Word: selma
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...most striking thing about law enforcement in Selma and Montgomery is its omnipresence. Last Thursday, at 4:30 a.m., a CRIMSON; reporter left the house where he was staying in the Negro residential section of Montgomery, drove to the nearest phone booth to telephone a story to the CRIMSON, and returned. The whole trip covered about three-tenths of a mile and took perhaps 30 minutes. In the course of it, he was stopped four times by Alabama state troopers who demanded to know what he was doing...
Later the same day, I was driving along Route 80 from Selma to Montgomery. About a mile outside of Selma, I noticed a helicopter hovering above the car. Beside me was a white CRIMSON photographer, and in the back seat was a young Negro who had asked us for a ride. The top was down, and we could soon see that a man in the helicopter was looking at us through binoculars and taking photographs. He followed us closely for 15 miles, until we suddenly veered into a gas station...
After only a day in either city, the sight of a line of state troopers forty men long and two men deep, with billy sticks poised, was--if still remotely terrifying--no longer shocking. Outside Brown's Chapel in Selma one could usually count 10-20 state troopers' cars. On Jackson St. in Montgomery half a dozen unmarked cars were constantly milling about. City police walked aimlessly through the street, trying to learn when there would be a march, and where the demonstrators would head. Plainclothes city policemen, sometimes making feeble attempts to pass themselves off as newsmen, photographed everyone...
...Selma Sheriff Jim Clark, a big man with balding head and a button reading the antithesis of Lackey. He rules his office an air of pomposity, as his brood of scream and deputy sheriffs hover reverently about radio monitor crackled with the "There's a bunch of 'em with signs head west on Jeff Davis Avenue, toward the houses." Clark flicks a switch on the and drawls, "Find out what they're doin a call me back...
...curtain of suspicion separates the white from the Negro community; but walking streets of Selma and Montgomery is not like in Harlem or Chicago's South Side. You no sullen or threatening stares. Centuries open oppression have implanted a different ; black faces either turn down and search sidewalk as you pass or probe your own face, for clues...