In 1961 Dallas County, Alabama, was 57 percent Black, yet only 130 of its 15,000 eligible Black citizens were registered to vote. Amelia Boynton’s Dallas County Voters League and SNCC spent years on slow community organizing until a 1964 injunction effectively barred more than two people from discussing voter registration. The local Courageous Eight then invited Martin Luther King Jr.’s SCLC, whose strategy of creating a visible nonviolent crisis for national cameras SNCC distrusted. White officials were split too: Selma’s public safety director Wilson Baker wanted quiet arrests out of sight, while Sheriff Jim Clark led a 200 man posse with cattle prods and whips, and the SCLC focused on Clark’s courthouse.
On February 18 a state trooper shot Jimmie Lee Jackson in Marion as he protected his mother and grandfather, and he died eight days later. SCLC strategist James Bevel proposed a 54 mile march to Montgomery, and on March 7 troopers and Clark’s posse attacked about 600 marchers led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, fracturing Lewis’s skull and beating Boynton unconscious. After a secret deal led King to turn a second march back, LBJ told Congress we shall overcome, and a protected march reached Montgomery with 25,000 people. Klansmen then murdered Viola Liuzzo. The Voting Rights Act followed in August, and by March 1966 nearly 11,000 Black Selma voters had registered and helped vote Clark out.
- Annie Lee Cooper knocked Sheriff Clark to his knees after he twisted her arm.
- Malcolm X visited Selma and presented himself as the alternative if King’s movement was rebuffed.
- Unitarian minister James Reeb’s killing drew national mourning, and Stokely Carmichael pointed to the far smaller response to Jackson’s death.
- A court order limited the march to 300 people on the two lane stretch of Highway 80 through Lowndes County.
- The FBI spread false rumors about Liuzzo through COINTELPRO while one of the Klansmen in the car was a paid FBI informant.
Leave a Reply