Jan. 25, 1965 - A Negro woman stepped out of the voter registration line today in Selma, Ala., and punched Sheriff James G. Clark in the face.
Three deputies grabbed her and wrestled her to the ground, and in the flailing, kicking struggle that followed, Sheriff Clark clubbed her. She was then taken off to jail in two pairs of handcuffs with a wound over her right eye.
Deputy Sheriff Doyle Wright, who took part in the melee, lost some skin from the back of his neck and had a knot on his cheek.
Dr. Martin Luther King, who was standing a few feet away, called the sheriff’s action “absolutely uncalled for and unnecessary.”
“We have seen another day of brutality,” Dr. King told a Negro audience a few minutes after the violence. “We still have in Dallas County a sheriff who is determined to trample over Negroes with iron feet of brutality and oppression.”
He called for demonstrations at the courthouse and urged the Negroes to “fill up all the jails of Dallas County and every surrounding county” if necessary.
So went Selma’s first registration day under a Federal Court injunction intended to restore peace to the courthouse where Negroes are trying to register to vote in significant numbers.
The woman was identified as Annie Lee Cooper, a 53-year-old clerk at a Selma hotel. She was charged with two counts of assault and battery and held under $2,000 bond.
Asked if she were married, Sheriff Clark replied: “She’s a n****r woman, and she hasn’t got a Miss or a Mrs. in front of her name. She says she’s a secretary at a motel, but I think she’s a bouncer.”
Sheriff Clark said she weighed 226½ pounds on the jailhouse scale. That is 6½ pounds more than the 43-year-old sheriff weighs, though much less than the combined weight of the four officers involved in the struggle.
The incident occurred shortly after about 200 Negroes and a few whites had lined up at the Lauderdale St. entrance of the Court House seeking access to the Board of Registrars.
The line had formed down the stairs, along the sidewalk, and back into an alley when Dr. King arrived and began talking to a group of reporters. Sheriff Clark hurried over, took Dr. King by the arm, and ordered him back to the curb.
Moments later, the woman attacked Sheriff Clark on the lawn between the court house and the sidewalk. He said later, “I didn’t even see her when she hit me in the eye.”
She put up quite a battle as the officers seized her and threw her to the ground.
“I wish you would hit me, you scum,” she snapped at Clark.
He then brought his billy club down on her head with a whack that was heard throughout the crowd gathered in the street.
In the struggle, Clark lost his green tie, his cape with “scrambled eggs” and badge, and, for a couple of minutes, his billy club.
Later, he showed no marks of injury, although he said: “If that eye isn’t black, it soon will be. She knocked hell out of me.”

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