Victory in Jail

In the third week of his drive to register Negro voters in Selma, Ala., and environs, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. deliberately set out to get himself and his followers arrested. He succeedd spectacularly, spending four days in jail himself and getting nearly 3,500 others booked by Alabama's remarkably stupid law enforcement officials, who fell hook, line and sinker for his bait. Toward week's end, King was accurately able to state in a national fund-raising "Letter from a Selma, Ala., Jail" newspaper advertisement that "there are more Negroes in jail with me than there are on the voting rolls."*

During the previous two weeks of his Selma drive. King had tried to steer clear of legal violations--particularly of breaking Selma's 1963 ordinance that bans "any parade or procession or public demonstration on the streets or other public ways of the city, unless a permit therefor has been secured from the council." Thus, in sending his followers to the county courthouse to try to register, he had carefully instructed them to move in groups of four or five, keeping at least 20 ft. apart.

Pied Piper Procession. By last week King decided to employ more dramatic tactics: he led 237 Negroes on a mass march to the courthouse, ignored the admonition of Selma's public safety director, Wilson Baker, who has been desperately trying to keep peace in the strife-stricken town and who kept running out to pluck at Parade Leader King's sleeve and saying: "This is a deliberate attempt to violate the city's parade ordinance. You know the law. You've been abiding by it for two weeks. You've had plenty of time to apply for a parade permit, and you haven't done it." As the Negroes marched on, Baker ordered them all arrested.

King's arrest, as he had anticipated, swiftly led to even more jailings. Some 474 Negro children deserted their classes to protest King's arrest; they were charged with juvenile delinquency. Another 36 Negro adults were charged with contempt of court for picketing the courthouse while state circuit court was in session. Next day another 111 adults were arrested on the same charge, despite their claim that they merely wanted to see the voting registrar: nearly 400 students were also arrested, packed into buses and driven to the old Selma armory.

And so it went. One day 355 Negro students locked arms on the sidewalk outside the courthouse, rocked to and fro while singing traditional civil rights songs, changing some of the words so as to include the name of Sheriff James Clark, the particular villain in the Selma drive. "I love Jim Clark in my heart," they sang, and "Ain't gonna let Jim Clark turn me 'round." Clark placed them all under arrest, but he provided no buses. Instead, he ordered them to follow two motorcycles in a Pied Piper procession through the center of Selma to the armory, where many spent a cold night sleeping on the cement floor.

Expensive Hamburgers. The demonstration spread to nearby Marion, Ala., seat of Perry County, in which Negroes outnumber whites 11,500 to 6,000, but only 300 are registered to vote. There Negroes tested the public-accommodations section of the civil rights law, entered a Marion drugstore, were served Cokes laced with salt and informed that the price of a hamburger had risen to $5. Next day 15 Negroes protesting this were arrested. This brought nearly 700 Negro students into the streets.

Boycotting classes, they marched in orderly fashion, observing traffic lights, toward the jail. There they sang civil rights songs until warned by a state trooper: "Sing one more song and you are under arrest." One of King's Alabama aides, James Orange, told the students: "Sing another song." Sing another they did; troopers arrested all 700, ordered them into school buses, sent them off to be booked.

Even while King's nonviolent strategy was working the way he wanted it to, he faced trouble from extremist Northern Negroes. While King was still in jail, New York's Black Nationalist Malcolm X visited Selma, spoke to an audience of some 500, cried: "The white man should thank God that Dr. King is holding his people in check, because there are others who don't feel that way, and there are other ways to obtain their ends." If King's tactics fail, Malcolm threatened, those "other ways" will be tried. And at week's end a group of 15 Northern and Western Congressmen visited Selma on an "inspection" trip.

Significant Breakthrough. Under the pressures already brought by King, Selma Negroes were actually beginning to make some progress in speeding the registration procedure. The county board of registration, which ordinarily sits for only two days a month, in January sat for twelve days, and on a single day last week processed 60 Negro applications--although there was no indication that any had been declared qualified to vote. Moreover, a federal judge, responding to a suit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice, decreed that Alabama's onerous 20-page voting test on government and the U.S. Constitution, aimed at disqualifying Negroes, must be discarded and that Dallas County registrars must process at least 100 applicants each day their offices are open.

With the breakthrough under his belt and his cause dramatized before the world, Martin Luther King finally paid his $200 bond, emerged from jail to propose a meeting with President Johnson in which he would urge that federal registrars replace local officials to assure racial equality in voting registration throughout the South.

Despite their gains, Negroes continued to protest. Another 525, including 450 children, were arrested in Selma at week's end. And King announced that his drive would continue there and would spread to such other Alabama cities as Montgomery, Gadsden, Anniston, Tuscaloosa and Dothan.

-As of then, only 335 of the 32,700 Negroes in Dallas County, of which Selma is the county seat, were registered to vote.

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