‘Courageous Eight’ risked all in Selma
Nearly 60 years ago, Black leaders organized three marches from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, the state capital, to protest legislation preventing Black Americans from voting.
The three marches, with the final occurring on March 21, 1965, were led by figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis and the Rev. Hosea Williams.
But historians and Selma natives say the marches wouldn’t have come about without eight people in particular, all members of the Dallas County (Alabama) Voters League, known as the Courageous Eight.
The searing images of white state troopers attacking peaceful marchers were among the factors that eventually led President Lyndon B. Johnson and other lawmakers to support national voting rights legislation, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
How did the marches come about?
In 1956, the NAACP was banned in Alabama, prompting members of the local Dallas County Voters League to hold NAACP activities underground, said activist-historian William Waheed, who wrote a book about Selma’s voting rights movement.
“One of the big problems in Selma is that you had about 60% to 70% of illiteracy among voting-age adults,” Waheed said.
The Dallas County Voters League eventually began hosting literacy classes, he said, but there remained obstacles for Black voters, including poll taxes and literacy tests with questions such as “How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?”
Local authorities told the voters league to cease public meetings, but the group kept at it, and eight people – the Courageous Eight – remained active. Their work earned them a nickname among Black families in Selma as “the Crazy Eight,” Waheed said.
“They were educators. They were business people. They were professional people, so people called them crazy because they challenged the system,” he said. “People also called them crazy because they knew they had awesome opportunities financially and professionally and they were giving it away.”
In 1964, Selma’s NAACP chapter was reinstated, Waheed said. Also that year, members of the Dallas County Voters League pushed the organization to invite King to Selma.
The league agreed under the condition that a select group of people oversee the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and King’s activities in Selma. The eight formed a steering committee and crafted a letter to invite King to Selma, Waheed said.
The marches begin
On March 7, 1965, John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led protesters on a march from Selma to Montgomery.
When they reached the height of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Alabama law enforcement ordered them to turn around; when they refused, officers beat them, leaving Lewis with a fractured skull and a concussion. More than 60 marchers were injured in what would go down in history as Bloody Sunday.
Two days later, on March 9, King led at least 2,500 protesters on another march, and they were again blocked from reaching Montgomery. This day became known as Turnaround Tuesday.
On the last attempt, on March 21, more than 3,000 civil rights demonstrators marched from Brown Chapel AME Church, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and down Highway 80, joined by U.S. Army troops and federalized Alabama National Guardsmen.
Said Waheed: “We hear about the bridge crossing, but very seldom do you hear about the pillars of the foundation of the bridge, which are the Courageous Eight.”