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.