Mud in the House

Alabama's freshman Congressman William Dickinson, 39, a Democrat-turned-Republican, is an ex-footballer from Montgomery, a onetime state judge, and a former assistant vice president of the Southern Railway System. He likes to make a splash. Last week he splashed mud all over the House floor. But only Dickinson got dirty.

In an hour-long speech, Dickinson declared that on the recent Selma-to-Montgomery march there was an interracial sex orgy of such proportions as to excite the envy of the most degraded pornographer. According to a batch of luridly detailed affidavits signed by various Alabama policemen and civilians, the marchers, when not marching, were apparently everywhere publicly fornicating, petting, kissing, drinking, exposing themselves and urinating.

Love on the Lawn? While his colleagues squirmed with shame and embarrassment, Dickinson blandly allowed as how "I am not going to vouch for the authenticity or the veracity of any affidavit or any individual whose affidavit I hold"--and then proceeded to lend them authenticity by reading some of the "eyewitness" reports aloud.

One affidavit was purportedly signed by an unidentified Negro, a veritable Uncle Peeping Tom, who claimed that he had seen "a Negro boy and a white girl engaged in sexual intercourse on the floor of a church while other boys and girls stood around and watched," and, further, that he had observed "an abnormal sex act" involving a Negro civil rights leader and a white girl at S.N.C.C. headquarters in a Montgomery hotel. A policewoman said that she had witnessed interracial love-making on the lawn of St. Margaret's Hospital in Montgomery. Others claimed to have seen white men in priests' garb and white women dressed as nuns swigging whisky, and, in the case of one "priest," paying a girl $12 for her favors.

Dickinson said he had access to photographs and movie films depicting the events, but he never produced them. Several newsmen saw much of the debauchery, he added, but newspapers had deliberately suppressed the whole thing.

"I Never Saw Any." Throughout the Deep South, hundreds of segregationists rushed to send for copies of the Congressional Record and all the prurient details. Chortled Dickinson: "One of my colleagues just came back from a newsstand, and he said, 'Man, they've got three bestsellers--Nugget, Playboy and the Congressional Record!' " Dickinson hardly seemed to care that many people, North and South, viewed such stories with great suspicion. Although congressional speeches are privileged, he said that he would repeat last week's charges in the Montgomery Coliseum, which would automatically lift his protection against a slander suit. "If they're not true," said he, "then I'm willing to be branded irresponsible."

Scarcely said than done. Dozens of clergymen who had made the march responded with outraged denials. Reporters who covered the event from beginning to end called the Dickinson report patent nonsense. While there was bound to be some hanky-panky, especially among some of the unwashed youngsters who joined the march for kicks, there was no evidence of open misconduct; certainly there were no arrests, even by the police officials who signed the affidavits. Said United Press International Photographer Phil Sandlin: "I spent five days and nights on the march. None of those things ever happened."

Adds U.P.I. Reporter Al Kuettner: "I saw no fornication. This guy is so completely off-base it is just fantastic." Says Selma's Public Safety Director Wilson Baker: "I never saw any of that."

"Most of us," editorialized Montgomery's Alabama Journal last week, "would like to believe that the demonstrators were, without exception, dissolute and base. This is the comfortable belief, and many people will go on believing it. This despite the fact that there were obviously, to any eye not blinded by rage, thousands of sincere, morally impeccable people in the march."

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