No." "Neither can I, but we might have to."
The media is confined off to the side where their view is limited. With their usual clueless certainty, TV reporters are telling viewers that the "militant" SNCC has "forced" this dangerous march on an "unwilling" Dr. King.
Charles Bonner: We kept stepping two by two, one foot in front of the other one, marching resolutely into hell, because it was so clear that we were going to be beaten. I mean, these men were just so prepared, they were not going to let their readiness go to waste by not beating us. I mean, when you look back on it, it was very clear.
When they come down off the bridge, the marchers cross over the Selma city line into the county jurisdiction of Sheriff Clark. The troopers and deputies begin donning their gas masks. The marchers stride forward on the shoulder of US-80, known in Alabama as the Jefferson Davis Highway. The front of the line is about 100 feet from the bridge when Major Cloud of the state troopers orders Williams and Lewis to halt and turn around (March 1-6).
“It would be detrimental to your safety to continue this march,” Major John Cloud called out from his bullhorn. “This is an unlawful assembly. You have to disperse, you are ordered to disperse. Go home or go to your church. This march will not continue.”
“Mr. Major,” replied Williams, “I would like to have a word, can we have a word?”
“I’ve got nothing further to say to you,” Cloud answered (Remembering 5).
As planned, the leaders motion for everyone to kneel in prayer.
Bonner: "I was probably about 10 to 15 rows back from John Lewis. ... I saw John Lewis ... kneel down with Hosea Williams, and of course we sat, like these waves you seen in the stadiums, as they knelt all the demonstrators behind fell in line and I knelt as well.
"Troopers Advance!" shouts the Major. A wave of cops smashes into the people at the front of the line.
Charles Fager: From between nearby buildings a line of horses emerged at the gallop, their riders wearing the possemen's irregular uniform and armed with bullwhips, ropes, and lengths of rubber tubing wrapped with barbed wire. They rode into the melee with wild rebel yells, while behind them the cheers of the spectators grew even louder. "Get those Goddamned niggers!" came Jim Clark's voice. "And get those Goddamned white niggers!"
John Lewis: The troopers and possemen swept forward as one, like a human wave, a blur of blue shirts and billy clubs and bullwhips. We had no chance to turn and retreat. There were six hundred people behind us, bridge railings to either side and the river below. ... The first of the troopers came over me, a large husky man. Without a word he swung his club against the left side of my head. I didn't feel any pain, just the thud of the blow, and my legs giving way. ... And then the same trooper hit me again. And everything started to spin. I heard something that sounded like gunshots. And then a cloud of smoke rose all around us. Tear gas. ... I began choking, coughing. I couldn't get air into my lungs. I felt as if I was taking my last breath.
Amelia Boynton is viciously clubbed to the ground and tear gas is shot directly into her face as she collapses into unconsciousness. Hosea Williams scoops up little Sheyann Webb and carries her to safety through the tear gas and charging horses.
Sheyann Webb: He held on until we were off the bridge and down on Broad Street and he let me go. I didn't stop running until I got home. ... I was maybe a little hysterical because I kept repeating over and over, "I can't stop shaking Momma, I can't stop shaking." ... My daddy was like I'd never seen him before. He had a shotgun and he yelled, "By God, if they want it this way, I'll give it to them!" And he started out the door. Momma jumped up and got in front of him. ... Finally he put the gun aside and sat down. I remember just laying there on the couch, crying and feeling so disgusted. They had beaten us like we were slaves.
Behind the possemen come the white thugs, beating down anyone who manages to stumble out of the gas cloud. They assault the reporters and break their cameras. One of the "reporters" is actually an FBI agent, and the three men who attack him are later arrested for assault on a federal agent. They are the only whites ever arrested for violence on "Bloody Sunday." They are never brought to trial.
The troopers, deputies, possemen, and thugs pursue the retreating marchers over the bridge and through the city streets, beating and assaulting Blacks wherever they find them — whether they're demonstrators or not. Dr. Moldovan and nurses Virginia Wells and Linda Dugan plunge into the swirling tumult. They lift unconscious and crippled victims into their ambulance and race back to the aid station at Brown Chapel, which is quickly swamped with the injured and wounded. By the end of the day, 100 of the 600 marchers require medical attention for fractured skulls, broken teeth and limbs, gas poisoning, and whip lashes.
The troopers and possemen swarm into the Carver Projects beating whomever they catch and charging their horses up the steps of Brown Chapel to attack those trying to seek sanctuary in the church. Another band of possemen force their way into First Baptist and throw a teenage boy through a stained glass window. Sheriff Clark fires tear gas into homes to drive people outside where they can be attacked. [Wilson] Baker tries to stop the carnage, but Clark shouts in his face, "I've already waited a month too damn long!"
Sheyann Webb's constant companion, Rachel West, 8 years old, recalls:
I saw the horsemen ... riding at a gallop, coming around a house up the way, and that's when I turned and ran. I heard the horses' hooves and I turned and saw the riders hitting at the people and they were coming fast toward me. I stopped and got up against the wall of one of the apartment buildings and pressed myself against it as hard as I could. Two horsemen went by and I knew if I didn't move I would be trapped there. I saw the people crying [from the gas] as they went by and holding their eyes and some had their arms up over their heads.
I took off running. ... I was out in the open then, right in the middle of the street and heading for the yard toward our house, and I heard these other horsemen coming and I knew they were going to catch me. I just knew they were going to either trample me or hit me with a club or whip. My legs didn't seem to be moving — it was like in a bad dream when you are chased by something and can't run. Well, just as I got to the yard this white [SNCC worker] named Frank Soracco came by me and he was moving fast. And I must have been crying out, because he stopped and just swept me up and carried me under the armpits and kept moving.
Some Blacks begin to retaliate with thrown rocks and bottles, but Movement leaders and civil rights workers move among them, urging nonviolent discipline. The cops are raging with mob fury, all control abandoned to racist hate. Many are now carrying loaded rifles and shotguns at the ready. The activists know that if a single white officer is injured by a tossed brick there'll be a blood-bath of indiscriminate gunfire.
Eventually, the frenzy of cop violence subsides and the forces of "law and order" occupy the Carver Project and Selma's Black commercial district, forcing all Blacks inside and off the street. They allow the MCHR ambulances to ferry the most seriously wounded — more than 90 — to Good Samaritan Hospital and Burwell Infirmary (a Black old-age home).
Among those hospitalized is John Lewis with a skull fracture and concussion. Before he allows himself to be taken to hospital, he tells the battered and bruised people gathered in Brown Chapel, "I don't known how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam. I don't see how he can send troops to the Congo. I don't see how he can send troops to Africa, and he can't send troops to Selma, Alabama. Next time we march, we may have to keep going when we get to Montgomery. We have to go to Washington." His words are reported in the New York Times and the Johnson administration responds by announcing that they will send FBI agents to Selma to, "... investigate whether unnecessary force was used by law officers and others."
As the afternoon wanes and evening falls, Brown Chapel remains crowded with marchers and supporters huddling together for mutual support. Acrid tear gas fumes still emanate from clothes and skin. Eyes weep and breathing is labored. There is anger and rage, of course, but also deep humiliation at being whipped and beaten and driven. Outside, the troopers and deputies strut like conquering heroes. Inside, people are dispirited and dejected. They have endured so much, violence, jail, economic retaliation, and yet despite all, practically no one has been registered to vote.
Sheyann Webb recalls:
When I had first gotten to the church ... my eyes were still swollen and burning from the tear gas. But what I saw there made me cry again. I'll never forget the faces of those people. I'd never seen such looks before. I remember standing and looking at them a long time before sitting down. They weren't afraid, because they were too beaten to know any more fear. It was as though nobody cared to even try to win anything anymore, like we were slaves after all and had been put in our place by a good beating.
I sat with Rachel up toward the front. ... we were just sitting there crying, listening to the others cry; some were even moaning and wailing. It was an awful thing. It was like we were at our own funeral. But then later in the night, maybe nine-thirty or ten, I don't know for sure, all of a sudden somebody there started humming. I think they were moaning and it just went into the humming of a freedom song. It was real low, but some of us children began humming along, slow and soft. At first I didn't even know what it was, what song, I mean. It was like a funeral sound, a dirge. Then I recognized it — "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me' Round." I'd never heard it or hummed it that way before. But it just started to catch on, and the people began to pick it up. It started to swell, the humming.
Then we began singing the words. We sang, "Ain't gonna let George Wallace turn me 'round." And, "Ain't gonna let Jim Clark turn me 'round." Ain't gonna let no state trooper turn me 'round. Ain't gonna let no horses. ..ain't gonna let no tear gas — ain't gonna let nobody turn me 'round." Nobody!
And everybody's singing now, and some of them are clapping their hands, and they're still crying, but it's a different kind of crying. It's the kind of crying that's got spirit, not the weeping they had been doing. And me and Rachel are crying and singing and it just gets louder and louder. I know the state troopers outside the church heard it. Everybody heard it. Because more people were coming in then, leaving their apartments and coming to the church — because something was happening.
We was singing and telling the world that we hadn't been whipped ... I think we all realized it at the same time, that we had won something that day, because people were standing up and singing like I'd never heard them before. ... When I first went into that church that evening those people sitting there were beaten — I mean their spirit, their will was beaten. But when that singing started, we grew stronger. Each one of us said to ourselves that we could go back out there and face the tear gas, face the horses, face whatever Jim Clark could throw at us (March 6-12).
SELMA: Unknown to the battered freedom fighters gathered in Brown Chapel, there is a political tsunami racing outward from Selma Alabama. Print and radio reporters jam the lines as they file their stories by phone. TV crews evade the trooper's highway blockade and rush their film to Montgomery where chartered planes fly it to New York for processing.
…
ATLANTA: Throughout the late afternoon, urgent phone conversations are held between Movement leaders in Selma and Dr. King and his executive staff in Atlanta. After more than 4,000 arrests, the brutal attack in Marion, police murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson, and now a massive assault stretching from the Edmund Pettus bridge into the heart of Selma's Black community, there can be no doubt that Governor Wallace and Sheriff Clark are determined to suppress the voting rights movement with savage police violence. That cannot be allowed.
Dr. King decides. They have to defy Wallace and Clark by marching again. But not alone. For the first time ever, he mobilizes all of SCLC's resources to issue a nationwide call for people of conscience to stand with local Blacks as they nonviolently confront troopers, deputies, and possemen. In previous years, small groups of northerners had been asked to support protests in places like Birmingham and St. Augustine, but never before has King made a general plea for thousands of people to place their bodies on the line against police violence. As night falls, hundreds of telegrams are being dispatched from Atlanta, reading in part:
The people of Selma will struggle on for the soul of the nation, but it is fitting that all Americans help to bear the burden. I call therefore, on clergy of all faiths, representatives of every part of the country, to join me in Selma for a minister’s march to Montgomery on Tuesday morning, March ninth.
…
Tuesday is chosen to give northern supporters time to reach Selma, and also time for SCLC attorneys to file a motion in federal court on Monday morning to prevent the state of Alabama from blocking the march. Unlike the Dallas County voter-registration cases which had to be filed in the Mobile district court of Judge Thomas, this motion will go before federal Judge Frank Johnson in Montgomery for the Middle District of Alabama. Judge Johnson is considered a "southern liberal," and SCLC leaders are confidant that he will grant their motion to allow a march from Selma to Montgomery. In the past, Johnson has ruled against bus segregation during both the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Freedom Rides, and he has supported Black voting rights in a number of cases. He has no love for Wallace — who once referred to him as a "carpetbagging, scalawagging, integrating liar" — and even less for the violent racists who bombed his mother's home in the mistaken belief that he lived there. U.S. Marshals now guard his home around the clock.
When word of the brutal attack arrives from Selma, members of the SNCC Executive Committee are meeting in Atlanta. … Bypassing SNCC's normal consensus-style decision making process, Jim Forman issues a mobilization call for all SNCC members to converge on Selma, resume the march, and confront the cops and troopers. He charters a plane to fly himself and other SNCC leaders from Atlanta to Selma.
SNCC veteran and Selma organizer Prathia Hall recalls:
On Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, I was at the Atlanta SNCC office when a call came from ... Selma. Over the phone we could hear screams of people who were being attacked. SNCC immediately chartered a plane so that people could go to Selma right away. As the group was ready to leave, Judy Richardson said, "Wait a minute, there are no women in this group. Where's Prathia?" And so I went.
It was a very traumatic time for me. When we got there we saw what had happened. It was a bloody mess; people's heads had been beaten; they'd been gassed. Of course we held a rally. At the meeting people were angry; they, too, had been traumatized. One man stood up and said, "I was out on the bridge today because I thought it was right. But while I was on the bridge, Jim Clark came to my house and tear-gassed my eighty-year-old mother, and next time he comes to my house, I'm going to be ready." Everybody understood what that meant. People had lived their lives basically sleeping with guns beside their beds — that was just a part of the culture. These were people who were struggling to be nonviolent, who in their hearts and spirits were not a violent people, but they also had notions of self-defense."
JACKSON: SNCC's large Mississippi staff is holding a state wide meeting in Jackson when word of Selma and Forman's mobilization call reaches them. By evening, carloads of SNCC veterans are rushing east on Highway 80 at dangerously high speeds.
...
NATION: Across the country, Freedom Movement activists respond. Some begin mobilizing support demonstrations at federal buildings in their home communities. Others head for Alabama. Linda Dehnad, of the New York SNCC office, recalls:
I was on the [Friends of SNCC] steering committee in New York. I worked with students. My house on Riverside Drive & 90th Street [was] the place [for SNCC folk] to stay when they were in New York. So my house always had SNCC people in it. On Bloody Sunday my dining room was filled with people. We were watching TV. We just turned on the news. So we're watching the news and somebody said, "Oh my God. That's John." Within 10 minutes, my house was empty. They grabbed their stuff and they went.
The Sunday night movie on ABC is the network premier of Judgment at Nuremburg, a major TV event with an estimated audience of 48 million. Correspondent Frank Reynolds interrupts the program with news from Selma followed by 15 minutes of Bloody Sunday film. Some viewers are at first confused, assuming the images are of Nazi atrocities. CBS and NBC also provide dramatic coverage — as do the Monday morning newspapers (Sunday 1-8).
Nearly 50 million Americans who had tuned into the film’s long-awaited television premier couldn’t escape the historical echoes of Nazi storm troopers in the scenes of the rampaging state troopers. “The juxtaposition struck like psychological lightning in American homes,” wrote Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff in “The Race Beat.”
The connection wasn’t lost in Selma, either. When his store was finally empty of customers, one local shopkeeper confided to Washington Star reporter Haynes Johnson about the city’s institutional racism, “Everybody knows it’s going on, but they try to pretend they don’t see it. I saw ‘Judgment at Nuremberg’ on the Late Show the other night and I thought it fits right in; it’s just like Selma” (Remembering 6).
For many Americans who have never before marched, never before protested, Bloody Sunday is the tipping point that moves them into action. Not Bloody Sunday alone, of course, but the cumulative effect of all that has gone before. Students, clergy, housewives, and men and women from all walks of life, both Black and white, determine to take a stand. Some hear of and respond to King's call, others act spontaneously. Some hit the road for Selma, some protest locally, some demand immediate action from their U.S. senators and representatives (Sunday 9).
Works cited:
Klein, Christopher. “Remembering Selma’s ‘Bloody Sunday’.” History. Web. https://www.history.com/news/selmas-b...
“March 7, ‘Bloody Sunday.’” The March to Montgomery (Mar). Civil Rights Movement History 1965: Selma & the March to Montgomery. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis65.h...
Oates, Stephen B. “The Week the World Watched Selma.” American Heritage, June/July 1982, Volume 33, Issue 4. Web. https://www.americanheritage.com/week...
“Sunday, March 7.” The March to Montgomery (Mar). Civil Rights Movement History 1965: Selma & the March to Montgomery. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis65.h...
“Tension Escalates.” Selma Voting Rights Campaign (Jan-Mar). Civil Rights Movement History 1965: Selma & the March to Montgomery. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis65.h...
SELMA: On Friday the 5th, Hosea Williams asks the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) for doctors and nurses in case of violence. Led by Dr. Al Moldovan, six MCHR doctors and three nurses arrive in Selma on Saturday. The march is scheduled to leave Selma on Sunday, March 7th.
Anticipating that their march will not be allowed out of Selma, SCLC leaders make few logistic preparations for a 50-mile trek to Montgomery over 4 or 5 days. They assume everyone will be arrested for violating Wallace's edict. The plan is to kneel and pray when ordered to turn around or disperse. By refilling the jails, they will maintain pressure on Washington and the federal courts. Though he [Martin Luther King] had previously said he would lead the march, SCLC leaders convince him to remain in Atlanta — he is more valuable out of jail speaking and mobilizing support than sitting in a cell. It's a decision that infuriates SNCC field workers in Selma who condemn it as a betrayal of the local marchers (though they themselves are still refusing to participate in the march) (Tension 9).
Here is a different accounting of King’s absence.
On Saturday, March 6, King was back in Atlanta, where he decided to postpone the march until the following Monday. On a conference phone call with his aides in Selma, he explained that for two straight Sabbaths he had neglected his congregation—he was co-pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church—and that he really needed to preach there the next day. He would return to Selma on Monday to lead the march. All his staff agreed to the postponement except Hosea Williams, a rambunctious Army veteran with a flair for grass roots organizing. “Hosea,” King warned, “you need to pray. You’re not with me. You need to get with me.”
On Sunday morning, though, King’s aides reported that more than five hundred pilgrims were gathered at Brown Chapel and that Williams wanted permission to march that day. In his church office King thought it over and relayed word to Brown Chapel that his people could start without him. Since the march had been prohibited, he was certain that they would get arrested at the bridge. He would simply join them in jail. He expected no mayhem on Highway 80, since even the conservative Alabama press had excoriated Lingo’s troopers for their savagery in Marion (Oates 20).
SELMA: Sunday, March 7, dawns cold and raw. Tension grips the city. The air is pregnant with potential violence. Carloads of white thugs prowl the streets looking for trouble. Just over the Edmund Pettus bridge on the road to Montgomery, a swarm of state troopers, sheriff's deputies and mounted possemen, wait impatiently. They are itching for action. John Carter Lewis, a Black dishwasher, is stopped on his way home from work. He's guilty of being Black in the wrong place. Two troopers attack him, striking him with their clubs, breaking his arm and bloodying his head.
After Sunday services, some 400 marchers gather at Brown Chapel. Some are still in their Sunday suits and dresses; others carry knapsacks and rolled up blankets tied with rough twine. Their mood is somber but determined. There is little of the spirited singing that buoyed previous protests.
John Lewis recalled: We expected a confrontation. We knew that Sheriff Clark had issued yet another call the evening before for even more deputies. Mass arrests would probably be made. There might be injuries. Most likely, we would be stopped at the edge of the city limits, arrested and maybe roughed up a little bit. We did not expect anything worse than that.
The MCHR medical team sets up a first aid station at Brown Chapel — a table, a mattress, and some basic medical supplies.
Charles Bonner, a Selma student leader, remembered: Even though we had been demonstrating for two years now, we had the uneasiness that this was going to be a different day — uneasiness is to put it mildly, if not euphemistically, because frankly it was a fear, it was a terror that was going through us all. We were scared, because we didn't know what was going to happen.
With horns blaring, a caravan of cars filled with 200 marchers from Perry County rolls in and unloads. Off to the side, SCLC divides its field workers into two groups, those who will march and presumably end up in jail, and those who will stay behind to mobilize a follow-on protest. James Bevel, Andrew Young, and Hosea Williams flip coins to decide who will lead the march in King's absence. Hosea is the odd man out.
It is mid-afternoon when the 600 or so marchers line up two-by-two and head for the bridge. Leading the line are Hosea Williams and John Lewis, behind them are SCLC leader Albert Turner of Marion and Bob Mants of SNCC. (It is SNCC policy that no one is allowed to go into danger alone, so he volunteers to accompany John despite SNCC's opposition to the march.) A few rows behind them are two of Selma's indomitable leaders, Amelia Boynton and Marie Foster. A handful of white civil rights workers and Movement supporters are mixed in among the Black students, teachers, maids, laborers, and farmers who make up most of the marchers. Behind them is a flatbed truck with some rented portable toilets and a couple of ambulances staffed by MCHR medics. (All but one of the ambulances are actually hearses owned by Black funeral parlors.)
Police roadblocks have closed the bridge to vehicles. The MCHR ambulances are blocked. Gangs of possemen on foot lurk nearby. The marchers remain on the sidewalk as they start up the bridge rise. When the leaders reach the crest, they see what awaits on the other side. State trooper cars, their lights flashing, are parked across the highway. A phalanx of more than 200 troopers and sheriff's deputies are lined up two and three deep to bar the march. To one side is a band of possemen in their khaki uniforms and construction helmets. More than a dozen of them are mounted on horses and they carry long leather bullwhips. White thugs armed with bats and pipes and waving Confederate battle flags crowd the burger-joint parking lot.
As the marchers start down the bridge slope toward the waiting cops, Hosea Williams looks over the rail at the cold, choppy waters of the Alabama River 100 feet below. "Can you swim," he asks John Lewis. "No." "Neither can I, but we might have to."
The media is confined off to the side where their view is limited. With their usual clueless certainty, TV reporters are telling viewers that the "militant" SNCC has "forced" this dangerous march on an "unwilling" Dr. King.
Charles Bonner: We kept stepping two by two, one foot in front of the other one, marching resolutely into hell, because it was so clear that we were going to be beaten. I mean, these men were just so prepared, they were not going to let their readiness go to waste by not beating us. I mean, when you look back on it, it was very clear.
When they come down off the bridge, the marchers cross over the Selma city line into the county jurisdiction of Sheriff Clark. The troopers and deputies begin donning their gas masks. The marchers stride forward on the shoulder of US-80, known in Alabama as the Jefferson Davis Highway. The front of the line is about 100 feet from the bridge when Major Cloud of the state troopers orders Williams and Lewis to halt and turn around (March 1-6).
“It would be detrimental to your safety to continue this march,” Major John Cloud called out from his bullhorn. “This is an unlawful assembly. You have to disperse, you are ordered to disperse. Go home or go to your church. This march will not continue.”
“Mr. Major,” replied Williams, “I would like to have a word, can we have a word?”
“I’ve got nothing further to say to you,” Cloud answered (Remembering 5).
As planned, the leaders motion for everyone to kneel in prayer.
Bonner: "I was probably about 10 to 15 rows back from John Lewis. ... I saw John Lewis ... kneel down with Hosea Williams, and of course we sat, like these waves you seen in the stadiums, as they knelt all the demonstrators behind fell in line and I knelt as well.
"Troopers Advance!" shouts the Major. A wave of cops smashes into the people at the front of the line.
Charles Fager: From between nearby buildings a line of horses emerged at the gallop, their riders wearing the possemen's irregular uniform and armed with bullwhips, ropes, and lengths of rubber tubing wrapped with barbed wire. They rode into the melee with wild rebel yells, while behind them the cheers of the spectators grew even louder. "Get those Goddamned niggers!" came Jim Clark's voice. "And get those Goddamned white niggers!"
John Lewis: The troopers and possemen swept forward as one, like a human wave, a blur of blue shirts and billy clubs and bullwhips. We had no chance to turn and retreat. There were six hundred people behind us, bridge railings to either side and the river below. ... The first of the troopers came over me, a large husky man. Without a word he swung his club against the left side of my head. I didn't feel any pain, just the thud of the blow, and my legs giving way. ... And then the same trooper hit me again. And everything started to spin. I heard something that sounded like gunshots. And then a cloud of smoke rose all around us. Tear gas. ... I began choking, coughing. I couldn't get air into my lungs. I felt as if I was taking my last breath.
Amelia Boynton is viciously clubbed to the ground and tear gas is shot directly into her face as she collapses into unconsciousness. Hosea Williams scoops up little Sheyann Webb and carries her to safety through the tear gas and charging horses.
Sheyann Webb: He held on until we were off the bridge and down on Broad Street and he let me go. I didn't stop running until I got home. ... I was maybe a little hysterical because I kept repeating over and over, "I can't stop shaking Momma, I can't stop shaking." ... My daddy was like I'd never seen him before. He had a shotgun and he yelled, "By God, if they want it this way, I'll give it to them!" And he started out the door. Momma jumped up and got in front of him. ... Finally he put the gun aside and sat down. I remember just laying there on the couch, crying and feeling so disgusted. They had beaten us like we were slaves.
Behind the possemen come the white thugs, beating down anyone who manages to stumble out of the gas cloud. They assault the reporters and break their cameras. One of the "reporters" is actually an FBI agent, and the three men who attack him are later arrested for assault on a federal agent. They are the only whites ever arrested for violence on "Bloody Sunday." They are never brought to trial.
The troopers, deputies, possemen, and thugs pursue the retreating marchers over the bridge and through the city streets, beating and assaulting Blacks wherever they find them — whether they're demonstrators or not. Dr. Moldovan and nurses Virginia Wells and Linda Dugan plunge into the swirling tumult. They lift unconscious and crippled victims into their ambulance and race back to the aid station at Brown Chapel, which is quickly swamped with the injured and wounded. By the end of the day, 100 of the 600 marchers require medical attention for fractured skulls, broken teeth and limbs, gas poisoning, and whip lashes.
The troopers and possemen swarm into the Carver Projects beating whomever they catch and charging their horses up the steps of Brown Chapel to attack those trying to seek sanctuary in the church. Another band of possemen force their way into First Baptist and throw a teenage boy through a stained glass window. Sheriff Clark fires tear gas into homes to drive people outside where they can be attacked. [Wilson] Baker tries to stop the carnage, but Clark shouts in his face, "I've already waited a month too damn long!"
Sheyann Webb's constant companion, Rachel West, 8 years old, recalls:
I saw the horsemen ... riding at a gallop, coming around a house up the way, and that's when I turned and ran. I heard the horses' hooves and I turned and saw the riders hitting at the people and they were coming fast toward me. I stopped and got up against the wall of one of the apartment buildings and pressed myself against it as hard as I could. Two horsemen went by and I knew if I didn't move I would be trapped there. I saw the people crying [from the gas] as they went by and holding their eyes and some had their arms up over their heads.
I took off running. ... I was out in the open then, right in the middle of the street and heading for the yard toward our house, and I heard these other horsemen coming and I knew they were going to catch me. I just knew they were going to either trample me or hit me with a club or whip. My legs didn't seem to be moving — it was like in a bad dream when you are chased by something and can't run. Well, just as I got to the yard this white [SNCC worker] named Frank Soracco came by me and he was moving fast. And I must have been crying out, because he stopped and just swept me up and carried me under the armpits and kept moving.
Some Blacks begin to retaliate with thrown rocks and bottles, but Movement leaders and civil rights workers move among them, urging nonviolent discipline. The cops are raging with mob fury, all control abandoned to racist hate. Many are now carrying loaded rifles and shotguns at the ready. The activists know that if a single white officer is injured by a tossed brick there'll be a blood-bath of indiscriminate gunfire.
Eventually, the frenzy of cop violence subsides and the forces of "law and order" occupy the Carver Project and Selma's Black commercial district, forcing all Blacks inside and off the street. They allow the MCHR ambulances to ferry the most seriously wounded — more than 90 — to Good Samaritan Hospital and Burwell Infirmary (a Black old-age home).
Among those hospitalized is John Lewis with a skull fracture and concussion. Before he allows himself to be taken to hospital, he tells the battered and bruised people gathered in Brown Chapel, "I don't known how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam. I don't see how he can send troops to the Congo. I don't see how he can send troops to Africa, and he can't send troops to Selma, Alabama. Next time we march, we may have to keep going when we get to Montgomery. We have to go to Washington." His words are reported in the New York Times and the Johnson administration responds by announcing that they will send FBI agents to Selma to, "... investigate whether unnecessary force was used by law officers and others."
As the afternoon wanes and evening falls, Brown Chapel remains crowded with marchers and supporters huddling together for mutual support. Acrid tear gas fumes still emanate from clothes and skin. Eyes weep and breathing is labored. There is anger and rage, of course, but also deep humiliation at being whipped and beaten and driven. Outside, the troopers and deputies strut like conquering heroes. Inside, people are dispirited and dejected. They have endured so much, violence, jail, economic retaliation, and yet despite all, practically no one has been registered to vote.
Sheyann Webb recalls:
When I had first gotten to the church ... my eyes were still swollen and burning from the tear gas. But what I saw there made me cry again. I'll never forget the faces of those people. I'd never seen such looks before. I remember standing and looking at them a long time before sitting down. They weren't afraid, because they were too beaten to know any more fear. It was as though nobody cared to even try to win anything anymore, like we were slaves after all and had been put in our place by a good beating.
I sat with Rachel up toward the front. ... we were just sitting there crying, listening to the others cry; some were even moaning and wailing. It was an awful thing. It was like we were at our own funeral. But then later in the night, maybe nine-thirty or ten, I don't know for sure, all of a sudden somebody there started humming. I think they were moaning and it just went into the humming of a freedom song. It was real low, but some of us children began humming along, slow and soft. At first I didn't even know what it was, what song, I mean. It was like a funeral sound, a dirge. Then I recognized it — "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me' Round." I'd never heard it or hummed it that way before. But it just started to catch on, and the people began to pick it up. It started to swell, the humming.
Then we began singing the words. We sang, "Ain't gonna let George Wallace turn me 'round." And, "Ain't gonna let Jim Clark turn me 'round." Ain't gonna let no state trooper turn me 'round. Ain't gonna let no horses. ..ain't gonna let no tear gas — ain't gonna let nobody turn me 'round." Nobody!
And everybody's singing now, and some of them are clapping their hands, and they're still crying, but it's a different kind of crying. It's the kind of crying that's got spirit, not the weeping they had been doing. And me and Rachel are crying and singing and it just gets louder and louder. I know the state troopers outside the church heard it. Everybody heard it. Because more people were coming in then, leaving their apartments and coming to the church — because something was happening.
We was singing and telling the world that we hadn't been whipped ... I think we all realized it at the same time, that we had won something that day, because people were standing up and singing like I'd never heard them before. ... When I first went into that church that evening those people sitting there were beaten — I mean their spirit, their will was beaten. But when that singing started, we grew stronger. Each one of us said to ourselves that we could go back out there and face the tear gas, face the horses, face whatever Jim Clark could throw at us (March 6-12).
SELMA: Unknown to the battered freedom fighters gathered in Brown Chapel, there is a political tsunami racing outward from Selma Alabama. Print and radio reporters jam the lines as they file their stories by phone. TV crews evade the trooper's highway blockade and rush their film to Montgomery where chartered planes fly it to New York for processing.
…
ATLANTA: Throughout the late afternoon, urgent phone conversations are held between Movement leaders in Selma and Dr. King and his executive staff in Atlanta. After more than 4,000 arrests, the brutal attack in Marion, police murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson, and now a massive assault stretching from the Edmund Pettus bridge into the heart of Selma's Black community, there can be no doubt that Governor Wallace and Sheriff Clark are determined to suppress the voting rights movement with savage police violence. That cannot be allowed.
Dr. King decides. They have to defy Wallace and Clark by marching again. But not alone. For the first time ever, he mobilizes all of SCLC's resources to issue a nationwide call for people of conscience to stand with local Blacks as they nonviolently confront troopers, deputies, and possemen. In previous years, small groups of northerners had been asked to support protests in places like Birmingham and St. Augustine, but never before has King made a general plea for thousands of people to place their bodies on the line against police violence. As night falls, hundreds of telegrams are being dispatched from Atlanta, reading in part:
The people of Selma will struggle on for the soul of the nation, but it is fitting that all Americans help to bear the burden. I call therefore, on clergy of all faiths, representatives of every part of the country, to join me in Selma for a minister’s march to Montgomery on Tuesday morning, March ninth.
…
Tuesday is chosen to give northern supporters time to reach Selma, and also time for SCLC attorneys to file a motion in federal court on Monday morning to prevent the state of Alabama from blocking the march. Unlike the Dallas County voter-registration cases which had to be filed in the Mobile district court of Judge Thomas, this motion will go before federal Judge Frank Johnson in Montgomery for the Middle District of Alabama. Judge Johnson is considered a "southern liberal," and SCLC leaders are confidant that he will grant their motion to allow a march from Selma to Montgomery. In the past, Johnson has ruled against bus segregation during both the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Freedom Rides, and he has supported Black voting rights in a number of cases. He has no love for Wallace — who once referred to him as a "carpetbagging, scalawagging, integrating liar" — and even less for the violent racists who bombed his mother's home in the mistaken belief that he lived there. U.S. Marshals now guard his home around the clock.
When word of the brutal attack arrives from Selma, members of the SNCC Executive Committee are meeting in Atlanta. … Bypassing SNCC's normal consensus-style decision making process, Jim Forman issues a mobilization call for all SNCC members to converge on Selma, resume the march, and confront the cops and troopers. He charters a plane to fly himself and other SNCC leaders from Atlanta to Selma.
SNCC veteran and Selma organizer Prathia Hall recalls:
On Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, I was at the Atlanta SNCC office when a call came from ... Selma. Over the phone we could hear screams of people who were being attacked. SNCC immediately chartered a plane so that people could go to Selma right away. As the group was ready to leave, Judy Richardson said, "Wait a minute, there are no women in this group. Where's Prathia?" And so I went.
It was a very traumatic time for me. When we got there we saw what had happened. It was a bloody mess; people's heads had been beaten; they'd been gassed. Of course we held a rally. At the meeting people were angry; they, too, had been traumatized. One man stood up and said, "I was out on the bridge today because I thought it was right. But while I was on the bridge, Jim Clark came to my house and tear-gassed my eighty-year-old mother, and next time he comes to my house, I'm going to be ready." Everybody understood what that meant. People had lived their lives basically sleeping with guns beside their beds — that was just a part of the culture. These were people who were struggling to be nonviolent, who in their hearts and spirits were not a violent people, but they also had notions of self-defense."
JACKSON: SNCC's large Mississippi staff is holding a state wide meeting in Jackson when word of Selma and Forman's mobilization call reaches them. By evening, carloads of SNCC veterans are rushing east on Highway 80 at dangerously high speeds.
...
NATION: Across the country, Freedom Movement activists respond. Some begin mobilizing support demonstrations at federal buildings in their home communities. Others head for Alabama. Linda Dehnad, of the New York SNCC office, recalls:
I was on the [Friends of SNCC] steering committee in New York. I worked with students. My house on Riverside Drive & 90th Street [was] the place [for SNCC folk] to stay when they were in New York. So my house always had SNCC people in it. On Bloody Sunday my dining room was filled with people. We were watching TV. We just turned on the news. So we're watching the news and somebody said, "Oh my God. That's John." Within 10 minutes, my house was empty. They grabbed their stuff and they went.
The Sunday night movie on ABC is the network premier of Judgment at Nuremburg, a major TV event with an estimated audience of 48 million. Correspondent Frank Reynolds interrupts the program with news from Selma followed by 15 minutes of Bloody Sunday film. Some viewers are at first confused, assuming the images are of Nazi atrocities. CBS and NBC also provide dramatic coverage — as do the Monday morning newspapers (Sunday 1-8).
Nearly 50 million Americans who had tuned into the film’s long-awaited television premier couldn’t escape the historical echoes of Nazi storm troopers in the scenes of the rampaging state troopers. “The juxtaposition struck like psychological lightning in American homes,” wrote Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff in “The Race Beat.”
The connection wasn’t lost in Selma, either. When his store was finally empty of customers, one local shopkeeper confided to Washington Star reporter Haynes Johnson about the city’s institutional racism, “Everybody knows it’s going on, but they try to pretend they don’t see it. I saw ‘Judgment at Nuremberg’ on the Late Show the other night and I thought it fits right in; it’s just like Selma” (Remembering 6).
For many Americans who have never before marched, never before protested, Bloody Sunday is the tipping point that moves them into action. Not Bloody Sunday alone, of course, but the cumulative effect of all that has gone before. Students, clergy, housewives, and men and women from all walks of life, both Black and white, determine to take a stand. Some hear of and respond to King's call, others act spontaneously. Some hit the road for Selma, some protest locally, some demand immediate action from their U.S. senators and representatives (Sunday 9).
Works cited:
Klein, Christopher. “Remembering Selma’s ‘Bloody Sunday’.” History. Web. https://www.history.com/news/selmas-b...
“March 7, ‘Bloody Sunday.’” The March to Montgomery (Mar). Civil Rights Movement History 1965: Selma & the March to Montgomery. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis65.h...
Oates, Stephen B. “The Week the World Watched Selma.” American Heritage, June/July 1982, Volume 33, Issue 4. Web. https://www.americanheritage.com/week...
“Sunday, March 7.” The March to Montgomery (Mar). Civil Rights Movement History 1965: Selma & the March to Montgomery. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis65.h...
“Tension Escalates.” Selma Voting Rights Campaign (Jan-Mar). Civil Rights Movement History 1965: Selma & the March to Montgomery. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis65.h...
Civil Rights Events -- Meredith March against Fear -- Canton, Return to Philadelphia
Access this map to follow the direction of the Meredith March. https://www.crmvet.org/docs/mmm_map.htm
On Thursday the 23rd, the Meredith marchers leave Benton and head east on Route 16 for the long 20 mile slog to Canton, the seat of Madison County. Still seething over the brutality in Philadelphia, as they trek across Yazoo County they share a fierce determination to defy violent racists by refusing to back down one inch when threatened by the forces of white-supremacy.
Madison County is 70% Afro-American. Like the Delta counties, most of its Black population are poor laborers, croppers, maids and menials who eke out an existence in grinding poverty. Whites make up less than a third of the population, but through denial of Black voting rights and organizations like the White Citizens Council they still maintain complete control of the political apparatus and they use their white power to keep wages low and working conditions abysmal. Almost 40% of the land is owned by Blacks, but rampant discrimination by the Department of Agriculture which denies them the crucial cotton allotments and federal subsidies that enrich white landowners, and other forms of economic domination by whites has kept Afro-American farmers mired in systemic poverty.
Canton, population 10,000, is the seat of Madison County. Some 60% of its inhabitants are Black and for years both town and county have been centers of CORE organizing. Though it's a racist stronghold, local leaders like C.O. Chinn, Annie Devine, and James McRee, aided by CORE field secretaries like George Raymond, Anne Moody, and Flukie Suarez have built a solid base of Freedom Movement support. When CORE began organizing there in 1963, almost 97% of whites were registered to vote but only 121 Afro-Americans were on the voting roles. Now, significantly, Black voters outnumber white voters in Madison County by 6000 to 5000. In addition to voter registration, the Madison County Movement has fought for school desegregation, mounted an effective economic boycott against white-owned stores, defended the rights of welfare recipients, and established an early childhood education center (Canton 1).
The movement in Madison County relied on the leadership of several key persons. C. O. Chinn, a local business owner known for his fearlessness, provided his store as a space for meetings and protected other activists from violent attacks. George Raymond, a former freedom rider from New Orleans, provided much of the strategy for the Canton movement, serving as the only staff member when the first CORE office opened in the county in 1963. Anne Moody, a Tougaloo College graduate later known for her memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi, spent Freedom Summer 1964 in Canton. Annie Devine, a well-respected teacher and insurance saleswoman who was intimately familiar with the workings of both Canton’s black and white communities, provided essential leadership and later served as a member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention (Walton 3).
By afternoon, hundreds of Madison County Afro-Americans, many of them now registered voters, are joining the march in the sweltering heat as it crosses over the Big Black River and approaches the outskirts of Canton. It's just two days past the summer solstice, the sun rises at 6am and doesn't set until after 8pm, and it beats down on the weary marchers for 14 solid hours.
McNeal Elementary School for Negroes is in the heart of Canton's Black community. Annie Devine asks the school board for permission to set up camp on its playground. School is out of session for the summer and at first the board makes no objection. Then they equivocate. Then they say the field is only for "school-sponsored events."
Despite the board's rejection, Local leader C.O. Chinn and Hosea Williams of SCLC proclaim that since Jim Crow schools are paid for by Afro-American taxes all they need is permission from the surrounding Black community which they clearly have. "This is our ground," says Chinn. "We're going to put up the tents or else. We're tired of being pushed around by white folks."
The cops arrest Chinn, Williams, George Greene of SNCC, three white and five Black marchers — one of whom is beaten, kicked, and called "nigger boy" by the sheriff.
Late in the afternoon, a long line of singing marchers parades through town to the courthouse where a big crowd of 1500 local Afro-Americans greet them. They triumphantly surge on to the lawn — long forbidden to Black feet — for a rally. Stokely tells them, "They said we couldn't pitch our tents on our Black school. Well, we're going to do it now!"
As they proceed through the Afro-American community towards McNeal School, more and more Afro-Americans join them. The dirt school yard is only partially fenced and no police block the way as more than 3500 people simply walk on to the grounds like a flowing river. But off to one side lurk a large posse of lawmen from different jurisdictions in their various uniforms. They're all equipped with helmets and those who aren't carrying rifles and shotguns grip long billy clubs in their gloved hands.
By now it's 7:30, a half-hour before sunset. A big U-Haul truck arrives to drop off the tents and people are asked to surround it so the tents can't be seized by the cops. A caravan of Highway Patrol cars pull up in a cloud of dust to unload a company of more than 75 Troopers in full riot gear. They assemble in battle formation upwind of where the tents are being unloaded and begin doning their black gas masks.
March leaders climb onto the top of the truck and speak through a bullhorn. When King speaks it's clear that he assumes the police intend to arrest people for trespass as had happened to Chinn, Williams and the others earlier that day. "We're gonna stick together. If necessary, we are willing to fill up all the jails in Mississippi. And I don't believe they have enough jails to hold all the people!"
"The time for anybody running has come to an end!" shouts Stokely from atop the truck. "You tell them white folk in Mississippi that all the scared niggers are dead! You tell 'em they shot all the rabbits — they gonna deal with the men!"
Many of the local supporters cautiously retreat off the field, but 2,000 or more defiantly remain — as do all of the Meredith Marchers. "Pitch the tents!" chant militant activists circulating through the crowd around the truck. "Pitch the tents! Pitch the tents!"
SCLC’s Bruce Hartford narrated what followed.
Without any warning at all or order from the police to disperse there came the loud sounds of Pop! Pop! Pop! Burning, stinging gas was everywhere. A white cloud enveloped me, blinding me with tears. My lungs burned with searing pain. I couldn't breath. I thought I was going to die. Everyone was running, choking, gasping, fleeing in all directions, bumping into each other in the blinding miasma.
A gas canister fired from a shotgun hit a woman near me and exploded — she screamed in agony but I couldn't see where she was. Some kind of hideous monster with a long black snout — a cop in a gas mask, I realized — abruptly materialized out of the fumes and smashed the butt of his rifle into my shoulder, knocking me to the ground. Someone tripped over me before I managed to get up and continue trying to escape. Every gasping breath was agony. My chest burned, my eyes gushed tears.
More cops appeared and disappeared in the acrid, stinking smoke, flailing with their clubs at anyone and everyone. I could hear the sickening thuds of wood striking flesh, and I must have been hit several more times because the next day I had long, dark, aching bruises on my back and side. At the time, though, I didn't feel the blows at all. An adrenaline rush can often block out pain — for a short while."
Both regular CS tear gas and the more powerful military-grade CN war gas are fired into the throng. Normally, police use tear gas to herd protesters out of an area, but the Troopers blanket the entire field leaving no avenue for escape. Crowd control is not their objective — their purpose is to punish the Meredith March for challenging the southern way of life and defying white-supremacy.
Some of the marchers try to take shelter against the school building's brick wall until a local cop lobs three gas canisters right into them. So-called lawmen knock down the tent poles and then toss tear gas bombs under the collapsed canvas to gas those now trapped beneath. "You niggers want your freedom — well, here's your freedom," a cop yells at Odessa Warwick, a mother of eleven as he kicks her, fracturing her spine.
Marchers are overcome by the fumes, passing out where they fall. Heads are bloodied and bones broken by rifle butts and billy clubs. A young boy coughs up blood, a four year old child fights to breath. Trying to aid the victims, MCHR medical worker Charles Meyer is clubbed down and kicked into a ditch. A woman is dragged down by her long blond hair. One-legged Jim Leatherer is brutally beaten, Troopers continually kick a young Black man who is on the ground vomiting uncontrollably. Another trooper smashes a priest with his shotgun and a marcher cries out, "He's a man of God!" "I'll put him with his God," shouts the Trooper as he hits the priest again.
Stokely Carmichael:
I took a direct hit in the chest from a canister and was knocked to the ground. Semiconscious and unable to breathe; my eyes tearing. My ribs felt as though crushed. Gas in my lungs was always my weakness. ... Choking for breath, I could hear screams, shouts, and Dr. King calling on people to remain calm amid the sickening thud of blows. They were kicking and clubbing people lying on the ground to escape the gas. Men, women, children, it made no difference. Then they were gone, leaving us to tend the wounded. So obviously it had simply been a demonstration of naked brute force for its own sake (Canton 2-4).
Jo Freeman, a white volunteer:
“My whole body felt blistered; my scalp felt like every hair was being pulled out one by one, and my lungs as though I was inhaling molten steel” (Weisbrot 2).
By sundown, the school grounds are cleared of protesters except for those too injured or overcome by gas to move. In the Afro-American community around the periphery of the McNeal grounds protesters and bystanders are all suffering from the after-effects of chemical attack and in many cases injuries and wounds from rifle butts and billy clubs.
A small child convulses on the floor of his home across the street from the school. His frantic mother grabs him up and runs outside desperately searching for help. "Lady, give him to me!" shouts a marcher. "I just got back from Vietnam, and I know what to do for him." The ground is muddy from the garden hose people are using to wash out their eyes and rinse the burning reside from their skin. He washes out the boy's eyes and then grabs a handful of mud, coating the child's face with it.
The emergency aid resources of MCHR are overwhelmed. Many of its volunteers are among the injured and incapacitated. Dr. Poussaint rallies his team to set up an emergency triage point in the Holy Child Jesus Mission with the nuns doing what they can to ease suffering. He phones for help to Jackson just 30 minutes down the road. From there, funeral director Clarie Collins Harvey directs Afro-American owned hearses to Canton where they act as makeshift ambulances carrying the worst injured to a Jackson hospital willing to treat Black protesters. All through the night, MCHR workers and the nuns labor to treat the victims of a brutal police riot.
Poussaint would later tell an interviewer, "We were all enraged. There was just so much rage." Stokely has to be restrained by friends from a futile charge into the police line. Rev. Andrew Young of SCLC, normally a calming presence, later recalls that with gas burning his lungs and eyes he thought to himself, ""If I had a machine gun, I'd show those motherfuckers!" Yet he manages to subordinate his anger to strategic realities and talk down a SNCC militant who is urging people to assault the heavily-armed Troopers and set fire to their cars.
Boiling fury engulfs Canton's Afro-American community and the Meredith Marchers. Some Black residents grab their guns and have to be pulled back from suicidal retaliation. His eyes still burning with tears, Dr. King manages to assemble those march leaders who can be found for an emergency meeting at George Raymond's home just a block from McNeal. Soon march marshals and local leaders are out on the night-dark streets urging people to assemble at a nearby church where the Meredith Marchers can grab some food, the injured be directed to the MCHR aid station, and local folk rally in the adjacent Catholic Mission's basketball court.
Bruce Hartford, SCLC, explained the marchers’ counter-response.
We would march that night through Canton's Afro-American neighborhoods to express our defiance and provide a nonviolent channel for the community's rage. ... Along with the other SCLC staff, I was given a colored armband and assigned to act as a march marshal, keeping people moving, defusing trouble, and maintaining nonviolence.
… Five or six hundred of us marched out of the church onto the unpaved and unlit roads of Canton's Afro-American community. This wasn't an on-the-sidewalk or avoid-blocking-traffic march. Instead we filled the streets singing and calling bystanders to come join us. Block by block our numbers grew as people joined us, but in the dark it was impossible to estimate or count how many were marching.
Some of the ultra-militants and the most strident Black Power advocates called for people to go downtown and "get whitey," others shouted that we should challenge the cops who were still guarding the disputed schoolyard. Fortunately, they had little support. Marshals like me urged the marchers to hold together and maintain nonviolent discipline. Most of the marchers were local folk with a solid grasp of Canton's tactical realities and they heeded our call.
Seething with anger, for an hour or more we surged through the dark streets, defiantly singing our freedom songs and chanting "Black Power" and "Freedom Now!""
A year earlier, when Alabama Troopers savagely attacked voting rights marchers in Selma, the world, the media, and the national political establishment reacted with outrage and determination. But now in the new political context shaped by violent urban uprisings, the "white backlash," media-hyped hysteria over Black Power, and the Freedom Movement's efforts to address issues related to economic justice and northern-style segregation, the media response to Canton is sparse and ambivalent.
After Selma, President Johnson addressed the nation and pushed the Voting Rights Act through Congress. About Canton he says nothing. Nothing at all. He refuses to meet with a delegation of ministers who want federal protection for civil rights protesters in Mississippi. The Attorney General's response is tepid, he "regrets" the use of tear gas and adds, "I'm sorry it happened. It always makes the situation more difficult." He then assures the public that he is confident Mississippi authorities will protect the civil rights of Afro-Americans in their state (Canton 4-6).
After a few short hours of exhausted slumber on the hard floor of the Holy Child Jesus basketball court, the Meredith marchers awake bruised and battered the next morning, Friday the 24th. Their clothing is still impregnated with chemical residue of the gas attack and their eyes sting and tear. Local Afro-American women have been laboring since dawn in the church kitchen to provide the Meredith Marchers a breakfast of hot coffee, bacon, grits, and biscuits smothered in gravy. As they wolf it down the marchers huddle in organizational staff meetings to be briefed on the plan that march leaders working late into the night have agreed on.
The tactical situation is complex. …
To ensure maximum participation by local Blacks the [march’s culminating] rally [in Jackson] is scheduled for Sunday the 26th two days hence, and out-of-state supporters have made travel plans accordingly. So the rally date can't be changed to accommodate surprise events such as the violence in Philadelphia and the gas attack in Canton. Which means that a march contingent has to depart from Canton on this Friday to be sure of reaching Tougaloo on time.
After the mob violence in Philadelphia MS, Dr. King promised to return on this Friday for a second protest in Neshoba County. One that will express the anger and defiance of local Blacks and show that the Freedom Movement cannot be halted by mob violence. Movement supporters from both Mississippi and Alabama are already on the road and Black communities in Neshoba and Lauderdale counties are mobilizing. If King doesn't show up now it will appear he is surrendering to fear of white violence — which he will not do. So King and a sizable contingent of marchers from Canton have to drive east to join the Philadelphia march.
Local Afro-Americans and the Meredith Marchers in Canton, of course, are still enraged over the gas attack and savage beatings of the evening before. And just as white violence in Neshoba can't be allowed to deter the Movement neither can police repression be allowed to do so in Canton. Which means that in addition to marching south towards Jackson and protesting in Neshoba there has to be strong direct action this day on the streets of Canton.
Albert Turner of SCLC is chosen to lead a small contingent of Meredith Marchers south on Highway-51 towards Tougaloo, while a larger contingent fills the available cars to accompany Dr. King, Floyd McKissck, and Stokely Carmichael to Philadelphia and the largest group of marchers and local folk remain in Canton for a day of action.
In a telegram to LBJ sent immediately after the violent outbreak in Philadelphia, Dr. King cited the "Clear and absolute breakdown of law and order in Philadelphia." And in reference to the planned return march he added, "We therefore implore you to send the necessary federal protection to Philadelphia, Miss. to protect the lives and safety of the citizens seeking to exercise our constitutional rights."
After the Philadelphia violence, a delegation of clergymen asked for a meeting with LBJ to press for federal protection and a thousand Movement supporters rallied in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House. Johnson, however, is unwilling to forgive King's opposition to the Vietnam War. And with the Meredith March manifesto explicitly condemning federal civil rights failures, as a matter of practical politics he can't use the march to further his own legislative agenda. Nor does he want to be seen as in any way siding with "Black Power" militancy. So the clergymen were turned aside and the protesters outside ignored.
The President rejects King's plea for federal protection replying that, "Personnel of the Department of Justice will be present" (as they had been on the first occasion). And in willful denial of self-evident realities he goes on to tell King that, "Governor Paul Johnson has assured [us] that law and order will be maintained Friday in Philadelphia and throughout the march, and that all necessary protection can and will be provided."
The mob violence in Neshoba and the horrific police assault in Canton pleases and gratifies many white voters in the state, boosting Governor Johnson's public support. But behind the scenes the state's power-structure remains split between hard-line segregationists determined to restore the old Jim Crow order with club and gun and self-described "racial moderates" who want to bring northern investment and business opportunities into Mississippi.
Across the state, affluent white businessmen desire lucrative national franchise opportunities like Burger King, Holiday Inn, 7-11, and the like, but those chains now insist on full compliance with the Civil Rights Act because they know they face consumer boycotts in the North if they tolerate segregation in the South. Yet any business that tries to operate on a desegregated basis in Mississippi faces economic boycotts by the White Citizens Council and possible Klan violence. …
On the previous Philadelphia march, State Troopers had been conspicuous by their absence but on this day they are out in force. Many of them had been part of the brutal attack the evening before in Canton but now they have new orders from the governor to maintain law and order and prevent the kind of lynch-mob violence that damages the state's reputation.
A newspaper editorial and radio announcements by local white leaders urge whites to ignore the march and refrain from ugly violence "[even though] "we know it is hard to take a lot of the lies, insults, and actions of beatniks who are worked up to fever pitch by their leaders with sessions of 'prayer.'"
When the marchers reach the downtown area, the sidewalks bordering the paved streets of white-controlled Philadelphia are again lined with hostile, jeering whites, men and women held back by flimsy rope barriers strung up by law enforcement. Those on the sidewalk jeer, curse, and spit at the marchers while others lean out the second story windows shrieking hate. State Troopers, however, do hold the mob at bay. When the Black protesters reach the courthouse the mayor uses a bullhorn to warn surrounding whites against violence.
Local leader Rev. Clint Collier opens the rally with a prayer and a freedom sermon: "We have been dictated to long enough," he tells the demonstrators. From the rear of the jeering crowd of whites glass soda pop bottles are hurled at him. In his short address Stokely says: "The people gathered around us represent America in its truest form. We will start representing ourselves in our way, and we will do it in our way." True to his nature, Dr. King offers a positive message of hope: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice and "We're gonna win, because the Bible is right when it says, 'Ye shall reap what ye sow.'"
"Go to hell!" scream the mob of surrounding whites, "Nigger! You're a nigger! Wait till tonight, you black bastards, we'll find you then! We're gonna kill King! We're gonna kill King!" Their rage is palpable, yet the police presence holds violence in check.
As the marchers return to Independence Quarters a white man guns his engine and attempts to drive his car into the line — protesters manage to dodge out of the way at the last second. The Troopers then arrest him and his passenger. But in that instant of swirling action and confusion, Neshoba County lawmen draw their pistols and point them at the demonstrators rather than the vehicle trying to run them down.
…
Rather than wait to join the caravan of Meredith Marchers returning to Canton, a car with three white ministers from the North and a Black NAACP official from Memphis decide to leave the rally early. Alone.
Their route takes them across Leake County where in response to the Meredith March, the local KKK has just bombed the St. Joachim Catholic School for Negroes. They are now patrolling Route-16 for marchers traveling between Philadelphia and Canton and a car with an Afro-American and three whites in cleric collars is an obvious target. A pickup truck driven by Klansmen tries to run them off the highway but the freedom car dodges. The KKK truck then blocks the road ahead while another car driven by Klan tries to ram the integrated vehicle. Somehow they manage to escape, turn around, and flee back towards Philadelphia at high speed with the KKK in hot pursuit until they reach Independence Quarters where armed Blacks stand on guard (Return 1-4).
In Canton on Friday morning the local Afro-American community continues to seethe over the savage police riot of the previous evening. Crowds gather early at Asbury Methodist Church and the adjacent Holy Child Jesus Mission. Everyone is determined to take strong action — but there's no agreement over what that action should be.
Local Movement leaders call for renewing the 1964 boycott of downtown Canton's white-owned stores with the slogan, "Black Out for Black Power." And also a day of disciplined, nonviolent protest as a show of determination and defiance. The white merchants of Canton are particularly vulnerable to boycotts by their Afro-American customers because they're in direct competition with the larger, more numerous, and better-stocked stores in Jackson just 30 minutes down the road — which is one reason the previous boycott had hurt them so badly.
Soon local members of the Madison County Movement are downtown, handing out boycott flyers, picketing stores with boycott and Black Power signs, and tying up traffic by slowly crossing the street at a leisurely pace. A voter registration march to the courthouse is blocked by the cops. A second march is allowed to proceed, but only on the sidewalk, not in the streets. When they arrive at the courthouse they are told that the clerk is "out to lunch." Some 50 or so Black citizens then add themselves to the voting rolls by registering with the federal examiner under the Voting Rights Act (VRA).
Bruce Hartford recalled:
… more than 500 chanting and singing marchers were snaking through the streets of Canton. In the Black neighborhoods we walked two-by-two on the side of the dirt roads next to the drainage ditches and in the white neighborhoods on their well-kept sidewalks. Marching into white areas was a bold and defiant move, a decisive declaration that rejected the deferential subservience of the past and a gesture that risked spontaneous violence from enraged whites. ... I remember nervous rumors passing up and down the line — that a parked car we were about to pass concealed a dynamite bomb, that in the next block they had a pack of dogs waiting to attack us, that the old white woman scowling at us from her porch had a big pistol hidden under her apron as she rocked back and forth on her rocker and that she'd sworn to shoot anyone who stepped on her lawn.
None of the protests, however, approach McNeal Elementary which remains guarded by heavily armed Troopers who have now stationed rifle-equipped snipers on the roof and erected searchlights to pick out targets after nightfall. The local power structure and police forces remain adamantly opposed to Blacks using the school for any Movement purpose. Yet almost all of those boycotting, picketing and marching — local movement and Meredith Marchers both — are determined to return to the schoolyard and defy the cops by pitching a tent. Some are collecting donations to buy new tents, others are trying to sew together bedsheets for a symbolic, make-do tent. "Come hell or high water," Movement activists tell each other, "a tent's gonna go up tonight."
For both sides now, the right of Afro-Americans to use McNeal has become a make-or-break symbol. Even though Blacks are marching and picketing all over the streets of Canton, white politicians can't accept Afro-American use of a Colored school for a protest-purpose because doing so concedes the point that Black taxpayers have the same legal right to access public facilities for public politics that whites have enjoyed for generations. Moreover, having denied permission the previous day, allowing Afro-Americans to protest there now would be an obvious concession, a retreat of white power forced by growing Black power. Which in turn clearly implies that henceforth elected officials must take Afro-American concerns into account. In essence then, Afro-American use of McNeal has become a practical clash between the traditional dominance of white power and the Freedom Movement's demand for Black Power.
…
Living in Canton is Colonel Charles Snodgrass, the state-wide commanding officer of the Troopers — an appointed rather than elected position. He breaks the impasse by inviting Madison County Movement leaders to a meeting in his office, the first such official meeting between the Movement and white authorities ever held in Canton. He offers other camping sites, but George Raymond replies that after the savage brutality of his Troopers the Black community needs to see tents go up at McNeal.
Local, state, and national Movement leaders assemble for an emergency summit meeting in the sweltering, jam-packed living room of Afro-American store owner George Washington. …
The meeting is tense and contentious. Stokley and Chinn argue for pitching the tents regardless of consequences. But Devine, Goodloe, and King convince the group to accept an invitation arranged by Snodgrass for a Black delegation to meet for the first time ever with the Mayor and city attorney. At that meeting a compromise agreement with the white power-structure is worked out. The Madison County Movement can hold a political rally on the school grounds — a tactical win for Black political power; and by forcing recognition from white politicians and establishing a precedent of communication and consultation it's a strategic victory as well. But no tents can be erected — a concession to property rights and white power. …
Shortly before sunset, more than 1000 local Afro-Americans and a couple hundred Meredith Marchers pack the Holy Child Jesus basketball court for a mass meeting. Most are determined to defy the Troopers by setting up a tent at McNeal. Speaking for the Madison County Movement, Annie Devine begins by saying "We're going to the schoolyard," but before she can complete her thought the crowd roars approval and rushes out into the street to form up for a march to McNeal.
Singing and chanting, the crowd surges forward and steadily grows in number. Marchers find garden hoses to soak towels and handkerchiefs in case of tear gas. Rumors spread up and down the line, Troopers with machineguns ahead, attack dogs seen at the school, busses waiting to haul protesters to Parchman Prison. No one knows what lays ahead but everyone's determination and courage are at the peak.
When they reach McNeal, the Troopers have distanced themselves, the snipers are gone from the roof and the searchlights dismantled. But there are no tents to set up. Mrs. Devine and others try to explain the compromise, but many of the marchers, probably a majority, feel let down and betrayed. With their expectations dashed, some grumble "We've been sold out." Others shout, "Get the tents!" But there are no tents for anyone to get.
Discouraged and disgruntled, the marchers return to the basketball court for a mass meeting with reporters barred (an unusual occurrence). Local leaders argue their case that recognition by elected officials and opening up communications represented a significant step forward and that another bloody confrontation would be a setback. To fierce approval, Stokely and other militants condemn the compromise of a rally without the tents. Rev. James Lawson who had attended the leadership meeting that accepted the deal, counters that no one proposed any way to pitch the tents without another savage attack by the Troopers, "You are as much to blame as anyone else," he tells Stokely. "You should have been prepared to suggest how it could be done."
The divided and impassioned mass meeting drags on until 2am, leaving some feeling bitter and betrayed, others seeing in the compromise a partial victory won without another round of police violence, no one hospitalized with injuries, and no one shot to death (Streets 1-4).
Works cited:
“Canton: Tear Gas & Rifle Butts, June 23.” Meredith Mississippi March and Black Power (June). Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.h...
“On the Streets of Canton Mississippi, June 24.” Meredith Mississippi March and Black Power (June). Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.h...
“Return to Philadelphia MS, June 24.” Meredith Mississippi March and Black Power (June). Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.h...
Walton, Becca. “Canton Civil Rights Movement.” Mississippi Encyclopedia. Web. https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/e...
Weisbrot, Robert. “Remembering the March Against Fear.” Colby Magazine. Summer 2014. Web. https://www.colby.edu/magazine/rememb...
On Thursday the 23rd, the Meredith marchers leave Benton and head east on Route 16 for the long 20 mile slog to Canton, the seat of Madison County. Still seething over the brutality in Philadelphia, as they trek across Yazoo County they share a fierce determination to defy violent racists by refusing to back down one inch when threatened by the forces of white-supremacy.
Madison County is 70% Afro-American. Like the Delta counties, most of its Black population are poor laborers, croppers, maids and menials who eke out an existence in grinding poverty. Whites make up less than a third of the population, but through denial of Black voting rights and organizations like the White Citizens Council they still maintain complete control of the political apparatus and they use their white power to keep wages low and working conditions abysmal. Almost 40% of the land is owned by Blacks, but rampant discrimination by the Department of Agriculture which denies them the crucial cotton allotments and federal subsidies that enrich white landowners, and other forms of economic domination by whites has kept Afro-American farmers mired in systemic poverty.
Canton, population 10,000, is the seat of Madison County. Some 60% of its inhabitants are Black and for years both town and county have been centers of CORE organizing. Though it's a racist stronghold, local leaders like C.O. Chinn, Annie Devine, and James McRee, aided by CORE field secretaries like George Raymond, Anne Moody, and Flukie Suarez have built a solid base of Freedom Movement support. When CORE began organizing there in 1963, almost 97% of whites were registered to vote but only 121 Afro-Americans were on the voting roles. Now, significantly, Black voters outnumber white voters in Madison County by 6000 to 5000. In addition to voter registration, the Madison County Movement has fought for school desegregation, mounted an effective economic boycott against white-owned stores, defended the rights of welfare recipients, and established an early childhood education center (Canton 1).
The movement in Madison County relied on the leadership of several key persons. C. O. Chinn, a local business owner known for his fearlessness, provided his store as a space for meetings and protected other activists from violent attacks. George Raymond, a former freedom rider from New Orleans, provided much of the strategy for the Canton movement, serving as the only staff member when the first CORE office opened in the county in 1963. Anne Moody, a Tougaloo College graduate later known for her memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi, spent Freedom Summer 1964 in Canton. Annie Devine, a well-respected teacher and insurance saleswoman who was intimately familiar with the workings of both Canton’s black and white communities, provided essential leadership and later served as a member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention (Walton 3).
By afternoon, hundreds of Madison County Afro-Americans, many of them now registered voters, are joining the march in the sweltering heat as it crosses over the Big Black River and approaches the outskirts of Canton. It's just two days past the summer solstice, the sun rises at 6am and doesn't set until after 8pm, and it beats down on the weary marchers for 14 solid hours.
McNeal Elementary School for Negroes is in the heart of Canton's Black community. Annie Devine asks the school board for permission to set up camp on its playground. School is out of session for the summer and at first the board makes no objection. Then they equivocate. Then they say the field is only for "school-sponsored events."
Despite the board's rejection, Local leader C.O. Chinn and Hosea Williams of SCLC proclaim that since Jim Crow schools are paid for by Afro-American taxes all they need is permission from the surrounding Black community which they clearly have. "This is our ground," says Chinn. "We're going to put up the tents or else. We're tired of being pushed around by white folks."
The cops arrest Chinn, Williams, George Greene of SNCC, three white and five Black marchers — one of whom is beaten, kicked, and called "nigger boy" by the sheriff.
Late in the afternoon, a long line of singing marchers parades through town to the courthouse where a big crowd of 1500 local Afro-Americans greet them. They triumphantly surge on to the lawn — long forbidden to Black feet — for a rally. Stokely tells them, "They said we couldn't pitch our tents on our Black school. Well, we're going to do it now!"
As they proceed through the Afro-American community towards McNeal School, more and more Afro-Americans join them. The dirt school yard is only partially fenced and no police block the way as more than 3500 people simply walk on to the grounds like a flowing river. But off to one side lurk a large posse of lawmen from different jurisdictions in their various uniforms. They're all equipped with helmets and those who aren't carrying rifles and shotguns grip long billy clubs in their gloved hands.
By now it's 7:30, a half-hour before sunset. A big U-Haul truck arrives to drop off the tents and people are asked to surround it so the tents can't be seized by the cops. A caravan of Highway Patrol cars pull up in a cloud of dust to unload a company of more than 75 Troopers in full riot gear. They assemble in battle formation upwind of where the tents are being unloaded and begin doning their black gas masks.
March leaders climb onto the top of the truck and speak through a bullhorn. When King speaks it's clear that he assumes the police intend to arrest people for trespass as had happened to Chinn, Williams and the others earlier that day. "We're gonna stick together. If necessary, we are willing to fill up all the jails in Mississippi. And I don't believe they have enough jails to hold all the people!"
"The time for anybody running has come to an end!" shouts Stokely from atop the truck. "You tell them white folk in Mississippi that all the scared niggers are dead! You tell 'em they shot all the rabbits — they gonna deal with the men!"
Many of the local supporters cautiously retreat off the field, but 2,000 or more defiantly remain — as do all of the Meredith Marchers. "Pitch the tents!" chant militant activists circulating through the crowd around the truck. "Pitch the tents! Pitch the tents!"
SCLC’s Bruce Hartford narrated what followed.
Without any warning at all or order from the police to disperse there came the loud sounds of Pop! Pop! Pop! Burning, stinging gas was everywhere. A white cloud enveloped me, blinding me with tears. My lungs burned with searing pain. I couldn't breath. I thought I was going to die. Everyone was running, choking, gasping, fleeing in all directions, bumping into each other in the blinding miasma.
A gas canister fired from a shotgun hit a woman near me and exploded — she screamed in agony but I couldn't see where she was. Some kind of hideous monster with a long black snout — a cop in a gas mask, I realized — abruptly materialized out of the fumes and smashed the butt of his rifle into my shoulder, knocking me to the ground. Someone tripped over me before I managed to get up and continue trying to escape. Every gasping breath was agony. My chest burned, my eyes gushed tears.
More cops appeared and disappeared in the acrid, stinking smoke, flailing with their clubs at anyone and everyone. I could hear the sickening thuds of wood striking flesh, and I must have been hit several more times because the next day I had long, dark, aching bruises on my back and side. At the time, though, I didn't feel the blows at all. An adrenaline rush can often block out pain — for a short while."
Both regular CS tear gas and the more powerful military-grade CN war gas are fired into the throng. Normally, police use tear gas to herd protesters out of an area, but the Troopers blanket the entire field leaving no avenue for escape. Crowd control is not their objective — their purpose is to punish the Meredith March for challenging the southern way of life and defying white-supremacy.
Some of the marchers try to take shelter against the school building's brick wall until a local cop lobs three gas canisters right into them. So-called lawmen knock down the tent poles and then toss tear gas bombs under the collapsed canvas to gas those now trapped beneath. "You niggers want your freedom — well, here's your freedom," a cop yells at Odessa Warwick, a mother of eleven as he kicks her, fracturing her spine.
Marchers are overcome by the fumes, passing out where they fall. Heads are bloodied and bones broken by rifle butts and billy clubs. A young boy coughs up blood, a four year old child fights to breath. Trying to aid the victims, MCHR medical worker Charles Meyer is clubbed down and kicked into a ditch. A woman is dragged down by her long blond hair. One-legged Jim Leatherer is brutally beaten, Troopers continually kick a young Black man who is on the ground vomiting uncontrollably. Another trooper smashes a priest with his shotgun and a marcher cries out, "He's a man of God!" "I'll put him with his God," shouts the Trooper as he hits the priest again.
Stokely Carmichael:
I took a direct hit in the chest from a canister and was knocked to the ground. Semiconscious and unable to breathe; my eyes tearing. My ribs felt as though crushed. Gas in my lungs was always my weakness. ... Choking for breath, I could hear screams, shouts, and Dr. King calling on people to remain calm amid the sickening thud of blows. They were kicking and clubbing people lying on the ground to escape the gas. Men, women, children, it made no difference. Then they were gone, leaving us to tend the wounded. So obviously it had simply been a demonstration of naked brute force for its own sake (Canton 2-4).
Jo Freeman, a white volunteer:
“My whole body felt blistered; my scalp felt like every hair was being pulled out one by one, and my lungs as though I was inhaling molten steel” (Weisbrot 2).
By sundown, the school grounds are cleared of protesters except for those too injured or overcome by gas to move. In the Afro-American community around the periphery of the McNeal grounds protesters and bystanders are all suffering from the after-effects of chemical attack and in many cases injuries and wounds from rifle butts and billy clubs.
A small child convulses on the floor of his home across the street from the school. His frantic mother grabs him up and runs outside desperately searching for help. "Lady, give him to me!" shouts a marcher. "I just got back from Vietnam, and I know what to do for him." The ground is muddy from the garden hose people are using to wash out their eyes and rinse the burning reside from their skin. He washes out the boy's eyes and then grabs a handful of mud, coating the child's face with it.
The emergency aid resources of MCHR are overwhelmed. Many of its volunteers are among the injured and incapacitated. Dr. Poussaint rallies his team to set up an emergency triage point in the Holy Child Jesus Mission with the nuns doing what they can to ease suffering. He phones for help to Jackson just 30 minutes down the road. From there, funeral director Clarie Collins Harvey directs Afro-American owned hearses to Canton where they act as makeshift ambulances carrying the worst injured to a Jackson hospital willing to treat Black protesters. All through the night, MCHR workers and the nuns labor to treat the victims of a brutal police riot.
Poussaint would later tell an interviewer, "We were all enraged. There was just so much rage." Stokely has to be restrained by friends from a futile charge into the police line. Rev. Andrew Young of SCLC, normally a calming presence, later recalls that with gas burning his lungs and eyes he thought to himself, ""If I had a machine gun, I'd show those motherfuckers!" Yet he manages to subordinate his anger to strategic realities and talk down a SNCC militant who is urging people to assault the heavily-armed Troopers and set fire to their cars.
Boiling fury engulfs Canton's Afro-American community and the Meredith Marchers. Some Black residents grab their guns and have to be pulled back from suicidal retaliation. His eyes still burning with tears, Dr. King manages to assemble those march leaders who can be found for an emergency meeting at George Raymond's home just a block from McNeal. Soon march marshals and local leaders are out on the night-dark streets urging people to assemble at a nearby church where the Meredith Marchers can grab some food, the injured be directed to the MCHR aid station, and local folk rally in the adjacent Catholic Mission's basketball court.
Bruce Hartford, SCLC, explained the marchers’ counter-response.
We would march that night through Canton's Afro-American neighborhoods to express our defiance and provide a nonviolent channel for the community's rage. ... Along with the other SCLC staff, I was given a colored armband and assigned to act as a march marshal, keeping people moving, defusing trouble, and maintaining nonviolence.
… Five or six hundred of us marched out of the church onto the unpaved and unlit roads of Canton's Afro-American community. This wasn't an on-the-sidewalk or avoid-blocking-traffic march. Instead we filled the streets singing and calling bystanders to come join us. Block by block our numbers grew as people joined us, but in the dark it was impossible to estimate or count how many were marching.
Some of the ultra-militants and the most strident Black Power advocates called for people to go downtown and "get whitey," others shouted that we should challenge the cops who were still guarding the disputed schoolyard. Fortunately, they had little support. Marshals like me urged the marchers to hold together and maintain nonviolent discipline. Most of the marchers were local folk with a solid grasp of Canton's tactical realities and they heeded our call.
Seething with anger, for an hour or more we surged through the dark streets, defiantly singing our freedom songs and chanting "Black Power" and "Freedom Now!""
A year earlier, when Alabama Troopers savagely attacked voting rights marchers in Selma, the world, the media, and the national political establishment reacted with outrage and determination. But now in the new political context shaped by violent urban uprisings, the "white backlash," media-hyped hysteria over Black Power, and the Freedom Movement's efforts to address issues related to economic justice and northern-style segregation, the media response to Canton is sparse and ambivalent.
After Selma, President Johnson addressed the nation and pushed the Voting Rights Act through Congress. About Canton he says nothing. Nothing at all. He refuses to meet with a delegation of ministers who want federal protection for civil rights protesters in Mississippi. The Attorney General's response is tepid, he "regrets" the use of tear gas and adds, "I'm sorry it happened. It always makes the situation more difficult." He then assures the public that he is confident Mississippi authorities will protect the civil rights of Afro-Americans in their state (Canton 4-6).
After a few short hours of exhausted slumber on the hard floor of the Holy Child Jesus basketball court, the Meredith marchers awake bruised and battered the next morning, Friday the 24th. Their clothing is still impregnated with chemical residue of the gas attack and their eyes sting and tear. Local Afro-American women have been laboring since dawn in the church kitchen to provide the Meredith Marchers a breakfast of hot coffee, bacon, grits, and biscuits smothered in gravy. As they wolf it down the marchers huddle in organizational staff meetings to be briefed on the plan that march leaders working late into the night have agreed on.
The tactical situation is complex. …
To ensure maximum participation by local Blacks the [march’s culminating] rally [in Jackson] is scheduled for Sunday the 26th two days hence, and out-of-state supporters have made travel plans accordingly. So the rally date can't be changed to accommodate surprise events such as the violence in Philadelphia and the gas attack in Canton. Which means that a march contingent has to depart from Canton on this Friday to be sure of reaching Tougaloo on time.
After the mob violence in Philadelphia MS, Dr. King promised to return on this Friday for a second protest in Neshoba County. One that will express the anger and defiance of local Blacks and show that the Freedom Movement cannot be halted by mob violence. Movement supporters from both Mississippi and Alabama are already on the road and Black communities in Neshoba and Lauderdale counties are mobilizing. If King doesn't show up now it will appear he is surrendering to fear of white violence — which he will not do. So King and a sizable contingent of marchers from Canton have to drive east to join the Philadelphia march.
Local Afro-Americans and the Meredith Marchers in Canton, of course, are still enraged over the gas attack and savage beatings of the evening before. And just as white violence in Neshoba can't be allowed to deter the Movement neither can police repression be allowed to do so in Canton. Which means that in addition to marching south towards Jackson and protesting in Neshoba there has to be strong direct action this day on the streets of Canton.
Albert Turner of SCLC is chosen to lead a small contingent of Meredith Marchers south on Highway-51 towards Tougaloo, while a larger contingent fills the available cars to accompany Dr. King, Floyd McKissck, and Stokely Carmichael to Philadelphia and the largest group of marchers and local folk remain in Canton for a day of action.
In a telegram to LBJ sent immediately after the violent outbreak in Philadelphia, Dr. King cited the "Clear and absolute breakdown of law and order in Philadelphia." And in reference to the planned return march he added, "We therefore implore you to send the necessary federal protection to Philadelphia, Miss. to protect the lives and safety of the citizens seeking to exercise our constitutional rights."
After the Philadelphia violence, a delegation of clergymen asked for a meeting with LBJ to press for federal protection and a thousand Movement supporters rallied in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House. Johnson, however, is unwilling to forgive King's opposition to the Vietnam War. And with the Meredith March manifesto explicitly condemning federal civil rights failures, as a matter of practical politics he can't use the march to further his own legislative agenda. Nor does he want to be seen as in any way siding with "Black Power" militancy. So the clergymen were turned aside and the protesters outside ignored.
The President rejects King's plea for federal protection replying that, "Personnel of the Department of Justice will be present" (as they had been on the first occasion). And in willful denial of self-evident realities he goes on to tell King that, "Governor Paul Johnson has assured [us] that law and order will be maintained Friday in Philadelphia and throughout the march, and that all necessary protection can and will be provided."
The mob violence in Neshoba and the horrific police assault in Canton pleases and gratifies many white voters in the state, boosting Governor Johnson's public support. But behind the scenes the state's power-structure remains split between hard-line segregationists determined to restore the old Jim Crow order with club and gun and self-described "racial moderates" who want to bring northern investment and business opportunities into Mississippi.
Across the state, affluent white businessmen desire lucrative national franchise opportunities like Burger King, Holiday Inn, 7-11, and the like, but those chains now insist on full compliance with the Civil Rights Act because they know they face consumer boycotts in the North if they tolerate segregation in the South. Yet any business that tries to operate on a desegregated basis in Mississippi faces economic boycotts by the White Citizens Council and possible Klan violence. …
On the previous Philadelphia march, State Troopers had been conspicuous by their absence but on this day they are out in force. Many of them had been part of the brutal attack the evening before in Canton but now they have new orders from the governor to maintain law and order and prevent the kind of lynch-mob violence that damages the state's reputation.
A newspaper editorial and radio announcements by local white leaders urge whites to ignore the march and refrain from ugly violence "[even though] "we know it is hard to take a lot of the lies, insults, and actions of beatniks who are worked up to fever pitch by their leaders with sessions of 'prayer.'"
When the marchers reach the downtown area, the sidewalks bordering the paved streets of white-controlled Philadelphia are again lined with hostile, jeering whites, men and women held back by flimsy rope barriers strung up by law enforcement. Those on the sidewalk jeer, curse, and spit at the marchers while others lean out the second story windows shrieking hate. State Troopers, however, do hold the mob at bay. When the Black protesters reach the courthouse the mayor uses a bullhorn to warn surrounding whites against violence.
Local leader Rev. Clint Collier opens the rally with a prayer and a freedom sermon: "We have been dictated to long enough," he tells the demonstrators. From the rear of the jeering crowd of whites glass soda pop bottles are hurled at him. In his short address Stokely says: "The people gathered around us represent America in its truest form. We will start representing ourselves in our way, and we will do it in our way." True to his nature, Dr. King offers a positive message of hope: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice and "We're gonna win, because the Bible is right when it says, 'Ye shall reap what ye sow.'"
"Go to hell!" scream the mob of surrounding whites, "Nigger! You're a nigger! Wait till tonight, you black bastards, we'll find you then! We're gonna kill King! We're gonna kill King!" Their rage is palpable, yet the police presence holds violence in check.
As the marchers return to Independence Quarters a white man guns his engine and attempts to drive his car into the line — protesters manage to dodge out of the way at the last second. The Troopers then arrest him and his passenger. But in that instant of swirling action and confusion, Neshoba County lawmen draw their pistols and point them at the demonstrators rather than the vehicle trying to run them down.
…
Rather than wait to join the caravan of Meredith Marchers returning to Canton, a car with three white ministers from the North and a Black NAACP official from Memphis decide to leave the rally early. Alone.
Their route takes them across Leake County where in response to the Meredith March, the local KKK has just bombed the St. Joachim Catholic School for Negroes. They are now patrolling Route-16 for marchers traveling between Philadelphia and Canton and a car with an Afro-American and three whites in cleric collars is an obvious target. A pickup truck driven by Klansmen tries to run them off the highway but the freedom car dodges. The KKK truck then blocks the road ahead while another car driven by Klan tries to ram the integrated vehicle. Somehow they manage to escape, turn around, and flee back towards Philadelphia at high speed with the KKK in hot pursuit until they reach Independence Quarters where armed Blacks stand on guard (Return 1-4).
In Canton on Friday morning the local Afro-American community continues to seethe over the savage police riot of the previous evening. Crowds gather early at Asbury Methodist Church and the adjacent Holy Child Jesus Mission. Everyone is determined to take strong action — but there's no agreement over what that action should be.
Local Movement leaders call for renewing the 1964 boycott of downtown Canton's white-owned stores with the slogan, "Black Out for Black Power." And also a day of disciplined, nonviolent protest as a show of determination and defiance. The white merchants of Canton are particularly vulnerable to boycotts by their Afro-American customers because they're in direct competition with the larger, more numerous, and better-stocked stores in Jackson just 30 minutes down the road — which is one reason the previous boycott had hurt them so badly.
Soon local members of the Madison County Movement are downtown, handing out boycott flyers, picketing stores with boycott and Black Power signs, and tying up traffic by slowly crossing the street at a leisurely pace. A voter registration march to the courthouse is blocked by the cops. A second march is allowed to proceed, but only on the sidewalk, not in the streets. When they arrive at the courthouse they are told that the clerk is "out to lunch." Some 50 or so Black citizens then add themselves to the voting rolls by registering with the federal examiner under the Voting Rights Act (VRA).
Bruce Hartford recalled:
… more than 500 chanting and singing marchers were snaking through the streets of Canton. In the Black neighborhoods we walked two-by-two on the side of the dirt roads next to the drainage ditches and in the white neighborhoods on their well-kept sidewalks. Marching into white areas was a bold and defiant move, a decisive declaration that rejected the deferential subservience of the past and a gesture that risked spontaneous violence from enraged whites. ... I remember nervous rumors passing up and down the line — that a parked car we were about to pass concealed a dynamite bomb, that in the next block they had a pack of dogs waiting to attack us, that the old white woman scowling at us from her porch had a big pistol hidden under her apron as she rocked back and forth on her rocker and that she'd sworn to shoot anyone who stepped on her lawn.
None of the protests, however, approach McNeal Elementary which remains guarded by heavily armed Troopers who have now stationed rifle-equipped snipers on the roof and erected searchlights to pick out targets after nightfall. The local power structure and police forces remain adamantly opposed to Blacks using the school for any Movement purpose. Yet almost all of those boycotting, picketing and marching — local movement and Meredith Marchers both — are determined to return to the schoolyard and defy the cops by pitching a tent. Some are collecting donations to buy new tents, others are trying to sew together bedsheets for a symbolic, make-do tent. "Come hell or high water," Movement activists tell each other, "a tent's gonna go up tonight."
For both sides now, the right of Afro-Americans to use McNeal has become a make-or-break symbol. Even though Blacks are marching and picketing all over the streets of Canton, white politicians can't accept Afro-American use of a Colored school for a protest-purpose because doing so concedes the point that Black taxpayers have the same legal right to access public facilities for public politics that whites have enjoyed for generations. Moreover, having denied permission the previous day, allowing Afro-Americans to protest there now would be an obvious concession, a retreat of white power forced by growing Black power. Which in turn clearly implies that henceforth elected officials must take Afro-American concerns into account. In essence then, Afro-American use of McNeal has become a practical clash between the traditional dominance of white power and the Freedom Movement's demand for Black Power.
…
Living in Canton is Colonel Charles Snodgrass, the state-wide commanding officer of the Troopers — an appointed rather than elected position. He breaks the impasse by inviting Madison County Movement leaders to a meeting in his office, the first such official meeting between the Movement and white authorities ever held in Canton. He offers other camping sites, but George Raymond replies that after the savage brutality of his Troopers the Black community needs to see tents go up at McNeal.
Local, state, and national Movement leaders assemble for an emergency summit meeting in the sweltering, jam-packed living room of Afro-American store owner George Washington. …
The meeting is tense and contentious. Stokley and Chinn argue for pitching the tents regardless of consequences. But Devine, Goodloe, and King convince the group to accept an invitation arranged by Snodgrass for a Black delegation to meet for the first time ever with the Mayor and city attorney. At that meeting a compromise agreement with the white power-structure is worked out. The Madison County Movement can hold a political rally on the school grounds — a tactical win for Black political power; and by forcing recognition from white politicians and establishing a precedent of communication and consultation it's a strategic victory as well. But no tents can be erected — a concession to property rights and white power. …
Shortly before sunset, more than 1000 local Afro-Americans and a couple hundred Meredith Marchers pack the Holy Child Jesus basketball court for a mass meeting. Most are determined to defy the Troopers by setting up a tent at McNeal. Speaking for the Madison County Movement, Annie Devine begins by saying "We're going to the schoolyard," but before she can complete her thought the crowd roars approval and rushes out into the street to form up for a march to McNeal.
Singing and chanting, the crowd surges forward and steadily grows in number. Marchers find garden hoses to soak towels and handkerchiefs in case of tear gas. Rumors spread up and down the line, Troopers with machineguns ahead, attack dogs seen at the school, busses waiting to haul protesters to Parchman Prison. No one knows what lays ahead but everyone's determination and courage are at the peak.
When they reach McNeal, the Troopers have distanced themselves, the snipers are gone from the roof and the searchlights dismantled. But there are no tents to set up. Mrs. Devine and others try to explain the compromise, but many of the marchers, probably a majority, feel let down and betrayed. With their expectations dashed, some grumble "We've been sold out." Others shout, "Get the tents!" But there are no tents for anyone to get.
Discouraged and disgruntled, the marchers return to the basketball court for a mass meeting with reporters barred (an unusual occurrence). Local leaders argue their case that recognition by elected officials and opening up communications represented a significant step forward and that another bloody confrontation would be a setback. To fierce approval, Stokely and other militants condemn the compromise of a rally without the tents. Rev. James Lawson who had attended the leadership meeting that accepted the deal, counters that no one proposed any way to pitch the tents without another savage attack by the Troopers, "You are as much to blame as anyone else," he tells Stokely. "You should have been prepared to suggest how it could be done."
The divided and impassioned mass meeting drags on until 2am, leaving some feeling bitter and betrayed, others seeing in the compromise a partial victory won without another round of police violence, no one hospitalized with injuries, and no one shot to death (Streets 1-4).
Works cited:
“Canton: Tear Gas & Rifle Butts, June 23.” Meredith Mississippi March and Black Power (June). Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.h...
“On the Streets of Canton Mississippi, June 24.” Meredith Mississippi March and Black Power (June). Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.h...
“Return to Philadelphia MS, June 24.” Meredith Mississippi March and Black Power (June). Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (Jan-June). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.h...
Walton, Becca. “Canton Civil Rights Movement.” Mississippi Encyclopedia. Web. https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/e...
Weisbrot, Robert. “Remembering the March Against Fear.” Colby Magazine. Summer 2014. Web. https://www.colby.edu/magazine/rememb...
