His Truth Is Marching On_John Lewis and the Power of Hope by Jon Meacham

Author:Jon Meacham [Meacham, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, Politics, History
ISBN: 9781984855022
Google: fgTlDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 53431510
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2020-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

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No one in Lewis’s column expected to make it to Montgomery. In the face of Wallace’s order, however, they felt they had no choice but to proceed. “Like everyone around me, I was basically playing it by ear,” Lewis recalled. “None of us had thought much further ahead than that afternoon. Anything that happened beyond that—if we were allowed to go on, if this march did indeed go all the way to Montgomery—we figured we would take care of as we went along. The main thing was that we do it, that we march.”

And they did. According to FBI reports of the day, marchers finished up a meeting at Brown Chapel at 2:18 P.M. Central. At that time, about 625 people (“practically all of whom were Negroes,” assistant FBI director Al Rosen wrote in an internal memorandum) silently walked from Sylvan Street to Alabama Avenue to the Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate general who had served as a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. At the crest of the bridge, Lewis looked out and saw what he remembered later as a sea of blue. State troopers under Colonel Al Lingo and a posse of deputies under Jim Clark were lined across Highway 80. “I saw in front of us a solid wall of state troopers, standing shoulder to shoulder,” Amelia Boynton recalled. White spectators, some waving Confederate battle flags, watched from outside the Glass House Restaurant, the Chick-N-Treat Drive-In, the Kayo gasoline station, and Lehman’s Pontiac dealership. Reporters and cameramen stood ready.

Lewis and Williams looked at the armed ranks, and then glanced down at the river. “John, can you swim?” Williams asked.

“No,” Lewis replied. “What about you?”

“A little,” Williams said.

“Well, there’s a lot of water down there,” Lewis said. “We cannot jump. We’re going to have to keep marching.”

“This is an unlawful assembly,” Major John Cloud announced as the marchers reached the bottom of the bridge, face-to-face with the lawmen. It was 2:52 P.M. “Your march is not conducive to the public safety. You are ordered to disperse and go back to your church or to your homes.”

Williams asked if they might have a word with Major Cloud.

“There is no word to be had,” Cloud replied. The two then repeated the exchange, to the same effect, which was none.

And so the two corps of Americans stood, staring, in the middling hours of afternoon.

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