Free Purple Daze by Sherry Shahan Page B

send a memo to President Johnson declaring that America’s limited military engagement in Vietnam is not succeeding, stating that the U.S. stands at a ‘fork in the road’ and must either escalate its involvement or withdraw.
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    February 18. Jimmie Lee Jackson walks with other African Americans in Marion, Alabama to protest obstructions in voter registration. Local police and Alabama State Troopers forcefully break up the unarmed protesters using bull-whips, billy clubs, and tear gas. Jackson, his sister, mother, and 82-year old grandfather seek refuge inside a café. Jackson is shot in the stomach by an Alabama State Trooper, chased into the street, and brutally beaten.

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    February 21. Malcolm X is assassinated at a speaking engagement at the Audubon Ballroom in New York. Three gunmen charge the stage, shooting him 15 times at close range. The 39-year-old minister and political rights activist is pronounced dead at New York’s Presbyterian Hospital.
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    February 21. Augustus Owsley Stanley III operates a makeshift laboratory in the bathroom of a house near the University of California, Berkeley. The lab is raided by police who are searching for methamphetamine. They only find LSD, which was not illegal at the time.
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    February 26. 27-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson dies at Good Samaritan Hospital in Selma from an infection associate with his gunshot wound.
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    February 27. Malcolm X’s funeral is held at the Faith Temple Church of God in Harlem with 1,500 people in attendance. After the ceremony, friends pick up the gravediggers’ shovels and bury their leader themselves.
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    March 7. Between 500 and 600 civil rights activists march east from Selma, Alabama. After crossing Edmund Pettus Bridge, they encounter state troopers and are ordered to disband. Soon thereafter, unprovoked troopers begin shoving demonstrators, knocking them down and beating them with nightsticks. Another detachment begins hurling tear gas. Images of bloodied and severely injured protesters flash across news media evoking the name “Bloody Sunday.”

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    March 8. Da Nang, Vietnam. 3,500 U.S. Marines land at China Beach to defend the American air base. They join 23,000 U.S. military advisors already stationed in the country.
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    March 9. Two days after Bloody Sunday, Dr. King leads 2,500 people in a symbolic march to Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. They kneel for a prayer session and sing hymns. Afterward, they march back, thereby obeying a court order against marching all the way to Montgomery.
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    March 9. Selma, Alabama. Three white ministers are attacked and beaten with clubs outside a café where segregationist whites are known to gather. One victim James Reeb, a Unitarian Universalist minister from Boston, is rushed to Selma’s public hospital where he’s refused treatment.
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    March 9. President Johnson sanctions the use of Napalm-B for use in Vietnam. When dropped from “hedgehoppers”—planes flying around 100 feet—the antipersonnel bomb showers a surface area with flames about 270 feet long and 75 feet wide.
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    March 11. Minister Reeb dies at University Hospital in Birmingham with his wife by his side.
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    March 16. Federal District Court Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr. rules in favor of civil rights activists wishing to march peacefully from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. He cites, “The law is clear that the right to petition one’s government for the redress of grievances may
be exercised in large groups ... These rights may ... be exercised by marching, even along public highways.” (Williams v. Wallace, 1960).
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    March 21–25. Dr. King leads 3,200 protesters in a march from Selma to Montgomery, walking approximately 12 miles per day and sleeping in fields. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating