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Finnegan B., Murphy K., Weber J. Gardner Rogers Rhetoric 105, Section S1 April 15, 2004 Marching for Freedom On a grey Sunday morning in March of 1965, Alabama State Troopers at the orders of Governor George Wallace advanced on a group of African-Americans leading a march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Using bull-whips, Billy clubs and tear gas, the armed troopers made short work of the defenseless protestors, injuring 57 of them while enforcing the strict segregation of the South. The march which was supposed to start in Selma and end at the state capitol in Montgomery was organized by voting rights leaders after a civil rights activist, Jimmie Lee Jackson, had been killed during a protest. Those who organized the march included chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) John Lewis and Hosea William, an assistant to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Voting rights campaign led by the SNCC had targeted Selma because it had one of the lowest ratios of African-American voters to white voters. Out of an eligible 15,000 Selmans, only 200 were registered to vote. The SNCC worked on cracking literacy tests, protesting poll taxes and staging sit-ins at registration centers in order to get blacks registered to vote. White responses a protest led by the SNCC caused the death of SNCC activist Jimmie Lee Jackson and in turn sparked the call for a protest march to Montgomery. After the first march brutally ended on “Bloody Sunday” as it came to be known, a second march was planned which would be co-led by the SNCC and Martin Luther King’s SCLC. A federal injunction allowed the march to take place without interference from the Alabama government. Between March 19th and March 23rd, 1965, thousands of voting rights activists both black and white marched the fifty miles from Selma to Montgomery to the steps of the Alabama State Capitol. Five months later in August of 1965, Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which banned literacy tests, poll taxes and other hindrances designed to impede black success. The media followed these marches very closely as they gathered more and more national attention. The events of “Bloody Sunday” had been caught on tape by NBC reporters and were aired live nationally the very same night after the event occurred. Most major newspapers including the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune ran big cover story articles on the march, many of which included pictures. One article written by Roy Reed of the New York Times thoroughly describes the events of police brutality that were occurring. John Lewis, chairman of the SNCC, cites Reed’s very same article in his book, “Walking With the wind; a memoir of the movement”, as he describes the events of the “Bloody Sunday.” Lewis states that he recalled receiving letters and phone calls the day after the event from people as far away as Minnesota and New York (Lewis, 332) who were registering their support with the protestors. The media was undoubtedly one of the key assets in gaining support among northerners to the black cause in the South. One powerful image featured in Lewis’ book shows state troopers advancing on the protestors with gas masks and clubs. Another picture, taken moments later, shows the police with raised clubs beating several protestors and herding the rest back in the direction they came from. As Americans watched police beat and gas these human beings, many were shocked at what they saw and felt that the violence that was taking place must come to an end. The second march that took place was actually a result of the shock of the American public with what they saw on television so they decided to make a trip to Alabama to join in the march. Newspaper images from the second march proved to be influential as well. Newspapers showed pictures of thousands of people, black and white, marching through the Cradle of the Confederacy in defiance of hundreds of years of hatred. Since the object of the march was aimed at gaining voting rights, the coverage in the newspaper may have only added fire to the passage of the Voting Rights Act later that year. To gain more understanding of our history and our societies feelings towards the march, we broke down two different magazines covering the march from Selma to Alabama; one article was written by Newsweek in 1965 (the year of the march), and the other was written in National Geographic Magazine in 2000. Although both magazine acknowledged the gains made after the Selma marches, one of the articles was much more critical of the protest efforts. The more current article in National Geographic entitled “Selma to Montgomery” was written much more conservatively and only focused on the positive aspects of the march. Chuck Stone, the author of the article, mentioned that the route that protesters marched has now been recognized in commemoration as the nations’ newest national historic trail (Stone 98). The magazine article also mentioned the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which Stone believes is a result of the protest. In contrast, in the Newsweek article, “Road From: Selma: Hope – and Death”, the author belittles the march by saying, “the trip was scarcely necessary” (Newsweek 24). The author goes on to say that King’s point had already been made by previous brutality that occurred earlier due to heavy protesting. (24) Later in the article, the author expresses that dealing with the massive rush of Negroes who were eager to vote would be a very daunting task; he says that similar protesting tactics will not help to solve the influx of voters (24). This type of comment is extremely sarcastic and shows little respect or sympathy for the thousands of men, women and children who marched 54 miles in hopes of simply gaining more equality and nothing more. To begin, we split our research into three different areas: newspapers, journals/magazines, and books. When searching in the New York Times Historical Index, “Selma to Montgomery” returned very few, irrelevant sources. We then typed in “voting rights” and got articles that gave a general overview of the march and the reason people initiated it but they did not include information about the march itself and the subsequent events that took place. We then noticed a focus on a specific event that occurred on the Edmund Pettus Bridge that when used as a search term, revealed more important aspects of the march that were not included in general searches. Other search terms that were useful on the NYT index were “Bloody Sunday” and “Selma, protest”. When Jason was searching for magazine or journal articles, he went straight to JSTOR since the topic would definitely be covered in the African American journals. He found that if he used the search term, “Selma, bridge” many pertinent articles came up that not only gave information on the march, but each focused on an important leader involved in the march. When he typed in “voting rights” in combination with Selma, Montgomery, or protest, many of the same sources appeared. To find a magazine back from 1965, Jason went straight the Reader’s Guide to Periodical literature and looked at magazines the guide listed until he found a relevant article to compare the current article we found written in National Geographic. When Ben was searching for books he used “Selma, Alabama” and “Montgomery, Alabama” which yielded unusable results. He then did “Freedom March” which gave several different events that were also given the name Freedom March. He then used, “John Lewis”, whose name appeared in many articles and got a really good book that we used for the bulk of our report. While researching the topic we found a variety of books on the topic but decided to pick two of them which seemed to carry the most relevance. The two sources report on more than just the incident at Selma and both focus on voter registration campaigns in the south. The first book, which we used as a source, was the autobiography of John Lewis. Lewis, as I mentioned earlier, was the chairman and co-founder of SNCC and played an integral role in the Civil Rights Movement in the South. The book presented a very insightful account into the events of the marches at Selma as the author was present at both of them; Lewis was clubbed in the head by a trooper on “Bloody Sunday.” The second source was not at all first hand. “Protest at Selma” was written by a certain David J. Garrow as his graduate thesis at Wesleyan University. The author seems to have done a great deal of research on the topic as his index rivals his book in length. After a grueling search online we were finally able to find a book review of Lewis’s autobiography. The review was written by Kathryn Nasstrom in 1999 and appeared in the Journal of American History in September of that year. The review is a double book review and it compares Lewis’ book to the biography of another SNCC worker Ruby Doris Smith Robinson. The review compares the views of each author on the SNCC and the Civil Rights Movement and makes some poignant analytical claims relating to both. Works Cited “Excerpts From Dr. King’s Montgomery Address.” New York Times 1965. “Road From Selma: Hope – and Death.” Newsweek 5 April 1965: 23-28. Garrow, David J. Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting rights act of 1965. Conn: Yale University Press, 1978. Lewis, John and D’Orso, Michael. Walking with the wind: a memoir of the movement. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1998. Nasstrom, Kathryn L. Rev. of Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, by John Lewis and Michael D'Orso. The Journal of American History 86 (1999). Reed, Roy. “25,000 go to Alabama’s Capitol; Wallace Rebuffs Petitioners; White Rights Worker is Slain.” New York Times 25 March 1965, pp. 1, 22. Reed, Roy. “Alabama Marchers Reach Outskirts of Montgomery.” New York Times 24 March 1965, pp. 1, 27. Reed, Roy. “Alabama Police use Gas and Clubs to Rout Negroes.” New York Times 7 March 1965, pp. 1, 20. Reed, Roy. “’Bloody Sunday’ Was Year Ago; Now Selma Negroes Are Hopeful.” New York Times 5 March 1965.
Reed, Roy. “Selma Arrests 350, Mostly White Visitors, Near Mayor’s
Home.” New York Times 19 March 1965. |