Renata Adler - After the Tall Timber

At the intersection of Montgomery Street and Dexter Avenue (the avenue leading to the capitol), Charles Mauldin turned and looked around. “They’re still coming out of St. Jude’s,” a reporter told him. And when the vanguard of the march reached the capitol steps, they were still coming out of St. Jude’s. “You’re only likely to see three great parades in a lifetime,” said John Doar to a student who walked beside him, “and this is one of them.” A brown dog had joined the crowd for the march up Dexter Avenue. On the sidewalk in front of the capitol, reporters stood on the press tables to look back. Charles and the rest of the orange-jacketed three hundred stood below. Behind them, the procession was gradually drawing together and to a halt. Ahead, a few green-clad, helmeted officers of the Alabama Game and Fish Service and some state officials blocked the capitol steps, at the top of which, covering the bronze that marks the spot where Jefferson Davis was inaugurated President of the Confederacy, was a plywood shield constructed at the order of Governor Wallace—”to keep that s.o.b. King from desecrating the Cradle of the Confederacy,” according to a spokesman for the Governor. Martin Luther King had managed to draw a larger crowd than the leader of the Confederacy a hundred years before.

Onto a raised platform — erected by the marchers for the occasion — in a plaza between the crowd and the steps climbed a group of entertainers that included, at one point or another, Joan Baez; the Chad Mitchell Trio; Peter, Paul, and Mary; and Harry Belafonte. As Alabamians peered from the statehouse windows, black and white performers put their arms around each other’s shoulders and began to sing. Although the songs were familiar and the front rank of the three hundred mouthed a few of the words, none of the crowd really sang along. Everybody simply cheered and applauded at the end of each number. Then Len Chandler, a young black folk singer who had marched most of the way, appeared on the platform. He was dressed peculiarly, as he had been on the road — in a yellow helmet, a flaglike blue cape with white stars on it, and denims — and the crowd at once joined him in singing:

“You’ve got to move when the spirit say move,

Move when the spirit say move.

When the spirit say move, you’ve got to move, oh, Lord.

You got to move when the spirit say move.”

In the subsequent verses, Mr. Chandler changed “move” to “walk,” “march,” “vote,” “picket,” “cool it,” and “love,” and the crowd kept singing. Joan Baez, wearing a purple velvet dress and a large bronze crucifix, even broke into a rather reverent Frug.

After an invocation by a rabbi and speeches by the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, the crowd turned away from the Confederate and Alabama state flags flying from the capitol, faced its own American flags, and sang the national anthem. At its close, the Reverend Theodore Gill, president of the San Francisco Theological Seminary, looked before and behind him and said a simple prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses.” One marcher applauded, and was immediately hushed. Then there was the succession of speeches, most of them eloquent, some of them pacific (“Friends of freedom,” said Whitney Young, of the Urban League), others militant (“Fellow Freedom Fighters,” said John Lewis, of SNCC), and nearly all of them filled with taunts of Governor Wallace as the list of grievances, intimidations, and brutalities committed by the state piled up.

“This march has become a rescue operation,” Charles Mauldin said quietly to a friend as the speeches continued. “Most of those Negroes along the way have joined us, and although this Wallace-baiting sounds like a little boy whose big brother has come home, standing outside a bully’s window to jeer, these Negroes are never going to be so afraid of the bully again. When the bill goes through, they’re going to vote, and the white men down here are going to think twice before they try to stop them. Big brothers have come down from the North and everywhere, and they’ve shown that they’re ready and willing to come down again. I don’t think they’re going to have to.”

“It’s good that even a few of the civil-rights talkers have joined us,” said another marcher. “When those people feel they have to climb on the bandwagon, you know you’re on the way to victory.”

As one speaker followed another, as Ralph Bunche, who had marched for two full days, and A. Philip Randolph spoke, the civil-rights leaders saluted one another and gave signs of patching up their differences. (Mr. Abernathy, second-in-command of SCLC, slipped once and said, “Now here’s James Peck, for James Farmer, to tell us whether CORE is with us.” Peck ignored the implications of the “whether” and spoke as eloquently as the rest.) The crowd applauded politely throughout but gave no sign of real enthusiasm. SCLC and SNCC leaders seemed to be equally popular, but the NAACP and the Urban League, more active in other states than in Alabama, seemed to require a little help from Mr. Abernathy (“Now let’s give a big hand to …”) to get their applause. Some of the marchers crawled forward under the press tables and went to sleep. A Japanese reporter, who had been taking notes in his own language, seized one of the marchers as he crawled under a table, “What do you think of all this?” the reporter asked. “I think it’s good,” the marcher said. Some fell asleep in their places on Dexter Avenue. (Perhaps remembering the mob scenes of the night before, the crowd left its members ample breathing space in front of the capitol.) A scuffle broke out between marchers and white bystanders in front of Klein’s Jewelry Store, but no one was seriously hurt. It rained a little, and Charles Mauldin said, “Wallace is seeing the clouds.”

Albert Turner, of Marion, where Jimmie Lee Jackson was murdered, said from the platform, “I look worse than anybody else on this stage. That’s because I marched fifty miles.” Then he read the black voting statistics from Perry County. When he said, “We are not satisfied,” the crowd gave him a rousing cheer. He looked down at his orange jacket and smiled. Mrs. Amelia Boynton spoke; during the previous demonstrations, she had been kicked and beaten, and jailed, for what some members of the press have come to call “resisting assault.” She read the petition, mentioning the “psychotic climate” of the State of Alabama, that a delegation of marchers was seeking to present to Governor Wallace, and she was roundly applauded. Near the end of the ceremony, Rosa Parks, the “Mother of the Movement,” who had set off Dr. King’s first demonstration when she was jailed for refusing to yield her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, received the most enthusiastic cheers of all. “Tell it! Tell! Tell!” some of the marchers shouted. “Speak! Speak!” Finally, after an extravagant introduction by Mr. Abernathy, who referred to Dr. King as “conceived by God” (“This personality cult is getting out of hand,” said a college student, and, to judge by the apathetic reception of Mr. Abernathy’s words, the crowd agreed), Dr. King himself spoke. There were some enthusiastic yells of “Speak! Speak!” and “Yessir! Yessir!” from the older members of the audience when Dr. King’s speech began, but at first the younger members were subdued. Gradually, the whole crowd began to be stirred. By the time he reached his refrains—“Let us march on the ballot boxes…. We’re on the move now…. How long? Not long”—and the final ringing “Glory, glory, hallelujah!” the crowd was with him entirely.

The director of the march, Hosea Williams, of SCLC, said some concluding words, remarking that there should be no lingering in Montgomery that night and exhorting the crowd to leave quietly and with dignity. There was a last rendition of “We Shall Overcome.” Within ten minutes, Dexter Avenue was cleared of all but the press and the troopers.