Selma's Painful Progress

By Ed Magnuson

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had targeted Selma, Ala., for a voter- registration drive. Although the city had 15,100 black residents, its voting rolls were 99% white. Dallas County Sheriff James Clark and his deputies arrested some 2,000 blacks trying to register, many merely for entering the whites-only front door of the courthouse. King on March 5, 1965, asked his followers to march 54 miles from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery to dramatize the injustice. "I can't promise that you won't get beaten," he warned. "But we must stand up for what is right."

Selma (pop. 27,260) has a restful Southern ambience these days, its broad streets and white houses with their screened verandas suggesting the setting of a Carson McCullers novel. (A movie based on her book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was, in fact, filmed there.) Edwin Moss, 69, was an Army combat veteran and one of the few blacks who was registered to vote in the town 20 years ago. Have things changed? "You're looking at one change," said Moss. He was the first black ever appointed as a registrar in Dallas County. Though the totals are distorted because people who have died or moved away have not been removed from the rolls, by last November Selma had 10,096 registered blacks, almost catching up to the 12,137 white voters.

John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Hosea Williams, a King deputy, rallied 600 blacks and a few whites outside the Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church on Sunday, March 7. They would march despite an order from Alabama Governor George Wallace, who had earlier declared that mass demonstrations "led by career and professional agitators" would not be permitted. Selma Mayor Joe T. Smitherman also opposed the march. The crowd at the church included Jesse Jackson.

As both sides seemed to anticipate, the Selma march would become a turning point in the civil rights movement, prompting Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act, eliminating literacy tests and leading to the end of poll taxes, + which discriminated against blacks.

Last week a crowd of some 1,800 people, mostly black, gathered in front of the same church to reenact the march. Nattily dressed in a blue blazer, Jackson noted some changes: "Twenty years ago, we could not drink water from a fountain when we were thirsty. We could not use the rest room when we had the urge." Yet, Jackson declared, "we stand here today because of unfinished business." Wilbert Thigman, a municipal worker who bears a scar on his arm as a result of the 1965 march, said conditions in Selma are much better now. A job then, he recalled, meant "50 cents a day and ten hours a day. You can get a lot more money now." Selma was once almost totally dependent on agriculture, mostly cotton. Now, observed Smitherman, still the mayor 20 years later, "there are 65 different sorts of manufacturing operations here." But Dallas County suffers a 15% unemployment rate; knowledgeable sources estimate the adult black unemployment rate at about 30%. The marchers formed two lines and moved toward the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Sixty state troopers were massed on the other side, blocking all four lanes of U.S. Highway 80. Sheriff Clark and his men, some on horses, waited nearby. Dale Ross, 10, watched as his father joined Clark's mounted possemen.

"My father told me it would be history in the making," Ross recalled last week, "and it was. That was a different time then. I'm glad to see blacks got all their rights. It's something to be proud of." Smitherman agreed, "We look back on it now, and we were wrong. Every American ought to have the right to vote."

The marchers crossed the bridge. The troopers put on their gas masks. "Turn around and go back to your church," shouted State Police Major John Cloud through a bullhorn. "You will not be allowed to march any further." The marchers stopped, but did not turn back.

As the anniversary march crossed the Pettus bridge, black and white Selma police officers and state troopers held back the automobile traffic. Blacks constitute 35% of the Selma police department and 45% of the fire department. Two of Selma's six present councilmen are black. A black woman, Jackie Walker, was elected tax collector last fall, becoming the first of her race to win a countywide election since Reconstruction. Walker died in an auto accident on Feb. 1. Selma's minority community is waiting to see if the white county commissioners will appoint another black to take her place.

"Troopers--forward!" shouted Cloud. As the dark blue uniforms advanced, officers swung their clubs. The marchers retreated under the assault, many falling. The troopers, joined eagerly by Clark's redneck posse, pushed on amid clouds of tear gas. Charging on horseback, someof the men swung bullwhips at the fallen and fleeing marchers. "O.K., nigger," yelled one horseman as he flailed his whip at a woman. "You wanted to march. Now march!"

"What happened was unjust," said Selma Librarian Patricia Blalock. "Some people reacted badly. But I think you should give a town another chance. We've tried to change." To the Rev. Frederick Reese, a Selma black leader who had invited King to check out the city's denial of voting rights in the first place, the 20-year evolution has been "miserably slow." Now principal of the Eastside Junior High School, Reese pointed to two private white academies that have opened since the public schools began to integrate in 1965. "There is toleration," he said. "Toleration is a step forward from the past, but real racial harmony has not been achieved."

With reporting by B. Russell Leavitt/Selma