In a democracy, he declared with finality, ‘It is wrong – deadly wrong – to
deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country.’ The pres-
ident considered the Selma protest a turning point in American history, com-
parable to the American Revolution and the Civil War. In a Texas drawl, he
fully embraced the civil rights movement: ‘Their cause must be our cause
too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must over-
come the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shallovercome.’
For the first time, Martin Luther King’s aides saw him cry with joy.
Judge Frank Johnson soon allowed the Selma-to-Montgomery march to
proceed. The judge recognized that the march might impede traffic, but the
‘enormous’ wrongs suffered by the demonstrators entitled them to march to
the capital. Governor Wallace called his old college friend a ‘low-down, car-
petbaggin,’ scalawaggin,’ race-mixin’ liar.’ When Wallace complained that the
march was too costly, president Johnson federalized the Alabama National
Guard to protect the marchers as they headed down Highway 80. He also
sent 2,000 army troops, FBI agents, US marshals, and a dozen planes and
helicopters to neutralize snipers and bombers. Pentagon generals would fol-
low the march minute-by-minute via a hot-line telephone hook-up.
On 21 March, two weeks after Bloody Sunday, 3,200 black and white
marchers set out for a third time on what John Lewis called ‘a holy crusade,
like Gandhi’s march to the sea.’ King led the march, bedecked with flowers,
and was joined by A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, Nobel
peace prize winner Ralph Bunche, labor leader Walter Reuther, actor Gary
Merrill, Rabbi Abraham Heschel of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and sev-
eral eminent historians, including John Hope Franklin, C. Vann Woodward,
and Richard Hofstadter, who recognized history-in-the-making. Lewis
walked every mile, but on doctor’s orders he was driven back to Selma each
night to sleep in a bed. Ordinary folks, students, and children accounted for
most of the marchers. Cager Lee, Jimmie Lee Jackson’s 82-year-old grand-
father, was there. Jim Letherer, a one-legged, husky white laborer from Saginaw,
Michigan, trudged the entire way on crutches.
Although most whites stared at the marchers as they passed by, other
whites revealed ugly prejudice. As the marchers left town, a record store’s
loudspeaker blared, ‘Bye, Bye, Blackbird.’ On the first day, a ‘Confederate Air
Force’ plane dumped hate leaflets on the highway. Along the route, hecklers
waved Confederate flags, gestured obscenely, and held up signs reading,
‘FAKE CLERGY & BEATNIKS GO HOME!’ They cursed the marchers, chant-
ing, ‘Go back to Africa where you belong, you black jigaboos.’ A car cruised
by with painted signs on its doors: ‘CHEAP AMMO HERE’ and ‘OPEN
SEASON ON NIGGERS.’
When the highway narrowed to two lanes on the second day, judge
Johnson required the band to shrink to three hundred and walk two abreast120 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT