It was my grandmother who first took me to hear Dr. King—that's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. That was back in 1963, when I was just thirteen years old. The church was packed. When Dr. King began to speak, everyone got real quiet. The way he sounded just made you want to do what he was talking about. He was talking about voting—the right to vote and what it would take for our parents to get it. He was talking about nonviolence and how you could persuade people to do things your way with steady, loving confrontation. I'll never forget those words—“steady, loving confrontation”—and the way he said them. We children didn't really understand what he was talking about, but we wanted to do what he was saying.
“Who is with me?” Dr. King asked, and all of us stood up, clapping. By the time we left that meeting, Dr. King had a commitment from me and everyone else in that church to do whatever it would take, nonviolently, to get the right to vote.
At that time I was already in the movement— the civil rights movement. I was mostly following the high school kids around— especially Bettie Fikes. She had this beautiful voice and I wanted to sing like her. Bettie and her friends were trying to integrate Selma by going to whites-only places. They sat at the whites-only Dairy Queen and the lunch counter at Woolworth's department store. They tried to sit downstairs at the movie theater. (Blacks could only sit in the balcony then.)
They said I couldn't take part in these sit-ins because I was too young, but I had a job to do. My job was to go for help. I was called the “gopher,” because I always had to “go for” someone's mama when Bettie and her friends were put in jail.
That all changed on January 2, 1965. That's when Dr. King came back to Selma for a big ma** meeting at Brown Chapel. We called it Emancipation Day because it was all about freedom. There were about seven hundred people there, and I was one of them. It was an awesome thing, a fearsome thing to see so many people. They had come from all around. And they had to travel some dangerous roads to get to Selma— little country roads where the Ku Klux Klan was riding around.
The music was fantastic. By then we had formed a freedom choir, and I was part of it. I got to sing in the choir with Bettie Fikes, and you know how I felt about that.
When Dr. King walked in, everyone stood and cheered. He talked about the vote and how we would get it. He told us we must be ready to march. His voice grew louder as he continued. “We must be ready to go to jail by the thousands.” By the end he shouted, “Our cry . . . is a simple one. Give us the ballot!”
To tell you the truth, I just felt that once our parents got the right to vote, everything would be a whole lot better. There's power in a vote. For years black people tried to register to vote, but they were mostly turned away. Just for trying to register, they could lose their jobs. You see, whenever a black person tried to register, someone would take a picture and then show it to that person's boss. White people could fire black people whenever and however they wanted.
That's why the civil rights leaders needed us children to march. After Dr. King's speech, our local leaders planned two or three marches for us every day. They would say, “We're going to march to the courthouse tomorrow. If you're with us, come here to Brown Chapel at nine thirty.”
The very first time I heard that, I said, “I'm going to march.”
On the day of a march, you would go to school for attendance, then slip out and make it down to Brown Chapel. Our teachers were the ones who unlocked the back door and let us out of school. They supported us— they had our backs.
Our teachers were excellent, but these smart people could not vote. They couldn't pa** the voter registration test. The tests were written to keep black people from voting. (White people didn't usually take those tests at all.) The registrars asked ridiculous questions such as, “How deep is the Alabama River?” and “How many jelly beans are in this gallon jar?” The questions had nothing to do with voting or the Constitution or citizenship.
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Two or three times a day, a group of us students would leave Brown Chapel heading downtown. I don't think we were ever fewer than about fifty kids on a march. Before we left, the adults would tell us, “You're going to go to jail. Do not fight back. You might be pushed; you might be hit. Just turn the other cheek. Do not fight back. Don't worry about it. We'll take care of you.”
Most of the time, once we got downtown the police let us march for four or five blocks.Then they would march us right onto yellow school buses. If you didn't get on the bus fast enough, the police would shock you with a cattle prod. That's a stick with an electrical charge, sort of like a Taser is now. Farmers used them to push cattle to move quicker or to get out of the way. That's what they used on us, like we were cattle.
At first they would take us to the old National Guard Armory, where we had to stand for hours all packed together, or sit on the concrete floor. But after a week or so of that, they started taking us right to jail.