Bloody Sunday 115defiantly: ‘Ain’t nobody scared around here.’ Then she sent the sheriff sprawl-
ing with a right cross. As deputies restrained her, Cooper taunted Clark: ‘I
wish you would hit me, you scum.’ The wild-eyed sheriff obliged, pounding
her head with a club until she bled. King was angered, but he held back men
who wanted to stop the assault. The beating got invaluable national attention.
King upped the stakes on 1 February, the next day for registration, when
he decided to get arrested. King hoped his jailing would draw media atten-
tion and bring in celebrities and needed money. From his cell, he penned a
letter like the one from Birmingham and published it as an advertisement in
the New York Times. ‘THIS IS SELMA, ALABAMA,’ he wrote. ‘THERE ARE
MORE NEGROES IN JAIL WITH ME THAN THERE ARE ON THE VOTING
ROLLS.’ Jail conditions were primitive. Prisoners slept on the concrete floor,
used a stopped-up toilet with no seat, and subsisted on black-eyed peas and
cornbread. Sheriff Clark flooded the floor with water and turned off the heat
in the dead of winter, but the drafty jail cell became a sauna as a hundred
men sang and clapped feverishly. Reports of the dreadful conditions led a
congressional delegation to investigate, but no uproar developed over King’s
jailing.
Days after King’s arrest, the movement got unexpected help. At SNCC’s
invitation, Malcolm X told a packed audience at Brown AME Chapel that ‘the
white people should thank Dr King for holding people in check, for there are
others who do not believe in these measures.’ He urged black Selmians to
demand that president Lyndon Johnson pay them back for helping him
win reelection. And if Johnson proved unresponsive, blacks should expose
American racism before the United Nations. Malcolm’s message alarmed
SCLC executive director Andrew Young, who enlisted Coretta Scott King to
calm the crowd with a talk on nonviolence. After Coretta’s impromptu talk,
Malcolm apologized to her: ‘I didn’t come to Selma to make [your husband’s]
job difficult,’ he insisted. ‘I really did come thinking that I could make it
easier. If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will
be more willing to hear Dr King.’
In truth, Malcolm’s views on race were in flux, especially after a pilgrim-
age to the Muslim holy city of Mecca. The white man, Malcolm concluded,
was not inherently satanic, a heretical view within the Nation of Islam.
Malcolm had soured on Elijah Muhammad, the self-proclaimed ascetic
divine who fathered illegitimate children and made Malcolm an unthinking
‘zombie.’ It became clear to Malcolm that the Black Muslims and their racial
theories represented a bastardized version of Islam. Malcolm was painfully
aware that Muslims spent their energies on condemning racism while Martin
Luther King manned the frontlines to end injustice, however ineffectively.
Malcolm now reached out to civil rights leaders who still eyed him warily,
and endorsed voting, not gunfire, as an important tool to improve black life.