DIVERSITY | Offering a place for everyone
27 December 2008
The Selma-to-Montgomery March
A Stirring Civil Rights March from Selma to Montgomery
By March 21, thousands of Americans from all walks of life began to assemble in Selma for the third Selma-to- Montgomery march. The marchers planned to cover the entire 87-kilometer route over the course of five days and four nights, with marchers sleeping under the stars. The route they followed is today a National Historic Trail.
With the support of the Johnson administration and an aroused American people, the difference from the earlier efforts could not be more apparent. Major John Cloud of the Alabama State Troopers had ordered the beatings and gassings two weeks earlier. Now he was obliged to occupy the lead car accompanying the protestors across the Pettus Bridge. Federal military police were on hand to provide protection, and elements of the Alabama National Guard were temporarily placed under federal command. As more than 3,000 marchers began the first leg of their quest, Abernathy told them, “When we get to Montgomery, we are going to go up to Governor Wallace’s door and say, ‘George, it’s all over now. We’ve got the ballot.’ ”
“Walk together, children,” King instructed, “and don’t you get weary, and it will lead us to a Promised Land.”
The New York Times offered this description of the crowd as it set out along U.S. Highway 80:
There were civil rights leaders and rabbis, pretty coeds and bearded representatives of the student left, movie stars and infants in strollers. There were two blind people and a man with one leg. But mostly there were the Negroes who believe they have been denied the vote too long.
The marchers covered a bit over 11 kilometers that first day, then pitched two large circus tents and slept in sleeping bags and blankets. The next morning King announced: “I am happy to say that I have slept in a sleeping bag for the first time in my life. I feel fine.” By the second day, though, blisters and sunburn were common.
Because the highway narrowed in rural areas, the federal court had ruled that only 300 marchers could participate until the road widened again outside Montgomery. But a fair number of “extras” chose to tag along, even during the third day, which was marked by torrential rains. The marchers responded in song; among their selections: “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round” and “We Shall Overcome.”
King briefly left the march to deliver a long-scheduled address in Cleveland, Ohio. There King made explicit his debt to Mahatma Gandhi, whose famous march to the sea anticipated the Selma-to-Montgomery trek. “We are challenged to make the world one in terms of brotherhood,” King said. “We must learn to live together as brothers, or we will all perish as fools.”
As the marchers approached Montgomery, the crowd swelled to 25,000 or more. They came by chartered plane, by bus, and by rail. A delegation of leading American historians arrived to participate in the final leg. They issued a statement: “We believe it is high time for the issues over which the Civil War was fought to be finally resolved.” The singer and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte enlisted an all-star group of Hollywood entertainers.
On March 25, with Martin Luther King at the head, the activists entered Montgomery. They marched up Dexter Avenue, tracing the path traversed a century ago by the inaugural parade of Jefferson Davis, first and only president of the Confederate States of America, the would-be nation whose championing of slavery sparked the Civil War. Now, a century later, the descendants of black slaves approached the state house to demand the rights to which they had long been entitled, and long been denied. Their petition read:
We have come not only five days and 50 miles [80 kilometers], but we have come from three centuries of suffering and hardship. We have come to you, the Governor of Alabama, to declare that we must have our freedom NOW. We must have the right to vote; we must have equal protection of the law, and an end to police brutality.
Governor Wallace had already fled the scene. It didn’t matter.
King delivered that day one of his most famous speeches, one in which he quoted a 70-year-old participant in the Montgomery bus boycott. Asked one day whether she would not have preferred riding to walking, Mother Pollard replied: “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.”
The just concluded march, King said, was “a shining moment in the conscience of man.” He singled out as honorable and inspiring “the pilgrimage of clergymen and laymen of every race and faith pouring into Selma to face danger at the side of its embattled Negroes.” “Like an idea whose time has come,” King continued, “not even the marching of mighty armies can halt us. We are moving to the land of freedom.”
We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. That will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.
I know you are asking today, “How long will it take?” I come to say to you this afternoon however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because truth pressed to earth will rise again.
How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever.
How long? Not long, because you still reap what you sow.
How long? Not long. Because the arm of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.
