ne week after Bloody Sunday – when the city of Selma in Alabama saw “shocking police violence” in response to protests against the deliberate failure of local authorities to put black citizens on the voting register – America was still digesting the “savage” images being shown on the news. At least 60 people were injured in the violence and the Rev James Reeb, a sympathetic white clergyman from Boston, was “clubbed to death by white extremists”.
Critics denounced President Johnson’s response as inadequate. Rather than sending in federal troops, which his advisers felt could have risked inciting greater violence and giving credence to the arguments of local authorities that central government was “riding rough-shod over states’ rights”, Johnson “packed Selma with plainclothes agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation” to report back on the unfolding crisis. Now, at the end of “an angry week of demonstrations across the country”, the President was preparing to deliver a message to Congress urging legislation to guarantee black voting rights.
Alabama state governor George Wallace, who wanted the President to intervene to stop the demonstrations, had failed to get Johnson onside. After three hours of discussion at the White House, Johnson suggested that Wallace “return home and declare his support for universal suffrage in his state and all over the United States”; that he “declare that the right of peaceful assembly would be respected”; and that he call a “bi-racial meeting in Alabama to try to achieve greater unity”.
When asked what would happen if the Governor did not accept this advice, the President replied that he had “made it clear, whether Mr Wallace agreed or not, that law and order would be maintained”. He added
A protester on the Selma to Montgomery marches makes his message clear in 1965
that federal officers would take over the compilation of voting registers wherever a local authority failed to do so and that criminal penalties would be imposed on those who stood in the way of voters’ rights.
The President described what had happened in Selma as “an American tragedy which must never be allowed to happen again”. He declared that “every resource of this Government will be directed to ensuring justice for all men of all races in Alabama and everywhere in this land. That is the meaning of the oath that I swore before Almighty God when I took the office of the President. That is what I believe in with all my heart. That is what the people of this country demand.”
The Sunday Telegraph’s Stephen Barber cabled some more positive news from Washington: “A final dress rehearsal will take place this week for America’s next big jump forward in the race to the moon.” The date of March 22 had been set for astronauts Virgil Grissom and John Young to be “rocketed into space” from Cape Kennedy in Florida. Barber explained: “Their three orbits of the earth will take them four hours and 50 minutes and, all being well, they will come down in the Atlantic where they will be picked up by a helicopter from the aircraft carrier USS Intrepid.”
This mission represented the second phase in the “realisation of the late President Kennedy’s dream of achieving a United States lunar landfall by 1970”. Barber pointed out that the programme was costing the American taxpayer £1,250 million a year, “or about two thirds as much as Britain’s entire defence budget”.
Meanwhile, John Lucas reported that “a search is now going on throughout Britain to identify more than 3,000 children who are thought to be suffering from a mysterious disorder that is little understood and is so far incurable”. The disorder in question was autism. A group of parents, doctors, psychiatrists and social workers had come together to form the Society for Autistic Children three years earlier and Geoffrey Howe, the Conservative MP who would later become deputy prime minister under Margaret Thatcher, was to urge the education minister to set up more dedicated schools “to remedy what the Society feels is an appalling lack of facilities”.
Leading by example, the Society was due to open a school in Ealing, London, for 25 children. In response to suggestions that autism had an environmental cause, the school’s headmistress, Sybil Elgar, said: “There is no lack of love from parents for any of the children here.”
RACHEL STEWART