“Well,” Miss Hayden said, “I think it’s going to get better.”
“Hard to say,” said one of the boys as they drifted back to their cars.
At midnight in the camp, Charles Mauldin, aged seventeen, the head of the Dallas County Student Union and a student at Selma’s Hudson High School, which is Negro, was awakened in the security tent by several guards, who ushered in a rather frightened-looking Negro boy.
“What’s going on?” asked Charles.
The boy replied that he was trying to found a Negro student movement in Lowndes County.
“That’s fine,” said Charles.
“The principal’s dead set against it,” the boy said.
“Then stay underground until you’ve got everybody organized,” Charles said. “Then if he throws one out he’ll have to throw you all out.”
“You with Snick or S.C.L.C., or what?” the boy asked.
“I’m not with anything,” Charles said. “I’m with them all. I used to just go to dances in Selma on Saturday nights and not belong to anything. Then I met John Love, who was Snick project director down here, and I felt how he just sees himself in every Negro. Then I joined the movement.”
“What about your folk?” the boy asked.
“My father’s a truck driver, and at first they were against it, but now they don’t push me and they don’t hold me back,” Charles said.
“Who’ve you had personal run-ins with?” the boy asked.
“I haven’t had personal run-ins with anybody,” Charles said. “I’ve been in jail three times, but never more than a few hours. They needed room to put other people in. Last week, I got let out, so I just had to march and get beaten on. In January, we had a march of little kids—we called it the Tots March—but we were afraid they might get frightened, so we joined them, and some of us got put in jail Nothing personal about it.”
“Some of us think that for the march we might be better off staying in school,” the boy wid.
“Well, I think if you stay in school you’re saying that you’re satisfied,” Charles said. “We had a hundred of our teachers marching partway with us. At first, I was against the march, but then I realized that although we’re probably going to get the voting bill, we still don’t have a lot of other things. It’s dramatic, and it’s an experience, so I came. I thought of a lot of terrible things that could happen, because we’re committed to non-violence, and I’m responsible for the kids from the Selma school. But then I thought, If they killed everyone on this march, it would be nothing compared to the number of people they’ve killed in the last three hundred years.”
“You really believe in non-violence?” the boy asked Charles.
“I do,” Charles said. “I used to think of it as just a tactic, but now I believe in it all the way. Now I’d just like to be tested.”
“Weren’t you tested enough when you were beaten on?” the boy asked.
“No, I mean an individual test, by myself,” Charles said. “It’s easy to talk about non-violence, but in a lot of cases you’ve got to be tested, and re-inspire yourself.’
By 2 a.m., hardly anyone in the camp was awake except the late-shift night security patrol and a group of radio operators in a trader truck, which served as a base for the walkie-talkies around the campsite and in the church back in Selma. The operators kept in constant touch with Selma, where prospective marchers were still arriving by the busload. Inside the trailer were Norman Talbot, a middle-aged Negro from Selma who had borrowed the trailer from his uncle and was serving as its driver (“I used to work in a junk yard, until they fired me for joining the movement. I’ve got a five-year-old daughter, but after that I made it my business to come out in a big way’); Pete Muilenberg, a nineteen-year-old white student on leave of absence from Dartmouth to work for C.O.F.O., the Congress of Federated Organizations, in Mississippi; and Mike Kenny, a twenty-nine-year-old white student who had quit graduate school at Iowa State to work for S.N.C.C.
“Snick isn’t officially involved in this march,” Mr. Kenny said to a marcher who visited him in the trailer early that morning. “Although individual Snick workers can take part if they like. They say Martin Luther King and Snick struck a bargain: Snick wouldn’t boycott this march if S.C.L.C. would take part in a demonstration in Washington to challenge the Mississippi members of Congress. We didn’t want to bring in all these outsiders, and we wanted to keep marching on that Tuesday when King turned back. Man, there are cats in Selma now from up North saying, ‘Which demonstration are you going to? Which one is the best? As though it were a college prom, or something. I tell them they ought to have sense enough to be scared. ‘What do you think you’re down here for? For publicity, to show how many of you there are, and to get a few heads bashed in. Nobody needs you to lead them. S.C.L.C. has got plenty of leaders.’ People need Snick, though, for the technicians. Some of us took a two-day course in short-wave-radio repair from one of our guys, Marty Schiff, so we could set up their radios for them. Then, a lot of Snick cats have come over here from Mississippi, where the romance has worn off a bit and it’s time for our experts to take over—running schools, pairing off communities with communities up North, filing legal depositions against the Mississippi congressmen and against the worst of the police. We’re called agitators from out of state. Well, take away the connotations and agitation is what we do, but we’re not outsiders. Nobody who crosses a state line is an outsider. It’s the same with racial lines. I don’t give a damn about the Negro race, but I don’t give a damn about the white race, either. I’m interested in breaking the fetters of thought. What this march is going to do is help the Alabama Negro to break his patterns of thought. It’s also going to change the marchers when they go hack home. The students who went back from the Mississippi project became dynamos. It’s easier to join the movement than to get out. You have this commitment. There will be Snick workers staying behind to keep things going in Selma. We were here, working, a year and a half before S.C.L.C, came in. Man, there’s a cartoon in our Jackson office showing the Snick power structure, and it’s just one big snarl. Some of us are in favor of more central organization, but most of us believe in the mystique of the local people. We’re not running the C.O.F.O. project in Mississippi next summer, because of the black-white tensions in Snick. Some of the white cats feel they’re being forced out, because of the racism. But I can understand it. The white invasion put the Negro cats in a predicament. Not even their movement was their own anymore. I’m staying with it, though. Every Snick meeting is a traumatic experience for all of us, but even the turmoil is too real, too important, for me to get out now. It’s what you might call the dramatic-results mentality. Some of the leaders may be evolving some pretty far-out political philosophy, but it’s the workers who get things done—black-white tensions, left-right tensions, and all.”
Later that morning, Tuesday, it began to rain, and the rain continued through most of the day. Whe
