Boasts ‘Bloody Sunday’ Led to Rights Act : Once-Violent Selma Now Proud of Racial Harmony

The way Mayor Joe Smitherman tells it, he and other white leaders got tired of seeing Selma blasted for its segregationist past, tired of television showing the old films of state troopers and sheriff’s deputies assaulting civil rights marchers with clubs and electric cattle prods at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on “Bloody Sunday.”

They got tired of hearing about young people who, when asked if they know about Selma, would reply: “Yes, didn’t something bad happen there?”

So Smitherman, once a die-hard segregationist who concedes that he used to be “somewhat of a demagogue,” says he decided to join other white leaders, along with Selma’s black leadership, in a campaign to remake the city’s image. They decided, in fact, to try promoting Selma as the birthplace of the 1965 Voting Rights Act--which Smitherman himself now hails as “the most important piece of legislation to be passed by Congress in a hundred years.”

It may have been world-class brass on Smitherman’s part, and some blacks say they had to drag the mayor to the decision “kicking and screaming.” But, however it happened, the city whose name became synonymous with racial violence as a result of the brutal treatment of black protesters on March 7, 1965, has turned itself into a community justly proud of its racial harmony.

Now, as city officials and civil rights leaders prepare a glorious celebration for next March to mark the 25th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” they can point to a record of accomplishment that local blacks and national civil rights leaders say other cities would do well to emulate.

U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a black civil rights leader who suffered a fractured skull when leading the 1965 march and who will return here as a principal figure in the anniversary celebration, calls the transformation “almost unbelievable.”

“There’s a greater sense of hope and optimism in Selma than in most towns and cities I know about,” said Lewis, who Smitherman once denounced as an outside agitator but now calls “one of the most courageous people I’ve ever known.”

Monument to King

Undoubtedly one of the most thoroughly integrated cities anywhere in the country, Selma now has a monument to civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and lists among its tourist sites the Pettus bridge, where troopers swinging clubs and sheriff’s deputies riding horses and hurling tear gas canisters and using whips and cattle prods attacked nonviolent protesters on “Bloody Sunday.”

Moreover, leaders such as Smitherman, who has been mayor for 24 of the last 25 years, have moved from fighting the federal government to tapping it for millions of dollars in aid to create a model program of integrated public housing that has been honored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The mayor, proud of his ability to obtain federal funding, tells conservative colleagues who complain about “tainted” federal money: “Yeah, ‘taint enough of it.”

Could Fight but Not Vote

Twenty-five years ago, when the voting rights marches began, blacks were systematically prevented from registering to vote in Dallas County and many surrounding counties. Reporters covering demonstrations in the area interviewed blacks who had fought in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War but could not vote.

Prior to “Bloody Sunday,” King had led some of the Selma demonstrations, but he had returned for a visit to his home in Atlanta that weekend, so the march was led by Lewis, then head of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and by several officers of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

When marchers refused to obey orders to turn back at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, state troopers, led by Alabama Public Safety Director Albert J. Lingo and a mounted posse directed by Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark, charged into their ranks, injuring 84 people--17 of them seriously enough to be hospitalized.

Television coverage of the attack--showing mounted deputies indiscriminately assaulting men, women and children--stirred indignation across the country and fueled public pressure for voting rights legislation.

Biracial Protests Held

President Lyndon B. Johnson deplored the “brutality” at Selma. Huge biracial protests were staged in Los Angeles and Berkeley, Calif., and other cities throughout the nation in sympathy for the marchers. After subsequent demonstrations, including a five-day Selma-to-Montgomery march led by King, Congress passed the Voting Right Act, 328 to 74, in the House and 79 to 18 in the Senate.

(The act suspended use of literacy or other voter qualification tests, which prevailed in much of the South, and it provided for the appointment of federal voting examiners for registering blacks in areas not meeting specified voter-participation requirements. It also provided for federal court suits to ban discriminatory poll taxes, leading to their abolishment in the only states that levied them--Mississippi, Alabama, Texas and Virginia.)

Today, even the Selma and Dallas County Chamber of Commerce, once a bastion of segregation, is promoting the anniversary celebration and advertising the “vital role” that Selma’s blacks have played in the history of the state and nation.

The chamber, in a current pamphlet, describes how the marchers were “driven back into the city” as they tried to cross the Pettus bridge on “Bloody Sunday” and declares:

“The resulting national outrage led President Lyndon B. Johnson to compare Selma to Lexington and Concord as ‘a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom.’ It also aided in the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which transformed both the state and the nation.”

Changed Political Landscape

Although it took several years for the act to be fully implemented and enforced, it eventually altered the nation’s political landscape, especially in some Southern states with large black populations that had routinely denied blacks the right to vote.

According to the Joint Center for Political Studies, the number of federal, state and local elective offices held by blacks nationwide more than quadrupled between 1970 and 1988, going from 1,469 in 1970 to 6,829.

Nowhere has the act had a more dramatic impact than in Selma itself, a city of about 27,000. It is 55% black and 45% white, although whites make up a majority of the voting-age population by a slight margin.

Four blacks and four whites sit on the City Council. Blacks occupy many of the top city offices, including personnel, human resources and unemployment. Blacks head two leading public educational institutions: Selma High School and the George Corley Wallace Community College.

Three of the five Dallas County commissioners are black.

Another black, Marie Foster, who marched daily in the Selma demonstrations, is one of three Dallas County registrars and is empowered to sign up voters on Saturdays and Sundays and to send deputies into neighborhoods to register them.

Politicians’ Attitudes Changed

In addition, the act changed the tune of many segregationists in public office. Politicians such as Mayor Smitherman and then-Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama, who had vowed to defend segregation “forever,” suddenly found it necessary to compromise and seek the support of black voters if they were to survive politically.

Smitherman said that he “used to sit around with other whites and cuss the blacks for all our problems.” He said he finally began to realize he was wrong and that discrimination against blacks was inexcusable. Knowing his own temperament, he said recently, if he had been a black in the 1960s, he probably would have been a militant protester.

Although he disavows some of the things he did during the civil rights demonstrations, Smitherman insists that he gets a bad rap from one particularly damning film clip that has been shown repeatedly on television over the years. It shows a young, crew-cut Smitherman referring to King, in apparent sarcasm, as “Dr. Martin Luther Coon . . . err . . . King.”

Smitherman says he actually had just had a conversation with a Selma bail bondsman named Martin Koon and made an honest slip of the tongue over King’s name.

Explanation Not Accepted

However, the Rev. Frederick Reese, a black who headed the Dallas County Voters League and marched in the Selma demonstration, said that, although the mayor did know a bail bondsman named Martin Koon, he does not accept the mayor’s explanation.

“Calling Dr. King coon was just in character with other statements he was making back then,” said Reese, who is now principal of Selma High School. “I don’t perceive it as something that could have been a mistake. But I do think the mayor has had some experiences that have changed him. Some of the change is just out of political necessity.”

Another black leader, J. L. Chestnut Jr., a civil rights lawyer and a power in local legal and political circles, agreed with Reese. “One thing Joe Smitherman can do that George Wallace could always do is count votes,” he said.

Chestnut credits Smitherman with being “the most gifted politician outside of George Wallace” he has ever met, but he said the mayor was slow to realize that “Selma needed to capitalize on its past and not deny it.”

“Joe didn’t want to do it,” Chestnut said, “and we had to bring him along kicking and screaming.”

Nevertheless, Chestnut, Reese and Lewis all consider Smitherman a friend and agree that he is a super salesman for Selma who in the last two decades has helped lead the way to greater racial harmony.

Northern Blacks a Problem

Indeed, relations between native blacks and whites, although far from perfect, have improved so much that both now say one of Selma’s biggest problems is an influx of Northern urban blacks whom they accuse of importing a “ghetto culture” of crime, drugs and violence.

“For the first time in my life, more blacks are coming to Selma from Chicago, Detroit and New York than we have going there,” Chestnut said. “And they have brought with them the ghetto culture, (which) has produced some startling and radical changes. We used to have about two murders a year, now we have one almost every other week. My mother used to never lock her house to go shopping. Now people will break in while she’s there. The black community is vastly different from what it was.”

Also, despite all their political gains, most of Selma’s blacks still find themselves clinging to the bottom rung of the economic ladder. “We’ve got a lot to be thankful for,” Chestnut said, “but we live in a city where the black majority really can’t do anything that the white minority opposes because the whites have total control over the economy--banks and everything else.”

However, Reese, who served as a city councilman from 1972 to 1984, points out that political gains have paid off in vastly improved government services for the black community.

“Ninety-five percent of the streets in Selma’s predominantly black neighborhoods were not even paved and the lighting was terribly inadequate before the Voting Rights Act,” said Reese, who headed the council’s streets and lights committee. “But we made sure there was equity in services, and now all the streets are paved and there’s better lighting.”

Defeated in Mayoral Race

Reese was defeated decisively when he ran for mayor in 1980; Smitherman polled at least 15% of the black vote. Reese called the mayor “a charismatic-type person who’s a master at working with all kinds of people.”

Smitherman, a fast-talking, street-smart politician who never attended college, was just 34 years old and had only recently taken office as mayor at the time of “Bloody Sunday.” He was contemptuous of and even hostile toward not only the civil rights demonstrators but the hundreds of journalists who descended on Selma to cover the demonstrations.

“I was a little bit of a demagogue back then,” he acknowledged in a recent interview with the Times reporter who covered the demonstrations.

Today, he could not be more cooperative with the press and speaks fondly of such former antagonists among civil rights leaders as Reese and Lewis. “I think the world of John Lewis. We’re close friends,” he said.

Reese and other black leaders who have accompanied Smitherman on his quests for HUD funds for public housing here have been astonished by his success. “I believe he’s gotten more money than anybody has for a city this size,” Reese said.

Uses Hard-Sell Tactics

Smitherman said that he used a hard-sell tactic on HUD officials, telling them: “Selma has been beat up on and victimized by all these demonstrations and all the press coming in here to write about how bad we were, and now we need you to help us.

“Some of them were black officials, and I told them they owed their jobs to Selma because of the Voting Rights Act,” Smitherman said. “One was Samuel Jackson, a HUD official who had marched in Selma, and I think we convinced him we were due some help.”

HUD has allocated about $75 million for public housing for Selma during Smitherman’s time in office, about $40 million of it between 1972 and 1979. About 1,800 families--roughly 20% of Selma’s families--live in public housing developments.

Smitherman readily agreed to HUD conditions that the seven housing developments be scattered throughout the city and that some housing be placed in predominantly white neighborhoods, including Selma’s wealthiest sections. Attempts to impose similar conditions on public housing in Northern cities have almost universally failed.

Housing Well Maintained

The mayor proudly led a Times reporter on a tour of the city’s seven developments, all neatly maintained and resembling private housing complexes more than public housing. Most of the dwellings are single units or duplexes, and there are no high-rise units in any of the complexes.

Even the oldest units, including a 50-year-old complex across the street from Browns Chapel, where King used to lead demonstrations, are neatly maintained, in stark contrast to some cities, where public housing has been torn down after only 20 years because of neglect and poor maintenance.

Smitherman, reflecting on Selma’s progress during the last two decades, said that public opposition to social change, including housing patterns, made the going tough and slow in the first few years after passage of the Voting Rights Act.

“It’s easy for historians to look back and say those rednecks in Selma should have done better,” he said. “But the politicians feared the public reaction when we tried to make changes. The public mood dictated a lot of what we did, and we anguished over a lot of the changes we knew we had to make. We may still have a ways to go, but I think we’ve come a long way.”