Martin DyckmanAfter state troopers, sheriff’s deputies savagely attacked voting rights marchers at Selma, Ala., with clubs, tear gas and cattle prods on March 7, 1965, two great Americans rushed to the city to try to take command of the perilous situation.
One was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., determined to lead a second march – regardless of the consequences – two days later.
The other was former Florida Gov. LeRoy Collins, President Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights mediator. His mission was to delay the second march.
Collins had been one of the people listening to King’s famous “I have a dream” speech, “a tiny speck, just one person in a throng of 200,000,” but had never met the civil rights leader. Their careers intersected for the first time early on the morning of March 9, 1965.
Collins saved lives that day. But Selma would fatally wound his political career.
Television networks had relayed the “Bloody Sunday” violence to a stunned nation and an incredulous world.
King meant to lead another march, augmented this time with white people, including 450 members of the clergy, who had hastened to Selma to support him. He wasn’t willing to wait for the decision of a federal judge, Frank Johnson, on whether to protect the marchers. The judge had also forbidden a renewed march while the case was pending, and King’s plan would flout his order.
Don’t let that happen, LBJ told Collins.
Nine months earlier, the president had plucked Collins from the tenuous but well-paid presidency of the National Association of Broadcasters to head the Community Relations Service, newly created by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It meant financial sacrifice – and Collins wasn’t wealthy – but LBJ had been advised that Collins “would sacrifice anything in the world” for his country. To the person who told him that, the president chuckled, “This is not going to be the place to win any popularity contests.”
At Selma, Collins found King unyielding. King said the people would march on their own if he didn’t lead them. The troopers and deputies would be waiting again at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a legendary grand dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan.
Collins had an idea. If the marchers would go only as far as the bridge, stop and pray, and then withdraw to await the judge’s ruling, would Alabama let them come and go in peace?
Gov. George Wallace gave the word. King agreed.
But few of his followers knew of the bargain. There was mass astonishment when the prayers concluded and King did an about-face to lead them away from the bridge.
The reason was revealed in testimony in the judge’s court two days later. Most of the press hadn’t known Collins was even in town. His mission went unannounced because the law establishing his agency required it to work confidentially, forsaking publicity.
“Tears were left on the bridge that day,” Collins wrote in a memoir, “but no blood.”
But for Collins, the president told him privately, “the ditches would have been knee-deep in blood.”
Blood was shed elsewhere in Selma that night. White hoodlums attacked three Unitarian ministers as they left a black restaurant. The Rev. James M. Reeb of Boston was clubbed on the head. On word of his death, LBJ sent Collins back to Selma, but his work was still under the media’s radar.
In Washington, a few days later, the president sent a voting rights bill to Congress and addressed a joint session to advocate its passage. Collins was in the gallery with Lady Bird Johnson. It was one of the most eloquent and forceful speeches in presidential history, closing memorably with the words of the civil rights anthem, “We shall overcome.”
There remained one more mission to Selma. The march to Montgomery began again on the 21st, with the force of the federal government behind it this time. The judge had enjoined Alabama from hindering the demonstrators and federalized National Guardsmen would protect them. Collins was to negotiate the entry to Montgomery with King and the city government.
The march was in its second day when Collins caught up with the column. He parked his car by the road and walked about a mile with King, Coretta Scott King and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy while they talked of what was to happen.
Ahead of them – Collins paid it no mind – was a truck with photographers.
The Associated Press photograph was in nearly every Florida newspaper that evening and the next day. While the caption identified him as the president’s representative, it failed to explain why he was there, leaving readers to their own conclusions.
Mary Call Collins quickly reached hers. When her husband called from the Tallahassee airport that night, having found no taxis, he asked her how he might get home,
“Well,” she snapped, “you might march.”
Three years later, almost to the day, the New York Times reported that the photograph was haunting Collins’s campaign for the U.S. Senate. Spread widely through North Florida, it was instrumental in forcing him into a bitter runoff with Florida’s attorney general, Earl Faircloth. Collins won the runoff, but narrowly. It left him fatally weakened, financially and politically, for the general election campaign against Republican Ed Gurney.
Faircloth had cynically linked the peaceful march from Selma to subsequent riots elsewhere. When Faircloth was through, Gurney didn’t even need to mention Selma.
Collins never ran for political office again.
He died 23 years later – in the month of March. The state House of Representatives pronounced him “Floridian of the Century.”
Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor of the St. Petersburg Times and author of Floridian of His Century: The Courage of Governor LeRoy Collins. He lives in western North Carolina. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
