Published in the Westchester Guardian, January 2015
“There was never a moment in American history more honorable and more inspiring than the pilgrimage of clergymen and laymen of every race and faith pouring into Selma to face danger at the side of the Embattled Negro.”
Selma is the county seat and the major town of Dallas County, Alabama. In 1961, the County’s population was 57% black, but of the 15,000 blacks old enough to vote, only 130 were registered. Eighty per cent of blacks lived below the poverty line.
On July 2, 1964, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, declaring segregation illegal, Jim Crow laws, however, remained.
In 1965, the population of Lowndes County, Alabama was 81% black and 19% white, but not a single black was registered to vote. Concurrently, 2,240 whites registered to vote, a figure representing 118% of the adult white population.
The Marches
On January 2, 1965, the Selma Voting Rights Movement officially started when Dr. Martin Luther King addressed a mass meeting in defiance of injunctions. On February 18, during a march to a courthouse in Perry County, protesting an arrest, street lights were turned off and state troopers attacked the demonstrators. One person was killed. On March 7, an estimated 525 civil rights marchers headed east out of Selma on U.S. Highway 80. The protest went according to plan until the marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, into a wall of state troopers. The officers became physical. Many demonstrators were knocked down, beaten with nightsticks while tear gas was fired and mounted troopers charged. Televised images of the brutal attack presented Americans with horrifying images. The day was nicknamed “Bloody Sunday”.
On March 9, “Turnaround Tuesday”, Dr. King led about 2,500 marchers out to the Edmund Pettus Bridge and held a short prayer session before turning around. That evening, three white ministers were attacked by four Ku Klux Klan members and beaten with clubs. One died after Selma’s public hospital refused to treat him.
On Sunday, March 21, close to 8,000 people assembled at Brown Chapel to commence the trek to Montgomery. On March 22nd and 23rd, three hundred protesters marched across Lowndes County. Then, on Thursday, March 25th, twenty-five thousand people walked from St. Jude to the steps of the State Capitol Building where King delivered the speech, “How Long, Not Long.”
The Speech
This thirty-six hundred word speech, without hate or rancor succeeded in strengthening the will power of this multi-racial and spiritually peaceful group. Dr. King acknowledges with sincere platitudes, their pains and suffering and quotes a Sr. Pollard when she was asked during a bus strike if her feet were tired, “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.”
Dr. King, in this first portion of the speech clarifies the history and importance of Montgomery as the first city where African-Americans united as one. These early battles led to the weak Civil Rights Act of 1964, clarifying the need for current marches rectifying where this act fell short – voter’s rights. Also, he does not ignore the complexities of politics and lauds then president, Lyndon Johnson for his courage and passionate appeals for human rights.
With thanks, respect and gratitude to the white population, he ends with complements to those who joined the movement and is certain segregation is on its dead bed and the only uncertainly is “how costly the segregationists and (Gov.) Wallace will make the funeral.”
Concluding the first portion of his speech and without attacking, blaming or hating those who are primarily depriving the African-American’s of their rights, Dr. King notes an historian’s hypothesis on the cause of this disease – the post-Civil War aristocracy. A Populist Movement was awakening between “the poor white masses and the former Negro slaves to the fact that they were being fleeced by the emerging Bourbon interests.” And this voting bloc “threatened to drive the Bourbon interest from …political power in the South.” Through their immense power they slowly, intentionally separated the poor, turned them against each other for competition of economic scraps. Through this history lesson, he does not place blame on the living, suffering hungry white classes but on an elite few carrying decisive intentions for the wealthy nearly a century earlier.
The middle of this speech begins with a proclamation that the fight if far from over, “Yes, we are on the move and no wave or racism can stop us.” The burnings, bombings and murders will not slow them down. The Reverend tries to unite, focusing on the common struggle between the races for better lives for their children. “Let us march on poverty until no American parent has to skip a meal so that their children may eat.” He expands beyond economics with – “Let us march on ballot boxes until all over Alabama God’s children will be able to walk the earth in decency and honor.” To reinforce that peaceful marching can be both a religious and successful endeavor, he refers to the Bible, Joshua, the Battle of Jericho and the falling walls of this mighty city – with non-violence.
Dr. King begins the final third of his speech with the continued commitment to non-violence by listing the martyrs of the movement. From the three Mississippi civil rights workers, to the four girls murdered in the church bombing (See my article on Oct 30th) to Medgar Evers, “we must go on and be sure that they did not die in vain.” They have a momentum that must not be lost. And in reply to editorials whose authors want a return to normalcy with the exit of these “agitators” he refreshes the public’s memory on the truth of what Alabama’s normalcy – “which leave the Negro perishing on a lonely island of poverty” facing beatings and death. “The only normalcy that we will settle for is the normalcy of brotherhood, the normalcy of true peace, the normalcy of justice.” Unlike today, hatred and malice are missing. Revenge is absent.
Commitment to non-violence is essential for success and inclusiveness. “Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding. We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of a white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.” Where is that today?
Mid-point of the conclusion, the Reverend phases passages using the terminology from hence we get the speech’s title. “How long will prejudice blind….” “How long will justice be crucified…” The moment, the hour might be difficult, but “…it will not be long, because truth crushed to earth will rise again.” His begins a short prose of “how long, not long” because “no lie can live forever,” “because you shall reap what you sow”, leading to the spiritual song, “Not long because: Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
The greatness of the moment could have easily been loss through call for violence and hate.
After Affects
The march did not end confrontations for violence continued to be perpetrated: That night, Viola Liuzzo, a white mother of five from Detroit supporting voting rights for blacks, was assassinated by Ku Klux Klan members. Afterward, the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation spread false rumors that Liuzzo was a member of the Communist Party and abandoned her children to have sexual relationships with African Americans involved in the civil rights movement.
U.S. Representative William Louis Dickinson made two speeches to Congress on March 30th and April 27th seeking to slander the movement by making spurious charges of alcohol abuse, bribery, and widespread sexual debauchery at the marches. Religious leaders present at the marches denied the charges, and local and national journalists were unable to substantiate his accounts.
On March 15, 1965, Johnson presented a bill to a joint session of Congress. The bill itself would later pass and become the Voting Rights Act. Johnson’s speech in front of Congress was considered to be a watershed moment for the civil rights movement.
Overall, the Justice Department assigned registrars to only six of Alabama’s 24 Black Belt counties during the 1960s. In 1960, there were just 53,336 black voters in the state of Alabama; three decades later, there were 537,285, a tenfold increase.
Sources. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selma_to_Montgomery_marches.
Carson and Shepard, Editors. A Call to Conscience. The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Warner Books. 2002 -30-
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