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Selma March For historical purposes, AARP is intent on collecting “The Voices of Civil Rights.” Here is a personal contribution, remembering Rev. Martin Luther King’s 1965 March for Freedom. Journalist, war correspondent and novelist W. C. “Bill” Heinz and I were en route from the Saturday Evening Post offices in New York City to Alabama, assigned to report on Rev. Martin Luther King’s Freedom March. We knew this would become a moment in history.Our particular burden was telling the story seven weeks after the march had ended. By then, television, newsweeklies and every United States newspaper would have presented its version of the events. The impractical deadline bedeviled Heinz, my friend and long my professional mentor. Nonetheless, this brilliant chronicler, who later would rewrite MASH into a bestseller, and produce Vince Lombardi’s autobiography: “Run To Daylight,” wrote 7,000 words that, to my mind, are a narrative summary school children will study as long as American history is taught. Here, then, are excerpts: “You will be the people that will light a new chapter in the history books of our nation,” Martin Luther King said. “This is one of the greatest demonstrations for human rights in history…Now is the time…Walk together, children. Don’t you get weary, and it will lead us to the promised land. And Alabama will be a new Alabama, and America will be a new America.” As soon as they had left Brown’s Chapel and turned right on Alabama Ave., they had encountered the hostile whites. The women were the worst…the first two women, in their early 50’s, plump, dressed for Sunday and their gray hair professionally set, were standing opposite the Selma Arms Co. “I ain’t seen a nigger I know yet,” the one in the brown and white checked coat said to the one in the gray coat. “If I see any I know,” the one in gray said, “I’ll run out and kick ‘em.” “We shall overcome,” the marchers were singing, their eyes straight ahead. “We shall overcome, some day.” The white nuns took the worst of it. What Sister Patrice, from San Mateo, CA and Sister Mary Leoline, from Kansas City, heard concerning their chastity out of the mouths of the white women of Alabama should not be printed. “You all got your birth control pills?” shouted a white woman in her 30’s. She was standing with a boy of about six and a girl of about four. When she began to shout, the boy and girl turned and looked up at their mother. On the matter of security, and safety, Heinz wrote: Charles B. Rangel, a Negro lawyer came from New York City where, he said, he had never before heard from a white woman, or from anyone else, the cry, “Niggers! Niggers! Kill the Goddam Niggers! “I was in Korea,” he said, “and I got the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart, but when I woke up at the campsite this morning, under similar surroundings, I had a strange feeling. I mean this was America, but American troops were guarding me.” (Along, as escorts, were members of the federalized Alabama National Guard. United States Marshals, in street clothes, had primary responsibility, while Regular Army demolition specialists searched culverts and roadside areas for bombs.) We repeatedly asked marchers why they were there? What prompted them to march? A Catholic priest gave a particularly compelling answer--- The Rev. Sherrill Smith was sitting on his raincoat on a grassy bank on the side of the highway. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, “and I suppose that each of us is here because of what he is himself, and it isn’t always easy to explain ourselves.”… “From my youth, I was a typical Northerner. I brushed shoulders with Negroes daily, but I never really saw them. While I was in the service, though, we came up through Georgia, and I saw for the first time the terrible gulf between the Negro and the white man. It was like another country. “Of course,” he said, “as a priest I represent the church, and I’ve felt great anguish about the silence of the church in the South. We’ve made enough high-sounding statements, and it just seemed to me that the time had come when we should be eyeball to eyeball. As a man, I’ve felt this deeply. “All I know,” he said looking right at the reporter, “is that I just had to put my feet on this highway, and I just had to walk.” Lastly, W. C. Heinz wrote, “The monuments of the Selma March of 1965 that publicized and set the moral climate for the passage of the Voting Rights Act, are not, of course, set in stone. They are in the registrations since of the millions of new black voters in the South, in the blacks who hold office in the 11 states of the old Confederacy…and throughout America, in black mayors, city council members and members of Congress. (For the full text of the Heinz-Lindeman piece, see “American Mirror” by W. C. Heinz; Doubleday & Co.; 1982. In the Author’s Note, Heinz says, “I owe a particular debt to Bard Lindeman…who, on the Selma March, patrolled with me U.S. 80, and whose legwork and perceptivity were responsible for much that is in the last piece in this book.”) |
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