Five Years After, Selma Cannot Forget Historic Rights March

By Roy Reed Special to The New York Times

    March 22, 1970
    
SELMA, Ala., March 21—The Albert Hotel, built in grand imitation of the Doges Palace, home to hundreds of lonely re porters in 1965, home to thousands of traveling planters for a century before that, has long since been dismantled and hauled away, every brick and chandelier, leaving in its place a graveled lot that is filled with automobiles for sale.

They say the hotel was losing burdensome amounts of money, that they tried energetically to save it and that when they finally gave up and tore it down in 1968, they did so with great regret. There is every indication that that is true.

Yet, visitors may find it hard to avoid the suspicion that the owners reacted to subconscious as well as financial motivations and tore it down to help the town forget 1965, when Selma became a national symbol of resistance to racial equality. The Albert, as the main gathering place for the nation's agents and observers, was central to the symbol.

Selma, in 1970, longs for nothing so much as to put its notoriety behind it and become just another American town.


It has papered Broad Street with plastic storefronts, new and shiny and in the manner of Kansas City. Two new shop ping centers are being promoted in the suburbs, and a new bridge is being built across the Alabama River, along with a highway by-pass to divert traffic around the city.

The young wear long side burns, and pant suits. Every body, young and old, talks foot ball at breakfast, lunch and dinner.



Lingering Ghosts

But Selma cannot forget. It is too full of ghosts — Viola Gregg Liuzzo, Jimmy Lee Jackson, James J. Reeb, Jonathan Daniels, all killed in this area's racial struggles—by white men who still run free.

Above all, there is the ghost of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. His memory is every where, suffused even with the ghost of the old hotel, emblem of the white man's way of life, where he signed the guest register one historic day in 1965 and was then slugged and knocked sprawling by some nameless “good old boy” full of rage and hurt.

His memory survives on Sylvan Street, where he visited the black children of “the project,” the public housing community; in Brown's Chapel, A.M.E. Church, where on mass meeting nights his voice shuddered and sighed and rose in agony; in the Selma jail, where the white policemen locked him up; at the foot of Pettus Bridge, where his followers, marching without him one Sunday, were clubbed, horsewhipped and tear-gassed; on the road to Montgomery, where he finally led the triumphant march that resulted in the Voting Rights Act of 1965.




A March for Freedom

The march to Montgomery was also supposed to free Alabama of its past. It began five years ago this morning, and just before the 4,000 hopeful set out, black and white to gather singing “We Shall Over come,” Dr. King climbed the steps of Brown's Chapel and told them:

“Walk together, children, don't you get weary, and it will lead us to the promised land. And Alabama will be new Alabama, and America will be a new America.”

After five years, after the violence of Detroit, Newark and other cities, after the death of Dr. King in Memphis, it is just beginning to be possible to look at Selma and see how the nonviolent movement has worked here.

All the outside civil rights workers have gone and the black community is once more in the hands of its old-fashioned leaders, mostly Christian ministers.

The most militant Negro left in town is a Baptist minister who is running for the State Senate, and it might be said that normalcy has returned.

Direct action demonstrations brought considerable gains to the black community here.

As of March 1 of this year, 10,739 blacks were registered to vote in Dallas County, compared to 13,735 whites. Only 300 blacks were registered before 1965, and that was the immediate cause of the movement.

Juries are integrated, thanks to the same Federal judicial process that put blacks on the voter rolls.

Eight or 10 Negroes work as clerks in downtown stores.

Nearly 15 per cent of Selma's black children attend formerly all-white schools. Full integration, with whites going to black (schools, is expected to begin next fall under a new court order that will be handed down this spring.

Six Negroes are city police men.

Two others are sheriff's deputies—strolling around the same courthouse where former Sheriff James G. Clark Jr. used to train his possemen in putting the electric cattle prod to use against people.

After complaints by black leaders, the county recently raised the pay and fringe benefits for black county employees.

Nonviolence Theory

A white policeman beat a Negro severely on Christmas Eve — for resisting arrest, the officer said — and the Negro died a few days later. After street demonstrations by Negroes, the policeman was charged with murder and suspended from the force. Some doubt that the policeman would have been charged five years ago.

But the concept of nonviolence was supposed to accomplish more than gains for blacks. The theory was that when unarmed blacks confront ed the white officials with nothing more than their bodies, and the whites brutalized them, then, after a period of anger, the whites would be assailed by conscience and have their racism exorcised, or at least diminished.

Whether this happened in Selma is hard to say, not because the white people hide their feelings but because they seem unsure of what their feelings are.

Thoughtful people, black and white, point to a great increase in the number of white moderates in the town since 1965, and to the greatly increased power that they exercise.

Among the moderate converts, there is undoubtedly increased sensitivity. White leaders no longer shrink from sitting down in meetings with blacks. They drink coffee with them. A few blacks regularly eat at downtown restaurants, and whites no longer object. There are even reports of blacks visiting occasionally in white homes.

There are other small pieces of evidence. White leaders call black leaders “Mister.”

‘They Call Me Reverend’

“They used to call me Preacher,'” said the Rev. P. H. Lewis, pastor of Brown's Chapel. “Now they call me ‘Reverend Lewis.’”

Not many Confederate flags are seen here on car bumpers these days.

Roswell Falkenberry, editor and publisher of The Selma Times Journal, notices that whites shake hands with blacks on the street now.

“Ten years ago,” he said, “they wouldn't have done that for a hundred dollars.”

A middle-aged insurance man patiently explains his segregation is philosophy—“They like it better going to school with themselves, and we do, too.” — and in half-an-hour his pronunciation shifts, in almost imperceptible slidings and slurs, from “nigger” to “nigra” to “Negro,” until at the end he is talking of “blacks.” Five years ago, he would have known exactly what to call them.

“We've learned a lot since 1965,” Mr. Falkenberry said, “We've learned that the world has changed since 1914, and the black man is going to have a part in it from now on.”

Black leaders agree that white attitudes and conditions for blacks have improved meas urably, and they trace the improvement to 1965.

Even the town “militant,” the Rev. L. L. Anderson, who has continued to lead young sters in demonstrations and is one of about 10 Negroes running for office this year, said, “By and large, things have im proved. Nonviolence in Selma was a success.”

Racist Feelings Shown

But if the rough edges have been honed away, it does not take much investigation to dis cover that a fairly hardy racism still thrives beneath the surface.

In the privacy of their homes and offices, some whites make it clear that they still have no use for the memory of Martin Luther King, and that they resent what he did to their town.

The old feelings of racial superiority still show themselves.

A prominent businessman and parishioner sits in the study of a leading clergyman and repeatedly uses the word “nigger,” but only after he slips and says, “by God” does he feel impelled to apologize to the minister for his rough language.

“I think most people's feelings about Negroes have not changed,” a white moderate said. “Racism has receded among the thinking people. But the rednecks still think Jim Clark did the right thing.”

He continued:

“They are still convinced that there would have been violence from the Negroes, saying, but we didn't give them a chance; Jim Clark didn't let them get violent; we had the upper hand.’ Then, as proof of what would have happened here, they point to the Negro violence in Detroit and Newark and other places.”

Martin Luther King was not the only hero in Selma, and his is not the only ghost. Jim Clark, dead politically (and perhaps in other, more important ways; he has had half a dozen jobs since being deposed in the 1966 election, and nothing has succeeded) is still a hero to many whites here.

Another heroic memory among white supremacists is that of Circuit Judge James A. Hare, who used to lecture visiting newsmen on the short comings of “blue-gummed Ibos” and other bits of African tribal history that, in his view, proved the basic inferiority of most blacks.

Judge Hare, who has been dead about a year, tried and convicted large numbers of the demonstrators for violating local ordinances. Some moderates are a little relieved that he is no longer around to “stir things up,” but other whites speak of him with great respect.

The feeling is still strong here that Selma has been maligned unjustly, and that the Federal Government's actions in forcing school desegregation, voter registration, juiy integration and the like have been punitive and unfair.

“Maybe we held 'em down for 350 years — maybe we had a ring in their nose for 350 years,” said James B. Ryall, an insurance agent and friend of Jim Clark's. “I don't believe it, but say we did. You going to do another wrong for the next 350 years to make up for it?”