Selma - March 7, 1965

Yesterday was the "official" observance of the march over the Edward Pettus bridge at Selma, Alabama and on to Montgomery. I intended to have a post up then but between family and the computer/internet, couldn't get it done.

Trying again.

The march started with a few hundred people. By the time of the 3rd march (they were beaten back when they first tried, the number had grown to 25,000, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and current Congressman John Lewis. If Sheriff Jim Clark though he'd put down a budding revolt with his thugs, tear gas, fire hoses, and horses, he couldn't have been more wrong. The march attracted the media from all over the world and pictures of his brutality were on every t.v. set. It was the beginning of the end for overt racists.


Three people died: Jimmie Lee Jackson, James Joseph Reeb, and Viola Gregg Liuzzo. Jimmie Lee Jackson died in Marion, AL His death triggered the march. James Joseph Reeb was assaulted leaving a black restaurant, and Viola Liuzzo was killed on her way back to her home in Michigan.

There will always be racists and bigots among us but they no longer have the open support of the law in this country. Covert support is something else again of course but I'll save the rant about open and fair elections for another time.


This site has information from many different sources along with a collection of photos. One of the articles is a personal reflection by Unitarian/Universalist minister Orloff W. Miller written in 2000, 35 years after the march. He was with James Reeb when he was killed.

Here it is, in its entirety.

Selma in Retrospect
Rev. Orloff W. Miller

As we close out the 20th century, it is difficult to recall what the American Civil Rights Struggle was all about back in 1965 -- exactly 100 years after the end of a Civil War which resulted in freedom for Negro slaves throughout the United States, but left them in social, economic, and political bondage. After the Civil War, whites and Negroes were kept physically and psychologically segregated throughout the South by separate (and unequal) public facilities. Hotels, schools, restaurants, and especially toilets and drinking fountains were all segregated. Whenever my seminary roommate traveled by Greyhound bus from Boston University to his home in North Carolina, as he crossed into the "Land of Dixie" (ironically, at Washington DC, the nation's capital) he had to suffer the demeaning humiliation of surrendering his seat up front with white friends, to sit or stand with other Negroes in the back of the bus.

In 1955, during our second year of school, that type of segregation on interstate buses was officially banned -- but lacked enforcement. It took another six years and several groups of "Freedom Riders", who somehow lived through beatings and fire bombings, to finally integrate those interstate buses.

Local city buses throughout the South were also rigidly segregated until 1956, when buses in Montgomery, Alabama (capital of the Confederacy) were integrated by order of the U.S. Supreme Court in December of that year. The change came after a year-long boycott by local Negroes, using the technique of non-violent resistance pioneered by Gandhi in India. Proudly, they walked to work rather than use segregated buses -- led by a 26 year old minister (who had just earned his doctorate at Boston University), the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

Fast food counters and restaurants in Southern cities began to be integrated in 1960 by Negro students, using "sit-in" tactics taught by the newly formed Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer included sit-ins, teach-ins, community organizing and voting rights education in Negro communities -- sponsored by a coalition of Civil Rights organizations (including SNCC), and staffed by students (Negro and white, from both North and South), of whom three were murdered.

Voting rights became the primary focus of the civil rights movement. Because Americans have never accepted the European tradition of registering locally with every residence change, for elections to be possible in America, citizens have to, at least, register to be able to vote. However, some barriers to voting have been in existence from the beginning. At first, only white male property owners were permitted to vote in all states. Women did not gain the right to vote until 1920 - while property ownership as a requirement gradually gave way to some form of poll tax in most states, which had to be paid before voting in an election.

Negroes gained the right to vote following the Civil War, but new barriers were very quickly erected - usually in the form of a literacy test. In 1961, Mississippi law required the prospective voter to fill out a 21-question form, and be able to interpret any section of the state constitution which the local registrar might request - Mississippi's constitution had 285 sections! And the voting rules were quite arbitrary. As late as 1952, throughout the South, only 20% of those Negroes eligible were registered to vote. And in many rural counties of Mississippi and Alabama, the number of Negroes registered to vote was far less than that. By the 1960s, the right to vote, a basic tenet of democracy, had thus become an explicit and very vocal demand of the "freedom" movement.

At the August 1963"March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom," I was among the more than 250,000 participants - - including a contingent of students and adults from the Unitarian Universalist Association who heard Martin Luther King deliver his now famous "I Have a Dream" speech. Meanwhile, the associate minister at All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington had been quietly working with an interracial religious coalition seeking to integrate neighborhood housing. In late 1964, he moved to Boston to work with Quakers in a similar neighborhood interracial housing program. This UU minister (and former Presbyterian) was the Reverend James J. Reeb.

In January 1965, the UUA sent a four-person staff team to Mississippi to assess the overall struggle for civil rights, and to review the role of UU's in that movement. As staff person in charge of networking the UU student and faculty activities across North America -- although a relative newcomer to UUism (I was born and educated as a Methodist) -- I was able to document the early and continuing participation of UU students and faculty in voting rights education, sit-ins, the rebuilding of burned Negro churches, and other civil rights projects. Meanwhile, that same month, two UU theological students from the Boston area were jailed in Selma, Alabama for helping Negroes in that city who were attempting to register to vote. All of this helped to prepare me, as a minister, to respond to the crisis in Selma two months later.

Selma, Alabama -- located in the very "Heart of Dixie" -- had served as the munitions arsenal of the Confederacy during the Civil War. A century later, in 1965, Selma's stubborn and rigorous enforcement of the South's segregation laws -- especially its systematic denial to Negroes of their voting rights, where only 2% of eligible Negroes were registered to vote -- made it a logical target for joint action by SNCC and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Sheriff James Clark epitomized the forces of bigotry in Selma, while John Lewis (national chairman of SNCC) and Martin Luther King, Jr. (then president of SCLC) represented the skilled outside leadership needed by the local Selma civil rights organizations.

On Sunday, March 7, 1965, the evening news on American television featured pictures of civil rights marchers in Selma at the foot of the U.S. highway bridge over the Alabama River. Having been led over the bridge by John Lewis, they were being tear gassed and beaten by Sheriff Clark's posse which was mounted on horseback. The following day, Martin Luther King sent telegrams to religious leaders across the U.S., asking ministers of all faiths to join him in a voting rights march from Selma to the Alabama state capital in Montgomery, some 47 miles (80 km) away, where he proposed to present a petition to Governor George Wallace, an avowed segregationist.

That night, I and scores of other UU's (among us, James Reeb) and ministers of many faiths flew overnight from Boston to Atlanta, and then to Montgomery the following morning, from whose airport we were then transported by SCLC in trucks and autos to Selma. We were joined by ministers, rabbis, priests (and seven nuns) representing many parts of America. We attempted to march that afternoon, but were turned back peacefully in compliance with a federal court order. Regrouping, we listened to Dr. King as he pleaded with us to stay in Selma for a few days, hoping that the court would reverse its decision. James Reeb and I, along with many others, elected to stay -- even though most of us had come without even a toothbrush.

That evening, James Reeb (Jim) and I ate with a number of other UU ministers, including Clark Olsen of Berkeley, California in a downtown Negro restaurant. As Clark, Jim, and I left Walker's Cafe we were attacked by four or five segregationist bigots. Jim's skull was crushed with the blow of a club from behind. Clark and I, having escaped with only scrapes and bruises, managed to get help for Jim -- but he died two days later at Alabama's University Hospital in Birmingham.

Jim's death galvanized the nation -- a nation which had hardly noticed a few days before when Jimmie Lee Jackson, a local Negro, had been shot and killed during a similar demonstration -- but James Reeb was a white minister from the North, and President Johnson sent yellow roses to his hospital room, and called him "that good man."

Only a few hours after a memorial service for Jim in Selma, the President announced, in a televised address before a joint session of Congress, his introduction of new voting rights legislation -- ending his speech with words affirming his support for the civil rights movement: "and we shall overcome!" One day later, a federal judge gave permission for a March from Selma to Montgomery. And by mid-August, Congress had passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Soon after, Negroes registered to vote in ever increasing numbers, and have since elected representatives to the Selma city Council, to state and city offices throughout the South (and North) and to the U.S. Congress.
The historic five-day march from Selma to Alabama's capitol took place from the 22nd to the 25th of March, 1965, protected by federal troops on orders >from the President. But in its aftermath, Unitarian Universalists would claim another martyr -- this time a woman, a mother of two, who was active in the First UU Church in Detroit. She was shot dead at the wheel of her car while ferrying demonstrators back to Selma following the march. But the nation (even UUs) would soon forget the death of Viola Liuzzo -- after all, she was just a housewife!

At this writing, a lasting memorial is planned at UUA headquarters in Boston, to help preserve the memory of three persons who gave their lives in 1965, that every American--- without regard to race, religion, sex, or nation of birth -- might fully and freely exercise the right to vote in the world's oldest democracy: Jimmie Lee Jackson, James Joseph Reeb, and Viola Gregg Liuzzo.

Rev. Orloff W Miller
European Unitarian Universalists, Minister-at-Large
and participant in the 1965 March from Selma to Montgomery