In January 1964, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was firing up an enthusiastic crowd at the Milwaukee Auditorium (now the Miller High Life Theatre), I had no idea I would be joining him and others a year later in a voting rights march that would change America.
King told the Milwaukee crowd of more than 6,000 that “we have argued and discussed” the issue of civil rights long enough.
“This problem [of racial injustice] will not work itself out,” he said. “Somebody must be dedicated. Somebody must be willing to stand up.”
A year later, in the spring of 1965, King sent out a call to white college students from the North like me and others at Ripon College “to stand up” and come to Selma, Alabama, for a five-day march to the state capital of Montgomery, which was being planned for mid-March.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
At Ripon, several of us were intrigued. But we how we could get to Selma? And how would we finance the trip?
My friends at Ripon included a brainy and disheveled guy from Waukesha named Dick Grimsrud and an equally brainy but less disheveled guy from Chicago named David Schwarz.
Between classes, Dick and I – along with a few other students – began to cobble together a plan to create a student-faculty delegation that would represent Ripon College at the Selma-to-Montgomery march.
As we pondered the idea, the school’s assistant dean of men, Patrick C. Hunt, received a call from Dan Friedlander, a well-known student activist at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, who asked if any Ripon College students would be interested in heading south to join the King-led march. About one hundred UW students had signed up for the trip, he said, and three chartered buses were prepared to leave Madison en route to Selma at a moment’s notice.
After learning of the Friedlander-Hunt call, we decided to float our nascent plan by the school chaplain, the Rev. Jerry Thompson, who agreed that representing Ripon College in Selma was the right thing to do.
It was decided that we should ask our friend David Schwarz, who also happened to be president of the Student Senate, to call a special meeting of the august body to consider providing some funds s for our hoped-for venture to the Deep South.
At the meeting, which began at about 7 p.m., when most students were either studying or heading to the local pub for a beer, Chaplain Thompson rose to our defense, saying that the voting rights legislation that President Johnson was about to send to Congress would not pass unless activists like King continued to operate in and around Selma. He said it was important for Ripon College to be represented in Selma at King’s planned march to Montgomery.
Some members of the Student Senate argued that the money could be better spent elsewhere, such as writing a check to the NAACP or inviting a speaker to campus to lecture on the issue. This caused James R. Bowditch, of the English Department, to blow up, saying that throwing money at the problem would be the worst thing that we could do. The physical presence of people who care could make all the difference, he said.
In the end, after less than an hour of discussion, the Senate agreed by 13-9 to allocate $400 for the trip to Selma.
Chaplain Thompson then asked those of us who were interested in going to Selma to meet him in his office at 11 p.m. to make the necessary arrangements. We agreed that we would leave for Madison – and eventually Selma – the next day.
The news that the Student Senate had allocated $400 to finance a college-sponsored trip to Selma spread like wildfire throughout the Wisconsin campus. Students who had earlier been deaf to what was happening down South now found a reason to be outraged.
Leading the protest was Richard Singer, a junior who used his show at the college radio station, WRPN, to urge students to demonstrate their opposition to this alleged misuse of student funds.
At 10 a.m. the next day, about 400 angry students – roughly half of the student body – heeded Singer’s call and began to converge on Smith Hall, where we were preparing to leave for Selma. Never before had the school seen such a display of public indignation over an issue.
The newly angry students were claiming that the Student Senate had acted inappropriately (i.e., without the full consent of the student body). But more importantly, they were saying that what was happening in Alabama was none of the school’s business.
A few students, however, bravely and publicly supported what we were planning to do. One was James E. Reed, a sophomore from Seattle, who wrote in the student newspaper, Ripon College Days, that those who were arguing that “we Northerners don’t have the right to go meddling in other people’s affairs” at first sounded reasonable. But that African Americans in the South do not enjoy the same rights as others, he said, is not a local problem but a national issue “because we are one nation and one people.”
“The denial of the right to vote to Mississippi Negroes can be a legitimate concern of someone living in Chicago,” Reed wrote. “And if this individual is sensitive to the demands of the situation, he has every right – legal and otherwise – to ‘meddle in Mississippi affairs.’ Perhaps the basic reason that the problem has been so bad for so long is that sensitive people in the North have felt it was none of their business …What is going on on the South today is our problem as well as the South’s.”
For its part, the school administration concluded that the Student Senate had acted within its rights in allocating the funds for our trip. But one member of the administration – David L. Harris, dean of men – went further, wholeheartedly endorsing our plan to participate in the ongoing civil rights demonstrations down South, including the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery.
Harris applauded the Student Senate’s decision, calling it “courageous,” and he said that, in his opinion, the student demonstration against it was misguided. “Wouldn’t you know that once they got off their apathy,” he said of the student protesters, “it would be for the wrong reasons?” He said he was ashamed at the “unseemliness” of the demonstration.
Students traveling to Alabama were members of the Ripon family, Harris said. “We should have been there to shake their hands and see them off,” he said. “This way, they left with memories of a screaming crowd, with few people knowing precisely what they were concerned about.” He said that the Student Senate had finally concerned itself with “something of vital significance to all Americans.”
“There is also a great educational opportunity here,” he said. “We can go down to Selma and learn something. Do the students really want another jazz concert [funded by the Senate], or do they want a complete, well-rounded education?”
Chaplain Thompson, meanwhile, had his hands full attempting to calm the crowd of student demonstrators which had gathered to prevent our departure for Selma. He explained that the trip to Selma was necessary to show the school’s support for civil rights. Then, in a backhanded compliment, he praised the protesters for showing interest in something important, “instead of beer and sex.”
But the crowd showed no signs of dispersing, so we loaded up the two cars that we were taking to Madison, where we would be herded onto one of three buses headed for Selma. After briefly threatening to block our departure, the crowd withdrew and we were on our way: six students – Dick Grimsrud, Noel Carota, Alexandra Corson, Nancy Cox, Ruth Lake, and I – plus three representatives of the college – Chaplain Thompson, Hunt and James R. Bowditch, of the English Department.
In Madison, we were quickly ushered on to a bus that we were told was headed for Selma. But later that day, just south of Chicago, we were informed that the situation in Alabama had become too dangerous for us to proceed, citing the beating of white college students in Montgomery the day before, as well as the ongoing violence and tension in Selma, where a memorial service was being held for James Reeb, a white Unitarian minister from Boston who had been clubbed to death by a group of white segregationists.
Disappointed, we were told by the organizers of the trip (mainly from Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC) that our new destination would be Washington, D.C. There, they said, we would join protesters outside the White House who were demanding that President Johnson send federal troops to Alabama to protect the civil rights activists there from the wrath of the state and local law enforcement establishment.
The next day, we arrived in the nation’s capital in the middle of a snowstorm. We were taken to a sidewalk in front of the White House to join 20-30 other students wrapped in sleeping bags and sitting in the slush, surrounded by dozens of policemen.
We were dirty and tired. But most of all, we were angry. We didn’t want to be in Washington, D.C.; we wanted to be in Selma where the real action was.
I’m not sure who made the decision, but it was decided that the four male members of our small Ripon College delegation – Chaplain Thompson, Hunt, Grimsrud, Carota and I – would proceed to Selma by rental car, while Bowditch and the three female students who had begun the trip with us – Corson, Cox and Lake – would return to Ripon (apparently on the assumption that the trip to Selma would be too dangerous for the “girls” to undertake).
Arriving in Atlanta, we dropped off our rental car in at the local Hertz office and boarded a bus for Birmingham, Alabama – a city known back then as “Bombingham” because of its history of racially motivated bombings by white segregationists who had terrorized the African American residents of the city for years.
That evening, Saturday, March 20, 1965, we arrived in Selma and were welcomed at the West Trinity Baptist Church, where we spent the night.
After breakfast the next day, Chaplain Thompson, Hunt, Carota, Grimsrud and I made our way to Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, where the march to Montgomery was set to begin at 10 a.m. in chilly but sunny air.
Shortly before 11 a.m., Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. arrived and began to address the crowd, which numbered about 3,000, in his now-familiar booming voice from the concrete steps of the church.
“You will be the people that will light a new chapter in the history books of our nation,” he said. “Walk together, children. Don’t you get weary, and it will lead us to the Promised Land. And Alabama will be a new Alabama, and America will be a new America.”
After he and other members of the clergy had spoken, we began to move slowly down Sylvan Street, with King leading the way.
At Alabama Avenue, we turned right and saw the first of many local white citizens we would encounter along the route. Here, they lined the street and were silent. But as we turned left onto Broad Street – the city’s main thoroughfare and the road to Montgomery – loudspeakers blared “Bye, Bye, Blackbird,” and white onlookers began to jeer.
Six abreast, we approached the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which spanned the Alabama River. I remember thinking as we walked over the bridge that we would all die instantly if some maniac were to dynamite the bridge from below.
The police, meanwhile, had closed off the two eastbound lanes of the four-lane highway, enabling us to proceed safely and smoothly. But the two westbound lanes remained open to traffic, which included a black Volkswagen with racial slurs whitewashed on its fenders and doors. Several white children lined the road waving toy guns and chanting racial slurs as loudly as they could, too.
Under the terms of a court order, an unlimited number of marchers would be allowed to begin and finish the five-day hike to Montgomery. But only 300 people would be permitted to walk on the two-lane middle section of the highway running through Lowndes County to the outskirts of Montgomery, where the rest would be allowed to join the march.
On the fifth and final day of the march, Thursday, March 25, as the protesters wove their way though the outskirts of Montgomery, their numbers grew to about 25,000 as local residents joined in.
At the state capitol building, Harry Belafonte, Joan Baez and other entertainers led the crowd in singing folk songs and spirituals. And finally it was King’s turn to speak.
“We have walked on meandering highways and rested our bodies on rocky byways,” he said. “Our bodies are tired and our feet are somewhat sore.
“They told us we wouldn’t get here,” he continued. “And there were those who said that we would get here only over their dead bodies. But all the world today knows that we are here and we are standing before the forces of power in the state of Alabama saying, ‘We ain’t goin’ let nobody turn us around.’”
King said that there had never been a moment in American history “more honorable and more inspiring than the pilgrimage of clergymen and laymen of every race and faith pouring into Selma to face danger at the side of its embattled Negroes.”
He paid his “profound respects” to the white Americans, in particular, who “cherish their democratic traditions over the ugly customs and privileges of generations and come forth boldly to join hands with us.”
King said that some people were asking how long it would take to achieve freedom and justice for all people.
“How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever. How long? Not long, because you shall reap what you sow….How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Four months later, on August 6, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibiting racial discrimination in federal and state elections.
Shortly after the march, we returned to Ripon and told our story to anyone who would listen, and even to those who would not. I hope that what we said and did somehow managed to change the minds of those who had earlier thought that Selma was none of their business.
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery march, and as I have done so often, I will return to Selma again to celebrate the occasion (this year in ceremonies taking place March 6-9).
I will be asked how the march may have shaped my thinking and actions going forward. I will say that it taught me and many other Americans the power of nonviolent civil disobedience to enact change, and it underscored how important individuals such as Martin Luther King, Jr., can be in inspiring others to make change happen.
Finally, participating in the march strengthened my commitment to play whatever role I could in righting the wrongs and building on the successes of this great country, which I must concede has been deeply challenging and seemingly never-ending at times. But for me, it has been worth it every step of the way.
