Word: selma
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Those words, written by Federal District Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr., galvanized civil rights forces last week into a display that may well become one of the most spectacular events of the Negro revolution. It is this week's 50-mile march from Selma, Ala., to Montgomery to dramatize the Negro demands for voting rights, protected by a force of 1,863 Alabama National Guardsmen, 100 FBI men, 100 federal marshals, and 1,000 U.S. Army troops...
...marchers were to follow the same route attempted two weeks ago from Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopalian Church in Selma, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where the first march was bloodily halted by helmeted state troopers and mounted possemen, then onto a four-lane, divided stretch of U.S. Highway 80. All but 300 marchers were to drop back at a point 17 miles out of Selma, where the highway narrows to a two-lane, 20-mile strip of piny woods and dismal marshes...
...their consciences and their sense of Christian duty demanded no less. Others were there simply to win merit badges, still others to test their own personal commitments in the crucible of violence. Some had come be cause, as Wilson Baker said, they felt that "someone else must die in Selma to bring this movement to its climax...
...speak tonight," he began slowly, "for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy. At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama...
Lyndon Johnson was not through. He warned: "Even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement ... the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life." With touching earnestness, he pleaded: "Their cause must be our cause too. Because it's not just Negroes, but really it's all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice." Then, in careful, metered, sledgehammer syllables, he added: "And-we-shall-over-come!" Without hesitation-no leader this...