Selma March

By Jimmy Breslin
New York Herald Tribune
March 1965

Selma, Alabama – United States Highway 80, between Montgomery and Selma, is fifty miles of asphalt with a yellow dividing line and a roadside of deep green grass which runs for long stretches without being cluttered with advertising signs. United States Highway 80 does not run through buying country. It runs through farmland that has been picked clean and through swamps with squirrel-colored moss trees standing dead in the muddy water.

And it runs past black pigs rooting in the grass and white-faced cattle sleeping against wire fences. Past tin-roofed gas stations sitting on red dirt side roads, and a Negro in a leather cap holding a brown mule while it grazes.

It is a lightly traveled, deserted road with cars cutting down it at 70 miles and hour, their blue-and –orange license plates saying, “Heart of Dixie.” United States Highway 80 is a road in the middle of the State of Alabama, and today everybody in the world looks at it.

Today, a march is to start down the highway. It is a march of fat young white girls in sneakers and raincoats, wearing glasses, and Negro boys in windbreakers. Of sloppy white men in beards and needing haircuts, who peer through thick glasses. And also of white ministers, Roman collars loose on their thin necks, and white nuns in flowing robes, and college students and bleak-faced old Negroes. And there will also be people like Ralph Bunche and the Reverend Martin Luther King, and Army troops will be all around them while they walk out and put the civil rights movement in the South onto Highway 80.

The world will be watching it all. But there may be very little to see outside of people walking. For the march is through down country, where a screen door shutting is the only noise of a day, and where excitement runs slowly through people.

“Where you from?”

“New York.”

“Uh-huh,” he grunted. He was about forty and wearing a brown rain jacket. He was looking out the window of Byrd’s Lucky Dollar truck stop. His hands were stuck into his pockets and his mouth was busy chewing gum. He chewed and looked out of the window for a long time without saying anything.

“New Yawk,” he finally said. He chewed the gum some more.

“Hope somebody kills me ‘fore I go to new Yawk again.”

“What’s this thing tomorrow look like to you?” he was asked.

“Circus.”

He walked over to the door, chewing his gum. He looked out the window.

“I give up goin’ to the circus when I was a keed.”

His friend sat on a stool with his back to the counter. This one had on a plaid shirt and dungaree pants and work boots. His scalp showed white through the close crew cut. He had high, tanned cheekbones and narrow eyes and he took cupped-hand drags on his cigarette.

“What I resent is all these taxes bein’ used to pay for this thing tomorrow,” he said. He scraped his boots on the rough cement floor.

Byrd’s Lucky Dollar has a low ceiling of wooden beams, tables and chairs at one end, and this small lunch counter at the other end. On top of the counter were tow napkin-holders, three bottles of catsup, a jar of chili peppers, and two bottles of McIlhenny’s Hot Sauce, New Iberia, La.

Then the man by the window began to talk without turning his head. “Last night over in Lowndesboro, this nigger woman comes over to a white lady and she says, ‘Who’s the boss of the country, Johnson or Governor Wallace?’ That’s just what this nigger woman said. Now they gonna give her a vote.” He chewed his gum again.

“All they got to be is twenty-one, black, and breathing, and they vote same’s any man.”

“Do you figure there’ll be any trouble on this march?”

“Don’t expect so. Ev’time you hit one of them people, you help ‘em.”

“Well, I hope to hell there won’t be – ”

“Mind your tongue,” the crew cut sitting on the stool said. “We civilized people here. We don’t allow anybody talkin’ like that in front of our women.” He looked around. The one waitress was at the stove in the kitchen behind the counter. “You damnyankees come down here and think you can talk the way you please in front of our women. Well, jes’ remember we civilized here.”

He took another cupped-hand drag on his cigarette. The one at the window kept chewing his gum and looking out at the empty road.

“Well, I’ll see you.”

The one on the stool said nothing.

“Be no trouble tomorrow,” the one at the window said. “We got other things to do besides watchin’ niggers with their white girl friends walk ‘long the side of the road.”

Lowndesboro sits a mile off Highway 80. It is a cluster of new red brick ranch houses and old plantation homes with twelve pillars at the front and busted cars and broken yellow school buses in the overgrown back yards. There is also the Lowndesboro Baptist Church and J.C. Green General Merchandise, tin-roofed and whitewashed wood with high wooden steps leading up to it.

Leroy Greene, who is Negro, stood in the doorway of his long wooden shack, which sits in the mud by the side of the road. In the windowless room behind him, five small kids, boys and girls dressed alike in filthy smocks, ran around.

“I tell you,” Greene said, “I don’t know much about the march. See, I work in Montgomery. This here is in Selma and I don’t get over there too much.”

“Well, do you think it will help?”

He stared out at the road – that blank stare Southern Negroes carry like a lunch basket.

“I don’t know he said. “That thing is over in Selma, and I work in Montgomery.”

“Well, don’t you think Martin Luther King is right?”

“Martin Luther King, oh, he right.”

“Do you know that he’s leading the march and that it’s a big thing?”

He stared.

“You mean you don’t know all about the march? It’s only just down the road from you.”

“It in Selma,” he said. “I don’t work in Selma.”

A dull-faced woman came and stood beside him. She had on a flowered blouse, wrinkled black Bermuda shorts, and red bowling shoes that had no laces in them.

“All these kids yours,” she was asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“What’s your wife’s name, Leroy?”

“She’s not my wife,” he said. “I just stays with her.”

The kids came out and crowded behind their legs. On the porch an old black and white spotted dog lifted his head, then dropped it back on his paws and fell asleep again. And Leroy Greene and the woman with the five dirty kids stood in the doorway and looked at the mud in front of the wooden shack, and the march on United States Highway 80, the march for the right of Americans to vote, was a million miles away from them. And what the South, and the North, does to a person who has black skin was set forever on their dull faces.

Are You John Lennon?

By Jimmy Breslin
New York Daily News
December 1980

That summer in Breezy Point, when he was eighteen and out of Madison High in Brooklyn, there was the Beatles on the radio at the beach through the hot days and on the jukebox through the nights in the Sugar Bowl and Kennedys. He was young and he let his hair grow and there were girls and it was the important part of life.

Last year, Tony Palma even went to see Beatlemania.

And now, last night, a thirty-four-year-old man, he sat in a patrol car at Eighty-second Street and Columbus Avenue and the call came over the radio: “Man shot, One West Seventy-second Street.”

Palma and his partner, Herb Frauenberger, rushed through the Manhattan streets to an address they knew as one of the most famous living places in the country, the Dakota apartments.

Another patrol car was there ahead of them, and as Palma got out he saw the officers had a man up against the building and were handcuffing him.

“Where’s the guy shot?” Palma said.

“In the back,” one of the cops said.

Palma went through the gates into the Dakota courtyard and up into the office, where a guy in a red shirt and jeans was on his face on the floor. Palma rolled the guy over. Blood was coming out of the mouth and covering the face. The chest was wet with blood.

Palma took the arms and Frauenberger took the legs. They carried the guy out to the street. Somebody told them to put the body in another patrol car.

Jim Moran’s patrol car was waiting. Moran is from the South Bronx, from Williams Avenue, and he was brought up on Tony Bennett records in the jukeboxes. When he became a cop in 1964, he was put on patrol guarding the Beatles at their hotel. Girls screamed and pushed and Moran laughed. Once, it was all fun.

Now responding to the call, “Man shot, One West Seventy-second,” Jim Moran, a forty-five-year-old policeman, pulled up in front of the Dakota and Tony Palma and Herb Frauenberger put this guy with blood all over him in the backseat.

As Moran started driving away, he heard people in the street shouting, “That’s John Lennon!”

Moran was driving with Bill Gamble. As they went through the streets to Roosevelt Hospital, Moran looked in the backseat and said, “Are you John Lennon?” The guy in the back nodded and groaned.

Back on Seventy-second Street, somebody told Palma, “Take the woman.” And a shaking woman, another victim’s wife, crumpled into the backseat as Palma started for Roosevelt Hospital. She said nothing to the two cops and they said nothing to her. Homicide is not a talking matter.

Jim Moran, with John Lennon in the backseat, was on the radio as he drove to the hospital. “Have paramedics meet us at the emergency entrance,” he called. When he pulled up to the hospital, they were waiting for him with a cart. As Lennon was being wheeled through the doors into the emergency room, the doctors were on him.

“John Lennon,” somebody said.

“Yes, it is,” Moran said.

Now Tony Palma pulled up to the emergency entrance. He let the woman out and she ran to the doors. Somebody called to Palma, “That’s Yoko Ono.”

“Yeah?” Palma said.

“They just took John Lennon in,” the guy said.

Palma walked into the emergency room. Moran was there already. The doctors had John Lennon on a table in a trauma room, working on the chest, inserting tubes.

Tony Palma said to himself, I don’t think so. Moran shook his head. He thought about his two kids, who know every one of the Beatles’ big tunes. And Jim Moran and Tony Palma, older now, cops in a world with no fun, stood in the emergency room as John Lennon, whose music they knew, whose music was known everywhere on earth, became another person who died after being shot with a gun on the streets of New York.

[I was home in bed in Forest Hills, Queens, at 11:20 p.m. when the phone and television at once said Lennon was shot. I was dressed and into Manhattan, to Roosevelt Hospital, the Dakota, up to the precinct, grabbed a cop inside, back to the Dakota, grabbed a cop outside, and to the Daily News. I wrote this column and it made a 1:30 a.m. deadline. I don’t there is anybody else who can do this kind of work this quickly.

I particularly like the mistake in it. Moran from Williams Avenue in the Bronx. It is Willis Avenue.

As I can’t use a terminal – the keys don’t make the noise I need and require too light a touch for me to make them work – a desk clerk put my typewritten copy into the terminal. He made the Williams Avenue error. I sure as hell know Willis Avenue, having had a drink in every bar there when it was Irish and having centered a whole novel on the street now that is Puerto Rican. The mistake and the reasons for it are testimony to the speed with which it was done.]