‘Everyone felt that we had to do something, but what?’’
‘Everyone felt that we had to do something, but what?’ John Lewis, a leader of the 1960s US Civil Rights movement, was recalling a meeting between members of two key civil rights organisations, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which Lewis then chaired, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) (Lewis, 2015: p. 231).
It was September 1963, and the group that gathered that night was discussing how to respond to the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama. Four young girls attending its annual Youth Day had been killed, and twenty-two others were injured. Those at the meeting included Martin Luther King, who had just addressed the funeral of three of the murdered girls; Diane Nash, a central leader in the early years of SNCC and by then a member of the SCLC staff; and James Bevel, also a former SNCC figure and then SCLC’s Director of Direct Action. At the meeting, Nash presented a plan to Dr. King for a ‘nonviolent attack on Montgomery [Alabama’s capital]—the kind of siege many… had had in mind for the March on Washington’, which had occurred just two weeks before (Lewis, 2015: p. 231).
Alabama was a bastion of racism. At the beginning of 1963, George Wallace, Alabama’s recently-elected governor, had declared ‘Segregation now… Segregation tomorrow… Segregation forever!’. Yet he faced opposition from local civil rights campaigners and initiatives organised by SNCC and SCLC. In April 1963, campaigners in Birmingham, Alabama’s largest city, had organised economic boycotts, picketing and sit-ins, and in May they had confronted police chief ‘Bull’ Connor’s dogs and firehoses. Then, on 15 September, Ku Klux Klan members murdered four girls at a church which had been a centre of this campaigning, located just ‘across the street [from] Kelly Ingram Park, where ‘Connor’s dogs and hoses had torn into’ marchers only four months earlier (Lewis, 2015: p. 228).
When Nash and her husband Bevel heard the news, they decided ‘that an adult man and woman could not allow four little girls to be murdered and do nothing about it’ and that they would campaign for ‘the right to vote for blacks in Alabama, and in that way, they could better protect their children’ (Nash in Ellis, 2017: p. 4).
Nash explained: ‘That afternoon, he and I drafted the original strategy for what became the Selma right to vote movement… It became my job to present the draft of the strategy that we had written to Doctor King’ (Ellis, 2017: p. 5)
During the following year, as SCLC weighed its options, Nash and Bevel developed various proposals for an Alabama campaign. Late in 1964, SCLC adopted the proposal of local activist Amelia Boynton that Selma be chosen as the campaign’s target (Garrow, 2015; Hartford, 2014).
Accounts of the events that followed can readily be interpreted in terms of the role of community organising, media power, or the lobbying of politicians. The following account particularly highlights the role of cultural power.
Selma and cultural power
‘Change happens when…’ – four factors
Martin Luther King writes,
The goal of the demonstrations in Selma, as elsewhere, was to dramatize the existence of injustice and to bring about the presence of justice by methods of nonviolence. Long years of experience indicated to us that Negroes could achieve this goal when four things occurred:
nonviolent demonstrators go into the streets to exercise their constitutional rights; racists resist by unleashing violence against them; Americans of good conscience in the name of decency demand federal intervention and legislation; the administration, under mass pressure, initiates measures of immediate intervention and supports remedial legislation…
In Selma, thousands of Negroes were courageously providing dramatic witness to the evil forces that bar our way to the… ballot box. They were laying bare for all the nation to see, for all the world to know, the nature of segregationist resistance. The ugly pattern of denial flourished [in states like] Alabama… By jailing hundreds of Negroes, the city of Selma, Alabama, had revealed the persisting ugliness of segregation to the nation and the world (in Carson, 2001, emphasis added).
The Selma campaign began with protest marches, which were met with police violence and mass arrests. Stories of police brutality made front page news (Williams, 2013). John Lewis describes the context:
‘People live there with a great deal of fear—[Selma] had a mean vicious sheriff in the person of… Sheriff Clark. And people had worked very hard to organize… We had had sit-ins at restaurants and lunch counters…’ (Blackside, 1985a).
Following the murder of movement activist Jimmy Lee Jackson, who was trying to protect his mother and 82-year-old grandfather from attacking troopers, movement leaders resolved to march in protest from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital. ‘We wanted to make it to Montgomery, to dramatize the right to vote’, stated Lewis (Blackside, 1985a).
Wallace was adamant: ‘There will be no march between Selma and Montgomery,’ he declared, and he instructed state troopers to ‘‘take whatever steps are necessary’ to prevent it.
Confrontation at Edmund Pettus Bridge: ‘Bloody Sunday’
However, the march proceeded. Lewis describes what happened when marchers reached the Alabama River at Selma:
When we arrived at the apex of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, we saw… a sea of blue, Alabama state troopers. About six hundred of us [were] walking in twos. It was a very peaceful, orderly protest… we heard one state trooper identify himself as Major John Cloud, and he said, …“this is an unlawful march, it will not be allowed to continue. I’ll give you three minutes to disperse and go back to your church.” And I would say in about a minute and, and a half he said, “Troopers, advance”… The troopers came toward us with billy clubs, tear gas, bull whips, trampling us… with horses. I felt… like I was going to take my last breath… I saw people rolling, heard people screaming… we were beaten back… downtown… I don’t know to this day, how I made it back … I said something to the effect that I don’t understand how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam… and cannot send troops to Selma, Alabama to protect black people who want the right to register to vote. (Blackside, 1985a)
It became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’. Lewis, hit by a club, was hospitalised for three days. Images of Amelia Boynton, gassed, assaulted and left for dead, circulated worldwide.
Television coverage interrupted regular programming to cover the scenes (Torres, 2018). Lewis reflects,
The American public had already seen so much of this sort of thing, countless images of beatings and dogs… But something about that day in Selma touched a nerve deeper than anything that had come before. Maybe it was the concentrated focus of the scene, the mass movement of those troopers on foot and riders on horseback rolling into and over two long lines of stoic, silent, unarmed people. This was a face-off in the most vivid terms between a dignified, composed, completely nonviolent multitude of silent protestors and the truly malevolent force of a heavily armed, hateful battalion of troopers… People just couldn’t believe this was happening, not in America. (2015: p. 331)
‘It will go down in history’
A second march, facing similar violence, did not proceed, in the hope that Washington would respond. Ahead of a third march, faced with immense public pressure, the President got involved. Johnson (1966 [1965]) announced legislation that would ‘strike down all restrictions used to deny the people the right to vote’ (p. 275). He then sent in the military to protect the third march from violence. People from across the nation travelled to Selma to participate. Lewis describes what happened:
Ministers, nuns, labor leaders, factory workers, schoolteachers, firemen—people from all walks of life, from all parts of the country, black and white and Asian and Native American, walked with us as we approached the same bridge where we’d been beaten two weeks before. The same troopers were there again, but this time National Guardsmen were there as well, and we passed over the river without incident, trailed by two truckloads of soldiers and a convoy of Army jeeps… The people who came out of their homes to watch as we passed by—rural people, almost all of them black, almost all of them dirt poor—waved and cheered, ran into their kitchens and brought us out food, brought us something to drink. More than a few of them put down what they were doing and joined us. (2015: p. 343-5).
Dr. King recalls,
We had people coming in from all over the country… We hoped to see… the greatest witness for freedom that had ever taken place on the steps of the capitol of any state in the South. And [the] march added drama to this total thrust. I think it will go down in American history on the same level as the March to the Sea did in Indian history. (Carson, 2001)
Lewis echoes these comments: ‘I think we all walked that day… with a sense of pride and with a sense of dignity… It was one of the most moving and really exciting moments, really, the drama of it all… It was… like Gandhi’s march to the sea’ (Blackside, 1985a).
Their reference is to Gandhi’s 1930 ‘Salt March’.
The movement shifted the politics
The passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act was not a foregone conclusion. Dr. King recalls his earlier discussion with Johnson about the issue:
[Johnson said] “I’m going to do it eventually, but I can’t get a voting rights bill through in this session of Congress… I can’t get it through, because I need the votes of the Southern bloc to get these other [policies] through. And if I present a voting rights bill, they will block the whole program. So it’s just not the wise and the politically expedient thing to do”… Three months later, the same President who told me in his office that it was impossible to get a voting rights bill was on television [saying], “We Shall Overcome,” and calling for the passage of a voting rights bill in Congress. And it did pass two months later. The President said nothing could be done. But we started a movement.
Dramatising the issue…
so that ‘it can no longer be ignored’
Dr. King speaks of pursuing ‘specific symbolic objectives’ (in Carson, 2001), explaining:
Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored… The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation… [W]e who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
Further reflections on movement strategy from Dr. King provide insight into his understanding of the importance of cultural power. He writes about how civil rights campaigns like Birmingham in 1963 and Selma ‘produced situations that symbolized the evil everywhere and inflamed public opinion against it. Where the spotlight illuminated the evil, a legislative remedy was soon obtained that applied everywhere’ (King, 2010 [1967]).
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The story of the Selma campaign highlights the important linkages between
- cultural power
- a shift in the ‘climate of opinion’,
- the overall ‘political climate’ and
- political change.
Originally, the conditions for the 1965 Voting Rights Act did not exist. Cultural power is one among a number of factors that made this outcome possible; however, without imagery and political theatre, the legislation would not have eventuated. Johnson would not back it, and it faced entrenched opposition from Wallace and his supporters.
The movement created the conditions for change, not just through protest, but protest which created vivid images and dramatised the issues in the public mind—and in the minds of movement supporters who lobbied Congress or participated in the march. Lewis observes that something about the images of Bloody Sunday ‘touched a nerve’, noting ‘the concentrated focus of the scene’.
References to drama appear repeatedly in the accounts by Lewis and King, and it is useful to analyse what happened in these terms. King’s account of the four elements that were required to achieve change almost reads like a theatrical or film script: nonviolent protesters, as the ‘protagonists’, claimed rights that the law did not recognise (‘acting’ as though they were real). Racist ‘antagonists’ resisted. The audience, moved by the drama, got involved. King recalled, ‘the sheriff had directed his men in teargassing and beating the marchers to the ground. The nation had seen and heard, and exploded in indignation’ (2010 [1967]: p. 1).
Cultural power—in tandem with ‘people power’—had shifted the climate of opinion. Facing the resulting pressure, the government acted.
Omitting imagery and drama from campaigns like this would empty them of much of their power: the argument here is that cultural power is worth seeing as a distinct force.