Chapter IV: Three Days In Montgomery
“The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you’re afraid,
and you don’t know what you’re afraid of.”
…Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn), Breakfast at Tiffany’s
At the Fortieth Reunion (see Chapter XV), there was quite a bit of discussion about who made the call for everybody throughout the country to flood Selma and bear witness to what was going on. I guess it was a measure of the confusion back then followed by the passage of forty years that the attendees were divided: one camp insisted it was MLK’s group, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the other camp was equally insistent that it was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). I was mostly in the former camp because I remember watching Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News quoting King urging people everywhere to come down South and join the March (to Montgomery). Well, the telling piece of evidence was sitting in a display case in the lobby of the Beeghly Library the whole time we were arguing over in Oller Hall.
Figure IV-1 is a picture of a mimeographed piece of paper given us the night before we left for the South. We were to fold up the paper, put it in our shoe, and use it if we were arrested and jailed and given the traditionally famous “one phone call.” The sorry state of the document comes from its being folded so many times and then mashed during the marches in Montgomery and then rough storage over the years. Of note are the top three contacts: all SNCC workers at various places and positions in the hierarchy. I have no idea who got the phone numbers, but I’m willing to guess it was Sara Clemson. The point is that they’re all SNCC people. I think that pretty much settles the argument, but it may well be that EVERYBODY made the plea: SCLC, SNCC, CORE (Congress of Racial Equality).
The local contacts are significant. At the top of the list is Dr. Ken Crosby, Professor of History. I never took a history class at JC and so only knew of him through others. My roommate and fellow civil rights participant, Doug Bowers, was taking his second class with Dr. Crosby, and he always had high praise for his lectures. I actually remember most his late forties Hudson, which he would occasionally drive on campus. Sylvia Kurtz has a discussion in her thesis of his civil rights work in the Huntingdon/Mt. Union area that predated our trip and that occurred over several years. I’m not sure how much help it would’ve been to call the “Juniata College main office.” At the time, I figured their response would be along the line of, ‘Well, kid, tough luck. We told you not to, but you just had to go. And now you want us to do what?’ Of course, calling Don Hope’s number would’ve rung up his wife. He was along for the trip. “Mr. Heberling” was Paul Heberling, Dean of Men and professor in the Sociology Department. Dean Heberling was incredibly well-liked and respected on campus, and I remember him coming to the lounge on the main floor of Sherwood dorm during my freshman year for informal talks with the guys. The final name was written in by me during the final, pre-departure meeting:
“call collect…..814-643-1243…..Dr. Brouwer”
Dr. Fred Brouwer was an assistant professor in Juniata’s philosophy department. I remember him attending two pre-trip meetings. He was tall and very quiet and gave the impression of being very kind and thoughtful. Unfortunately, I never personally interacted with him. His picture is in the 1965 and 1966 issues of the Alfarata, and then he’s gone.
There was a meeting somewhere on campus Saturday morning, March 13th at which sleeping bags and lunches were distributed and final instructions were given (by whom?). Driving down Moore Street towards the county courthouse, we passed a long procession of students and faculty carrying signs in support of our trip and civil rights in general. As our car drove past, I was astonished to see my German professor, Walter J.T. Morris walking in the long line and carrying a sign. I felt my ears go red, and I instantly felt bad about hating him every day of my academic life. The feeling quickly passed.
Figure IV-1. The in-your-shoe list of emergency phone numbers.
Figure IV-2a & IV-2b. Dean Heberling, who was involved in civil rights years before our trip south. Professor Brouwer, whose name & phone number I added to my list of contacts.
The rally at the courthouse seemed interminable. It was cloudy, cold, and dreary as only the Pennsylvania hills can be in mid-March. The air felt as if the perennial March thought-it-was-over-didn’t-you, two-feet-of-miserable-goddamn-slush snowstorm was only moments away. I can’t remember who talked or what they said. I just remember being damp and cold to the point of shivering. Finally, it was over, and we began the long journey south by going east on Route 22 to Mt. Union and then south on Route 522. I had taken along a cheap, spiral-bound notebook. I sat in the back seat, angled into the corner against the back door. I have no idea whose car I was in or who was driving. My roommate was in the back seat with me, staring out the window at the abandoned East Broad Top railroad tracks and Aughwick Creek. Down past the Pennsylvania Turnpike, I pulled out the notebook and began writing. I eventually filled out a page, the top part of which is shown in Figure IV-3.
First, we see the timing of the events at Juniata, leaving the college around 11:30 AM and then leaving the court house rally around noon. Just as we were coming up on McConnellsburg, we slowed for a state police car with its “gumball” roof light blinking and parked along the side of the road. As we passed, we discovered the car pulled over was the Gallway Kinnell contingent: a somber omen. The line “Last Confederate Bivouac” refers to one of what as kids we called “Hysterical Markers,” actually one of thousands of roadside markers installed by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. The odd happenstance of a Confederate memorial along a Pennsylvania secondary highway again struck me with foreboding.
The First Day: Sunday March 14, 1965
Someone had made the decision to rendezvous at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church where MLK preached in the late 1950’s. The visual impressions of the Alabama state capitol are vivid even today. Aside from the police presence and the knots of men scattered everywhere, the image of the two flags flying over the capitol dome was particularly penetrating. Note that Reverend Witt’s car had been pulled over and harassed by the police. Everyone in the car was a nervous wreck by the time we joined up with them. We were more or less in the vanguard, and I think that whomever our contacts were didn’t quite know what to do with us. We ended up in the basement of the church while the regular Sunday service went on over our heads. We nervously fidgeted to the strains of “Arise O You” from the Youth Choir.
Figure IV-3. The first page of my notebook: March 13, 1965. Written at the beginning of the trip.
Figure IV-4. The first page of the narrative (second overall): the morning of Sunday March 14, 1965 upon our arrival in Montgomery, Alabama.
Figure IV-5. MLK’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery.
Finally, a church deacon suggested that we all go up and join the service. Figure IV-6 shows the program. We settled down just after the sermon had begun. It was titled “The Will To Win” and was delivered by a young, guest minister just out of seminary, Reverend J. Pearson from Washington, DC. The theme was perseverance and revolved around a story of a young boy who was too underweight to play football. His solution was to constantly eat bananas, day after day, until he gained the necessary pounds. I remember sitting in the rock-hard pew with other Juniatians and thinking, ‘Here we are, a zillion miles from Juniata, prepared to do God-knows-what, anticipating the worst, and we’re sitting in a church listening to a sermon about eating bananas.’ God does have a wicked sense of humor.
One thing of which the JC contingent was painfully aware was the lily-white depictions on the cover. I’m sure that there was simply nothing else available from the Christian supply houses. And in an age innocent of clip art, the deacons had to make do with what they could get. Before the service was over, the deacons took up a collection for us and raised around $50.00, a tidy sum in those days.
The first page ends with the entire JC group sitting in cars, parked in tandem on a side street somewhere in Montgomery, while SNCC is consulted about what to do with us. Note that the SNCC official is at “a hotel,” an indication that the heavy hitters had arrived from Atlanta. We finally ended up in a small bungalow a few blocks from the Alabama State Teachers College, the home of Ed Jones, who had been expelled from the college and then lost his job because of his involvement with SCLC. Page two of the narrative (Figure IV-7) picks up the action at “Freedom House.” For the rest of the narrative, I’ll transcribe what I wrote and insert explanations and comments as necessary.
Figure IV-6. The Sunday service program at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church for the day we arrived in Montgomery.
Figure IV-7. The second page of the narrative: “Freedom House.” Early Sunday afternoon, Sunday March 14, 1965.
At a house in Mont. There’s a little heater in front of me. Musty, musty. Everybody’s standing around. People I don’t know. “This is our house,” says Kinnell. Tension, tension. God it sounds so melodramatic; but what can ever sound more like a lie than the truth.
Plans, radios, short-wave, a telephone hooked up to a patch box. Things lying all around. Nervous, nervous. Here we sit, advised not to go out in the streets. Students we passed on the way in are already in Selma. From Antioch in two cars. They’re passing a list around to sign in case of trouble. Men coming in with helmets! Jesus Christ, what’s going on? They’re for us!
Talking with students from Antioch. Trying on helmets, at least they are. People with helmets to the front. We’re marching here today, to the capitol. Bail money is available. Helmets…
Freedom House had only three rooms that I remember. The front two-thirds of the house were divided lengthwise, with a living room on one side and a bedroom followed by a bathroom on the other. The back third contained a kitchen that ran the width of the house. There was a small back porch and yard. The Antioch group, consisting of a single, scruffy faculty member and four students, had arrived first in a VW microbus and had set up a shortwave receiver and an antenna on the roof. The receiver was monitoring the Montgomery police bands.
There’s a baby in the back room, crying. People just sitting around, waiting, not knowing what we’re going to do. We’re in the hands of SNCC. Pray to God they know what they’re doing. God, we’re going out there. Consensus is that we’ll get arrested. We must sign out, where why & how long. Somebody may go out and never come back. No sleep, no sleep. I no longer have a stomach.
From the third page of the narrative (Figure IV-8):
A policeman went by on his motorcycle. He just smiled and shook his head. People are coming in and out. Outside three negroes watch for trouble; and there’s going to be some. Appearance of disorganization. Out to the car to get luggage. I don’t know why I brought it in. If we have to leave, I’m gonna be hurtin’! Some of the leaders aren’t even worrying about getting arrested. They figure it’s inevitable. Money in my shoe, flannel shirt, two packs of cigarettes.
During this time period, I wandered into to the kitchen at the back of the house. Four blacks were sitting around the table, smoking and drinking beer. This is when Ed Jones told me about how ironic it was that he was considered a Philistine by other blacks because he was upsetting things by being involved in the civil rights movement. I remember that the bare boards of the back wall were covered with colorful QSL cards, sent by ham radio operators to one another to confirm a contact.
Leadership is faulty. Jesse … , coordinator of SNCC, has been drinking along with some others. They don’t care. There’s only a handful of us here now, and none will be coming.
I think SNCC was stunned anybody showed up, thus the chaos. This led SNCC to tell the JC group that we and the Antioch contingent were about it.
The cops are out after Jesse for vagrancy. He was at a motel trying to find accommodations when somebody finked. We march anyway.
Frightened out of my wits. We march two-by-two to Alabama State University [sic], singing freedom songs I don’t know.
Nothing like on-the-job training. Using whites to march on an all-black college was a risky move on the part of SNCC. Not only did they have no idea what kind of reception we’d get, they also were very aware that this would cross one of those invisible boundaries that would infuriate the white infrastructure: blacks protest, whites protest, but whites don’t stir up our black folks.
Lack of organization. Roy Bulkley [sic] protests this fact, is put down. We rouse up about 300 in front of one of the dorms. Speeches, speeches, speeches follow. Jesse, Moore-From-Mobile, many students speak up. Wonderful feeling. Students rising in protest. Accomplishing something: students helping themselves because we can’t do it by ourselves. I pray to God that we accomplished something.
Figure IV-8. The third page of the narrative: the first action, a march to the Alabama State Teachers College, Sunday March 14, 1965.
We’ll run into Moore-From-Mobile again tomorrow. Roy Bulkey was a senior history major. He was big and had a booming voice and was also a fellow worker in the dining halls. Roy had brought with him his loose-leaf Bible, which he would open whenever he felt the need for divine emphasis. More on Roy in a moment. The next paragraph spills over onto page four of the narrative (Figure IV-9).
But all through it plain-clothes men, about 10, increasing slowly, stand across the street, grimly quiet. [page three ends] They watch, say nothing. More speeches, songs, threats. The feeling is good, but always the police. We begin to march. About 300 follow. A cop says “There’s too many” into his two-way. We march to the president’s house (Watkins). It’s down with Wallace and Watkins. Roy makes some speeches, gets into an argument with some cop over who we’re affiliated with. Cops watch us walk away from the house. Students disperse and we walk back together without incident.
The police presence at this early stage consisted of almost exclusively standing across the various streets and intersections from us and watching. Many were in plain clothes. Some uniformed police finally came up to us when a bunch of black students went up onto the front porch of the college president. It had become apparent through the various speeches that SNCC wanted the black students to join the white protestors in delivering a letter to Alabama Governor George Wallace demanding that he rescind his prohibition on the march from Selma to Montgomery and issue a permit for the event. I have no idea who had written the letter or what it said. In any case, this message had not been clearly understood by the students, who decided to use the occasion to raise all kinds of campus grievances, yelling them through the front windows of the president’s house. Roy apparently decided that this was diluting the message and literally tried to take over the whole affair. The SNCC field workers were aghast. Roy started loudly arguing with everybody: the students, the SNCC workers, and then finally the police. All the time, he was thrusting out the open loose-leaf Bible as if it were some kind of bladder totem that would sanctify his posturings. The JC contingent cringed. Finally, someone yanked him down off the porch and told him to shut the hell up.
Here we are, back at the house on Jackson Avenue. We’re in a bedroom with the radio playing. It’s 5:45 and there’s nobody around except some students out in the living room drinking whiskey.
A negro comes in and gives us some SNCC buttons. He is drinking whiskey. I ask, “Do you think that the house will be bombed or hit with bricks?” Answer: “Man, I’ve been shot at, an’ in Mississippi they bomb everything. I ain’t worried. Y’all gotta go sometime an’ why not for freedom?” Enough said!
Well, that looks very brave on the page, but at this point I wasn’t feeling sanguine about freedom or anything else. The students were the same ones from Antioch, who seemed intent on serving out their tour of duty smashed. We were supposed to be resting while others (who?) were out trying to find us a place to crash for the night. So far, the tidal wave of Northerners had failed to materialize. I remember feeling very alone in that sad bedroom.
John Garrett and I actually laid down side-by-side on the bed and tried to rest. We failed spectacularly:
After a fitful rest, Roy barged in and said they found rooms for us. I got my stuff together and went out. After a while I put stuff in Fike’s bus. More and more confusion. Kinnel [sic] takes the girls away, who knows [where]? Waiting, this horrible waiting. Outside we are shadowy forms milling quietly, whispering in pairs. Every once in a while a police car rolls by. Inside the beats are still drinking whisky out of jars – lying all over the place, talking loudly. No hope from in there, so the door is shut again.
First, “my stuff” was a ratty old, thin wool, olive drab sleeping bag, the kind you could still find back then in Army/Navy surplus stores, and a 1940’s cardboard suitcase given to me by my father. “Fike’s bus” was John Fike’s VW microbus. I was very conscious of the police presence and their subtle psychology of silently watching. Aside from making me feel as if I were in a fish bowl, the non-confrontational aspect was downright creepy. As H.P. Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury often noted, the imagination is usually much more terrifying than reality. Note that the scruffy Antioch students have now become Beatniks. I particularly didn’t like their condescending and dismissive attitude towards the JC group. I’m sure we looked too squeaky clean for their pseudo-radical tastes. But oddly enough, we fit in with the Black civil rights field workers WAY better than they did. Small consolation, I guess, in the “who’s the coolest” competition.
Figure IV-9. The fourth page of the narrative: Sunday’s action is concluded.
Finally word arrives. After agonizing delays we board cars and take off across town to God-knows-where. We are now in the basement of an old church. I have claimed a pew sitting along one wall. It’s too short for me. Light bulbs hang down from the ceiling about four feet from the cement floor. They are unshaded. Doug is playing classical stuff on a beat-up piano. Sitting around, each with his own private thoughts.
“Doug” is my freshman year roommate Doug Bowers. He was a music major and a descendant of Jacob Zuck, Juniata “pioneer” whose window portrait in stained glass was at one end of old Carnegie Hall. Juniata didn’t have much to offer Doug, and he transferred out after his freshman year. I never stayed in touch, and it saddened me to learn that he had passed away sometime before the March 2005 reunion.
The church basement was the perfect gothic setting for my pensive mood. With the stark shadows from the slightly swaying light bulbs, the tinny out-of-tune piano, the total lack of sound deadening, and the obviously nervous small talk, it was as if we had walked onto the pages of a Dark Horse comic. Robert Mitchum could’ve burst through the door, snap brim hat and gun drawn, and he would’ve fit right in.
I don’t know what to think. I’m scared now; but I’m even more scared about tomorrow. To get thrown in jail for nothing is bad news. They say we have bail money. Who knows? If in jail, how long ‘till bail? Then we must come back down here again for trial. They needed us today. Our group made up most of the march. We’ve done something, seen results. But, God, what of tomorrow??
I give myself a B+ for honesty. The confusion and lack of organization made me think that what we had done so far was just kill time: ‘Well, they’re here. We have to do something with them.’ Or maybe I was being too hard on everyone. It all seemed to be so off-handed. The possibility of getting thrown in the slammer as a Northern civil rights agitator for basically engaging in busy work really bothered me. As usual, I end the day’s musings trying to be upbeat.
Page six of the narrative (Figure IV-11) contains three short segments: early evening, just before “lights out,” and just after getting up the next day.
8:45 Sunday evening. Brushed my teeth, changed clothes and washed up. Feel much better. — Late at night now. All lights off except two. Just a coupla kids up. Mr. Maas, Mr. Hope, Rev. Witt are all here. Things are quiet and a dog is barking. Roy just said a prayer. If there’s a God above us, I hope he heard, I hope he heard.
Note that, even with Reverend Witt in the group (Juniata graduate and minister at Huntingdon’s Evangelical United Brethren Church), Roy Bulkey presumes to say a prayer. The guy was just too much.
The Second Day: Monday March 15, 1965
Page six of the narrative ends with a short paragraph written just before we went outside:
Sober morning. No word on what’s going to happen. I had a miserable night. We got a bite to eat at a small grocery store. It’s quarter-to-eight, and we’re moving out.
The church was in a mixed commercial-residential area. We had to cross a busy, four lane street to get to the corner store. Don Hope bought a loaf of bread and a can of sardines, made himself a sandwich right there on the sidewalk, and almost made me blow lunch. I hadn’t eaten much of anything since Saturday morning, and the smell and thought of that sandwich turned over whatever remains were still in my system. I stuffed my package of peanut butter crackers into my shirt pocket.
Page seven of the narrative (Figure IV-12) picks up the action after we made it back to Freedom House (“headquarters”):
Figure IV-10. Page five of the narrative: we finally leave Freedom House for the basement of a Black church, somewhere in Montgomery.
Figure IV-11. Page six of the narrative: the end of the first day, Sunday March 14, 1965, and getting up on the morning of Monday, March 15th.
From headquarters we went to a café right off campus. We waited. Some played a bowling machine. Milling around. They won’t let us on campus. Still alone, looking out over Ala. State College. Here we are safe. We are notified that they have been intercepting calls on the short wave. The Klan and other interested parties are patrolling around in cars, ready to fink us out and ready to get out and attack us.
The café was really a soda fountain and grill right across the street from the college that catered to the college crowd. The group from Antioch had been monitoring the police bands closely. The Klan and others itching for some “action” had apparently been out cruising all night, looking for people who bore any resemblance to “outside agitators.” The ominous part was the conversations between these small groups and the police, who would arrange to avoid any situation until it was “over” and then arrive on the scene to clean up the mess and arrest the “agitators.” To be truthful, we were referred to as “white niggers,” apparently the lowest rung on the evolutionary ladder and fair game for any harm that might come our way. The numerous times I heard the phrase, it was spit out in a snarl complete with bared teeth.
Still we wait, smoking and watching. We march around campus and try to enter. We are stopped, but about 200 students join us. We march across campus to the auditorium. They can’t stop all of us. We stay outside. If we remain on campus, they will bring in the wagons. We march back to café. We move to another café further away from campus; still the good humor men mill around, watching, grinning.
We were actually stopped by the campus police on foot on the opposite side of the street from campus. We were at an intersection with the main entrance to the campus. Two campus police squad cars were parked end to end across the entrance between two large columns. The “200 students” were on the other side of the squad cars, trying to get out. They finally just scrambled over the cars. We then walked around the perimeter of the campus. The Blacks walking with us kept calling to students still on the campus grounds to join us. This was the first time I heard the sung phrase, “Which side are you on, boy? Which side are you on?” After our group about doubled in size, we turned onto campus and headed for the auditorium. SNCC field workers and a couple of JC profs managed to weed out all the whites except Pam Clemson, who ended up inside the building. We moved back off campus and across the perimeter street. The “good humor men” were the plainclothes police. Their grinning wasn’t forced. I’m sure they thought the whole affair was stupid. The next paragraph was written back at the café:
At long last other students arrive. About 40 of us altogether get organized. All money is collected and dungarees are distributed. We mill around, talk with new people. They are very scared, like we were yesterday. Outside is a car of detectives. I stand at the door smoking a cigarette and watch.
Those forty students were the vanguard of a tidal wave of people that kept arriving throughout the day and on into the evening. There were charter buses everywhere, driving down residential streets, blocking intersections, getting caught in one-ways with no room to turn around, disgorging people in the middle of marches. It was total chaos, not unlike battalions of airborne troops getting dropped on both sides of a battle zone. The police would form a blockade, and four huge Greyhounds would pull up behind them and unload over 200 protesters. I’m certain that neither SNCC nor the authorities had any idea there’d be so many people arriving so quickly. I heard later that morning SNCC and SCLC had started “waving off” buses and redirecting them to Selma.
I have no idea the purpose of distributing dungarees. Protect our knees? Make us all look like James Farmer (head of CORE)? Note that the JC contingent has suddenly transformed itself from neophytes to seasoned pros. Ah, the ever-present pecking order: “We were scared yesterday…” As if. In defense of myself (standing at the door nonchalantly smoking a cigarette while eyeing the police), at this point in my life I had not seen a single Bogart movie!
In spite of the chaos, there was still that petition to deliver to Governor Wallace:
Finally the word arrives, we march, singling freedom songs. We approach cafeteria and a great mass of negro students cheer us on. What a feeling. We march on two-by-two. Ahead [page seven ends] are the cheering students. They rush up, about 400 of them, and greet us, shake hands. We are stopped by campus cops. We turn around, but the students follow. Back on the street the cops are on motorcycles, about 10. But are too many [of us]. We now form a line, two-by-two about 4 blocks long, solid.
Figure IV-12. Seventh page of the narrative: mobilizing for the first action of Monday, March 15, 1965.
This paragraph ends page seven of the narrative and continues onto the top of page eight (Figure IV-13). Obviously, word had come out from the college that students would indeed join us on the march to the capitol building, we just had to “come and get them.” So, in symbolic defiance, we marched back onto the campus just long enough to pick up the campus contingent, then turned around to begin the march in earnest. This was too much for the police:
We are finally stopped by a phalanx of helmeted, billy-clubbed, sadistic white bastards. They are all across the street, 40 in number. We sit down because they will not let us continue. Speeches, threats, testimonials and songs. Oh, those fantastic negro singers and those wonderful freedom songs! We move into the street and sit down. I am on the curb.
Freedom songs, oh God what a feeling! Grim, itchy cops only a few feet away — fingering their clubs, stretching, doing isometrics with them. James Forman [sic], head of SNCC is here. [actually, it was James Farmer, head of the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE…it took a while to learn the players when you didn’t have a program] The Pres. of college refuses to sign a petition. It will be taken to capitol. We have no permit. Cop chief asks us, we don’t answer. The paddy wagons arrive. Still we sit.
My enthusiasm was mostly coming from the sheer numbers of people. The earlier actions were immensely uncomfortable for me because it seemed so easy for the police to just scoop us up and drop us off at some Klan hideout deep in the sticks. That now seemed improbable with such a large and growing mass of people. The Blacks called the constant fiddling with the billy clubs “tweeking.” James Farmer was quite the character. He was dressed in bib overalls and arranged for water and oranges to be distributed to the marchers. (I have no idea where they came from; they just suddenly materialized.) He also became incensed over people tossing orange peels onto the street. He found a broom and started sweeping them up. He even swept around the boots of the policemen. It was quite a moment.
More and more students arrive both from Ala. State and all over the country. We sit, the sun beating down. Testimonials. Speeches. A drunk leads a rousing, wonderful drunken song.
Page nine (Figure IV-13) starts with an explanation of how orange peels got on the street. I have no idea to whom “freedom pro’s” refers:
The police are still there. Bedrolls, oranges, and water are brought in. We are only blocked in one direction. More speeches, fantastic speeches by the freedom pro’s.
We go back to the café, have a beer and get cigarettes. More and more students are around. We return and there are many more people here now.
As noted, the police were only blocking the route to the state house. The longer the police line was in place, the more and more people joined the crowd in front of it. I remember having to fight through people to get back to the café. Those just arriving had no idea what was going on. The whole street was starting to resemble a quarter-mile-long block party. At the café, they had long since given up stashing people’s wallets and money. The supply of “dungarees” had been exhausted hours before, along with the supplies of beer and cigarettes. There was trash everywhere. I walked all the way back to the head of the march, right in front of the police line, picked up my notebook, and started right in again:
I am writing and suddenly the police leave. We get up and go to the end of the block. We get on the walk, four abreast. We get in the street. Go back a little bit. Everybody’s singing a freedom song. The press has their lights on us. We are silented [sic]. I can’t see ahead. Still in the streets. Singing, press lights, SNCC men hanging out of the hotel window. Can’t see. Singing, clapping, cigarette smoke. We must go back. We are marching as soon as they clear traffic. We are moving. I am writing as I walk. Singing, clapping in the middle of the street. Smiling, laughing, tearful people, emotions, halloes and smiles. Oh God, I can’t write anymore. At least 1,000 people.
The disjointed text is explained by the fact that I was trying to walk and write at the same time, all while in the middle of a mash of people being directed to go forward, go back, stop, wait, start. I’m surprised any of it is legible:
Figure IV-13. Eighth page of the narrative: the action at Alabama State Teachers College.
We are silenced. Still aren’t moving. We must go back again. The cops aren’t pushing us back. They don’t tell us what to do. They may trap us again. We are going to get talked to so we can get organized and MARCH WHEN WE WANT TO MARCH!
Page ten of the narrative (the last page) takes the action right up to the beginning of the final phase of the abortive march (Figure IV-15).
We are sitting at the end of the block. Singing and talking. We are not marching yet. Man at the end of the block using antiphony so everybody can sing along. The good humor men are pissed off. They let us go and we aren’t going. James Forman [sic] speaks. A jet goes by.
As you can tell, by this time whether due to weariness, nervousness, or just the urge to do something, anything, the whole crowd from the front line (where I was) all the way back to the campus had gotten silly, rowdy, and in a couple of spectacular cases, very drunk. Moore-From-Mobile had weaved and staggered his way up front and had become one of our chorus leaders. Then, he suddenly started yelling “Old enough to fight, old enough to vote.” Well, the parts of the crowd who heard him let out an audible groan. As if it wasn’t proving hard enough to simply deliver a petition to the statehouse, here’s “Moore” again, trying to change the subject. Several of the riot squad snickered and shook their heads. Somebody back a-ways shouted, “Shut the fuck up!” which startled everyone and Moore-From-Mobile particularly. Moore started staggering back through the crowd towards whomever shouted. John Garrett and I were still sitting together on the curb. John muttered, “Jesus, here we are in the middle of a civil rights protest, and there’s gonna be a race war among the protesters. That’ll look great on the evening news”.
I never did get James Farmer’s last name right. Right after I wrote that last sentence, the whole mass of people started off. By now, it was late afternoon, and there were three of us walking together: Fred Bailey, Doug Bowers, and me. John Garrett had been in the group, but somehow he had gotten separated in the many trips back to the café by the college. We were no longer in the vanguard, about a half block of people were in front of us. We marched out of the Black neighborhood and turned left down a gradual incline into a section of multi-story state office and apartment buildings. We made a sharp right. As the twilight deepened, the TV news crews turned on very bright lights that were on long poles. Whites hung out the windows, yelling epithets at us and occasionally throwing stuff down on us. Suddenly we stopped.
All three of us realized that the huge mass of people had somehow disappeared, and we now had police lines in front and behind us. What we didn’t know was that most of the marchers had been neatly cleaved away and had been stopped right at the edge of the Black neighborhood. All the media followed the head of the march, leaving the rest of the huge crowd in the gathering darkness.
So there we were, stopped yet again. This time, instead of a more-or-less friendly residential area as a backdrop, we had these buildings with whites hanging out the windows, yelling at us. Rumors flew back and forth through the crowd. Word finally came down that this was as far as we were going to get. Now what? During the interminable waiting, someone held a tiny transistor radio high above his head. It was Lyndon Johnson announcing at a press conference that he was sending to Congress in two days his landmark civil rights legislation, which eventually passed and became known as the Civil Rights Act of 1965.
I’ve never before or since experienced a greater sense of being part of history than at moment. And how ironic: there’s Johnson in his southern draw, outlining the salient points of his proposed law, and there we are sitting in the gathering chilly darkness in the middle of a street behind some office buildings in Montgomery, Alabama, trying to exercise the redress of grievances amendment to the U.S. constitution and getting it stuffed up our collective butts. I thought back to that first view of the Alabama building with the Confederate flag flying above the dome. Had it only been yesterday?
Figure IV-14. Page nine of the narrative: on the streets of Montgomery, Monday afternoon March 15, 1965.
Figure IV-15. Page ten of the narrative: the final page covering the action right up to the moment the march to the state house begins in earnest.
I’m sure Lyndon Johnson would’ve loved to have helped us out. But it wasn’t in the cards, at least not for us on that night and in that place. Johnson’s speech finally ended, and we were left standing in the quiet and darkness. I remember being able to make out Orion between the buildings and trying to decide if it was higher in the sky than it was back north at Juniata. After more endless waiting, it was announced that we were going to be allowed to return to where we started, but only in groups of up to three. The thought did not appeal to any of us. We were quite a few blocks away from the Black neighborhood. We already knew about the Klan and such. Would we all make it back?
After a long time (remember, we were fairly close to the front of the crowd), it was finally our turn to be “released.” The three of us hustled back as fast as we could walk. When we got to Freedom House street, we were greeted with the aftermath of what we learned had been a melee. After the separation, the back part of the crowd had been left sitting until it became dark. While we sat and listened to Lyndon Johnson, they had gotten attacked by the police and “deputies,” who were really just thugs in work clothes deputized by the sheriff. Freedom House was in chaos. The JC contingent and the Antioch students were nowhere to be found. People in shock were milling around all up and down the street. The first JC person to show up was Janet Kaufmann, who told us in detail what had happened. She was worried sick about John Garrett, with whom she had lost contact right at the start of the melee.
We stayed put, and finally JC people started reporting in. We had a powwow on the front porch, exchanging horror stories and asking for news about group members still “out there.” After a long time, Jim Lehman (a junior) said he just had to get back to Juniata because of Move Up Day. For non-Juniatians, this was a quite formal set of ceremonies including a convocation during which new Student Senate and class officers were installed for the next school year. Move Up Day also marked a sort of “coming of age” after which a number of freshmen prohibitions were removed, such as being forbidden to walk on the (very convenient) diagonals in front of Founders Hall. Jim was the incoming Senate President and felt his absence would be a huge gaff. (My copy of the student handbook, The Pathfinder, shows Move Up Day as occurring on Tuesday, March 16th. I have no idea how Jim expected to leave at that late hour on Monday the 15th, drive over 1,000 miles, and arrive at Juniata in time for anything.)
Oddly, no one paid any attention to the impossible schedule, and Jim was adamant that he didn’t want to make the trip alone. He asked for volunteers to go along. At first, nobody budged. By now, it was after 10 PM, and he really wanted to get started. We decided that it was unfair to single out one person. He had a Volkswagen bug and could carry three people. After drawing straws, the “volunteer” group ended up being me, my roommate Doug Bowers, and, of all people, Roy Bulkey.
Miraculously, all our stuff was still in the bedroom of Freedom House, just as we left it early that morning. As we packed up and as Jim got directions on what the “safest” route was out of town, John Fike came up to me and scribbled down on a small notepad the name and phone number of a reporter for the Huntingdon newspaper, Jim Hunt. John lived in Huntingdon. Hell, his father was Vice President and Treasurer of the college. Anyway, he told me to call Jim Hunt and tell him everything that had happened that day. Before we left, I went to the back of the house and found Ed Jones and got him to give me his name and address, which I wrote at the bottom of the same small piece of notepaper. (See Figure IV-17.)
We never did meet up with everyone in the group, even though we kept hanging around to see if any late stragglers absolutely, positively had to get back. Finally, word came back that a number of people had already found places to crash for night. That ended the vigil, and we pulled away from Freedom House sometime after midnight.
Figures IV-16a & IV-16b. Jim Lehman (1966) provided the getaway car, and John Fike (1965) gave me the contact at the Huntingdon newspaper to whom he asked me to report what had happened.
Figure IV-17. Note given to me by John Fike, Juniata senior, just before leaving Montgomery for Juniata, late evening of Monday March 15, 1965. I added the name and address of Ed Jones who lived at Freedom House and lost his job and was expelled from school for his civil rights activism.