Bloody Sunday 113Boynton, Amelia(1910- ): Local leader of the
Selma campaign.
what we want from white people. You just have to know how to ask.’ The
LaFayettes explained that only through political action would blacks get
their garbage hauled away, streets paved, and schools opened more than
three hours a day. Most adults were too frightened to step forward, so the
LaFayettes appealed to students and farmers to shame city folk into register-
ing to vote. But the high school principal and president of Selma University
threatened to expel any student participating in demonstrations. Slowly the
LaFayettes built up trust in the local community, especially after the 22-year-
old Bernard was nearly killed by a klansman swinging a gun. Bernard wore
his blood-soaked shirt for weeks as a badge of honor.
SNCC’s voter-registration drive invariably ended in harassment, dis-
missals, and beatings after photographs of the applicants appeared in the
newspaper. Undeterred, canvassers held a ‘Freedom Day’ on 7 October,
which attracted 350 blacks to the Dallas county courthouse. As federal
officials watched impassively, the police clubbed and arrested volunteers who
gave sandwiches to those in line. When SNCC organized a boycott of city
buses after an impatient driver dragged a pregnant black woman to her
death, its office was raided, and several workers were arrested. Selma’s boss,
circuit court judge James Hare, accused the activists of being ‘Communist
agitators’ and forbade public gatherings of more than three people, an
injunction that ended mass marches. Hare was predisposed against blacks,
believing they were innately inferior and could not be domesticated ‘any
more than you can get a zebra to pull a plow, or an Apache to pick cotton.’
Such obstacles kept black registration at a tiny level despite months of civil
rights agitation.
As SNCC’s voter-registration drive faltered, the Voters League (the rein-
carnated NAACP) recruited Martin Luther King. The league was led by
Frederick Reese, a dynamic young Baptist clergyman and science teacher;
Sam Boynton, a US agricultural extension agent, and Amelia Boynton,
an insurance agent and past president of the local NAACP; Marie Foster, a
dental hygienist who taught citizenship education classes; and J.L. Chestnut,
Selma’s only black attorney. King accepted their challenge in part because a
voter registration drive among the state’s 500,000 unregistered blacks would
memorialize the four Birmingham girls murdered in their church. King also
needed to put SCLC’s stalemated campaign in St Augustine behind him. Most
important, Selma had a violent sheriff in the Bull Connor mold. The villain
this time was the tempestuous Jim Clark, who dressed and acted like
general George Patton as he kept local blacks under his thumb. A King aide
remarked that ‘Bull Connor gave us the civil rights bill, and Jim Clark is
going to give us the voting rights bill.’
Selma’s new mayor, Joe T. Smitherman, realized that Clark’s strongarm
tactics threatened the northern investment he coveted. The mayor was
Clark, James, Jr.(1922–
2007): Dallas county
sheriff whose violence
swelled the Selma demon-
strations.