The Long March From Selma

March 21 is a momentous date in U.S. history. In 1965, Americans took another step toward redeeming what Martin Luther King Jr. called the “promissory note” of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Actually, there were many steps taken in 1965, and some of them were bloody. They were taken on the road from Selma, Ala.

The march from Selma to Montgomery was actually the third of three such marches that year. In 1964, Martin Luther King had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and he and the leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference decided to make their stand in Alabama, where King began his ministry at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in 1954.

The SCLC joined forces with another group, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to register voters in the town of Selma. These attempts were met with violence and intimidation – and very few new African American voters – and when a young protestor named Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot dead by police, a protest march was called for March 7. The planned destination: the state capital in Montgomery.

Now the battle lines were truly set. Two years earlier, Gov. George Wallace delivered a fiery inaugural address from the portico of Alabama's state capitol on the very spot where Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy. Wallace made that historical connection in his speech, which he punctuated with the now-infamous declaration: “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”

To this, civil rights leaders offered a profound and succinct rejoinder, “We shall overcome!”

This was more than a prayer, and more than a hymn. It was a call to action. And on March 7, SCLC leader Hosea Williams and SNCC leader John Lewis led 500 souls on the 54-mile march from Selma toward the capital. But in a horrific scene captured by news cameras and broadcast to the world, the marchers were set upon after crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge by a mob armed with clubs and whips. Alabama state troopers either stood by and did nothing or participated in the attack.

“Bloody Sunday” generated national outrage, and prompted a direct challenge from Lewis, who was severely beaten that day, to the man in the White House: “I don’t see how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam, I don’t see how he can send troops to the Congo, I don’t see how he can send troops to Africa,” Lewis said, “and can’t send troops to Selma.”

In Washington, Lyndon Johnson was having similar thoughts. Meanwhile, religious leaders poured into Alabama from around the country, and two days later, Martin Luther King led a crowd four times as large on the same route. Again, they were turned back by police who had barricaded State Route 80, the road into Montgomery. Johnson had seen enough. On March 15, the president took to the airwaves to announce a new voting rights act.

“There is no Negro problem, there is no Southern problem… there is only an American problem,” LBJ told the nation on March 15, 1965. “Their cause must be our cause too -- because it is not just Negros, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

Six days later, on this date in history, the marchers tried again. This time, they were escorted by U.S. Army troops and federalized members of the Alabama National Guard. They crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge and continued on State Route 80. A federal judge had limited the marchers on the highway to 300, but by the time they reached the steps of the capitol in Montgomery on March 25, their ranks had swelled to 25,000.

There, only a few hundred feet from the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the Rev. King addressed a crowd – and a watching world. “The end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience,” he said. “And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.”

How long must they wait? King asked the audience in his famous call-and-response, still chilling 47 years later. “How long? Not long.”