Hosea Williams: The Tactical Mastermind of the Selma to Montgomery March

By: Rolundus Rice, Ph.D

Historians and journalists have documented the events leading up to “Bloody Sunday.” However, many scholars have not examined the critical fourteen days between March 7 through March 21, 1965. Hosea described these two weeks as “crisis-packed.” “We immediately set to work preparing for a second Selma-to-Montgomery march….” Hosea, Young said, “assumed responsibility for logistics.” According to John Lewis, “Hosea never stopped. Apparently he started planning for the continuation of the march” as soon as the chaos ended on Sunday. “He,” Lewis continued, “became the leader and ringmaster more than anyone else.” Early on the morning of March 8, Hosea, as the lead plaintiff, filed suit in the United States District Court Middle District of Alabama against Governor George Wallace, Al Lingo, the Director of Alabama Public Safety’s Department and Sheriff Jim Clark. Seasoned civil rights attorneys Fred D. Gray, Solomon Seay, James Nabrit III, and Jack Greenberg served as counsel. In Williams v. Wallace, the plaintiffs filed motions for a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction to nullify Governor Wallace’s March 6 proclamation banning any marches in Selma—an act that Judge Johnson would later declare crossed the “constitutional boundary line.” Initially, however, Judge Johnson told the plaintiffs that he would not immediately enjoin the defendants from blocking any subsequent marches until he held hearings later that week. Pointedly, Johnson strongly recommended that the SCLC postpone the march scheduled for Tuesday. After filing the motion at the federal courthouse in Montgomery, Hosea traveled a few miles to the MIA’s headquarters on Dorsey Street to plan strategy for new demonstrations to demand the right to vote and a redress of grievances. On Monday evening, March 9, after spending Sunday night sleeping on the kitchen floor in the Brown Chapel parsonage, Hosea met with King, Young, Bevel and SNCC members, Lewis, Willie Ricks, and Fay Bellamy, to discuss how to channel the momentum that had reached a crescendo only twenty-four hours earlier. Engaged in the teleconference meeting from Washington, D.C., was United States Attorney General, Nicholas Katzenbach. With Katzenbach dissenting the meeting participants initially decided to march to Montgomery the following day until they realize the logistical nightmares that would follow a hastily-planned fifty-four-mile march that could easily span four or five days. Planning was complicated

by the fact that over four-hundred priests, ministers and rabbis had already arrived from throughout the country in Selma in response to King’s plea to support the demonstration. For example, “We had to find places for them, and figure out how to feed them,” Hosea said. Moreover, Johnson, whom the SCLC needed as an impartial ally, had cautioned them against marching until he could hear testimony later in the week and, as Katzenbach made clear, the Johnson Administration vehemently opposed a march the next day. As a compromise with the White House and the Justice Department, King, with the counsel of his senior leadership, including Hosea, agreed to lead a symbolic march close to Haistens Mattress and Awning Company on Tuesday. Haistens was located just before the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Once the 1,500 marchers, one third of whom were clergymen, reached the bridge, they knelt in prayer and marched back to Brown Chapel. The next week was arguably one of the most hectic and demanding seven days of Hosea’s tenure in SCLC. King instructed him to formulate a logistical plan to be submitted to Judge Frank Johnson for the latter’s consideration when deciding to permit the march to Montgomery. “What a job,” he told King. But his military training from his days with a quartermaster truck company during the Allied Occupation of Europe and his experiences in leading highly-publicized civil rights demonstrations during the previous three years in Savannah and St. Augustine gave him the background needed to create a logistical plan that could pass judiciary muster. That plan carried was also important in shaping Lyndon Johnson’s deliberations because Alabama officials had insisted in hearings on March 16 and 17 that a march from Selma to Montgomery was not conducive to the safety of the public. Thousands of marchers presented one problem, protecting, feeding and providing toilet facilities presented other obstacles. Moreover, Hosea had to construct a plan that not only conformed to state and county parade procedures, he also had to anticipate and preempt Wallace’s and Lingo’s arguments while devising a proposal within a very short window of time. Hosea solicited the assistance of Attorneys Jack Greenberg and James Nabrit to ensure that his proposal, which was submitted to Judge Johnson on March 17, did not break any laws, a misstep which would have been used by the defendants to halt any plans for the march and thereby bring the movement’s momentum to a halt. Over the next few days, Hosea devised a detailed logistical plan that included the dates, times, routes and the mileage that would be covered each day of the march. By all standards of measurement, he, and to some degree, other SCLC staffers, had to plan for the unpredictable actions of Governor George Wallace, the Alabama Department of Public Safety and the nameless and numberless white toughs who will invariably stalk and attempt to ambush unarmed marchers. Undaunted, he considered every conceivable, reasonable detail. He laid out the support services that would be available to the marchers: food, truck-borne washing and toilet facilities, litter and garbage pickup by truck along the route, ambulance and first-aid service, and communication services via “walkie-talkie.” Lastly, Hosea spelled out what would happen once the marchers reached the state capitol in Montgomery on the final day of the fifty-four mile trek from Selma. Hosea’s detailed plan won the approval of Judge Johnson. On March 18, 1965, at approximately 4:42 p.m., Judge Johnson signed the order declaring that the march could

proceed. Hosea’s plan called for the march to commence Sunday, March 21. On Sunday morning, March 21, exactly two weeks to the minute since Hosea had delivered his impassioned speech to congregants at Brown Chapel AME, he and a diverse group of approximately 4,000 demonstrators prepared to leave for the first-leg of the four-day march. “When it finally got started, it was pretty tame. I was so busy, I probably missed a lot,” Hosea said. The huge number of out-of-town participants strained even the best laid plans. Alexander Aldrich, chairman of the Special Cabinet Committee on Civil Rights in the administration of New York Governor, Nelson Rockefeller, painted a clear picture for posterity: “Lots and Lots of the brass, and hundreds of kids, plain folks, white and Negro,” came to support the epic protest. The fifty-four mile protest reached its climax on March 25 after more than 30,000 marchers, including two Nobel Peace Prize winners, several United States Congressmen and entertainers, made it to the Alabama State Capitol on Dexter Avenue, less than one hundred yards from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church — the only church that King pastored a decade earlier. Marchers started out that morning eight abreast, fighting to keep the lines organized until they made it to the capitol. Hosea, Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta, took the lead with Ralph and Juanita Abernathy. Marchers knew they were witnessing a historic moment in the history of the United States as they saw the stars and bars of the Confederate flag atop the dome of the capitol building—with a spot on its portico identifying where Jefferson Davis had taken his oath as the president of the Confederacy in 1861 – irony that is Williamsesque in every sense.