Selma Sparks Campus Civil Rights Fervor

From the Scarlet & Black's digital archive
Reprint of an article from the March 20, 1965, issue

Four of us, Henry Wilhelm [’68], [the late] John Phillips [’67], Harold Fuson [’67], and I, decided Tuesday afternoon of last week that we had to go to Selma. We left that night.

It was a 20-hour ride in Wilhelm’s well-traveled, near-legendary VW. We stopped in Montgomery Wednesday night. At that time demonstrators were still standing on the capitol lawn.

The next morning we drove to Selma, a wealthy [Alabama] town of some 28,000. It’s an old town with old customs. The customs are hard to change and that, perhaps as much as anything, is why it was chosen for this drive.

The news releases from Selma give a fairly accurate description of what has happened here. That’s not the whole story.

One drives into Selma and enters a never-never land. It’s kind of an Alfred Hitchcock version of Alice in Wonderland.

The area where the Negroes live and the area where the demonstrations take place — a three-block by three-block federal housing project encompassing Brown’s Chapel AME Church and a Baptist church — is a world unto itself, separated from the city by a line of city, county, and state police. People here can’t help referring to that line of police as the “perimeter,” a military term which, unfortunately, is all too accurate.

Outside that “perimeter” is a town full of people who are having 200-year customs changed in two months. They have been subjected to every kind of torment possible and their patience has been stretched razor thin. It’s not a point of justification for anything they’ve done or will do. It’s simply a point one has to remember in dealing with them and trying to understand them.

It goes without saying that these people hate Negroes. Even more they hate the press, which exposes them to the world. But even more, they hate the northern college student. The four of us are an unfortunate combination — northern college student pressmen.

Inside the “perimeter” it is a different world. Everyone but white townspeople are free to come and go as they want so long as they don’t march and so long as they don’t try to go through the “Selma Wall,” the police barricade that you see in newspapers.

Inside there is a chaos and an order. Leaders, tireless men, bring order through an unseen system of communications.

A party-like atmosphere prevails most of the time and, as time passes, this atmosphere increases. It is difficult to imagine that this is the same group of demonstrators who were beaten a week ago and had one of their own killed.

The best example of this came Sunday morning when a group of ministers tried to march to church. They were, as you know, stopped.

As they stood at the “Wall,” stomach to stomach, eyeball to eyeball, with the troopers, one expected anything. Anything, that is, but what happened. When everyone realized that the ministers weren’t going anywhere, they started laughing and joking, exchanging cigarettes and matches. I was standing next to Wilson Baker, public safety director, when he confronted the marchers. There was no hate. He told them they couldn’t go. They didn’t. He said he was sorry. He was.

The four of us are working as newsmen. Fuson and I have ABC press cards which I managed to get through means which would make a redneck indignant and probably make Sheriff Clark furious. Phillips and Wilhelm have no press identification but with their cameras they go everywhere with everyone assuming they are pressmen.

We did not come to Selma to demonstrate, and we have not demonstrated. We came because we wanted to see, and we wanted to tell others. 

In the few words I have here I cannot begin to describe the Selma demonstration. It is a situation that will require millions of words and hundreds of pictures. We have lived with demonstrators, police and townspeople, yet I’m not sure any of us could begin to draw a clear picture of it all.

You have to come to Selma to know Selma.