Selma, Alabama — February 1965

I

In the decades since Dr. King’s murder, I have been bemusedly tolerant of the plethora of conspiracy theories offered in explanation, tending to believe and disbelieve them all, in equal measure:

The CIA? The Klan? The Mafia? A redneck hit squad? A lone bigot?

All are plausible. Yet I’m evenhandedly skeptical too, because while one of the conspiracies finally succeeded, I knew well enough that there were numerous others which were foiled only by chance, by timely police intervention, or —or, well, because someone like me was walking near Dr. King at just the right moment, and blocked a sniper’s aim.

That security duty was one of my early tasks as a rookie civil rights worker: to stay close to Dr. King when we filed through the Selma streets. There were three or four of us who shared this duty, and we kept him pretty much surrounded.

We were the point men, his bodyguards. Unarmed, of course, and in my case at least, no great physical threat to any direct assailant. But without weapons and muscle, how were we supposed to provide protection?

Simple: our bodies were visual obstructions, blocking the aim of any sniper crouched on nearby rooftops, trying to draw a bead on Dr. King through the scope of a high-powered rifle.

The job was explained to me by big James Orange, who had been around the movement a lot longer. I grasped its function at once. But I also had a question: What if the sniper fired anyway, hoping for a lucky shot, and hit me instead?

James Orange answered my query first with a characteristically broad, hearty grin. Then he shrugged, slapped me on the shoulder and said, “Hey, don’t worry about it, Chuck. If you get killed, we promise — Dr. King will preach at your funeral!”

“Hey, thanks, Jim,” I retorted, “that makes me feel so much better.” But the comeback took a couple seconds longer to come up with than I wanted.

Five years later, researching my book Selma 1965, I found references to a police report which said that on one of our marches there may well have been a rifleman on a rooftop, poised to do just what I was there to prevent. Dr. King, it turned out, learned of this much sooner; he had spoken calmly about it to reporters a few days later.

Reading about the report made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. But I wasn’t really surprised.

   *    *    *

By mid-February, 1965, I had been in Selma about six weeks, in a kind of basic training for the voting rights campaign there. Perhaps because I was raised on military bases, comparing the movement to an army came easily to me: Dr. King was the general; I, white and fresh from college in Colorado, was a private, a grunt.

Although our commander had just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, his ragtag force in Selma was ready for combat and bent on conquest. For us, victory meant nothing less than the overthrow of centuries of black exclusion from public office, the ballot, and the jury box in most of the American South.

Of course, the military parallel is wildly inexact: for one thing, we aimed at a bloodless coup; more mundanely, even in 1965 a real army private earned considerably more than my pittance of $25 per week. One didn’t join the movement to carry a gun, or get rich.

[NOTE: When I first used this analogy, it seemed borderline outlandish: but an eminent war reporter,  Thomas Ricks, has since made it the basis for an entire illuminating book, Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968.]

[Correction: The original version of this post misidentified the author of Waging A Good War; the text has been corrected, and I regret the error.]

During the heat of the movement’s struggles, many situations were dangerous; but night marches were especially so. In the summer of 1964, Dr. King and others of his staff had led numerous night marches in St. Augustine, Florida, where the local sheriff was known to be in close collusion with the Ku Klux Klan.

More than one of these marches had been attacked by whites, and I had heard these marches referred to by older civil rights workers to as the very archetypes of terror. “Man, after those marches, I was glad to get inside a nice, safe jail,” one veteran told me.

I believed it. The cover of darkness had been a standard weapon of the Klan and other southern vigilantes. But this very fact also increased the tactical value of a night march. It was also, Dr. King astutely guessed, the right moment for such a march in Alabama.

If it scared us, it would also scare the authorities, or at least Selma’s new public safety chief, Wilson Baker. And it would likewise bring the press back in droves. On February 17, an especially tense day, Dr. King announced he would call for night marches to increase the pressure.

II

Dr. King was as good as his word. The very next night, from the nearby town of Marion, a march set out from a small black church on a corner of the town square. One of Dr. King’s top aides, C.T. Vivian, just out of jail, was in the lead.

The response was swift and violent: The street lights suddenly went out, and the marchers were attacked by state troopers and others. A well-known reporter for NBC TV, Richard Valeriani, was beaten bloody; and a young local man named Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot by a state trooper named James Fowler. Jim Clark was spotted on the scene, in civilian clothes, carrying a nightstick.

After Marion, events moved swiftly: squads of state trooper cars pulled into Selma, with the courthouse as their stronghold. On Saturday, February 20, Governor Wallace issued a proclamation banning night marches.

Dr. King was determined to defy the ban. Back in Selma on the evening of March 1, there was a  mass meeting already noisily underway when I arrived at Brown Chapel AME Church. I came ready to do my part, which I presumed would be the usual, marching close to Dr. king as one of his shields. From the volume and timbre of the singing and clapping, I could tell that the people were especially enthusiastic. They were ready to march, to follow Dr. King anywhere.

III

That is, most of them were.

Beyond the spotlight glare of his fame, Dr. King had his detractors within the ranks, and this was true in Selma as elsewhere. The most vocal critics were found among the staff of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

As a newcomer, I puzzled over their complaints, trying to make out not only the specifics, but also their emotional substrate — not just the words, but the music.

SNCC represented a younger, mostly secular, and more militant generation of activists, many of whom were quite cynical about the black clergy which Dr. King represented, and the Christianity from which he drew his rhetoric. They also resented the media’s overwhelming focus on Dr. King as the personification of the civil rights struggle.

But it also seemed that many of them disliked King personally. Their brief against him included a number of points:

He was a publicity hound, they charged, always staying close to the TV cameras, and seldom lingering in a place after they had left.

He exploited local campaigns for the publicity and financial benefit of his organization, SCLC, leaving local leadership at higher risk of white backlash and reprisal after he left town, and less able to cope with it.

And not least, it was often hinted that he was a physical coward, who carefully avoided the really hazardous marches, leaving them to underlings while he hobnobbed with senators and millionaires, collecting awards and fat speaking fees.

Besides the general complaints, there was a specific history to this antagonism in Selma: SNCC workers had done the original organizing here, three years before King came, and they had taken more than their share of licks for it from Clark and his posse, with little to show for it but their scars. Some felt Dr. King and SCLC were now moving in on their turf and taking credit for all their hard work and suffering.

Leading a night march, besides its publicity value, was an ideal way to banish such charges. And there was certainly no sense of doubt or skepticism in the crowd. They were ready to hit the street; anxious, even.

IV

I lingered for awhile in the back of the church, joining in with the singing, and enjoying the fervent preaching. Dr. King was not on the platform yet, but I was sure he would be there shortly. Anyway, by this time I knew that some of his lieutenants, such as Ralph Abernathy and James Bevel, when at their best were even more moving and powerful in the pulpit than Dr. King. I was happy to listen to them, and gain strength from the group.

But after two, three rousing sermons and more freedom songs, something about the mass meeting began to feel out of rhythm. Dr. King still hadn’t taken his seat on the platform; the sermons were being given by second-tier staff, along with a couple of alumni from out of town, and their fervent homilies were taking longer than usual.
They’re pushing it, I suddenly realized. They’re stretching out their material, straining and pumping up the rhetoric like balloons. They’re stalling.

What was going on? Dr. King was often late, but I was pretty sure he and his inner circle were all in town. Where were they? Something was up. What was it?

I decided to find out. Making my way up a side aisle, I went through a door and down a short hall behind the platform, to where there was a kitchen and a couple of small offices. The singing and preaching were muffled now, and voices came from one of the offices.

Opening the door, I saw several of the staff gathered around a desk, with others behind them. Among them were the real insiders: Ralph Abernathy, Andy Young, Hosea Williams, James Bevel. I slipped in and stood at the back, listening. Andy Young was talking into a black telephone receiver. I sensed he had been talking for awhile. Then he handed it to Dr. King.

“Yes, Mr. Marshall,” Dr. King said into it. “Good of you to call.”
Then he listened, murmuring occasional monosyllabic responses.
“Who is it?” I whispered to someone. “What’s going on?” “Burke Marshall,” came the quiet reply.

V

I knew the name. Burke Marshall was Deputy United States Attorney General for Civil Rights. He was probably calling from Washington.

“I understand your concern, sir,” Dr. King said after an interval. He was speaking slowly and deliberately. “I realize that it’s dangerous. But as you can understand, we live with danger all the time. And as I have said to the people here, I’m going to march tonight, and that’s what I expect to do.” His voice was calm and sounded tired.

The night march. A call from Burke Marshall.

I was recalling St. Augustine and putting two and two together when Dr. King thanked Marshall again, said goodbye, and hung up.

“He says there’s a group of Klansmen in the area who are looking for trouble,” Dr. King reported. “He doesn’t have enough federal marshals to protect us, and he wants us to call off the march.”

Scanning the rest of the group, I could tell they had already heard the gist of this message. Somebody, maybe one of the SNCC staff, jeered quietly. “Hell, if we called off every march where there was danger we’d never march at all.”

Some others nodded at this, and maybe — my memory is not clear — Dr. King smiled wanly. But the mood was clearly subdued. The noise of singing and clapping from the church swelled and rumbled through the wall.

Dr. King stirred in his chair. “Well, Andy,” he said, “I guess we’d better go on out there and get ready.”

But the phone rang again before he could rise. Someone else, probably Andy, picked it up, spoke quietly into it, and listened for a few moments. Then he put his hand over the mouthpiece and spoke to Dr. King.

“It’s Katzenbach. For you.”

Nicholas Katzenbach; I knew that name also. The Attorney General of the United States, point man on civil rights for the President, doubtless calling from his big office in the sprawling, granite Justice Department building in Washington.

Dr. King took the phone, said hello, and listened patiently in his turn. Then he repeated what he had just said to Burke Marshall:

“I appreciate your concern, sir,” he concluded. “But as I have said, our plan is to march, and we’re going to do that. We can’t let threats of violence deter us. I understand sir.” There was some more monosyllabic dialogue. Then “Thank you very much.”

He hung up again. As he had listened, and then talked, I felt the room getting somehow quieter, even with the crowd’s exuberance echoing around it. I also felt colder. Glancing from side to side, I saw that the faces of all the insiders, Andy, Hosea, Abernathy, were very long and somber. Their eyes had widened, just a little, but enough to notice. And despite the sense of chill, there was sweat on some foreheads.

They were afraid, I realized. But not they, we. I was becoming afraid also.

VI

Andy and Dr. King were repeating for the rest of us what they had heard:

Katzenbach had underlined Burke Marshall’s report. There was a Klan hit team in the area, and they were planning to make their assault in two groups. The Carver Homes, which surrounded the church, were built in neat parallel rows at right angles to Sylvan Street, and were well-suited for the Klan’s purpose, especially at night. The only illumination was a few porch lights.

“They’ll wait til the march gets most of the way down the block,” Andy explained. “Then one group will come between the houses right across from the church with billy clubs and who knows what else, and jump the march there.”

But the first charge would be only a tactical diversion. As everyone’s attention shifted to the melee that would follow, marchers would begin to scatter. In the confusion, another team would steal down between houses closer to the corner, aiming for their real target — the front of the column, and Dr. King.

As I took in this explanation, and visualized the impending scene, time seemed to slow down, and the whole room took on a certain unreal, almost dreamlike quality.

A moment of — what, truth? — was upon us. We had a threat of imminent violence, delivered not by some anonymous postcard or a heavy-breathing phone call, but by the two highest law enforcement officials of the U.S. government.

“Katzenbach said they don’t have enough marshals in the area to protect the march, and they can’t count on the sheriff or the police.”

“Count on them?” someone scoffed. “Hell, that posse is the Klan.”

My knees began to tremble, just a little. I glanced down nervously, hoping the motion wasn’t visible through my overalls. Where would I be when the march left the church? Probably where I had been on those previous occasions, marching near Dr. King with the others. Being a sitting duck, or rather a walking one.

My bladder begin to make itself felt. I had read about this in soldiers facing battle. Well, I was a soldier, if a nonviolent one, and would follow orders, however shakily. Just please, God, don’t let me pee my pants.

There was more talk, a jumbled mixture of bravado and barely-concealed apprehension; the words are lost to me now. But as they swirled anxiously around us, I slowly became aware of silence at their center: Dr. King behind the desk, listening but not quite seeming to hear. By now, a sense of terror at the attack to come was palpable among us. All of us, that is, except Dr. King.

Then it was apparent to me that he was somehow disconnected from the rest of us, or at least, disconnected from our fear. There he was, only a few feet away, listening and talking quietly; I heard him clearly despite the din of the mass meeting.

And yet it was also as if he was floating far above us, on a raft of complete calm atop the swirling current of our dread.

One by one the members of his inner circle began raising objections, suggesting that the march could in fact be put off. They didn’t actually admit to their fear, but the fact of it was evident, and I was glad to hear them speak up.

Dr. King remained calm, immoveable. I knew, I thought, that he was capable of feeling fear. But either he had banished it that night, or had learned to live out of its reach at the important moments.

“We’ve got to march,” he repeated, adding that it was time to go speak to the people, to reinforce their nonviolent discipline in the face of provocation, and then to head out.

As this parley continued, I saw clearly something else I hadn’t seen before: the falsity of the rumors of Dr. King’s cowardice in the face of physical danger. At moments like this, they were not just false, but laughably so.

Everyone in that room, including me, was terrified, and with good reason.

Everyone, that is, except Dr. King. He was a rock. Standing at the rear of the room, my fear soon mingled with a kind of awe at the utter fearlessness he was manifesting. This sense of awe deepened as the moments passed.

VII

Much later, when he was long dead and I had learned more about him, I gained a certain perspective on this moment. He had, after all, faced violence before: in September, 1958 he had been stabbed by an unbalanced woman at a bookstore in Harlem. The seven-inch blade sank into his chest very near his heart, and he had to sit motionless until help came, to prevent it from slicing the aorta and killing him.

His house in Montgomery had been bombed. A neo-Nazi had attacked him in Selma just a few weeks earlier.

Among the death threats which came to him almost daily, more than a few had been real and credible.

But there was more. In November, 1963, after watching the funeral cortege of John F. Kennedy, King suddenly turned to his wife Coretta and said, with a sober matter-of-factness, “That is what will happen to me.”

VIII

So he knew.

By February of 1965, he had known for a long time, and evidently accepted, that for him, it was not a question of whether violent death would come, but only a matter of when and where.

This knowledge makes more intelligible the memory of that moment in the back of Brown Chapel AME Church. The rest of us in that room did not know what kind of death awaited us; Dr. King evidently did, and by whatever process, was at able to live with and not be paralyzed by it. If that end was to arrive this night, then so be it.

It was Andy Young, one of the shrewdest of his aides and a veteran of the St. Augustine attacks, who finally found the argument which could deflect this irresistible force, could budge this immovable object. He spoke over the voices of the crowd swelling into another round of the song, “You Got to Do What the Spirit Say Do,” with its verse: “If the Spirit Say March, You Got to March, Oh Lord. . . .”

“Martin,” he said, “I know we’re ready to march” –by which he really meant, you are ready– “but what about the people out there?”

They didn’t have the benefit of these phone calls from Washington, he went on. They didn’t know how imminent the risks really were that night. It was one thing for us, in this room, to go out there. That was our job, and we knew what we were getting into. But the people?

Of course, they had been told it was risky. And they already knew well enough the hazards of being assertive Negroes in the Deep South. And yet, how many of them would still want to march if they knew what we now knew — if they had sat through these phone calls?

As he spoke, I saw that this plea, for it was nothing else, was sinking in.

Again, much later I understood better that Dr. King, beneath the layers of celebrity that had been congealing around him for a decade, was at heart a pastor, a shepherd of souls. I had glimpsed this in his quiet talks with the prisoners in the county jail earlier in February.

And that’s how he had started out in Montgomery. If fate had not intervened, that is where he would likely have been in 1965, preparing to succeed to his father’s pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

In the gospels, Jesus declares that it is the shepherd’s role to lay down his life for his flock. But was it right to lay down the lives of the flock for the shepherd? This was the burden of Andy’s argument, and I could see he was scoring points.

Dr. King began to nod. “Maybe you’re right, Andy,” he said at length. “It is a different thing for them than for us.” If he didn’t intend the “us” ironically, I certainly heard it thus. “I suppose we’d better put off the march for a day or so.”

IX

There was a collective sigh of relief from the rest of the room. The trembling in my knees began to subside; my bladder seemed less urgently full. There were a few barks of nervous laughter.
With this decision made, the talk quickly turned technical, about who would call Washington back with the news, and how to maintain the interest of the media for another week or so.

But this minutiae was drowned out by the crescendo of another song: “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round. . . ”

“Well,” Dr. King said calmly, “I guess we’d better go out there and tell them.

That was when I abruptly grasped another critical dimension of this scene: When Dr. King went out to the platform, quieted the cheers, and then told the frenzied crowd that plans had changed, that they were to put a lid on their enthusiasm and go quietly home, he wasn’t going to tell them that it was to foil a Klan hit squad poised outside for the kill.

Instead, he would say something eloquently vague about the importance of seeing and responding to kairotic moments — he liked this New Testament term for God’s timing, even though, or perhaps just because, few of his hearers would know what it meant.

But among the audience there would also be the skeptics, the mockers. They would not be fooled by talk of kairos. They would hear about the phone calls from Washington, and they would say, “You see? He chickened out. The Klan came around, and he ran away.”

I knew that’s what would be said, and soon enough it was. But I also knew — I had seen, in a way I could almost touch — that this claim too was completely mistaken.

Dr. King was not afraid of the Klan and their hit squads. And there is more: when it meant the safety of his flock, he was not even afraid of looking like he was afraid, as he stood on the platform that night and said a benediction on the wilting, frustrated and confused crowd that had waited for him so long and so passionately.

Coming home that night, I could not tell which had been the more intense, exhausting experience: what had happened to me personally in that back room, or what I had seen in Dr. King.

Since then, the balance has become much more clear: my fears were ordinary, familiar and appropriate, nothing to be ashamed of. But what was made manifest through Dr. King that night was something else again. I have never seen anything like it, before or since.