"Selma" the movie is coming to theaters this December. Here is an excerpt from Eye on the Struggle
relating to the march.
The
following spring, the civil rights movement made it clear that its legislative
business was not done. On Sunday, March 7, 1965, protesters in Alabama seeking
to draw attention to the state’s insistent use of Br’er Rabbit–like trickery to
keep blacks off the rolls of registered voters began a march from Selma to the
state capital in Montgomery. State police used deadly force to halt the march
as it crossed the
Edmund Pettus Bridge, only hundreds of yards into its planned fifty-mile journey.
A week later, President Johnson came to Capitol Hill to
address a joint session of Congress. Payne secured a seat. She did not want to miss
this moment. As a voting rights organizer for the Democratic Party, she was
anxious to see what the president was willing to do to back up his stated
intentions of following up the 1964 Civil Rights Act
with a federal voting rights law. The violence that met the group drew
national attention to their cause and was forcing his hand.
When
Johnson rose to the dais on the floor of the House, more than seventy
million Americans tuned in on their televisions to see what he
had to say. In the gallery above, Payne listened in amazement. In
sonorous tones and in his distinct drawl, Johnson spoke in almost
religious terms of the right to vote, making almost no reference to
the Constitution or laws. Rather, he focused on an elusive idea
of the “American Promise” and represented it in a narrative in
which the time had come to grant the final act of freedom to its black
citizens. “As a man whose roots go deeply into Southern soil, I
know how agonizing racial feelings are,” Johnson said. “I know how
difficult it is to reshape the attitudes and the structure of our society.”
All
who listened knew the speech was unlike any the president had
given before. They witnessed a rare moment in politics where quiet
eloquence silenced noisy opposition. The events in Selma, Johnson
said, were part of a movement that reached into every part of the
nation. African Americans were securing for themselves the freedom they
had long been denied. “Their cause must be our cause too. Because
it’s not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us who must overcome the
crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.” Then, pausing
and
leaning forward, Johnson repeated the words of the movement’s anthem,
“And we shall overcome.”
Payne
could not find words to describe her feelings at the end of
his speech. Two days later, in her office, she sat at her typewriter. “I
would like every schoolchild in American to have a copy of this speech,”
she wrote the president. It ranks in importance, she said, with
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation. “I
am proud and grateful for your leadership and I pledge to give my best efforts for the implementation of your program.”
Taking
her pledge to heart, Payne flew to Selma to join the third attempt
to make the march to Montgomery, but this time with the
backing of a federal judge, who enjoined the police from stopping the
marchers, and federal troops summoned by the president. Nonetheless,
it was like stepping into the lion’s den. “You could just feel
the hatred,” Payne said. “It was just like an enveloping cloak around
you.”
At
the spot where the earlier marches had been halted, hundreds of
angry white Southerners, infuriated by the presence of federal troops,
watched as 3,000 marchers crested the Edmund Pettus Bridge
and descended toward them while army helicopters hovered above.
Held back by a line of soldiers with bayonet-tipped rifles,
the angry
whites waved Confederate flags and racist placards. “I’ll never forget
the faces, the contorted faces of housewives, standing out and screaming
like they were just lunatics from the asylum, you know, just
screaming such terrible epithets and hatred,” said Payne. They called
out “Nigger, nigger, nigger!” and “Go to hell,” and cursed President
Johnson. “The reaction of the people was
so vitriolic,” Payne
said. “You never realized how deep human hatred can be. And
that was the way it was all along the march.”
Another
life was taken. Klan members murdered a thirty-nine-year-old Detroit
mother of five, Viola Liuzzo, for having given a ride to
a young black protester. “This was a madness, just a total madness,” Payne
said. “This was a time when all—it was
a purging of the white South,
all the venom that came out, and perhaps it was good, because it
was just boiling over, and it was such an excess. It was a preparation for
later acceptance of what they knew was inevitable.”
The
police attack on the marchers and the ultimate success of the
march impressed Capitol Hill. The Senate minority leader, Republican
Everett Dirksen, joined the majority leader, Democrat Mike
Mansfield, in supporting a bill like that demanded by the marchers
in Selma. By August a bill was on the president’s desk granting
the federal government immense judicial powers to end Southern
methods of keeping their black citizens from the voting booth.
A
Johnson aide was dispatched to deliver to Payne one of the pens
the president used in signing the Voting Rights Act. Aside from
Martin Luther King, she became one of the very few people who
were not lawmakers to have a pen from the signing of both the 1964
Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the two most seminally
important legislative victories of the civil rights movement. She
put both pens on display in her apartment.