T h e F i r s t M a r c h
T h e S e c o n d M a r c h
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After watching the film, "Selma" write a journal entry that evaluates the film. What emotions, reactions, inspiration did you have/take from the film. Why was the march in Selma so important to the movement? What was the importance of the second march? How did King's involvement show the importance of his leadership during this time?
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In 1964, SNCC and local activists intensified their campaign to register black voters. Local black leaders asked the SCLC to join the campaign in Selma, Alabama, to protest discriminatory voting practices. Selma Sheriff Jim Clark responded to the nonviolent protests with physical force. In response to the arrest of an SCLC activist, protestors held a nighttime rally in the nearby town of Marion. The rally was entirely peaceful until the crowd left the Zion Methodist church. Then, mysteriously, the streetlights went out and a mob of white segregationists and police assaulted the protestors. One of their victims was 26-year-old army veteran Jimmie Lee Jackson, who died from his injuries a few days later. The Reverend James Bevel, an SCLC strategist, recalled how activist leaders struggled to find a way for the community to constructively express their grief and outrage:
I had to preach, because I had to get the people back out of the state of negative violence and out of a state of grief. If you don’t deal with negative violence and grief, it turns into bitterness. So what I recommended was that people walk to Montgomery [the state capital], which would give them time to work through their hostility and resentments and get back to focus on the issue. The question I put to them was, “Do you think Wallace sent the policemen down to kill the man? Or do you think the police overreacted? Now, if they overreacted, then you can’t go around assuming that Wallace sent the men down to kill. So what we need to do is to go to Montgomery and ask the governor what is his motive and intentions.” It’s a nonviolent movement. If you went back to some of the classical strategies of Gandhi, when you have a great violation of the people and there’s a great sense of injury, you have to give people an honorable means and context in which to express and eliminate that grief and speak decisively and succinctly back to the issue. Otherwise the movement will break down in violence and chaos. Agreeing to go to Montgomery was that kind of tool that would absorb a tremendous amount of energy and effort, and it would keep the issue of disenfranchisement before the whole nation. The whole point of walking from Selma to Montgomery is it takes you five or six days, which would give you the time to discuss in the nation, through papers, radio, and television and going around speaking, what the real issues were. |
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Watch the Obamas go to Selma on the 50th Anniversary of the March on Selma.
Representative John Lewis is holding hands between Michelle and Barack Obama.