Word: selma
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Ignoring an order from Governor Wallace forbidding the march, 650 Negroes and a few whites filed through the back streets of Selma, and headed for the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which crosses the Alabama River...
...Selma is a city of 29,500 people-14,400 whites, 15,100 Negroes. Its voting rolls are 99% white, 1% Negro. More than a city, Selma is a state of mind. "Selma," says a guidebook on Alabama, "is like an old-fashioned gentlewoman, proud and patrician, but never unfriendly." But the symbol of Selma is Sheriff James Clark, 43, a bullyboy segregationist who leads a club-swinging, mounted posse of deputy volunteers, many of them Ku Klux Klansmen. It was in Selma, four years ago, that the Federal Government filed its first voting-rights suit, but court processes...
...Selma seemed a natural target to Martin Luther King. He rounded up hundreds of Negroes at a time, led them on marches to the county courthouse to register to vote. Always, Clark awaited them, either turning them away or arresting them for contempt of court, truancy, juvenile delinquency and parading without a permit. In seven weeks, Clark jailed no fewer than 2,000 men, women and children, including King, who dramatized the situation by refusing to make bond for four days. Still the Negroes came, singing "We shall overcome." In reply, Sheriff Clark pinned a button on his shirt reading...
King called for a march from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery, 50 miles away. King planned to lead the march himself, but at the last minute was persuaded by aides to stay at his Atlanta headquarters for his safety's sake...
...despair. Many elderly bondholders were depending on the securities for retirement income, but the bonds that had been bought as recently as March 1981 for $5,000 sold last week for as little as $700. Robert Kahn, 69, a former court reporter living in Hollywood, Fla., and his wife Selma, 67, had $10,000 invested in Whoops Nos. 4 and 5 bonds. Says he: "I felt secure. That was the whole point of buying the bonds. I didn't want to make extra money. I just didn't want to lose what...