The Aim: Registration

To begin the 1965 civil rights drive, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King chose the town of Selma (pop. 29,500), deep in Alabama's black belt. It was a deliberate choice -- and it brought results, up to a point.

For long years, Selma could have served as the model of unyielding resistance to civil rights progress. After the Supreme Court school-desegregation decision in 1954, it was the first Ala bama town to organize a white Citizens Council, which has kept Selma as stubbornly segregated as any community in the nation. From his Selma headquarters, Dallas County Sheriff James Clark firmly kept Negroes down, aided by a squad of special deputies known locally as "squirrel shooters." Last summer Clark and his men herded more than 100 Negroes off to jail with sticks, blows and cattle prods when they tried to register to vote.

As soon as King arrived in town last week, accompanied by eleven Negro aides, he walked into Selma's Hotel Albert, built by slave labor over a century ago as a copy of the ornate Doge's Palace in Venice, and tried to register for a room. Out from the white crowd in the lobby edged a onetime Birmingham gas-station operator named James Robinson, 26, a member of the small, arch-segregationist National States Rights Party. While one white woman stood on a chair screaming "Get him, get him, get him!" Robinson landed two punches on King's head, aimed two kicks at his groin. Pulled away from King by city police, Robinson was hustled off, later was fined $100 and sentenced to 60 days in jail for assault. King got his room in the Hotel Albert (price: $5.75), became the first Negro ever to register and stay there.

Long Enouqh in the Alleys. Fact is that a new Selma city administration, with the cooperation of many businessmen, is trying hard to clear the town's dark racist reputation by steering a more moderate course. On the very day that King arrived, seven of Selma's restaurants were quietly and peaceably integrated.

But King and the other Negro leaders are aiming at more than integration of public facilities this year; they are trying to push the Southern Negro's right to register and vote. In Selma, fewer than 1% of 15,100 Negro residents are registered voters (20% are registered in Alabama as a whole). The Justice Department has already brought suit against Alabama Secretary of State Agnes Baggett, charging that the state's registration requirements are unconstitutional--including a 20-page test on government and the Constitution so difficult that Chief Justice Earl Warren might well have trouble passing without a favorable nod from the registrar. Apart from such onerous laws, in Selma the bulky figure of Sheriff Jim Clark stands adamantly in the way of any Negro registration.

In a first registration attempt last week, more than 400 Negroes marched to the county courthouse, but most were rounded up by Clark and his men and herded off to wait in a roped-in alleyway beside the courthouse. All day long they waited. None were registered. Next morning the Negroes tried again, spurred by the Rev. Ralph Abernathy of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who cried: "We intend to enter by the front door. We have gone in the back doors from the alleys for too many years." Again they were met by Clark, who threatened to jail them if they did not move into the alleyway. The Negroes refused to do so and 66 were arrested, including Mrs. Amelia Boynton, the registration-drive chairman, who was seized bodily by Clark and pushed half a block along the street into a waiting patrol car.

With Billy Club. But Selma has another law-enforcement officer, Public Safety Director Wilson Baker, a onetime city police captain who was appointed to the special post last year after newly elected Mayor Joe T. Smitherman realized that Sheriff Clark's high-handed ways would no longer do. A self-described segregationist, Smitherman nonetheless says: "We want to maintain the dignity of the town, and peace."

Thus the situation turned into a small civil war between Smitherman and Baker on the one hand, Sheriff Clark on the other.

On their third attempt to register, Baker provided a city police escort for the Negroes. But at the county courthouse, where Clark's word is still law, the sheriff stood in the doorway with billy club and cattle prod in hand. He brushed aside Baker's objections, arrested 156 more Negroes when they refused to leave the front of the building, and hustled them off in a bus.

In the meantime, the Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People asked for and got a federal court injunction against further interference by Clark. Said the court in Mobile: "Per sons legally entitled to register as voters should be permitted to do so in an orderly fashion." Moreover, King announced, the Legal Defense Fund would soon send to Selma a panel of seven white lawyers to draw up "freedom registration" forms, register the Negroes and try to bypass Clark and Dallas County by submitting the forms for verification directly to a federal district court. With that, King left Selma temporarily, promising to return to continue "plaguing Dallas County--creatively and nonviolently."

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