Difference of Impact

Whenever one of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's nonviolent civil rights drives is met by white nonviolence, the result is something like driving a tack into a marshmallow: there is very little impact. That was what happened last week in Montgomery, Ala.

Pressing his voter-registration drive, King arrived in Montgomery urging a "march on the ballot boxes," called on Negroes to join "by the thousands" in a demonstration of "peaceful good will." Far from resisting, city officials fell all over themselves in their hurry to help out. Police all but urged upon King a permit to parade the five blocks to the county courthouse from the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where King was pastor when he first made a national name for himself as leader of a bus boycott (TIME cover, Feb. 18, 1957).

Here, Apathy. Montgomery's city administration invited reporters to attend King's demonstration. Officials distributed press kits pointing out the route of the march, granted special permission to take photographs inside the courthouse. A pressroom was set up in the Carnegie Library next door to the courthouse, with enough desks, telephones, coffee and doughnuts for everyone. When the time came for the march, city police provided a special protective escort for the Negroes.

Then, instead of the thousands King had called for, fewer than 200 Negroes turned up. Most of them were already registered to vote. Those who were not were swiftly enrolled--without any of the headline-making incidents upon which civil rights protest movements thrive.

As King should have known, Montgomery Negroes who were interested enough to register have mostly been able to do so since 1962, when Federal District Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. ordered an end to discrimination by city registrars. Even so, only 40% of eligible Negroes have bothered to sign up, compared with 75% registered among eligible whites. Before leaving Montgomery for Washington, where he met with the President and got assurances that the Administration would soon send new voter-rights legislation to Congress, King explained what had happened. It was, he said sadly, a matter of "apathy in the Negro community."

There, Enthusiasm. By midweek, King was back in Selma, Ala., where white segregationists--unlike those in Montgomery--still had not learned the lesson of meeting nonviolence with nonviolence. Even while King was elsewhere, Selma Negroes, of whom some 3,500 already had been arrested, again lined up outside the county courthouse to register. The registration board was not scheduled to sit again until this week, but as each Negro turned away, he merely went to the end of the line. This enraged Sheriff James Clark, who started whacking about with his billy club and--without realizing the irony of his deeds and words--crying: "You are making a mockery of justice."

Clark's temper continued to be King's greatest asset. Next day, Clark and his deputies arrested for truancy some 160 Negro youngsters peaceably demonstrating outside the courthouse, headed them off toward the edge of town. Selma's jails, said Clark, were already full, so he intended to take the kids to the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge six miles away. Brandishing billy clubs and electric cattle prods, Clark's men forced the children into a quick step and then a trot as Clark bellowed: "You like to march so much, so we'll let you." Several youngsters dropped out, vomiting. Clark's first set of deputies wearied--and were relieved by others, who had been trailing in squad cars. The children's march went on for nearly three miles--until, finally, Clark and his deputies let them "escape."

Apparently the goings-on in Selma had taken their toll on Clark too. At week's end he was taken to Vaughan Memorial Hospital, suffering, his doctors said, from chest pains and exhaustion. A band of some 200 teen-age Negro demonstrators, most of whom had been prodded along the forced-march route by Clark and his men, gathered outside the hospital carrying signs that bore the message "Jim Clark, get well in mind and body." Said one of the demonstrators later: "It just wasn't the same without Clark fussing and fuming. We honestly miss him." That was not hard to understand, for Sheriff Clark had been an unwitting asset to King and the Negro community in Selma.

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