1King used these words for dramatic effect in an advertisement appealing to “all decent Americans” for financial support for the SCLC’s efforts. See The New York Times, Feb. 5, 1965, p. 15. He used similar words in a commentary widely circulated in black newspapers. See "More Negroes in Jail than on Voting Rolls." New York Amsterdam News (1962-1993): 8. Feb 27 1965. ProQuest. Web.
for insisting on the right to vote, creating such a crisis that a 15-man congressional delegation traveled from Washington to survey the scene. Malcolm X came, too, just weeks before he would be assassinated in New York City.
Perhaps most significant of all who made their way to Selma were members of the press, especially reporters and cameramen from the major television networks. Their graphic accounts shocked a nation out of its willful ignorance and accelerated a drive for social and political rights that had been underway in earnest since the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-1956.
“Mass Arrests Fail to Halt Selma Drive,” the Pittsburgh Courier of Feb.13, 1965, assured its readers in a story carried on Page 4. In an editorial, the Courier demanded that President Lyndon B. Johnson take immediate action, noting: “The disgraceful spectacle of Nobel Peace Prize winner, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, sitting in jail in one of the outposts of the ‘Great Society,’ Selma, Ala., is downright immoral, a travesty on justice and reduces the Constitution of the United States to a mere scrap of paper…not to say how it dwarfs the nation’s position in the eyes of the rest of the world….Dr. King and 770 other Negroes were arrested while demonstrating against Alabama’s voter-registration requirements, which rape the Constitution and ravish the rights of free men.” What was happening in Selma was news, but not yet the major event that would rivet the nation in less than a month, forcing a Southern-born United States president to act with more speed than he had intended and to publicly embrace the cause led by a man he did not fully trust and may even have envied for his charisma and headline-grabbing prowess.
Selma had not been chosen accidently for the first major test of the new Civil Rights Act of 1964, which not only outlawed segregation in public accommodations but seemed to enfranchise blacks, too. Selma was then – and a half century later still proudly proclaims to be – The
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