Free At Canaan's Edge by Taylor Branch Page B

In 1963, while visiting anti-segregation demonstrations in Savannah, Georgia, where Williams was then a local leader, Young wound up arrested for the first time. In 1964, sent by King with explicit instructions to dampen incipient protests in St. Augustine, Florida, he walked into a mass meeting only to hear Williams invite “the prettiest girl in the church” to join Young in leading a night march—his first—which soon led to a Klan beating. Young realized that these baptismal trials actually raised his commitment to and his standing within the nonviolent movement, above that of mild-mannered church administrator, but he warned sternly that the stakes in Selma were too high for Williams to dissemble again.
    Young sent messengers to retrieve Bevel and retreated to the parsonage next door, fending off urgent inquiries about the schedule. Albert Turner, a bricklayer swept into voting protests only a month ago, served notice that his people from Perry County were resolved to march somewhere that day, even if only around Brown Chapel, and many raised questions about the white man in a clerical collar who arrived with Young in place of Martin Luther King. Rev. John B. Morris by coincidence had shared a flight from Atlanta and then joined Young for the drive from Montgomery in haste to follow up on the previous day’s drama, which the New York Times on page one called “the first time an all-white group of Southerners had demonstrated in the streets for Negro equality.” The Ellwanger march came as a welcome surprise to Morris, a founder of the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity (ESCRU), as did the nationwide coverage alongside stories about the upcoming Marine deployment to Vietnam.
    Regular notice made Selma part of a new vocabulary that the civil rights movement had pushed forward in public discourse since the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision on schools. There was a photograph of Sheriff Jim Clark in that morning’s New York Times Magazine, illustrating a published debate from England between writers James Baldwin and William F. Buckley on whether “The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro.” Buckley assailed a tendency to “rush forward and overthrow our civilization because we don’t live up to our high ideals,” while Baldwin asserted that “the American soil is full of the corpses of my ancestors” for systemic reasons deeper than hateful excess on the fringes of society. “Sheriff Clark in Selma, Alabama cannot be dismissed as a total monster,” Baldwin told the Cambridge Union Society in February. “I am sure he loves his wife and children and likes to get drunk. One has to assume that he is a man like me. But he does not know what drives him to use the club, to menace with the gun, and to use the cattle prod.”
    Sheriff Clark’s image also appeared that Sunday morning on national television, explaining that he had started using cattle prods about 1957 and that he had formed his volunteer posse of two hundred men originally to handle labor disputes. To interviewers from the ABC Issues and Answers program, Clark asserted that King came to Selma “to satisfy his revenge against me and also to make his personal bank account larger” by stirring trouble over a voting issue that was phony because “nigras are registered pretty much as they desire to.” Clark told the television audience that public harassment had driven him to move his wife and children into the jail for security, though there had been “no attempts on my life as yet.” Locally, every half-hour on Selma radio, his voice urged citizens to stay in their homes that Sunday, and Clark in person—back from taping Issues and Answers the previous day in Washington—was driving from the Montgomery airport with Colonel Al Lingo toward a staging ground on the east side of Pettus Bridge, outside city limits, where their men