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81 6. Spring and Summer 1965: Marches, More Marches, and Al Pitcher The voice of dissent must be heard. —Henry Ford Two dates serve as markers for the spring of 1965: March 21, when my wife, Nancy, marched in Selma, and April 19, when the CCCO mounted the Good Friday demonstration in Chicago. Selma is important to the Chicago story in the same sense as the impact of the march on Washington two years earlier. By recruiting participants from Chicago and by drawing attention to the national scope of the civil rights struggle, these two seminal events served to energize the movement back home. While many others have presented their Selma stories. Nancy’s decision to go to Selma and her reflections on that experience are important to record. She represented our family. To recap briefly: on March 7 and 9, 1965, two civil rights marches in Selma led to major confrontations at the bridge where the marchers, who had set out for Montgomery, were turned back. There was considerable violence, and Rev. James Reeb, a Unitarian minister, among those who were attacked, died a few days later. A new march was quickly organized on March 21, and people from all over the country traveled to Selma to demonstrate that the movement was not going to be deterred from marching from Selma to Montgomery. Six individuals from the Unitarian Church, including my wife Nancy, made the trip; I couldn’t go because of my teaching obligations. The entire operation was well organized. Nancy recalls that in spite of the fact that thousands and thousands of people were pouring into that small Spring and Summer 1965 82 area, several young black men met her group at the train station in Selma and brought them to the location where others were gathering to begin the march. Before the march started, they visited several homes where black people greeted them warmly and provided food and bathrooms. She was impressed by how many incredibly talented, young black people were involved. “Here was this raw talent that had always been there in the black community but had never been heard, really, never understood, never appreciated, never before allowed to come out.” For most of the hours that they were in Selma, the atmosphere felt like a festival, like “old home week.” Nancy recalled seeing Harvey Cox (a roommate of mine from the University of Pennsylvania) sitting on the grass with a bunch of people, looking like everyone was enjoying a midday picnic. The amount of time spent marching was relatively short, probably not more than an hour or two. So there was a lot of down time—not a day of great momentum, but a day full of great emotion. There was considerable praying and many speeches, from Martin Luther King, Walter Reuther, and other dignitaries. Nancy especially remembered going to hear Walter Reuther speak. “All of us in the Chicago group decided to go to the meeting. By the time we got to the church, it was jammed. There were only a few seats left, up in the balcony , where we decided to sit and hear the speech. Some might say we were probably tempting fate because there were about three times more people in that balcony than should have been there. It was an old wood-frame church, and how everyone managed to squeeze in and not break that balcony was, in retrospect, something to marvel at. It was fortunate for us that we escaped without injury. But no one considered leaving. Everyone was going to stay there! Thoughts of danger never entered our minds—although I should have been concerned since I had left three small children behind in Chicago.” During the march the police, who were keeping people in order, knew the eyes of the nation were on them, so they didn’t do anything untoward, and the marchers were very disciplined. They marched up to the bridge, which served as a “mission accomplished.” Another anxious moment occurred on the way out of town. At the end of the day, the group got back into their van to drive to the airport and fly back to Chicago. It was later than had been planned, so people were anxious to get to the airport. As they sped along the dark roads deep in the South, the van passed a car, filled with black teenagers, which had broken down. But the van just kept moving; the driver refused to stop and help anyone...

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