brandishing nightsticks and wearing blue uniforms, white helmets, and gas
masks. Sheriff Clark’s mounted possemen waited out of sight. With blood-
shed likely, ambulances and hearses stood at the ready. A scared Williams
asked Lewis if he could swim because ‘I’m sure we’re gonna end up in that
river.’ Just then, major John Cloud shouted in a bullhorn that the demon-
strators had two minutes to ‘turn around and go back to your church! You
will not be allowed to march any further!’
The troopers and deputies then slammed forward in the most savage
police riot of the civil rights era. Black bodies toppled like bowling pins.
Lewis suffered a fractured skull, and five women, including Amelia Boynton,
were beaten unconscious. After the police blinded the marchers with tear
gas, sheriff Clark’s possemen rode their horses into the foggy fray and
clubbed them. One posseman swung a rubber tube wrapped with barbed
wire. Clark fanned the possemen’s rage. ‘Get those god-damned niggers!’ he
shouted. ‘Please, no!’ a terrified marcher cried. ‘My God, we’re being killed!’
Some marchers slid down the riverbank or under cars to escape. Others ran
for their lives, as the possemen chased them across open fields all the way
to the chapel. All the while, white spectators cheered the lawmen on with
bloodcurdling yells. When night fell, fifty-seven blacks were treated for
injuries ranging from broken teeth and head gashes to fractured limbs. Hosea
Williams, a World War II combat veteran, insisted that ‘the Germans never
were as inhuman as the state troopers of Alabama.’
The television networks interrupted their programming to flash the sav-
agery of ‘Bloody Sunday’ across the country. ABC was showing the premiere
of Stanley Kubrick’s Judgment at Nuremberg, a powerful story of Nazi racism.
The shocking footage of racism in Alabama produced a tidal wave of indig-
nation. Thousands of white and black Americans flooded the White House
with telegrams, signed petitions, and demonstrated in eighty cities to end the
violence. Conservative Republican congressmen, including Gerald Ford of
Michigan, denounced the police riot and endorsed a voting rights bill for
blacks. Hundreds of clergymen accepted King’s call to join a ‘ministers’
march’ to Montgomery, even though more violence was clearly in the offing.
King realized that bold action was required, lest the public lose interest.
He announced his intention to lead the people across Pettus Bridge on
9 March. To his surprise, federal judge Frank Johnson, whose civil rights
record was the best in the South, enjoined the march until the governor
could respond. King was caught in a bind between the law, which forbade
the march, and the militants and hundreds of out-of-town volunteers who
demanded it forthwith. As King deliberated, attorney general Nicholas
Katzenbach warned him to stay away from Selma because of a Klan plot
against his life. Katzenbach also made clear that a march would embarrass
the administration and delay a voting rights bill. When King ignored the118 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT