
          Margaret Long: March on Montgomery
          By Long, MargaretMargaret Long
          Vol. 11, No. 3, 1989, pp. 9-11
          
          EDITOR'S NOTE: Margaret Long, editor from 1961-1966 of
New South, the Southern Regional Council publication
that was one of the forerunners of Southern Changes,
died in February in Tallahassee, Fla.; she had been ill for several
months. Her recounting, below, of the conclusion of the 1965 Selma to
Montgomery March remains as a testament to her gifts as writer and
observer. Thc article originally appeared as Long's regular column,
"Strictly Subjective," in the March 1965 issue of New
South.
          A pearly light glowed gray-bright through the rain clouds over
Montgomery and bathed the beautiful old city in a humid, soft
glare. The overcast day of the March on Montgomery was deceptively
luminous so that the spacious, serene streets, the great trees fuzzed
green and gold, the romantic old white houses behind magnolias and
sugarberries, the teeming mud-soaked squalor of the back streets of
Darktown and the commodious suave slow white downtown with its low
skyline, crowned by the State Capitol at the high end of Dexter
Avenue, all showed themselves in picturesque pause as "the Negroes"
and their white Yankee friends--from 25,000 to 50,000 strong--marched
from the red brick buildings and brown mud quagmires of Catholic
St. Jude City three miles to the Capitol.
          We hastened late to St. Jude City to meet the March, which was two
or three hours late getting started, with plenty of time for the
familiars at such events to greet one 

another as we moved about,
pulling our shoes precariously out of the sucking mud each
step--journalists, radio men black and white interviewing Negro
notables and oddly talking their stylized air-waves talk into their
little mikes; obscure young Negro heroes from the violent vineyards of
the Deep South; a middle-aged Jewish devotee of Civil Rights, jail and
the heady camaraderie of the Movement; hurried notables hastening to
the front line of the March forming inside the gate of St. Jude.
          The March gathering inside St. Jude--to the hideously amplified
sound of some emcee or other insistently shattering the pearly
expectancy of the air with his banal bellowings--took shape with
famous figures in the front line: Dr. Martin Luther King and his
handsome young wife Coretta, her curly dark hair blown black in the
damp breeze; Dr. Ralph Bunche, moon-faced and beaming with the
felicity and pride he brings to such occasions; Whitney Young, head of
the National Urban League, massive, handsome and smiling; Bayard
Rustin, tall and gracefully genial; John Lewis, Chairman of the
Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, tenderly baby-sitting a
little brown girl he held by the hand; and other leaders black and
white. James Baldwin, small, black and bug-eyed, hung back with the
field hands and marched, some ten thousand people behind, with James
Forman, Executive Secretary of SNCC, Forman wearing his Snick
trademark denims. Baldwin marched in a grave business-like way, and
occasionally exhibited an elegant, warm charm in a quick smile or wave
to an acquaintance.
          They were all very grand, the leaders, great white churchmen,
dramatic and girlish nuns and the famed black and white
entertainers. Somewhere in the crowd which the press estimated at
4,000 to 25,00 and 30,000 and Rev. Ralph Abernathy called more than
50,000, were Anthony Perkins, the actor, Shelley Winters, the actress,
Dick Gregory, a bunch of famous folk singers, distinguished Negro
entertainers and, I think, Leonard Bernstein. At any rate, the great
maestro appeared the night before at the St. Jude program of
celebrities come from all over the country to show they want Deep
South Negroes to vote and be free Americans, even in Alabama.
          
            Bearing Witness
          
          Thus they bore witness to the best American feeling for our civil
rights and liberties, and as one beset and outcast white Montgomery
liberal (who had to cook for one hundred of the distinguished visitors
crowded out of hotels and restaurants) said, they were "the
conscience of the country converging on Montgomery."
          Still, with all their beauty, talent, distinction and  feeling I felt the biggest and most absorbing show was
staged by the Negroes of Montgomery as the thousands, black and white,
marched through their ghettos to downtown and the Capitol.
          As dun-colored white boys of the Alabama National Guard, formidable
in heavy helmets, boots and khaki coveralls, and sternly impassive
perhaps in confusion at their federal role of protecting Negro
marchers and Yankee outsiders, lined the sidewalks and as Army
helicopters rattled above in the gray sky, we passed a sagging,
paintless house where six or eight Negro children watched the march
from their porch, the shy, pigtailed little girls in doe-eyed, docile
wonder and the little brown boys smiling. And a fat three-year-old man
child suddenly attacked a buzzing helicopter in a fierce show of
joyful valor. He laughed, he shouted, he threatened, he shook his
fists and waved his arms, he flung himself about mightily, stomping
and hollering to drive the intruder from his sky--baby refutation of
the popular thesis of the demeaned Negro male--while his brothers and
sisters giggled and rejoiced at his ragings.
          
            Walking on "Nice" Streets
          
          We walked on Cleveland Avenue, a "nice" Negro street with a white
columned apartment house, a tasteful big gray house and grassy yards
with budding trees and gold-showering forsythia and the faint scent of
crabapple blossoms in the beginning pink bloom, and the well-dressed
Negroes on the sidewalks watched their protesting, marching friends
blandly and non-commitally.
          The March broke into song off and on--"We Shall Overcome" on one
block which drifted offend swung into "Which Side are You on, Boy?"
two blocks ahead, started by the five thousand Negro high school and
college students Snick organizers go out for the March (young Negroes
who have never before set foot in the street, ten years after
Dr. King's Montgomery bus boycott) and the parade tramped smiling and
dense into the muddy streets and lanes of "niggertown," dingy stores,
ramshackle houses, big trees, budding white spirea and yellow Dutch
broom, slick dirt sidewalks, and the poor, black, brown and golden
people, beaming, waving, clapping, beholding their Negro greats
marching for their freedom, and the strange, comradely whites from
North and South come, at 

last, to befriend them.
          An old patriarch, a sallow, mustached ninety-year-old  color of a green olive, sat in a rocking chair on his
paintless porch, watching with aged, narrow eyes, while his brown
daughters waved and smiled at the marchers and his great-grandchildren
ran about and shrilled out "We Shall Overcome."
          Half a dozen boys on the dirt sidewalk hollered at a round-faced
black boy in the March and he smiled and waved at them, and a group of
dark women waved and called to their high school girls and boys
walking by. Some old men and young women raised their voices to join
in the March's chorus of "We Shall Overcome, black and white together,
brothers we shall be-ee," and a nun's high soprano met the clear
contralto of a young mother holding a fat golden baby in dirty diapers
in the soaring, mournful assertion of "Deep in my heart, I do believe,
we shall overcome some day."
          
            Smiles in Grateful Greeting
          
          An old black grandmother in a white apron over her colorless dress
raised her heavy eyelids to look at, smile at and wave at white women
in the March, to welcome the strange friends from far away. On
porches, on the dirt sidewalks and in the mud streets, the young and
old women with shy grace and great effort met the white faces to smile
in grateful greeting. A brown slattern, her belly distended with
another baby under her streaked and faded red dress, her crisp hair
swathed in a dirty head rag, her feet in shoes run down to the soles,
lifted her weary, bitter face to nod and smile at a white woman
walking by.
          Nicely garbed young and old Negro women and Sunday-dressed children
waved and clapped as the marchers passed, in sweet hospitality for the
marching guests.
          We passed a drab stretch of sagging houses, dirty store fronts and
grassless yards, and suddenly blooming like a brilliant zinnia bed in
a dirt alley were a dozen or so children in a baby delegation
marshaled by two pretty young colored women, who exchanged grown-up
smiles with the marchers and passers-by appreciating the lovely little
ones. Their deep-eyed, tender faces, black, beige, nut brown and
nearly white, smiled shyly and their little pink-palm hands waved like
petals in a wind. I can't imagine what the black two-year-old boy or
the bronze, pigtailed ten-year-old girl in a starched yellow dress
thought it was all about, but their welcome was entrancing.
          Here and there a watching Negro joined the March. A thin old black
lady in a white dress, beside herself in the wonder and pride of the
event, left the March to greet by-standing friends and pull some of
them into the parade with her.
          And, when the throngs got to town, passing a poor white section
edging on the Negro neighborhoods where white girls amiably took
pictures, workmen watched wondering and undecided and a shabby fat man
cursed the marchers and reporters and photographers, they were a great
army of Negroes, distinguished white Americans, foreign delegations,
and the black poor of the Alabama countryside from Selma to
Montgomery.
          Negroes in the movement are always talking about the
"confrontation," of which it seems to me, for all their efforts, they
have had very little, since the white folks they would "confront" like
to turn their eyes away, put the Negroes in jail and behave as if
their dark neighbors are somebody from New York, Moscow or Peking. But
in Montgomery there was a "confrontation" when what looked to me like
40,000 or 50,000 Negroes and white people walked up Dexter Avenue,
past the big hotels and office buildings and the stunned, solemn,
smiling whites on the wide streets and in office windows and hotel
balconies, and proceeded singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic,
toward the State Capitol of Alabama, which loomed like an alabaster
dream palace in the sky at the end of the avenue. This first Capitol
of the Confederacy must be the most beautiful state building in the
country, with its elegant high dome, its white columns, graceful wings
and tiers of marble steps, splendidly gleaming on bright greensward
and among high old trees.
          
            Easter Egg Troopers
          
          And that March Thursday, a row of state troopers with bright green
helmets, green ties, khaki shirts and green trousers stood guarding
the dream ramparts of the Old South in bright and gala array like so
many festive Easter eggs as the black and white Americans marched
singing to the steps. Behind the Easter egg troopers stood hundreds of
white state officials and employees, while scores more leaned out of
office windows to hear the glorious singing, the great oratory, the
outsiders' American assertion and the Alabama Negroes' vows to vote,
sit in the legislature and equally participate in political power in
Alabama.
          I don't know what the white folks so spectacularly confronted
thought. But they stood on the marble steps for four hours hearing
every pounding song, every surge of laughter, every black shout of
ridicule and every rousing ring of the orators' echoed promise to
march, vote and demonstrate until Alabama belongs to black and white
together.
        