The 50th anniversary of the famous Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march in Alabama has already been mostly observed and remembered nationally.
The highlight included a big celebration in Selma on March 7 and a speech from President Barack Obama that some thought was one of the best of his presidency from an oratorical standpoint.
But the actual 1965 march to push for the passage of a voting rights act took place from March 21-25 – exactly 50 years ago this week.
This was, of course, after the marchers – who were protesting to end challenging literacy tests and poll taxes for voters – were granted a court order to march under federalized Alabama National Guardsmen.
Out of curiosity, I decided to go back and look at both Chattanooga newspapers from March 1965 on microfilm at the library to see how the event was covered.
What I found was a march that was perceived at the time perhaps somewhat differently in the papers than it is in 2015, due to the fact that not everyone was supportive of it in the world of 1965.
However, even through that perspective of long ago, it was quite clear that the marchers believed they were morally right in what they were doing.
Of the two Chattanooga papers, the Chattanooga News-Free Press devoted more space, wire service stories and pictures to the march.
Whether this was due to the fact that it might have had more available pages than the Chattanooga Times is not known.
The News-Free Press also commented regularly during the week on the event on its editorial page, mostly by criticizing the tactics of the marchers and voting rights advocates.
For example, when the march began, one editorial hoped for no incidents of violence but added, “Every decent citizen should also be fully aware of and disgusted with the determined trouble making which has victimized the people of the United States, and with the excesses of the president which have victimized the Constitution.”
Later in the week the News-Free Press wrote an editorial saying that the marchers had freedom, but what they really wanted was respect. “But respect is something that must be earned,” the commentary said.
The Chattanooga Times did not comment about the march nearly as much on its editorial page. But at the start it did offer a show of support for the marchers by encouraging the passage of a Voting Rights Act.
“The situation is such that strong legislation on this subject, which must be passed by this Congress, is the professed sum not only of a number of Southern Democratic congressmen, but of some Southern Republicans as well,” the Times commentary stated.
Neither paper had a Chattanooga reporter covering the event.
The march was taking place at the same time that a Gemini capsule piloted by astronauts John Young and Virgil Grissom was bringing back the first close-up photos of the moon. As a result, Americans were busily looking at the world externally and internally at that time due to the two different kinds of journeys.
The Vietnam conflict was also growing more complicated and was making plenty of news.
The 50-mile Selma-to-Montgomery march began on Sunday, March 21, at the large Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Several thousand then worked their way across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, with some younger marchers kneeling down on the bridge to symbolize when many had been beaten by law enforcement officers two weeks earlier.
As the marchers continued, they were met with a few jeers, and one record store played “Dixie” over a speaker system. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was with them during this part of the journey, said he actually thought the marchers would receive more negative comments than they did, the papers said.
But the marchers also received some positive inspiration. Jim Leather, a one-legged white man from Michigan, joined the marchers for a period, as did Cager Lee, the 82-year-old black grandfather of Jimmie Lee Jackson, who had died in February in related violence.
Here is how Associated Press reporter Ross Hagen described that first day: “Priests, nuns, ministers and rabbis walked. Beatnik types were there. So were white women, Negro civil rights leaders, a Negro pushing his baby in a stroller. Some were well dressed. Some wore Levis.”
By the time they stopped for the evening eight miles down the road, only about 400 marchers planned to spend the night in tents set up in a cow pasture belonging to black farmer David Hall.
Some of the hundreds of others who took part were returned to Selma via special train cars. The ones who spent the night in sleeping bags or makeshift bedding slept under two tents – one for the women and one for the men.
They were protected throughout the night by some Alabama National Guardsmen under Brig. Gen. Henry Graham.
The Guardsmen were mobilized by President Lyndon Johnson, who had communicated that plan to Alabama Gov. George Wallace. Telling Gov. Wallace about the plan for the president and serving as a go-between was none other than Buford Ellington, who was helping with federal emergency planning in between terms as Tennessee governor.
Among the other logistical measures, a special trailer was also provided for Dr. King by his supporters.
Even in 1965, this seemingly extemporaneous trip was well orchestrated.
Because the overnight temperature dipped down to 31 degrees, which resulted in the cancellation of a special program by the marchers, the Guardsmen standing sentry built campfires.
The marchers had also built campfires, but they were also warmed – at least emotionally -- by finally feeling as though they were on the beginning steps of a journey toward true freedom for all Americans.
The next morning, Monday, March 22 -- as the sun began rising amid clear skies – a breakfast of oatmeal, toast, jelly and coffee arrived via truck from Selma.
As the News-Free Press documented, the marchers then left at 8 a.m., with Dr. King saying the goal was to march 14 miles that day.
After marching on that Monday, they camped that night near a swamp on some Lowndes County land owned by black storeowner Rose Steele, who did some brisk business with the marchers.
The rural Lowndes County at the time had four times more blacks than whites, but the first black person had not been registered to vote until the week before.
The Lowndes sheriff, Frank Ryals, was also apparently not happy about the march. He was quoted in one article in the News-Free Press as saying that the march was unneeded. “It’s a lot of expense for nothing,” he said. “It’s disrupting the people in their homes and on the highway.”
That night, Dr. King left to go to Selma and then to Cleveland, Ohio, for a program honoring him. That move and the fact that he had slept in a warm trailer were criticized by some, including the News-Free Press, which said in an editorial that a leader should “ask no more of his men than he is willing to do himself.”
While this march was taking place, a number of peripheral-but-related events were also staged. For example, a Louisiana segregationist group had paid to display billboards around Alabama during the week that showed a picture of Dr. King at the Highlander Folk School by Monteagle, Tenn. The caption said he was at a “Communist training school,” according to a front-page story in the Chattanooga paper.
Dr. King told reporters that he had spent about an hour in 1958 at the school, which did civil rights and labor union training at that time and simply considered itself liberal, not communist-oriented.
However, Dr. King still tried to distance himself from the facility when he said, “If I was trained there, it was mighty short training.”
With Dr. King gone the next morning -- Tuesday, March 23 -- a number of others took over leadership of the march. They included John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, King aide Andrew Young and New York attorney Charles Rangel, who later became a U.S. representative.
As the marchers gathered to start during rainy weather, a 17-year-old black girl, Betty Jean Sullivan, had a health emergency and had to be taken away by ambulance. Rev. Young took the occasion to tell the group that now was the time to drop out for those who were struggling physically.
Some dissension also overcame the marchers, whose numbers had to be cut to 300 during this leg because the trek went through some narrow stretches of land by swampland, and because U.S. Highway 80 narrowed from four to two lanes.
Some blacks said the white participants should drop out as the numbers had to be reduced.
But Rev. Young disagreed, replying, “We must have a small group of white people because, frankly, the white people are our protection. Besides, this is not just a Negro movement. We are dramatizing all of America’s problems.”
The crankiness among the proverbial 20th century desert wanderers might have been brought on by the rain that fell throughout that Tuesday.
That night, they camped on land owned by Birmingham black millionaire A.G. Gaston, whose motel was bombed during the 1963 civil rights protests there.
The next morning, Wednesday, March 24, they arose earlier than normal and, after another breakfast of toast and oatmeal, began marching at 7 a.m. They wanted to make 14 miles, which would put them within the city limits of Montgomery.
As they began, the restrictions on the number of marchers were lifted as the highway became wider. As a result, hundreds of supporters began filing in to march with them. Dr. King also returned from Cleveland to join them.
Victory – or at least their goal of reaching Montgomery – seemed finally at hand. It had to be a satisfying feeling to those who believed in voting rights for all law-abiding citizens.
That night, they stayed on the expansive grounds of the City of St. Jude hospital and educational facility. Before they all slept on an athletic field, a “Stars of Freedom” rally was held there that included appearances by Odetta, Harry Belafonte, Pete Seeger, Leonard Bernstein and Joan Baez.
By the time they began marching the final six miles to the Montgomery state capitol building about 11 a.m. Eastern time the next day -- Thursday, March 25 -- some 15,000 or more fellow marchers and supporters were in town to join them as one collective body.
The program at the capitol began with entertainment at 12:30 Eastern time, followed by remarks by Rev. Young, the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, and Dr. Theodore Gill of a San Francisco seminary.
After Old Testament and New Testament readings shortly before 2, remarks followed from march director Hosea Williams, the Rev. T.Y Rogers, Albert Turner of Marion, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth of Birmingham, F.F. Reese of Selma, and the Rev. James Bevel of the Southern Christian Leadership.
Then, brief comments were made by United Nations undersecretary Ralph Bunche, A Phillip Randolph of the Sleeping Car Porters Union, Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, James Farmer of the Congress for Racial Equality, and Mr. Lewis.
Then at mid-afternoon came the remarks from Dr. King, who had no doubt ascended to the leadership of the civil rights groups due primarily to his articulate speaking skills.
In his stirring style, he told the crowd that some people thought they would not make it to Montgomery. However, he said. “All the world today knows that we are here and we are standing before the forces of power in the state of Alabama saying, ‘We ain’t goin’ to let nobody turn us around.’ ”
Then, toward the end of the speech that surely went beyond the 15 minutes that had been allotted, he encouraged the marchers to remain committed to nonviolence to achieve goals like the passage of a federal voting rights law.
“Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding,” he said. “We must come to see that the end we seek is a society of peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.
“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.”
The moving program ended with the singing of the civil rights anthem, “We Shall Overcome,” which had been written by Zilphia Horton, wife of Highlander Folk School founder Myles Horton, and several others.
That night, after the civil rights advocates were celebrating the completion of the march and rally, organizers and participants received some bad news.
Selma participant Viola Gregg Liuzzo of Detroit, who had lived in Chattanooga in the 1930s and early 1940s, was shot and killed while driving through Lowndes County after taking some marchers to the Montgomery airport. Some Ku Klux Klansmen from Alabama were later arrested.
While a horrific event, her unfortunate death was not in vain, nor was the march. That was because slightly more than four months later – on August 6, 1965 – the Selma participants finally received the news they wanted: President Lyndon Johnson had signed the Voting Rights Act into law.
The marchers had overcome after all.
And 50 years later, as the march was remembered, another black man spoke about overcoming, just as Dr. King had. But this time the speaker held a position that might have seemed unlikely in 1965 for a black man – president of the United States.
And as President Obama added during that talk, an even more perfect world for all people is still out there waiting for those willing to march courageously and with a moral conscience.
“There are more bridges to be crossed,” he said. “And it is you, the young and fearless at heart, the most diverse and educated generation in our history, who the nation is waiting to follow.”
Jcshearer2@comcast.net