Selma March Rolled Back

Mar. 9, 1965 - Dr. Martin Luther King led 1,500 Negroes and whites on a second attempted protest march today. State troopers turned them back on the outskirts of Selma, Ala., after they had gone one mile.

But this time there was no violence — unlike a similar confrontation at the same spot on Sunday. On that day, troopers and Dallas County sheriff’s officers broke up an attempted march to Montgomery, the state capital, 50 miles away, with clubs and tear gas.

“We had the greatest demonstration for freedom today that we’ve ever had in the South,” Dr. King said as he disbanded the brief march today.

Tonight, three Unitarian ministers who had participated in the march were beaten by whites on a downtown street corner. The ministers are white.

One of them, the Rev. James Reeb, 38 years old, of Boston, was taken to University Hospital in Birmingham with a serious head injury and later underwent surgery. The police said Rev. Reeb, who is in critical condition, had been knocked unconscious with a club.

The Rev. Clark Olsen, 32, of Berkeley, Calif., and the Rev. Orloff Miller, 33, of Boston, were less seriously injured. 

They told the police they had been attacked by five men in sports clothes after they had eaten dinner in a Negro restaurant.

“Selma had to show its true colors,” Dr. King said tonight of the beating. “It was cowardly work done by night.”

The meeting of troopers and demonstrators had been awaited in Selma with dread following the Sunday clash, in which 84 marchers were hurt.

Its peaceful resolution resulted from an arrangement between leaders of the march and the troopers worked out beforehand, with the Federal government as mediator. The arrangement had face-saving features for both sides.

The demonstrators began their march in the face of a Federal Court injunction prohibiting the march and in spite of a plea against it by President Johnson.

It was clear that the one-mile march was more a gesture than a firm intention to walk all the way to Montgomery.

After the confrontation, the Negro leaders temporarily suspended plans for any further attempts to make the march, which had been planned to dramatize a struggle to register Negro voters.

Federal District Judge Frank Johnson Jr. of Montgomery, who had ordered the Negroes earlier today not to march, will hold a hearing Thursday on a petition by the Negroes to declare unconstitutional an edict by Gov. George Wallace banning the Selma-Montgomery march.

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