COMMENTS: AT FIRST GLANCE-Remembering Selma in Black and White
Mills, Nicolaus
When the Selma crisis began, 20 years ago this spring, the country was ready for it. Before Selma there had been the Woolworth sit-ins, the freedom rides, and in 1964 the Mississippi Summer...
...But the graininess of the photo, its lack of art make it more indelible to me...
...Even the deaths at Selma—first Jimmie Lee Jackson, then James Reeb, then Viola Liuzzo—brought with them a sense of dela vu...
...Hemmed in as we were by barbed wire, there was no place to run or hide...
...Always obscene...
...The Times picture is not essentially different from those of a year before, of Birmingham authorities turning fire hoses and dogs loose on black demonstrators...
...Or had they simply not brought guns...
...The overcast Selma afternoon, the photographer's distance from the violence have muted the clarity the picture should have...
...Like most of my generation, those of us who finished college in the early 1960s, I look on Selma as the high point of the civil rights movement...
...After a while, the shouting stopped, and the men drove away...
...It is the New York Times front page picture of March 8, the day after Bloody Sunday, that remains the most searing...
...I could never bring myself to hang up on my callers, just as a year later, working and teaching in Mississippi, I could never quite bring myself to admit that people like me no longer had a useful role to play in the civil rights movement...
...The anonymity of this picture is, I find, reassuring...
...The picture is not at all sharp...
...My memories of it are more mixed, black and white pictures that even now seem almost as clear as they were two decades ago...
...Always at night...
...But it is not nostalgia that I feel for Selma...
...then by some wordless signal we went back to work...
...Nobody's face, not even those of the men leading the parade—Martin Luther King and on either side of him Ralph Bunche and Ralph Abernathy—can be seen...
...It reflects the fact that at its best the civil rights movement was a mass movement, made possible by a wide range of sacrifice rather than the heroism of a few...
...The following Sunday a second Selma-toMontgomery march began...
...I kept thinking the right photo would do the trick, change the feelings that were making it so difficult for whites and blacks to get along...
...Then Stokely Carmichael's version of "black power," and finally the urban riots of 1967...
...It brings to life the television footage of the night before, then freezes it...
...It was the day following the Sunday march, and a couple dozen of us, all who could fit in the back of a small moving van, were cleaning out the pasture where the marchers would camp their first night on the road...
...It was taken on the day the second Selma march began...
...The only serious question is, will you enter the picture frame...
...We had no way of telling...
...80 the federalized Alabama National Guard was riding shotgun...
...Before Selma there had been the Woolworth sit-ins, the freedom rides, and in 1964 the Mississippi Summer Project...
...I am in this picture, somewhere toward the middle, near the left side of U.S...
...After Selma there was Watts...
...A week later the hate calls started...
...Their cause must be our cause too...
...What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement that reaches into every section and state of America...
...Without enough rakes and shovels to go around, it was slow going...
...We were too far away to make out their shouts, but we could see the rebel flags draped over their car hoods, and we had no trouble guessing what they were thinking...
...The picture I like best is one never taken...
...Of course, I cannot be seen...
...And yet there is something about this second photo that makes me uneasy...
...Are you prepared to be more than a witness...
...Suddenly a caravan of cars pulled up along the highway...
...Six months earlier there had been James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner...
...But the sun was warm, and we knew we would finish long before evening...
...By the time Selma began, the "Southern Way of Life" had lost credibility...
...I was in graduate school at Brown at the time of Selma, and when I returned North, I wrote a short article for the school paper on what I had seen...
...It hides the fact that all along U.S...
...Only here the violence is perfectly controlled, systematic...
...The second picture I remember is a much happier one, "Marchers on U.S...
...There is no looking at this picture and saying, you do not see it all...
...The picture is dominated by Alabama state troopers as they sweep from left to right, clubbing marchers who have fallen, rushing ahead like cavalry to inflict as much damage as they can on the enemy...
...It did not, I believed, matter who took the photo or who was in it...
...When Alabama state troopers attacked a column of black marchers as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, one did not ask why the marchers failed to turn back as they were ordered...
...Had they done nothing because there were so many of us...
...But for a moment we had felt the kind of fear the Selma organizers struggled with all the time, and we knew we were lucky...
...It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life," the president declared...
...80 after Crossing Edmund Pettus Bridge...
...We stood there, hoping the men in the cars did not have guns...
...This time the marchers were protected by the National Guard and led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and four days later, when they arrived in Montgomery, they were welcomed by a crowd of 25,000, most of whom had flown or bused in from the North...
...It mutes the shouts of "White Nigger" that came from everywhere and the farm children with their BB guns, (Continued on p. 251) 131 AT FIRST GLANCE (continued from p. 131) who looked like nothing so much as satanic marionettes...
...It is the kind of panoramic shot the wide-angle lens and helicopter have made possible...
...A week after the "Bloody Sunday" attack on Pettus Bridge, Lyndon Johnson went before Congress to propose the Voting Rights Act of 1965, delivering the strongest civil rights speech by any president in this century...
...Only that it caught both the terror and the hope that being in the South in those years always came back to...
...There was nowhere else we wanted to be...
Vol. 32 • April 1985 • No. 2
