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The Selma March (1965)

From 1965: Renata Adler reports on Martin Luther King, Jr., and the historic march from Selma to Montgomery.

In a field behind the housing development, the Reverend Andrew Young, executive director of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (S.C.L.C., referred to by some of the marchers as Slick), which sponsored the march, was giving marshals and night security guards last-minute instructions in the tactics of non-violence. 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 star 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. 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.

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