Word: selma
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During the previous two weeks of his Selma drive. King had tried to steer clear of legal violations-particularly of breaking Selma's 1963 ordinance that bans "any parade or procession or public demonstration on the streets or other public ways of the city, unless a permit therefor has been secured from the council." Thus, in sending his followers to the county courthouse to try to register, he had carefully instructed them to move in groups of four or five, keeping at least 20 ft. apart...
Pied Piper Procession. By last week King decided to employ more dramatic tactics: he led 237 Negroes on a mass march to the courthouse, ignored the admonition of Selma's public safety director, Wilson Baker, who has been desperately trying to keep peace in the strife-stricken town and who kept running out to pluck at Parade Leader King's sleeve and saying: "This is a deliberate attempt to violate the city's parade ordinance. You know the law. You've been abiding by it for two weeks. You've had plenty of time...
...court for picketing the courthouse while state circuit court was in session. Next day another 111 adults were arrested on the same charge, despite their claim that they merely wanted to see the voting registrar: nearly 400 students were also arrested, packed into buses and driven to the old Selma armory...
...went. One day 355 Negro students locked arms on the sidewalk outside the courthouse, rocked to and fro while singing traditional civil rights songs, changing some of the words so as to include the name of Sheriff James Clark, the particular villain in the Selma drive. "I love Jim Clark in my heart," they sang, and "Ain't gonna let Jim Clark turn me 'round." Clark placed them all under arrest, but he provided no buses. Instead, he ordered them to follow two motorcycles in a Pied Piper procession through the center of Selma to the armory, where...
Martin Luther King's voter registration drive in Selma has dramatized once more the massive barriers which confront Southern Negroes who attempt to register and vote. At present, approximately 40 per cent of the Negroes in the South are able to vote, although in some states the figure is much lower. In Mississippi, only seven per cent of the Negro population is registered...