Word: smitherman
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...Washington, all bars and most restaurants close at midnight on Sunday. It was well after midnight on Sunday, April 4, when Joseph T. Smitherman, 35, the race-baiting mayor of Selma, Ala., and his home-town friend, Attorney Joe T. Pilcher Jr., 35, decided they were hungry and thirsty...
...knew of an after-hours spot suitable to their needs and took them in a taxi to the Anchor, a respectable-looking apartment building a mile away. In the building, Edwards told them, was "a club where Congressmen go," and he would need some cash for membership dues. Mayor Smitherman gave him some money, and Race Horse left the two Southerners after promising to return with the membership cards...
...dramatize the Negro plight goes hand in hand with the more substantive drive to achieve equal rights, Selma seemed a natural target to Martin Luther King. The city's civil rights record was awful. There was Clark, the perfect public villain. There, too, was Mayor Joe T. Smitherman, 35, an erstwhile appliance dealer, an all-out segregationist, and a close friend of Alabama's racist Democratic Governor George Wallace...
Mapping the Route. Mediator LeRoy Collins provided an answer-of sorts. He had conferred with Selma's Mayor Smitherman, with Top Trooper Al Lingo and Sheriff Clark. They were willing to let the civil rights marchers cross the bridge to the point on Highway 80 where the Sunday march ended in disaster. Then the troopers would turn King and his followers back-and King would leave peaceably. Lingo even drew a rough map of the route that the marchers would be permitted to take. Collins, in turn, showed the map to King, who reluctantly fell in with the plan...
...Bridge. Finally, Martin Luther King arrived, having committed himself to the deal proposed by Collins and approved by Smitherman, Lingo and Clark. His unsuspecting listeners settled into a respectful hush as he spoke of his "painful and difficult decision." Said King with great emotion: "I have made my choice. I have got to march. I do not know what lies ahead of us. There may be beatings, jailings, tear gas. But I would rather die on the highways of Alabama than make a butchery of my conscience! There is nothing more tragic in all this world than to know right...