At Canaan's Edge by Taylor Branch Page A

him.
    Hastily, they reviewed contingencies of nonviolent practice for the volunteers assembled in Brown Chapel. If stopped, they would sit in prayer until arrested or tear-gassed, which would provide ample ground to seek relief in federal court. Young told reporters that King decided to stay in Atlanta once Governor Wallace announced his intention to block the march, the better to seek political support in the North. Lewis read a statement about why they were marching. He carried a backpack stocked haphazardly for a short trip to jail, with an apple, an orange, a toothbrush, and a copy of American Political Traditions. After a final chorus of “God Will Take Care of You,” Lewis and Hosea Williams led the way from Brown Chapel at 1:40 P.M. Sunday—only to run into a glowering Wilson Baker, who, having resigned and un-resigned that morning in renewed infighting among segregationists, required them to abide by every scintilla of the parade ordinances until he could bid them good riddance from his jurisdiction. The marchers repaired to the playground of Carver Homes for an anticlimactic interval to form roughly twenty-four squads of twenty-five, each with a staff person to maintain proper spacing, and they stepped off again two abreast at 2:18 P.M. , followed by a vehicular train that reflected their meager expectation of reaching outdoor bivouac: a flatbed truck with four portable toilets, two ambulances for the medical committee volunteers, and three borrowed hearses for supplies.

    S QUADS CLOSED ranks as the march line turned out of Selma as never before, climbing on the left sidewalk up the long slope of an empty Pettus Bridge. Police officers held up the ambulances and hearses, saying the roadway was closed to traffic, and a state administrator served notice that the out-of-state volunteers were not licensed to dispense medical care in Alabama. Diane Nash, patrolling the rear of the march line for stragglers, was drawn into a dispute over the legal status of Red Cross armbands and the meaning of “emergency treatment” in one section of the state code, but the support vehicles remained stranded as the front of the line reached the overarching steel girders at the crest of the bridge, nearly a hundred feet above river waters that were choppy from the crisp March winds.
    Down the bridge before Lewis and Williams opened a vista of forbidding reception. In the middle distance, a wall of trooper cruisers blocked all four lanes of Highway 80. Closer, a reserve of some 150 troopers, sheriff’s deputies, and possemen mingled behind a front line of twenty-five troopers about two hundred yards beyond the foot of the bridge—the possemen in khaki jackets and white helmets, fifteen of them mounted on horseback, the troopers in blue uniforms and blue helmets. Scores of white spectators jammed the parking lot of “Chicken Treat, Home of the Mickey Burger,” some standing on parked cars, across the highway from several dozen Negroes who gathered cautiously behind an old school bus. Near the front line, outside the showroom of Lehman Pontiac, troopers guarded an observation area reserved for journalists and several of the twenty FBI observers scattered around Selma.
    With the march line sighted on the bridge, a buzz about rumors and source reports died down in the observation area. FBI communications were sifting two death threats out of Chicago alone, one falsely claiming that a hired gunman spotted King in Selma. A television correspondent who knew better took King’s absence as confirmation of his political soundings on “some sort of power struggle” behind the scenes, in which the more militant SNCC students reportedly had imposed the Sunday march upon an unwilling King. At least one network camera operator, without knowing that SNCC’s executive committee actually was renouncing the march as King’s folly, * adapted in his own pragmatic way to the volatile confusion of