Feb. 3, 1965 - More than 1,000 Negro schoolchildren were arrested today in Selma, Ala., and in the nearby town of Marion, to which Dr. Martin Luther King’s voter-registration campaign has spread in recent days. State troopers took about 700 demonstrators into custody as they marched on the Perry County Courthouse in Marion, a town of 3,800. They were charged with either unlawful assembly or disobeying an officer, hauled off to a work camp 60 miles away and held under bonds of $100 each.
More than 300 were arrested for truancy in front of the Dallas County Courthouse in Selma after they serenaded Sheriff James Clark and a special posse for 30 minutes with civil rights songs.
Today’s arrests brought to more than 2,600 the number made in the Selma area since Dr. King went there early in January and announced his nonviolent campaign would plague Dallas County until Negroes in the Alabama “Black Belt” were permitted to vote in greater numbers.
Dr. King spent his third day in jail. He directed the campaign from his cell by sending out letters of instruction to his staff.
The Marion students assembled today in front of the town jail and began singing freedom songs when a trooper said: “Sing one more song, and you are under arrest.”
James Orange, a member of Dr. King’s Alabama staff, turned to the students and said: “Sing another song.”They did, and the troopers held them under arrest and loaded them into school buses.
In Selma, Charles Mauldin, a 17-year-old high school student, led several hundred students in a song directed at Sheriff Clark. They changed the words of their songs to include the sheriff’s name: “Ain’t gonna let Jim Clark turn me round” and “I love Jim Clark in my heart.”Sheriff Clark smiled, paced the street, and talked to his six deputies, 20 special posse men, and several city policemen and state troopers.
Until the police chased them away, about 300 whites and Negroes lined the sidewalk across the street and watched. The mechanics at the Ted Gentry Chevrolet Company came out and looked.“There’s going to be some n*****s killed here before this is over,” one of them said. “They’ll be killed like flies.”

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