It's Friday, March 25, 2022, the day of the week when I pass along a quotation intended to be uplifting. Today, I'm reprising some lines from a fiery and eloquent Martin Luther King Jr. speech delivered 57 years ago today on the steps of Alabama's state capitol.
In our time (although not in 1965), March is observed as Women's History Month, so it seems fitting to point out this morning that the first, and last, people quoted by the Rev. King on that momentous spring day in 1965 were women.
The legendary March civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery was actually the last of three such demonstrations in 1965. Five months earlier, Martin Luther King had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and he and the leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference decided to use some their movement's international currency in Alabama, where King began his ministry at Montgomery's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.
The SCLC joined forces with another group, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to register voters in the small city of Selma. These attempts were met with violence and intimidation; and when a young protester named Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot dead by police, a protest march was called for March 7. The planned destination: the state capital in Montgomery.
The battle lines were now set.
Two years earlier, Gov. George Wallace had delivered a fiery inaugural address from the portico of Alabama's state capitol on the very spot where Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy. Wallace made that historical connection in his speech, which he punctuated with the now-notorious declaration: "In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!"
To this, civil rights leaders offered a profound and succinct rejoinder, "We shall overcome!"
As I've written in this space previously, this line was more than a prayer, and more than a religious hymn. It was also a call to political action. And on March 7, it was answered by 500 brave souls, who embarked with SCLC leader Hosea Williams and SNCC leader John Lewis on the 54-mile march from Selma to the capital. In an appalling scene captured by news cameras and broadcast to the world, the marchers were set upon after crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge by a mob armed with clubs and whips. Alabama state troopers either stood by and did nothing -- or participated in the attack.
"Bloody Sunday" generated national outrage and prompted a direct challenge from John Lewis, who was severely beaten that day, to the man in the White House: "I don't see how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam, I don't see how he can send troops to the Congo, I don't see how he can send troops to Africa -- and can't send troops to Selma."
In Washington, Lyndon Baines Johnson was having similar thoughts. Meanwhile, religious leaders poured into Alabama from around the country. Two days later, Martin Luther King led a crowd four times as large on the same route. Again, they were turned back by police who had barricaded state Route 80, the road into Montgomery. President Johnson had seen enough. On March 15, LBJ took to the airwaves to announce new voting rights legislation. "There is no Negro problem, there is no Southern problem … there is only an American problem," he told the nation. "Their cause must be our cause, too – because … really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome!"
Six days later, on this date in American history, the marchers tried again. This time, they were escorted by U.S. Army troops and federalized members of the Alabama National Guard. They crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, continuing on Route 80. A federal judge had limited the number of marchers on the highway to 300, but by the time they reached the steps of the capitol in Montgomery four days later, their ranks had swelled to 25,000.
There, only a few hundred feet from his old church, the Rev. King addressed a crowd -- and a watching world. The first person King mentioned in his speech was an elderly church matriarch and veteran marcher he identified on that day as "Sister Pollard" (usually known as "Mother Pollard" within the civil rights community). King related an anecdote from the earlier Montgomery bus boycott when Mother Pollard, then in her 70s, was asked if she wanted to ride for a while. When she declined, she was asked, "Well, aren't you tired?"
"And with her ungrammatical profundity," King noted, "she said, ‘My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.' And in a real sense this afternoon, we can say that our feet our tired," King added, "but our souls are rested."
This yarn was known to many of the black clergy present that day and to the local church ladies and Southern student activists like John Lewis. Now, the world knew it, too. And that day, King ended his speech on a rhetorically thundering high note in which he also quoted a woman, although not by name. He didn't have to. Her words had been famous for a century. They were penned by a 19th century white poet whose marriage to a staunch abolitionist had helped give her art its historic purpose. The poet's name was Julia Ward Howe, and when the Rev. King asked his audience -- and a watching nation -- how much longer the descendants of enslaved people would have to wait for their unalienable rights as Americans, King invoked Howe's most famous words, the lines to the "Battle Hymn of the Republic."
How long must they wait? King asked. In his famous call and response, still chilling 53 years later, King answered his own question. "How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
Then King continued, invoking the Union Army's galvanizing marching song, penned in February 1862:
How long? Not long, because mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the LordHe is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are storedHe has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift swordHis truth is marching on.
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreatHe is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat.O, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant my feet!Our God is marching on!
Glory, hallelujah! Glory, hallelujah! Glory, hallelujah! Glory, hallelujah!His truth is marching on!
And that's our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
