Word: selma
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Head It Off. Colonel Al Lingo was in Selma too-this time with 500 state troopers, leaving only about 250 to attend to the rest of Alabama's law-enforcement requirements. FBI agents drifted unobtrusively into town. Straw-bossing federal activities was John Doar, Assistant U.S. Attorney General in charge of civil rights. As a personal mediator sent by President Johnson came LeRoy Collins, onetime Democratic Governor of Florida, now chairman of the Community Relations Service, which was established under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Collins' orders from Johnson were to head off trouble at all costs...
President Johnson publicly declared that he "deplored the brutality" in Selma-and urged Selma's opposing sides to cool down. And in Atlanta, Martin Luther King announced that as a "matter of conscience and in an attempt to arouse the deepest concern of the nation," he was "compelled" to lead another march from Selma to Montgomery. He called it for Tuesday, March...
...emplane for New York when he heard that King was calling for help. Day walked back into the terminal, bought a ticket for Alabama. Also in Indianapolis, Jewish Mission Worker David Goldstein had an appointment to seek a salary raise from his boss; he canceled it and headed for Selma. California's Episcopal Bishop James Pike interrupted a trip to New Orleans and flew into Alabama. Methodist Bishop John Wesley Lord, vice president of the National Council of Churches, came from Washington...
...more than 400 white churchmen sped to Selma. Many turned up without so much as a toothbrush or a change of socks, and few had any idea of where they would stay. Some seemed to think it was all something of a lark. Said one clergyman to a colleague as he stepped off the plane in Montgomery: "Fix bayonets! Charge!" Also on hand were secular crusaders, including Mrs. Paul Douglas, wife of Illinois' Democratic Senator, Mrs. Harold Ickes, widow of Franklin Roosevelt's Interior Secretary, and Mrs. Charles Tobey, widow of the former Republican Senator from New Hampshire...
That very night, in the home of a Negro dentist in Selma, King was undergoing intense pressures and conflicts. His instinct was to go along with Judge Johnson and postpone the march. He was fearful of provoking another savage onslaught by state troopers and Sheriff Clark's men. But he was also smarting under criticism for having absented himself from the Sunday march. And he felt an obligation to the out-of-state clergymen and others who had come to march...