2 ARKANSANS recall melee in ’ 65 march in Alabama.
It was tear gas that drove the horses crazy on Bloody Sunday.
On March 7, 1965, Alabama state troopers lobbed tear gas at 525 civil- rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which spans the Alabama River in Selma.
A mounted volunteer sheriff’s posse armed with whips and chains donned gas masks before attacking the black marchers, said Jim Rose III, a Fayetteville lawyer who was an Army intelligence officer in Selma at the time.
But the horses had no such protection.
“When the tear gas hit those horses, they went crazy,” Rose said. “These big bad posse guys were getting their asses thrown off their horses, and the horses were going everywhere.”
In the melee, John Lewis suffered a fractured skull, apparently from an Alabama state trooper’s billy club.
Bloody Sunday was a turning point in the civil rights movement. The courage Lewis exhibited later solidified his reputation as a civil rights icon.
Lewis, who was a leader of the march, is now a Georgia congressman, and still leading.
He said he won’t attend the inauguration today of Presidentelect Donald Trump. About 60 other House Democrats say they will follow Lewis’ lead and won’t be there either.
Lewis questioned the legitimacy of Trump’s election, to which Trump responded in a tweet that Lewis was “all talk, talk, talk.”
Roy Reed of Hogeye doesn’t remember Lewis as a talker. Reed said Lewis is soft- spoken and leads by example.
Reed, who grew up in Hot Springs, covered the march in Selma and other civil rights stories as a reporter for The New York Times. He became acquainted with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Lewis and other civil rights leaders of the time.
“He’s brave but he’s humble,” Reed said of Lewis. “I put him right up there by Martin Luther King. They had that true Christianity as I would put it.”
Lewis wanted to be a preacher. An uncle gave him a Bible for Christmas when he was 4 years old, and by the next year he was reading it aloud, preaching to his chickens, according to Book One of March. The graphic novel is part of a trilogy by Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell, a Little Rock native who did the artwork.
Reed remembers the tear gas in Selma.
“It also blinded the reporters and cameramen,” he said. “We were all kind of enveloped in tear gas. It was specifically for the marchers, to make them run.”
Reed said he remembers seeing the billy clubs flailing, and marchers falling.
He said he saw Lewis on the ground after the attack, seemingly unconscious.
“After the troopers and the others moved on, chasing the marchers back down across the bridge, the first thing I saw when I got to where they’d all been standing, the leaders, there was John on the ground,” said Reed.
Lewis and the other injured marchers got up and made their way back to Brown Chapel.
“Mr. Lewis, before going to the hospital, made a speech to the crowd huddled angry and weeping in the sanctuary,” according to Reed’s story in the March 8, 1965, issue of The New York Times.
“I don’t see how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam — I don’t see how he can send troops to the Congo — I don’t see how he can send troops to Africa and can’t send troops to Selma, Ala.,” Lewis told the crowd.
Lewis, in 1965, was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which directed many of the voter registration drives in the South.
Eighty- four of the 525 marchers were injured, and 17 were hospitalized, according to a subsequent article by Reed.
King wasn’t in Selma on Bloody Sunday. But the 50- mile march from Selma to Montgomery resumed on March 21 with King leading the group out of town. The march ended five days later on the steps of the state Capitol. Hundreds of people made the entire trip — through cold weather and sometimes torrential rain. By the time the marchers got to the Capitol, there were 25,000 of them, wrote Reed.
Some described the march as the greatest civil rights demonstration in American history, according to his article the next day.
Rose and another Army intelligence officer prepared a report for the Pentagon about the final march to Montgomery. The document, which has been declassified, outlines areas of heightened risk along the route, which was U. S. 80. Country stores, gas stations and campgrounds were of particular concern.
Rose said he got word that some locals had been collecting rattlesnakes and scorpions, and planned to deposit them at one of the campgrounds before the marchers arrived to spend the night. He reported that to the Pentagon, and soldiers were sent in comb the area ahead of time. They found no snakes or scorpions.
The media reported that the soldiers were looking for bombs, said Rose, but that wasn’t true.
Rose said he had breakfast with King and the other civil rights leaders on some mornings at the Holiday Inn in Selma.
King thought Rose was with the FBI, and since Rose was under cover, he didn’t tell King any different. Rose was actually the special agent in charge of the Montgomery field office for Army intelligence from 196366. Rose said his background as a Southerner — a Helena native who graduated from Mississippi State — helped him land the job.
“I was there because the Army wanted their man on the ground in case they had to federalize troops or send in their own troops,” said Rose.
Rose said he was there to document events. The Army issued him a Leica rangefinder camera to use.
“We were under strict orders not to step in,” Rose said.
He said his report on Selma made it to President Lyndon Johnson, who wrote him a letter thanking him for his work in Alabama.
The Voting Rights Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Johnson on Aug. 6, 1965. It closely followed the language of the 15th Amendment of the U. S. Constitution, prohibiting racial discrimination in voting practices or procedures.
“Although ratified on Feb. 3, 1870, the promise of the 15th Amendment would not be fully realized for almost a century,” according to the Library of Congress website, loc. gov. “Through the use of poll taxes, literacy tests and other means, Southern states were able to effectively disenfranchise African Americans. It would take the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 before the majority of African Americans in the South were registered to vote.”
On Saturday, Lewis is to headline a march in Atlanta aimed at protesting Trump’s administration a day after Trump is sworn into the White House.
Besides saying Lewis was all talk, Trump’s tweet referred to Lewis’ Atlanta- based congressional district as “crime- infested” and in “horrible shape.”