12 BLOODY SUNDAY
T
he crisis over black voting reached boiling point in the sleepy town
of Selma, once a cotton market on the muddy Alabama river. Bull
Connor grew up in Selma, and the state’s Citizens’ Council first met
there. To keep the white monopoly in political power after emancipation,
Alabama’s state constitutional convention of 1901 instituted a literacy test
that excluded nearly all blacks for more than a half century. Although 57 per
cent of the voting-age population was black in the surrounding Dallas county,
just 1 per cent of them was registered to vote. Elsewhere, intimidation shut
the door to black voting. In the adjoining, heavily black counties of Lowndes
and Wilcox, not one black had dared to register since Reconstruction. Whites
boasted that any black trying to register would be dead by sundown.
The Dallas county registrar had a bag of tricks to frustrate blacks. The
office opened only on the first and third Mondays of the month, and the regis-
trars invariably arrived late, took long lunch breaks, and closed early. When
the office was open, perhaps a dozen blacks a day got in, only to confront
four-page forms and obscure questions based on the constitution. Registrars
had complete discretion to fail applicants. A black person who neglected to
cross a ‘t’ on the registration form, could not define words like ‘turpitude,’ or
was unable to recite the 14th Amendment verbatim was denied the right to
vote. To frighten black applicants, the registrar would ask them, ‘Does your
employer know you’re here?’ Blacks with common-law marriages or illegit-
imate children flunked the ‘good character’ test. The snail’s pace in Dallas
county limited black registration to 156, mainly teachers, professionals, and
businessmen. At that rate, a century would pass before all eligible blacks
could vote. For the foreseeable future, blacks could never outvote the 9,500
whites who were already registered.
Against all odds, SNCC’s Bernard LaFayette, a veteran of the Nashville
sit-ins and Freedom Ride, and his wife Colia led a campaign in Selma in early
1963 to register intimidated blacks. At first, black leaders denied there were
any racial problems. A minister told the LaFayettes, ‘We know how to get