“Dr. King to Lead Massive Assault in Alabama City,” the Baltimore Afro announced in a wire service story on Jan. 23 with a map pinpointing the obscure cotton town. The story reminded readers that “Selma became known as a segregation holdout last summer when hundreds of citizens were arrested after the civil rights law was passed.”
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Queen City of the Black Belt. Black, as in soil, that is. That rich soil had given rise to a dependence upon blacks to till it from the 19th century on. Thus, the 1960 population of 28,400 was slightly more than half black in Dallas County, of which Selma is the seat. It was, King had said on Jan. 2 in a speech at Brown A.M.E. Chapel there, “a symbol of bitter-end resistance to the civil rights movement in the Deep South.”
Selma was the industrial, agricultural and cultural center of the region, and for a few years blacks had been ramping up their challenges to racist laws and customs. In one outrageous move, sparked by a voter-registration march led by SNCC’s John Lewis in July 1964, a judge had banned gatherings of more than three blacks in public at any one time. To attend a church meeting or participate in a march called by King and the others meant transgressing the law. But as Andrew Young, then a top assistant to King, recalled in his 1996 memoir, An Easy Burden: “In little Selma, more people were committed to the movement before Martin’s arrival than after months of organizing and two weeks of daily demonstrations in Birmingham….[W]e could have chosen any of a hundred similar towns, but we could not have found a more exemplary case of social polarity, or a more abused and oppressed black community.”3 In Dallas County about 300 blacks were registered compared to 9,500 whites. In nearby Lowndes County, with a higher percentage of blacks, not even one had been permitted to register.
conscience in the name of decency demand federal intervention and legislation. The Administration, under mass pressure, initiates measures of immediate intervention and remedial legislation.”4
But as Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff note in The Race Beat, their Pulitzer Prize-winning account of press coverage in the
modern civil rights era, “None of
2"Send in the First Team." Pittsburgh Courier (1955-1966), City Edition ed.: 10. Feb 13 1965. ProQuest. Web.
3 Andrew Young, An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America. New York: Harper Collins, 1996, pp. 338, 341.
By this time King had become adept at using the mainstream media to spread the word and drum up support in the form of money, political influence and foot soldiers. He later told the Saturday Review that he had crafted a four-pronged approach for the battle that would be played out in Selma. “Non-violent demonstrators go into the streets to exercise their constitutional rights. Racists resist by unleashing violence against them. Americans of
this would work, of course, if the press did not witness the demonstrations.” Starting in late 1964, when Claude Sitton, a Georgia native, became national editor of the New York Times, King “was to be covered by a Times reporter anywhere he went in the South on a civil rights mission.” Not to be outdone, the Los Angeles Times also established a Southern bureau. The three national television networks were eagerly experimenting with fast-breaking news coverage.5