Selma: Sustaining the momentum
Two Century editors report from the second march in Selma, Alabama, on March 9, 1965
Having traveled to Atlanta by plane, many of the civil rights demonstrators who converged on Selma today rode by bus or rented car past the state capitol in Montgomery before reaching their destination. Two flags, those of Alabama and of the Confederacy, fly atop the capitol dome to inform visiting Americans that they are outsiders. The demonstrators rode on new interstate highways dotted by signs bearing those same flags—highways paid for largely by federal taxes but designated the “Wallace Program” to honor the governor who makes visitors outsiders. The logic of the federal experience, however, will not permit George Wallace and his followers to have their way: in regard to the concerns of this nation all are insiders. As with state, so with church. None of the New Testament’s metaphors for the church will permit today’s demonstrators to be thought of as outsiders, so long as there is suffering among Christians in Alabama.
Today’s insiders were responding to an appeal that came yesterday afternoon from Martin Luther King Jr., of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and from allied civil rights groups (including SNCC and CORE, whose untiring stalwarts deserve more credit than they have received for the rights activities in progress in Alabama). Banks had already closed by the time the appeal reached Chicago and other northern cities. The ministers, rabbis, priests, executives, professors, editors, students and housewives who had only a few hours to get to Selma reached into emergency funds, piggy banks, petty cash boxes and other symbols of free enterprise to scrape together plane or train fare. (We thought of these varied resources as we looked into the eyes of the white citizens of Selma who were looking into our eyes: we were sure that they were sure these funds just had to come from the communists!)
Weary from the night’s travel, hundreds of participants assembled at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church in a Selma that was ominously quiet, oppressively tense. Inside the crowded church, recent history and events of recent days were being recounted. Listeners knew that in 1965 voting rights would be the focus of aspirations and demonstrations. Though Negroes had been in North America for three and a half centuries, few of them in the south could exercise such rights; a century after emancipation, almost no black belt Negroes were free to share in the most basic expressions of American freedom. Speaker after speaker repeated the story and the problem. Local and state “power structures” (a phrase used almost as an incantation) have not helped the Negro in his quest for the vote, in fact have brutally thwarted him as he sought it. Demonstrations were to call attention to the difficulties Negroes have in registering to vote on the basis of existing law. The larger purpose of attracting attention is of course to compel passage of federal legislation which will guarantee Negroes their rights.
