Beware of Limbo Dancers: A Correspondent’s Adventures with the New York Times

7. Marching to Montgomery

CHAPTER 7 Marching to Montgomery My own awakening to a new level of reality had begun just days after my arrival in Selma. On March , a Sunday, a few hundred marchers, mostly black, had crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the Alabama River to begin what had been billed, a little tentatively, as a march to the state capital, Montgomery, some fifty-four miles east. King, their most important leader, was not there. He was in another part of the country that day. The marchers headed out without him, going to see the governor, they said. Their repeated attempts to register to vote had been rebuffed—firmly, you might say—so they wanted to press their case with Governor George C.Wallace in person.The governor,always attentive to the desires of the citizens, went to see them, instead, in a manner of speaking. He sent his personal emissary, Colonel Al Lingo, head of the state police, and several dozen armed troopers. The state men were accompanied by a sizable band of Sheriff Jim Clark’s deputies and ex officio helpers on horseback. The sheriff referred to the horsemen affectionately as his “posse.” Men and horses blocked the highway on the Montgomery side of the bridge.Colonel Lingo got out a bullhorn and ordered the marchers to halt. They went a few steps farther. They stopped, hesitated, then knelt to pray in the grassy median that divided the four-lane highway. At the head of the column were John Lewis, the young chairman of SNCC and many years later a congressman, and Hosea Williams, a chief organizer for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Mrs. Amelia Boynton, a local leader, knelt beside them. Quite suddenly, Colonel Lingo ordered the troopers to advance. They rushed forward in a flying wedge. I described what happened next in my story for the Times:  The wedge moved with such force that it seemed almost to pass over the waiting column instead of through it. The first  or  Negroes were swept to the ground screaming , arms and legs flying, and packs and bags went skittering across the grassy divider strip and on to the pavement on both sides. Those still on their feet retreated. A cheer went up from the white spectators lining the south side of the highway. Then came the pop of a tear-gas canister, and a venomous cloud covered the highway. Through the mist I heard coughing, the sound of clubs on flesh and bone, and cries of pain. The men on horses sped through the fleeing marchers wielding whips on faces, backs, and legs. The spectators whooped and cheered. I hope never again to see such hatred in the eyes of men, women and, yes, children. Tear gas was not new to me—I had tasted it once in Little Rock when some segregationist hothead set it off at a Little Rock school board meeting—but it is not an experience that a person can become accustomed to. Inhalation is almost never fatal, but it is altogether a physical and emotional torment.You feel that you dare not breathe or, worse, that you cannot breathe. But by then it is too late because you have already got enough of it in the lungs to start the coughing. The eyes sting so intensely that you believe it may be unbearable, and you think you surely are going blind.Then comes an unreasoning fear.You are cut off and at the mercy of whatever marauders may be heading your way. And that is just the reaction of the newsmen who happened to be there watching. At the Pettus Bridge, the real targets were the hapless people fleeing for their lives back into the town, and fleeing blinded because while the newsmen got only noxious whiffs of the gas, the marchers got it all, an enormous thick mass that rolled over them just as the club-swinging officers—wearing gas masks, of course—were attacking them from the rear. I saw many outrages covering the civil rights story, but for sheer brutality I never saw anything to match the scene at the Alabama River crossing that day in . They called it Bloody Sunday.Yes,there was blood as well as terror.Among those hos-  MARCHING TO MONTGOMERY pitalized were Mrs.Boynton and John Lewis.The young man’s skull was fractured. He never forgot that day, even as an old man...