The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories (22 page)

The horses and the whips had something to do with it, too. In the early 1960s, we had become almost accustomed to seeing police attack civil rights demonstrators with clubs and tear gas on our newscasts, but the horses and bullwhips were new. What kind of police officer would trample a child under a horse's hooves? What kind of police used bullwhips?

And I went because I believed that Dr. King and the demonstrations were in the right. A few years earlier, when I was a student at Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University, I was one of a committee that met with the university chancellor and urged him to allow TCU's few black students to live in the dorms and eat in the university dining hall if they wished. And I had walked a picket line in front of a movie theater in downtown Fort Worth, demanding that the management allow black patrons to sit wherever they wished, not just in the balcony.

I wasn't one of the shock troops of the civil rights movement, but I believed.

And I went because I was tired of being ill at ease that I was a white Southerner, a descendant of Confederate soldiers, living among self-righteous Yankees who believed that the nation's only race problem was in the South, and who suspected that anyone who talked with a drawl was a Klansman in his heart. I wanted to prove to them that many white Southerners believed in freedom and equality and justice, too.

And I went because I loved the South and wanted to see its tragic racial conflicts resolved without further bloodshed. I didn't want any more people to have to die so that all adult Americans could vote.

So on the night of March 15, when two chartered buses loaded with students from Boston's four Protestant theological schools headed south, I was aboard. Our arrangement with the bus company called for us to ride to Selma, show our support, stay until the afternoon of March 19, then return to Boston. We hoped the big push to the capital would begin while we were there, but the matter was in the hands of U.S. District Judge Frank Johnson in Montgomery, and he hadn't decided yet whether to allow such a march.

We arrived in Selma about 7 a.m. on March 17, groggy from 34 hours on the road. Volunteers led us off in small groups to homes and churches open to us as living quarters. A young boy took me and two other Harvard students—Roy Branson and Bob Schraeder—to the Green Street Baptist Church. We unrolled our sleeping bags on the floor of a Sunday school room and tried to sleep. We couldn't.

That afternoon we joined 500 demonstrators who were moving in double file toward the courthouse. The sky had turned dark and threatening. My marching partner was a black girl who said her name was Easter, about 12 years old. She was shy, or maybe just quiet. I asked her how many of the marches she had been in. She said, “All of them we've had.” I asked her if she had been at the Pettus Bridge. She said, “Yes.” She had two small scars on her face. I wondered if she had received them in the marches, but I wasn't bold enough to ask.

Just as we arrived at the courthouse, the dark skies opened. Heavy rain and hail pelted us. Easter had a colorful plaid umbrella. She opened it, and I held it over us. Not many of the marchers had had her foresight. A young black man standing next to us was getting soaked. We invited him under the umbrella, too.

Several black ministers stood on the courthouse steps and said prayers. The Rev. Hosea Williams, who had led the marchers to the Pettus Bridge on what was now being called “Bloody Sunday,” made a speech. I remember nothing of what he said, just the rain and the hail and the smirks on the faces looking at us through the courthouse windows, happy at our soaking. We stayed a long time, I think. Then we sang several freedom songs and began our walk back to Brown Chapel AME Church, where all the marches started.

State troopers were swarming over the downtown area. I counted seven of their cars on a single block. Two troopers were in each. White men stood in groups under the awnings in front of the stores, shouting as we walked by: “Nigger lover!” “White nigger!” Easter and I, walking together under the plaid umbrella, seemed especially to anger them. A man said: “Look at that preacher and his nigger gal! Ain't they cute?”

Twenty-five years later, I remember his face. He was the first to show me hatred in person.

Judge Johnson decided that day to allow the march to Montgomery. He ordered the Alabama State Troopers not only to refrain from attacking the marchers, but to protect them. If they failed, he warned, they would be held in contempt of court.

The judge placed restrictions on the marchers, too. About 40 of the 54 miles of highway between Selma and the capitol in Montgomery were only two lanes wide. Along that stretch, the judge said, no more than 300 people could march, and one lane of the highway must always be kept open to traffic.

So the plan became this: The march would begin at Brown Chapel on March 21 after an outdoor church service. The crowd of black Selma citizens and the volunteers then would march out of the city as far as the four-lane pavement extended, about eight miles. Then all but 300 marchers would return to Selma.

The 300 would march for three days until the highway widened to four lanes again, a few miles outside Montgomery. Then the throng would rejoin them for the push to the capitol, where, it was hoped, Dr. King and Mr. Reese and the other leaders would meet with Gov. Wallace.

About 250 of the 300 would be local people who had fought the voting rights battle in Selma for many months, even years. The remaining 50 would be celebrities who had raised money to support the march, dignitaries who had lent their names and reputations to the cause, and a few volunteers from around the country whose work for civil rights had been long and hard.

When our buses headed back to Boston on March 19, Roy and Bob and I weren't aboard. We couldn't bear to leave Selma just as the greatest march of the civil rights struggle was about to begin. We weren't among the honored 300, but there was plenty of work to do. Soon after Judge Johnson handed down his order, the black section of Selma came to resemble the staging area for an invasion. Dozens of trucks moved in and out, delivering food, air mattresses, tents, medical supplies, portable toilets. Many of the cargoes came from other states, since Alabama suppliers refused to sell or rent to the cause.

Lines of chartered buses stopped in front of the churches, bringing hundreds of new volunteers for the big march. Most were white, most of them clergy and professors and students, some from as far away as Hawaii. Cheers greeted them all. Reporters, photographers and TV crews were arriving from all over the world. It was raining every day.

In the churchyards, Hosea Williams and other veterans were teaching us how to fall to the ground, roll up in a ball and cup our hands over our genitals. “They always try to hit you there first,” Mr. Williams said. “If they can't hit you there, they'll go for the head and the kidneys, but you can't protect everything.”

He told us to carry identification and at least $2 at all times, so we wouldn't be arrested for vagrancy. He told us to carry no aspirin or prescription medicines, so we wouldn't be arrested for possession of drugs, and no pocketknives, nail files or ballpoint pens, so we wouldn't be jailed for carrying deadly weapons.

State troopers, Dallas County deputies and Selma policemen sat in their cars near the street comers, watching us.

Those of us not among the 300 were assigned jobs preparing food, driving trucks, finding phones for the reporters to use, carrying messages, raising tents. Roy and Bob and I were among those assigned to be marshals.

The marshals were to wear yellow armbands and walk outside the ranks and keep order among the marchers on the big day. We were to keep our people away from the roadsides, so hostile onlookers couldn't grab them, pull them away and beat them or kill them. We were to help stragglers and find ways to get them safely out of the march and back home. We were to keep our people from answering the jeers and curses they would hear. We were to keep them looking straight ahead.

Sunday was sunny and warm. Three thousand of us stood in the street in front of Brown Chapel, in the midst of the George Washington Carver Homes public housing project. On the church steps was a lectern covered with a white cloth. Smoke from a garbage fire drifted around the side of the church. Cinders were falling on the crowd. Dr. King was speaking.

“You will be the people that will light a new chapter in the history books of our nation,” he said. “This is one of the greatest demonstrations for human rights in history. We have waited for freedom. We are tired of waiting. Now is the time. Walk together, children. Don't you get weary. And it will lead us to the Promised Land. And Alabama will be a new Alabama, and America will be a new America.”

Then, marching eight abreast, we started.

Downtown, a segregated crowd lined the sidewalks, white people on one side of the street, black people on the other. They were shouting. “White nigger!” “Communist!” “Scum!” “Yes!” “Freedom!” “Praise God!”

I was walking on the white side of the street, down the narrow space between the marchers and the crowd. A man stepped off the sidewalk and grabbed my arm. He tried to rip off my marshal's armband. “What the hell does all this damn stuff mean?” he said. I looked him in the eyes and said nothing, as I had been trained to do. I slowly pulled my arm from his grasp. He stepped back onto the sidewalk, and I walked on.

A police car was at the comer where we turned onto Broad Street, Selma's main thoroughfare. A recording of
Dixie
blared from the car's loudspeaker. Then
Bye Bye Blackbird
. A policeman standing beside the car made a big show of taking pictures—or pretending to—of local black people in the march. “We know who you are. We'll remember you,” he said.

When we crossed Edmund Pettus Bridge, I noticed the federal presence for the first time. National guardsmen and regular Army MPs were everywhere. Military helicopters circled over us.

Gov. Wallace had claimed that Alabama lacked the resources to protect the marchers as Judge Johnson had ordered, so President Lyndon Johnson had nationalized the Alabama guard and sent the MPs from Fort Benning, Ga. Soldiers stood in pairs—a black and a white in each pair—all along the highway, bayonets fixed to their rifles.

Beyond the bridge, crowds of white people leaned into the road, shouting so loudly that we could hear nothing else. The nuns among us bore the worst. What the white women by the roadside screamed about their chastity can't be repeated here. Some of the men by the roadside were drunk. For a quarter of a mile, I almost held my breath, afraid they would pull me or someone from our column into their midst.

Then suddenly we were in the countryside, passing pastures and fields and woods and small communities where whites and blacks stood together by the road, the whites shouting insults, the blacks singing.

Cars crowded the other half of the four-lane highway. Many bore signs: “Coonsville, U.S.A.” “Go Home, Scum.” Teenagers leaning from car windows waved Confederate flags. Where a country lane opened into the highway, two guardsmen stood, one white, one black. The white soldier glared with rage. Tears rolled down the black soldier's face.

We reached the camping ground—a plot of land owned by a black farmer, eight miles from Selma—just before sundown. The temperature was dropping fast and thunderclouds were gathering. The leaders canceled the mass rally that had been scheduled, and the marchers, except for the 300, were shuttled by bus to a special train, which would return them to Selma.

A young black man invited Bob and me to ride back to town in his car with him and two of his friends. It would be faster than the train, so we accepted. We got into the back seat with one of the friends.

As we crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the driver told Bob and me to crouch down so we couldn't be seen through the windows. Just as we reached the heart of downtown, the engine died. The driver coasted the car around a comer off Broad Street and parked it.

“It's the generator,” he said. “It's been giving trouble. I'll go call somebody to come get us.” He told Bob and me to hunker on the floor of the back seat, then he went away.

A few minutes later, he returned. He said he had found a phone, but it was out of order. He tried to start the car again. It wouldn't. He left to look for another phone.

Everybody was tense. “If the troopers see you in this car with us, they'll kill us all,” said the man in the front seat. Then a car door slammed. “Oh, God, It's deputies!” he whispered.

A flashlight glared at the window. What you boys doing?” It was more a threat than a question.

“Car busted,” mumbled the man in the front seat. “My friend has gone to look for another one.”

“What's wrong with it?” the deputy asked.

“Don't know. It just stopped.”

The deputy flashed his light into the face of the man in the back seat with Bob and me. At that moment, I
knew
with absolute certainty that we were going to be killed. But my mind was full of a calm that I hadn't known before—a tranquility I still can't explain. It was as if I were standing outside myself, watching myself as I would a character in a movie, not at all grieved that he was about to die.

Then the light moved away. “Well, all right,” the deputy said. The door slammed again. The police car pulled away. The man in the front seat said, “There was two of them. Lord.”

In a while, our driver returned with another car. His friends hustled Bob and me into the back seat. We stuck to the back streets and eased back to Brown Chapel.

The next two days moved slowly for Roy and Bob and me. We read, slept and stayed up almost all of Tuesday night playing poker. Roy, a Seventh Day Adventist, had to be taught the game. It was raining again. I was fighting a cold, probably the result of that first rainy walk to the courthouse with Easter.

Things being as they were, I couldn't go to any of the drugstores in Selma, all owned by whites. A small boy told me about an old man who had a tiny store in a tin shed and took me there. The man had one box of Anacin and one bottle of Vicks cough syrup. I bought them, doctored myself, and contrary to Hosea Williams' orders, kept them with me in my coat pocket.