Gallery • 6 Photos

photos courtesy of Mrs. Betsy Darby

Crowds marching up Dexter Ave towards the capitol.

On January 2, 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. led a meeting inside Brown Chapel in Selma, Alabama, to rally in favor of voting rights for blacks across the state. Nearly 700 residents of Selma and Dallas County packed the chapel. It was standing room only. During that meeting, King told them, “Today marks the beginning of a determined, organized, mobilized campaign to get the right to vote everywhere in Alabama. If we are refused, we will appeal to Governor George Wallace. If he refuses to listen, we will appeal to the legislature. If they don’t listen, we will appeal to the conscience of Congress… We must be ready to march.  We must be ready to go to jail by the thousands… Our cry to the State of Alabama is a simple one. Give us the ballot!”

Following this meeting and just four days after Alabama’s Governor George Wallace spoke from the front of the State Capitol, “I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny…and I say…segregation today, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever,” blacks converged on the county courthouse in order to register to vote and take the literacy test. They were humiliated. They were forced to stand in an alley and wait. They were manhandled into police cars and arrested.

In Selma, the jails were overcrowded. Those arrested were forced to work in chain gangs. Beds were removed from prison facilities forcing prisoners to sleep on the floor. The single toilet in the building clogged, and prisoners were forced to drink from a shared tub of water. As arrests continued, blacks lost their jobs and were forced from their homes for their involvement in the fight for voting rights. With no one being registered to vote, no recognition of their struggle and no end in sight, those from the black community began to wear down.

It wasn’t until after the murder of 26-year-old church deacon, Jimmie Lee Jackson at the hands of Alabama State troopers that things began to escalate.  Malcolm X is assassinated, which led Rev. James Bevel to tell a congregation at a voter registration rally in Marion, Alabama: “We must go to Montgomery and see the king! Be prepared to walk to Montgomery! Be prepared to sleep on the highway!” Bevel wanted blacks across the state to march on the state capitol and demand justice from Governor Wallace in the murder of Jimmy Lee Jackson. Bevel wanted blacks across Alabama to call for voting rights. King endorsed Bevel’s idea and a march was set for Sunday, March 7, 1965.

“The first Selma to Montgomery march began and ended with the events of ‘Bloody Sunday,'” when 600 civil rights marchers, asking for the right of black Alabama residents to register to vote, were attacked by state and local police with billy clubs and tear gas at the Edmund Pettus Bridge.” Two days later, King led a second group of marchers to the Pettus Bridge. However, the group turned around and came back into Selma because of a court order preventing them from getting to Montgomery safely.

“After the marchers returned to Selma, Rev. James Reeb, a white minister from Boston, was beaten severely and died. “National attention was now focused on Selma. Finally, Federal District Court Judge Frank Johnson ruled that the march could proceed and, on March 21, 1965, the four-night march began in Selma. Eight thousand started the march but only 300 were allowed to make the entire 54-mile trek to Montgomery. More would have marched, but the judge limited the number for safety reasons. But thousands of others were allowed to join the last steps from outside Montgomery into the downtown where the Alabama State Capitol awaited them on March 25, 1965.”

The march and rally ended just before dinnertime. At its conclusion, Steve Porter, my father, who was in attendance with six of his Duke University brothers, headed home up Interstate 65 in his Buick Skylark. On his way home, he stopped at a diner in Montgomery. Mr. Porter remembers the woman at the counter telling him, “We know you were a part of that march. You’re not welcome here.” He was prompted to leave without receiving service. Porter said, it was at this point that he realized the point of the march and the reason he drove to Montgomery.

As Mr. Porter continued on his way up I-65, he came across two African-American men in the emergency lane frantically waving him down. When he stopped, four additional men came running up the embankment towards his car. They piled in frantically, pointing up at a group of men on the overpass, members of the KKK, who had shotguns pointed at them. Porter drove without stopping to Oakwood College in Huntsville.

The six men he picked up were students at the college. They defied the administration in order to attend the march. Don Monroe, one of the men Mr. Porter picked up, said that it was, “divine intervention. It was because of the Lord that Steve came by in that empty car.” Divine intervention, indeed. Once safe at Oakwood, the men learned of the murder of Viola Liuzzo, a white housewife from Michigan. She was killed by the Klan for carrying marchers back to their colleges and homes just as Mr. Porter had done. Porter considers his stopping a mere act of human decency when very little was being shown to our fellow man.  

All that was 50 years ago and seems very removed from where we are today. So, to honor those steps, that walk, those sacrifices, my father and I traveled back to Montgomery. We weren’t alone.  My father’s wife, Devona, and my son, Jack, were also in tow. And 50 years later, instead of meeting his Oakwood College friends along the highway after the march, Don Monroe and Benjamin McAdoo walked side by side with the man they credit with saving their lives, the man they call their “angel.”

Approximately 7,000 people gathered at the City of St. Jude to walk the same route that King and others traversed in the last three miles towards the Alabama State Capitol. Young and old, black and white, the crowd marched through the poorest streets of Montgomery. Some held signs reading “The March Continues” or “Equality” or simply “Vote.” We locked arms. We sang civil rights songs, “We Shall Overcome” and “I Shall not be Moved.” We repeated a chant now Rep. John Lewis used when he walked alongside King in 1965:

Pick ‘em up

            Lay ‘em down

            All the way

            To Selma town

We were a united group focused on a common cause. Not only were we honoring the foot soldiers of 1965, but we were also focusing on how to continue the fight for justice and equality in our nation.

Fifty years later, as we converged on Montgomery, my father said there were some glaring differences between then and now. In 1965, the crowd marching towards the Capitol steps was mostly white. At that time, blacks feared losing their jobs, homes or worse if they were seen. However, this past week, the marchers were mostly blacks from the city of Montgomery. Mr. Porter explained that 50 years ago the sidewalks were lined with members of the National Guard with rifles in hand. Behind them were people shouting racial slurs, spitting and holding racist signs telling marchers to go home.

This past week, the streets were lined with people waving and recording the marchers on their cell phones, iPads and camcorders. There was even a group of young preschoolers standing on the doorstep of their daycare waving and singing “This Little Light of Mine.” It felt a lot like we were marchers in Louisville’s own Pegasus Parade. In 1965, King and others were not allowed to speak from the State Capitol steps. Governor George Wallace refused to meet with King. This past week, not only did King’s youngest daughter, Dr. Bernice King, address the crowd from the capitol steps, but she was joined by Governor Wallace’s daughter, Peggy, as well as the current Governor of Alabama, Robert Bentley, and the Mayor of Montgomery, Todd Strange.

In 1965, blacks would have been turned away at local Montgomery restaurants. However, this past week, we shared not one but two meals inside upscale eateries in downtown Montgomery, white and black together at the same table. In 1965, marchers needed military presence to ensure their safety from local residents and local authorities. However, last week, about a mile into the march, Benjamin McAdoo stopped to talk to a young, white police officer about honoring those who marched alongside King.

But, I still believe that King’s dream has not been realized. We have a ways to go. We have a duty to do whatever it takes to uphold the idea that all men are created equal.

In the wake of Ferguson, the racist chants of the SAE frat brothers at Oklahoma University, the noose around the neck of the statue honoring the first African-American student at Ole Miss, the Trayvon Martin shooting, and many others, I question just how far we as a nation have come over the last fifty years.  I question just how long we must wait for justice, for equality. I wonder if Dr. King’s answer would sound similar to the final words he spoke from the back of a flatbed truck in Montgomery in 1965:

I know you are asking today, “How long will it take?”… I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because “truth crushed to earth will rise again.”

             How long? Not long, because “no lie can live forever.”

            How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

It is our job to challenge the issues of race that confront, corrupt and undermine us. We, as a nation, need to come together to find a solution to end the hopelessness of this country. Without hope that we can create justice in this country, we have nothing. We have to be brave. We must continue this movement by doing more than just what is comfortable and convenient.

We must do just as King said to a crowd of 2,500 on the Edmund Pettus bridge on turnaround Tuesday, “In the struggle, we must seek more than civil rights, we must work for a community of love, peace, and true brotherhood. Our minds, souls and hearts cannot rest until freedom and justice exist for all people … We will not stop… for we cannot stop, and we will not be patient.”

Let us not be patient in our continued march for equity and justice for all people.