Renata Adler on the March to Montgomery

This Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, consider reading Renata Adler’s “Letter from Selma,” from April 10, 1965, about the march from Selma to Montgomery. It’s a fascinating, revealing, and inspiring piece of reporting.

Adler resists the impulse to write about the march as myth. Instead, she shows how things are a little disorganized. At the kick-off in Selma, the speakers don’t speak loud enough. (“An irreverent, irritated voice with a Bronx accent shouted, ‘Would you mind please talking a little louder!’”) At camp the first night, there aren’t enough sleeping bags. The next day, when the marchers shout “What do you want?” to African-Americans on the roadside, the bystanders smile, but don’t respond with the expected call—“Freedom!” The marchers, one man says, are “ordinary, garden-variety civilians,” and many of them, Adler finds, aren’t sure exactly what they hope to accomplish by marching. And yet, out of this ordinariness, and with every step, the march gathers force and meaning, and by the time they arrive in Montgomery, the marchers know they’ve done something extraordinary. “You’re only likely to see three great parades in a lifetime,” the lawyer John Doar says to a student walking next to him, “and this is one of them.”

King himself appears mainly on the margins of Adler’s piece, and he’s seen, largely, through the same lens as everyone else. Many marchers, she writes, speak about King “half in joking and half in reverent tones (most of them referred to him conversationally as ‘De Lawd’).” While King marches at the front of the procession, his friend, the Reverend Morris H. Tynes, makes fun of him. (“Moses, can you let your people rest for a minute? … Can you just let the homiletic smoke from your cigarette drift out of your mouth and engulf the multitude and let them rest?”) And in Montgomery, when King gives a speech, the crowd, composed, in great part, of young people, is irreverent and snarky—at first:

Finally, after an extravagant introduction by Mr. Abernathy, who referred to Dr. King as “conceived by God” (“This personality cult is getting out of hand,” said a college student, and, to judge by the apathetic reception of Mr. Abernathy’s words, the crowd agreed), Dr. King himself spoke. There were some enthusiastic yells of “Speak! Speak!” and “Yessir! Yessir!” from the older members of the audience when Dr. King’s speech began, but at first the younger members were subdued. Gradually, the whole crowd began to be stirred. By the time he reached his refrains—“Let us march on the ballot boxes. … We’re on the move now. … How long? Not long”—and the final, ringing “Glory, glory, hallelujah!,” the crowd was with him all the way.

Adler’s “Letter from Selma” is unlocked for everyone and available in full in our archive. And, for more on Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil-rights struggle, you can read Calvin Trillin and Freeman Dyson on the March on Washington, and Erin Overbey on Trillin’s civil-rights coverage.

Photograph by Bettmann/Corbis.