Selma, 1965: ADL Joins the March

  • January 16, 2015

The following article was published in April 1965 ADL Bulletin, written by National Director Benjamin Epstein.

Martin Luther King, Jr., center, stands between ADL National Director Benjamin Epstein and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and with Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and other Civil Rights Leaders in 1963

IT BEGAN ON MARCH 21. A “gigantic witness to the fulfillment of democracy,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., called it.

“Walk together, children,” Dr. King said, “…and Alabama will be a new Alabama, and America will be a new America.”

And  we  walked together – more than 3,000 Americans: Negroes and whites, ministers, rabbis, Catholic nuns, students, representatives of organizations, those who belonged to no  group other than the human race – all in peaceful demonstration against blind violence, in “gigantic witness” to the constitutionally guaranteed right of all citizens to register and vote. We walked  the seven  miles out  of Selma  to  where  U.S. Highway  80   changes from  four  to  two lanes, where by Federal court ruling only 300 could continue the  journey to  Montgomery along the narrower stretch of road.

I walked with my wife, who said there was no other place in the world to be on that Sunday, and with Oscar Cohen, director of ADL’s program division, and with a solemn-faced seven-year-old Negro boy who had asked to join us and who held tightly to Oscar Cohen’s hand until the youngster was too tired to go another step and was returned to Selma in a jeep.

“I want to march for freedom,” the boy had said.

Four days later, on the outskirts of Montgomery,  2 ,000   Americans from  all  sections of the country joined the march for the  final  three-and-one-half   miles  to  the Alabama  state  Capitol. Representing  the League were Rabbi Solomon S. Bernards, director of interreligious  cooperation; Rabbi Israel Mowshowitz, chairman of  the interreligious committee; Lawrence Peirez, chairman of  the fact finding committee; Lester J. Waldman, director of organization and planning; Harold  Braverman,  secretary of the race relations committee; Sheldon Steinhauser, Denver  regional director; Melvin Cooperman,  St. Louis  regional  director; David Chancer, assistant  director  in  Milwaukee;  and   Mrs. Edith  Tarcov  of  the department  of  intercultural affairs.

IN  SELMA,  die-hard segregationists bemoaned “the nightmare” of not being left to solve their own problems, bragged about the “progress” they had made –a bi-racial committee, a bond issue for paving streets in  the  Negro  section – and neglected to mention that the “bi-racial” committee met separately, that paved streets were no answer to a free people’s cry for freedom. In Montgomery, the battle flag of the Confederacy flew over the Capitol.

There seemed so little understanding, so little realization that the issue is democracy, that democracy in any state of the union is the concern of every state in the union, of the nation as a whole. There were cries of “subversives,” ”beatniks,” “press distortion,” in a futile attempt to hide from the world what the world had already seen – a sheriff with a badge that said “Never,” cruel, excessive force against helpless people, the body of discrimination stripped of any legal argument  and left naked in  the Alabama mud.

There was the clergy, of all faiths – priests in particular, so obvious in their turned collars, nuns so visible in their mud-soaked habits – were these the “subversives,” the “beatniks”? And not even Rockwell or Crommelin or the Ku Klux Klan could stir up anti-Semitism as had been done so many times before when Jews and Jewish organizations had been in the forefront of the fight for civil rights, for human rights for all people. This was an interfaith movement, an interfaith pilgrimage, an end to the patience or complacency of far too many who had been silent for so long.

Only the South’s newspapers seemed understand what had happened.

“…Now is the hour for excuses and elaborate denials, for imputing all blame to press and outside agitators, none to inside imbecility,” said the Alabama Journal.

“Selma has revealed a growing public impatience at finding official resistance to the goal of an equal chance for all Americans. The weight and speed with which this consensus was expressed give hope that we soon can be done with re-arguing the past and get on with the problems of the present and the dreams of the future,” said The Atlanta Constitution.

It was the South’s own newspapers that saw what its legislators and  die-hards still refused  to admit – that the policy of total defiance had  helped to hasten the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the introduction – and probable passage – of the 1965 voting rights bill.

IN FIVE DAYS filled with drama and human sacrifice, the goal of freedom, of true democracy, moved closer in sight. The task ahead, for the Anti-Defamation League, for all agencies and individuals dedicated to justice and fair treatment, is to smooth the road, to promote American ideals of democracy through obedience to law and through intergroup cooperation. This we will do, with all the resources and experience of our more than fifty years of life. For we, of all people, know the evil of silence

Benjamin Epstein

ADL National Director