Word: selma
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Mapping the Route. Mediator LeRoy Collins provided an answer-of sorts. He had conferred with Selma's Mayor Smitherman, with Top Trooper Al Lingo and Sheriff Clark. They were willing to let the civil rights marchers cross the bridge to the point on Highway 80 where the Sunday march ended in disaster. Then the troopers would turn King and his followers back-and King would leave peaceably. Lingo even drew a rough map of the route that the marchers would be permitted to take. Collins, in turn, showed the map to King, who reluctantly fell in with the plan...
While all these negotiations were going on, the would-be marchers-1,500 strong-congregated in and around the Brown Chapel. Despite the federal court order, sentiment was strongly in favor of marching. A white minister arose to declare: "No matter what happens, we can never get away from Selma, Alabama, again-never!" Princeton University's Religion Professor Malcolm Diamond announced that he would march, quoted Federal Judge Thurgood Marshall, a Negro, as once having said, "I am not defying the sovereignty of my country. I am making witness within the framework of the law of my country...
...Altar. In his Washington office, Attorney General Katzenbach, shirt sleeves rolled up, studied an enlarged map of Selma. Two telephone lines, fed into an office squawk box, echoed with brisk reports from Aide John Doar on the scene. At 3:56 p.m., Katzenbach phoned Presidential Aide Bill Moyers at the White House. "We're right at the critical moment," said he. "I'll keep you posted...
...rise to the bait. And in Washington, Katzenbach heard Doar's voice: "King is walking back this way. He's asking the marchers to turn back." Katzenbach called the White House and said: "King has turned around." Katzenbach next talked to LeRoy Collins in Selma and phoned the White House again. "It looks very good," he said with obvious relief. "More like the March on Washington than anything. They're going back to the church. John Doar feels this will take away a lot of the bad taste of the brutality on Sunday. It looks...
Tuesday night three white clergymen dined at a Negro restaurant in Selma. One of them was the Rev. James Reeb. Reeb, who was born in Casper, Wyo., was ordained a Presbyterian minister but converted to Unitarianism in 1959. A slight, energetic, hard-working man, father of four children, Reeb worked for four years at All Souls' Church in Washington, D.C., but he found parish work too limiting. "He had a great love for people and their needs," says a colleague, the Rev. William A. Wendt. "He could not have cared less about whether they were going to heaven...