Ibn Rushd was born in 1126CE in Cordova, Spain, into a well-connected family of jurists and theologians. His grandfather and father both held the office of chief judge (qadi) of Cordova under the then ruling Almoravids dynasty (a position which Averroes would later occupy). His education, though in a sense orthodox for a Muslim male, was by our standards eclectic: Qur’anic exegesis, the Hadith, jurisprudence (Fiqh), scholastic philosophy, mathematics and linguistics were all studied, and became part of his intellectual armory. Moreover, under the tutelage of Abu Jafar Harun, Ibn Rushd attained a proficiency in medicine, which eventually enabled him to become the royal physician to the Almohad caliphs Abu Yaqub Yusuf and Abu Yusuf Yaqub. Indeed, such were his abilities in this field that his book Generalities (Kulliyat) was perhaps the most significant general medical text in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic worlds for several hundred years after his death.

It was Ibn Rushd’s connections within the royal court that led him by happenstance to the most significant body of work of his life. He had been introduced to the caliph, Abu Yaqub, by his mentor Ibn Tufayl, who at that time was the court physician. The story has it that the caliph thoroughly unnerved the young philosopher by asking him whether the heavens were created or not. This seems an innocuous enough enquiry, but  it was the kind of question that could get a Muslim philosopher into trouble. The difficulty is that a negative response potentially places a limit on the power of God, whereas an affirmative response runs the danger of anthropomorphising him. The caliph, a keen philosopher himself, spared Ibn Rushd’s blushes by answering his own question, and then engaging in a long discussion of the issues surrounding it. Shortly afterwards, Ibn Rushd received word that the caliph believed the works of Aristotle to be disjointed, rather obscure, and therefore likely to confuse people. The solution was simple – Ibn Rushd should write commentaries on them.

Twenty-six years later, Ibn Rushd completed this task (as far as it was possible). Based on Arabic translations, the commentaries took three different forms. The shortest (Jami) were simple summaries, suitable for anybody who wanted just a flavour of the work. The intermediate commentaries (Talkhis) were appropriate for normal studies. And then there were the Tasfir – detailed analyses of Aristotle’s work, incorporating  Qur’anic concepts, which were suitable for advanced study. Ibn Rushd did not have access to Aristotle’s Politics, so instead he commented on Plato’s Republic, arguing that the original Islamic community was equivalent to Plato’s ideal state.

According to Oliver Leaman, a leading scholar of Islamic and Judaic philosophy, the most impressive aspect of these commentaries is that Ibn Rushd was able to resurrect Aristotle’s original arguments by ridding them of the Neoplatonist baggage they had gained over time. His technique was to approach the texts as though they were new, and then to reconstruct their arguments on authentically Aristotelian lines. Leaman argues that although Ibn Rushd was not always successful, and though he was not shy about adding his own comments to the text, his work on Aristotle remains impressive. Certainly his commentaries helped to spark a revival of interest in Aristotle in the Judeo-Christian world, where they retained their influence for several centuries after his death.

Although Ibn Rushd enjoyed the protection of royal patronage, he was not entirely able to avoid the unpleasantness that inevitably occurs when religious orthodoxy runs up against intellectual freedom. In 1195, at the age of seventy, with the Almohad caliph under pressure to do something about  the liberalising tendencies within Islamic society, he was formally exiled from Cordova, his writings were banned, and his books burned. Though quickly back in favour, and allowed to return home, he did not live much longer, and questions about his orthodoxy persisted. Indeed, his influence in the Muslim world quickly declined after his death, as Islam embarked on a path which all but extinguished the sort of intellectual life that bred philosophers as great as al-Farabi (Alpharabius), Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd himself.

The tension between philosophy and religion that characterised this era found perfect expression in the dispute that formed the basis of Ibn Rushd’s most important work of original philosophy, The Incoherence of Incoherence (Tuhafut al-Tuhafut). This is a defence of philosophical reason against its critics. Its specific target was the Islamic theologian and mystic al-Ghazali (Algazel), who had written The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahafut al-Falasifa), in which he attacked philosophy, and in particular the work of Ibn Sina, for being self-contradictory and un-Islamic.

Al-Ghazali’s attack was multidimensional – commentators have identified at least seventeen different points of contention – but perhaps the most interesting issues have to do with God as a freely acting agent able to intervene in the world in any way that he chooses. Consider, for example, the question that caliph Abu Yaqub posed to the young Ibn Rushd – are the heavens created? The Islamic philosophers who were the focus of al-Ghazali’s ire had tended to argue that they were not. Ibn Sina’s view, for instance, was “emanationist”: he claimed that the universe was not created ex nihilo at a particular moment in time, but rather that it exists out of necessity, emanating in manifold forms from God’s divine nature. Or to put this differently, God is the divine One, the pure intellect upon which all reality is founded, and to which it is connected by logical relations.

Obviously, this is a highly esoteric conception of God, and to the uninitiated likely it makes little sense, but certainly it didn’t please al-Ghazali. It is easy to see why – it seems to do away with God as a free agent. Al-Ghazali ‘s response to all this was to argue that the Qur’an is quite clear that the universe was created by God. If God is an agent, able to act according to his own will, then it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that he created the world ex nihilio, and that he could eliminate it again should he so choose. In effect, then, al-Ghazali defends a particular conception of divine agency: God is all-powerful, therefore, he can act to create and destroy worlds.

Ibn Rushd’s critique of al-Ghazali’s view of divine agency is exemplary in terms of the kinds of argumentative techniques that he employed. He argued that al-Ghazali goes wrong by mixing up the temporal and the eternal. It is quite reasonable to suppose that temporal beings (i.e., humans)  can decide to embark upon some course of action, then delay doing so, then begin, then stop, and then start again, but it doesn’t work that way for God. Consider, for example, what follows from God’s omniscience and omnipotence: God will always know the best arrangement for the universe, and he will always be able to instantiate it, so it doesn’t make sense to think that he might choose not to instantiate it at a particular moment in time. To put this another way, there is nothing internal nor external to his nature that might lead him to delay the moment of creation. Indeed, it isn’t clear that there will even be different moments in time for God, especially if one thinks that God is present across all times.

Similar kinds of difficulties afflict al-Ghazali’s position if one reflects upon God’s perfection. God is eternal and unchanging. This makes it problematic to suppose that he has desires that he might act upon in the same way that human beings have desires which they act upon. The idea of desire suggests some kind of perturbation in God’s nature, which is then annulled when the desire is fulfilled. But this makes no sense, since it implies a change in God’s nature – and as we have seen God’s nature is eternal and unchanging. It seems to follows then that God’s acts must simply be a manifestation of his nature, and that they are not willed in the same way that human beings will their acts.

It is easy to see why this kind of argument might get an Islamic philosopher into trouble. As al-Ghazali suggested, it does seem to do away with God’s agency – his freedom to choose. Although Ibn Rushd denied this particular criticism, he was aware that there was a general issue about the impact of philosophical arguments on less sophisticated believers. In his work Decisive Treatise (Fasl al-maqal), he argued that it is clear from the Qur’an that there is an obligation to attempt to understand the world through the study of philosophy:

That the Law summons to reflection on beings, and the pursuit of knowledge about them, by the intellect is clear from several verses of the Book of God, Blessed and Exalted, such as the saying of the Exalted, “Reflect, you have vision:” this is textual authority for the obligation to use intellectual reasoning, or a combination of intellectual and legal reasoning. Another example is His saying, “Have they not studied the kingdom of the heavens and the earth, and whatever things God has created?”: this is a text urging the study of the totality of beings.

However, Ibn Rushd did not think that the arguments of philosophers were suitable for general consumption. In particular, where philosophy leads to conclusions that conflict with the apparent meaning of scripture, then it should be kept from the ordinary masses. He was quite clear that there could be no real conflict between philosophical truth and scripture – any disagreement simply meant that an allegorical reading of scripture was required. This had long been accepted as a legitimate way of proceeding by the Muslim community, which meant that al-Ghazali, and the other critics of philosophy, were wrong to claim that philosophers were indulging in unbelief when they questioned doctrines such as the creation of the universe or bodily resurrection. Nevertheless, Ibn Rushd did believe that in order to serve the end of the collective well-being of the Muslim community, it was necessary for teachers to modify their arguments depending on the audience they were addressing. To attempt to teach the ordinary faithful about a higher interpretation of scripture when they do not have the conceptual apparatus to understand it almost inevitably harms their faith, and thereby affects the happiness of the community as a whole. Philosophical enquiry is sanctioned by God, but it requires the kinds of talent and rigorous training that necessarily means it will be suited only to a minority of people.

Ibn Rushd’s philosophical arguments on religious matters were not entirely defensive. He also developed a number of arguments in favour of the existence of God, contending that the fact that the world fits so neatly with the purposes of human beings, and the fact that all living things are clearly the work of a designer, is proof of God’s reality. And, as we have seen, he wrote influentially on non-religious matters. However, even if it ultimately failed, it is for his defence of philosophical reason, which he mounted in the face of considerable opposition, that he is rightly celebrated.

Burke was born to a Protestant father and Catholic mother in Ireland in 1729. Raised as a protestant, he excelled at school, passing entrance examinations to Trinity College, Dublin in 1746. After graduating, he moved to London, where he studied law at Temple’s Inn. However, he was more interested in the world of letters than the legal profession, and after the publication of his satirical A Vindication of Natural Society,  and then a year later a philosophical study of aesthetics titled A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, he became thoroughly immersed in London literary life (which at that time boasted Samuel Johnson, David Garrick and Oliver Goldsmith amongst its numbers).

Burke’s specifically political career took off after he was elected to the House of Commons in 1765. It was during his nearly thirty years as a parliamentarian that he produced the work that is the bedrock of his reputation  As well as the Reflections, he wrote significant treatises on the American colonies, the India question, Catholic emancipation, the English constitution, and the threat to religion from the new atheism. However, his reputation amongst his contemporaries rested on more than just his written work. He was also a formidable orator and statesman – never quite making it to the top of the greasy pole, but still able to command the attention of the House of Commons right up until three years before his death in 1797.

His conservatism was rooted in a deeply ingrained suspicion of any radical politics that was based on abstract principles derived solely from the operations of reason; or as he put it, on an “insuperable reluctance to destroy any established system of government, upon a theory.” There is a basic idea here that is quite straightforward: Society is complex, and human nature unpredictable; therefore, it is not prudent to mess around with political and social arrangements that have stood the test of time. The reason why this became an issue during the 18th Century was that Enlightenment thinkers were arguing precisely that it was possible to reform society on the basis of a priori conceptions of natural rights, such as liberty and equality.

The Unitarian dissenting minister, Richard Price, for example, whose sermon “On the Love of Our Country” motivated Burke to write the Reflections, greeted the French revolution, which ostensibly instantiated Enlightenment principles, by declaring that he could now “depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation.” For Price, salvation here meant “a progressive improvement in human affairs which will terminate in greater degrees of light and virtue and happiness than have yet been known” – the world, he thought, was “outgrowing its evils … anti-Christ falling and the millennium hastening.”

Burke had no truck with the unbounded optimism of this view of the situation in France. In the Reflections, he contrasted the French revolution with the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 where William of Orange marched on London unopposed to replace the Catholic James II. The situation in England required a revolution in order to return government to a condition that was in line with the traditions of which it was a part. The French revolution, in contrast, aimed simply to slough off the past. It was an attempt at a root and branch reconstruction of society on the basis of an abstract philosophy of natural rights. There was no recognition of the importance of tradition, custom and sentiment. It was, Burke argued, bound to end in bloody failure.

Part of Burke’s scepticism about the proposition that a priori rational reflection might successfully be articulated to the service of radical social reform has to do with the central and necessary importance of specific social and historical circumstances. Consider, for example, the claim that liberty is a good thing. On its own, it is almost meaningless:

Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect…Is it because liberty, in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to felicitate a madman, who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty? Am I to congratulate an highwayman and murderer, who has broke prison, upon the recovery of his natural rights? (Reflections on the Revolution in France)

Burke’s view was that it was simply too risky to allow natural rights to trump an established system of government. Moreover, the shared traditions, beliefs and habits of a nation, instantiated and passed on through extant institutions, function to secure the benefits that have been hard won by previous generations.

By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of providence, are handed down to us, and from us, in the same course and order. Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world… (Reflections)

Burke’s rejection of Enlightenment talk of natural rights, though, is fuelled by more than just a pragmatic, cautionary sensibility. It is also linked to a particular conception of human nature. The Enlightenment philosophers tended to think that human beings, certainly in the absence of the corrupting effect of modern society, are systematically capable of rationality, fellow-feeling and benevolence. Thus, for example, Rousseau argued that in a state of nature humans are “noble savages”, who live solitary and peaceful existences.

Burke’s view was radically different, having much more in common with Augustine and Hobbes than with the Philosophes. He believed that human beings are fallen, corrupt, and capable of great evil if the civilizing veneer of established institutions is removed. In the absence of the constraints imposed by tradition, prejudice and habit, humans are little more than the “shriveled, meager, hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour.” Thus:

Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individual, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will be controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can only be done by a power outside of themselves. (Reflections)

Of course, the trouble is that it is all too easy to forfeit the hard won civilising effect of the state and civil society. It cannot be conjured up de novo, and then recreated time and again, simply by an appeal to abstract principles and talk of natural rights. The consequence of thinking that unfettered freedom is freedom in toto is precisely the kind of Jacobin excesses that occurred in the French revolution. In the Reflections, this idea finds its most famous expression in the passage dealing with an attack on Marie Antoinette:

…the queen was first startled by the voice of the sentinel at her door, who cried out to her to save herself by flight – that this was the last proof of fidelity he could give – that they were upon him, and he was dead. Instantly he was cut down. A band of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with his blood, rushed into the chamber of the queen, and pierced with a hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed, from whence the persecuted woman had but just time to fly almost naked… (Reflections)

It might be true then that the lives of men at the end of the 18th century were no longer “nasty, short and brutish”, but it was Burke’s view that one sure way to return them to that state was to tear down the structures of established government in the name of a reassertion of natural rights.

Not surprisingly, the reaction to the publication of Burkes’ Reflections was mixed. The Establishment, it hardly needs to be said, loved it. Radicals were not so keen. Its weakness is obvious: in defending established the status quo, it seems to justify the iniquities that are perpetrated in its name. As Mary Wollstonecraft pointed out, it’s a bit rich getting worked up about the fate of the Queen of France, if you don’t appear to care a jot for the multitude of mothers who cannot afford to feed their babies.

But there is something rather striking about the Reflections that is worth commenting upon: Burke largely got it right about the French revolution. As Conor Cruise O’Brien has pointed out, many people assume that he wrote his polemic after the Jacobin terror had accounted for the deaths of countless thousands of French people. But, in fact, Burke foresaw the “transmigrations, fire and blood”:

…the September Massacres, the Terror, the executions of the King and Queen – those events all lay in the future. And yet there is a sense in which those events are already present in the Reflections. They are present in the sense that the ferocious dynamic which Burke ascribes to the Revolution, even in 1790, became visible to the world through those events of 1792-94. (National Review, Dec 17, 1990)

It is important to remember that Burke was not an unsophisticated thinker. As we have seen, his conservatism was motivated by a distrust of abstract principles, and a belief that it is necessary to pay attention to history and circumstance. This means that his political views are much less predictable than a straightforward understanding of conservatism might suggest. For example, the position he took on the events leading up to the American revolution was a lot more nuanced than might be supposed. He did not think that Britain should adopt an aggressive policy towards the wayward colonists. Rather, in a feted parliamentary speech, he urged that Britain should make concessions in order to secure the loyalty of America. History and experience suggested that force wouldn’t work, so whatever might be felt about the right of Britain to levy unpopular taxes, for example, the only sensible course of action was compromise.

Edmund Burke was not a systematic philosopher (indeed some commentators go so far as to claim that he was not a philosopher at all). Rather, like his contemporary Thomas Paine, he was a political thinker who sought to influence the course of social and political events through his writing. Even if ultimately unsuccessful in this way, it is certainly the case that Burke’s ideas have informed the thoughts of successive generations of political theorists. His arguments against the French revolution now seem a little extreme; but the ideas that motivated them retain their significance, and form part of the armoury of many a conservative thinker.

This essay originally appeared in the Independent newspaper as part of their Great Philosophers series.

[W]e have the happiness of making known to the British public, and hence to the whole civilized world, recent discoveries in Astronomy which will build an imperishable monument to the age in which we live, and confer upon the present generation of the human race a proud distinction through all future time.

These recent discoveries were nothing as mundane as a new planet or star. Rather, the article began by describing the how Sir John Herschel, the eminent English mathematician and astronomer, had developed a new telescope by means of which he was able to see things as clearly in space as it is possible to see them on Earth. Lots of technical detail followed about its construction and deployment, and then came the bombshell: The Moon is teaming with life.

Not just vegetation, though there is plenty of that, including forests, dark red flowers, lichen, and the like. But also many species of animals and birds: bison; mountain-top unicorns; pelicans; white stags; miniature zebra; hut-dwelling, bipedal beavers; and the most spectacular discovery of all, a race of furry, winged men:

We counted three parties of these creatures, of twelve, nine, and fifteen in each, walking erect towards a small wood…They were like human beings, for their wings had now disappeared, and their attitude in walking was both erect and dignified…They averaged four feet in height, were covered, except on the face, with short and glossy copper-colored hair, and had wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly upon their backs, from the top of their shoulders to the calves of their legs.

The New York Sun went on to reveal that Vespertilio-homo, as Herschel had named these creatures, were rational, good tempered, able to engage in conversation, and were capable of producing works of art. Unfortunately, further revelations about the moon and its inhabitants were ruled out after Herschel’s telescope suffered a sudden and terminal breakdown (after it was pointed towards the Sun).

All this was of course an elaborate hoax. It is generally accepted that it was the work of Richard Adams Locke, a reporter working for the Sun at the time, who had been educated at Cambridge University. However, perhaps not surprisingly, it seems that many people were taken in by the story. The Sun’s circulation increased rapidly from about 15,000 people on the morning of the first article to 19,000 on the day that the winged-men were announced (though it should be said that there is some dispute about this).

A journalist later reported that

Yale College was alive with staunch supporters. The literati…looked daily for the arrival of the New York mail with unexampled avidity and implicit faith. It was the absorbing topic of the day. Nobody expressed or entertained a doubt as to the truth of the story. (Cited at the Museum of Hoaxes)

Edgar Allen Poe, it is said, stopped working on a follow-up to his The Unparalleled Adventure Of One Hans Pfaall because he felt he could not match Herschel’s moon discoveries. And a missionary society from Springfield, Massachusetts decided to send a group of missionaries to the moon in order to bring Christianity and civilisation to the Vespertilio.

However, not everybody was so credulous. The New York Commercial Advertiser, for example, said of the hoax that it was ‘well done’, but that it was simply unbelievable that such a telescope could have been constructed, especially without anybody noticing or passing comment on it. And the New York Herald openly accused Locke as being the author of the hoax. The New York Sun, for its part, never publicly admitted that the story was false, saying only that it would have to check with English and Scottish newspapers before coming to that conclusion. Nevertheless, the whole event has gone down in history as the first, and perhaps greatest, American journalistic hoax.

Sir John Herschel, when he first heard of the story, was amused, declaring that his own observations were never that exciting. However, he eventually became irritated by the whole affair. It seems that people who continued to take the story seriously never stopped asking him about it.

Alabama police attack Selma marchers

Sheyann Webb still has nightmares about the masked horsemen who thundered across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on the afternoon of March 7th 1965. ‘I was terrified,’ she later told Frank Sikora. ‘I saw the horsemen coming toward me and they had those awful masks on…Some of them had clubs, others had ropes or whips, which they swung about them like they were driving cattle… People were running and falling and ducking… I never got hit, but one of the horses went right by me and I heard the swish sound as the whip went over my head and cracked some man across the back. It seemed to take forever to get across the bridge.’

Sheyann Webb, in 1965 only eight years old, had been part of a peaceful, six-hundred strong protest march when the horsemen attacked. The mayhem and violence that followed, broadcast across the United States and around the world, marked a turning point in the civil rights struggle of African-Americans.

Background

The events of ‘Bloody Sunday’, as this day has come to be known, had their roots in the racism and segregation practices of the American South. It is easy to forget just how entrenched racism was in the former Confederate states. Although slavery had been abolished in 1865 by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, the Southern states had quickly introduced new laws – the Jim Crow laws – that had legalised discrimination and segregation. Between 1870 and 1884, for example, eleven Southern states enacted legislation that prohibited interracial marriages, and soon afterwards laws appeared formalising segregation practices in the areas of schooling, transport, public accommodation and recreation.

The racism of the American South was also manifest in a general atmosphere of violence and intimidation. The lynching of African-Americans was common right up until the Second World War, often occurring with the tacit approval of local authorities. In Waco, Texas, for example, Jesse Washington, an illiterate 17-year-old, who had been convicted of raping and killing a white woman, was mutilated and burned alive in 1916 by a cheering mob that reportedly included the mayor and chief of police. Moreover, Blacks could be lynched without being suspected of any crime at all. Merely offending ‘racial etiquette’ – maybe flirting with a white woman, or talking out of turn – could be enough to incur the wrath of a lynch mob. Perhaps most notoriously, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black boy from Chicago, was tortured and killed near Money, Mississippi in 1955 by two local men, J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant. His ‘crime’ had been to make mildly sexual advances towards the latter’s wife, an offence against local custom, which, in the eyes of his killers – and presumably also the all-white jury that acquitted them (despite their later confessions) – merited the severest retribution.

Segregation, violence and intimidation, then, were part of everyday life for African-Americans living in the American South in the first half of the twentieth century. The civil rights movement, which exploded onto the scene in the 1950s, sought to bring this to an end. Between the years of 1954 and 1965, employing a variety of tactics including demonstrations and marches, sit-ins, and freedom rides, the movement achieved a number of notable victories in stripping away the legal basis of segregation and discrimination. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, for example, prohibited racial discrimination in all places of public accommodation, including theatres, cinemas and concert halls. However, at the start of 1965, there was still one area where very little progress had been made; namely, voter registration.

In a democratic country, the ability to take part in elections is a prerequisite of political power and representation. Therefore, to the extent that Southern blacks were excluded from the political process, their drive for equal rights was necessarily compromised. It is easy to understand then why it was a concern to civil rights activists that in states such as Mississippi and Alabama voter registration amongst African-Americans ran at less than 15% of eligible voters. It was this issue that saw Selma, Alabama move to centre stage of the civil rights story.

Selma

In early 1963, there were 15,000 African-Americans of voting age in Selma, yet only 156 of them had registered to vote. There were two main reasons for this. First, many black people did not consider voting to be something that properly concerned them. In his great civil rights history Eyes on the Prize, Juan Williams reports that one elderly woman greeted a voter registration drive in Selma by claiming that she didn’t have ‘enough mind’ to vote. Second, and more significantly, Selma’s blacks experienced violence, intimidation and obstruction if they attempted to get themselves onto the ballot. There was nothing unusual about Selma in this regard. African-Americans in the South had faced danger and difficulty in registering to vote for nearly as long as slavery had been abolished. Many Southern states employed literacy tests that were almost impossible to pass to ensure that even those potential black voters prepared to run the gauntlet of white violence did not end up on the voters register.

However, there was something about Selma in the early 1960s that made it particularly attractive to civil rights activists. Its sheriff, Jim Clark, an unreconstructed bigot and segregationist, could be relied upon to react violently and intemperately to any attempt to organise a voter registration drive. Therefore, Selma offered the possibility of national publicity for the campaign to end discrimination in voting rights. This fitted nicely with the strategy of civil rights organisations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which relied on forcing politicians to legislate by provoking confrontations with local authority that demonstrated the iniquity of systematic racial discrimination.

The SNCC, in particular, had early success in Selma with this strategy. In October 1963, it organised a ‘Freedom Day’, which saw some 250 blacks queuing outside the courthouse in order to register to vote. They were there for only three hours before they were attacked by Sheriff Clark’s deputies after two SNCC workers had tried to hand out sandwiches to the assembled crowd. However, although news of this and other incidents reached Washington, there was little progress during 1964 on legislation that would guarantee the right of blacks to vote. Consequently, in January 1965, Martin Luther King and the SCLC decided to make Selma the focus of a concerted campaign for equal voting rights. “We will seek to arouse the federal government by marching by the thousands to the places of registration,’ King declared from the pulpit of Selma’s Brown Chapel. ‘When we get the right to vote, we will send to the statehouse not men who will stand in the doorways of universities to keep Negroes out, but men who will uphold the cause of Justice. Give us the ballot.’

Their campaign enjoyed almost immediate success. On January 19th, King led some 250 marchers to Selma’s courthouse, with the intention of provoking a confrontation with Sheriff Clark. It worked perfectly. Clark lost his temper after the demonstrators had refused to be corralled in an alley. Amelia Boynton later described what happened:

Clark had a big club in his hand, and he yelled to me, ‘Where are you going?…’ Before I could gather my wits, he had left the steps and jumped behind me, grabbed me by my coat, propelled me around and started shoving me down the street. I was stunned….I said, ‘I hope the newspapers see you acting this role.’ He said: ‘Dammit, I hope they do.’

 Sheyann Webb, who two months later was to be scared witless by the masked horseman on Edmund Pettus Bridge, relates what happened next.

We had been there for twenty or thirty minutes, standing, talking, singing a few songs, when I heard this disturbance toward the front. Then folks began shouting and crying out; I saw the sheriff with a hand behind the neck of Mrs. Amelia Boynton, running with her and hollering.

By arresting Boynton in full view of the media, Clark had played straight into the protestors’ hands. The incident made it into the national newspapers, with both the New York Times and the Washington Post running illustrated stories about it. Over the next six weeks the civil rights movement kept up the pressure in Selma with more marches, which led to more arrests, and more publicity. Perhaps the most surreal incident occurred on February 3rd when some 300 high school students marched on the Selma courthouse, where they were arrested en masse.

Not surprisingly, the federal authorities were by this time becoming interested in Selma. In early February, President Johnson gave public support to the demand for equal voting rights, insisting that every American ‘should be concerned with the efforts of our fellow Americans to register to vote in Alabama’. For moderate whites, there were extrinsic, as well as intrinsic, reasons for heeding Johnson’s call. The events in Selma were disastrous for America’s reputation abroad and damaging to the political and economic prospects of the South. For African-Americans and civil rights activists, of course, it was a much more personal battle.

‘There’s no aspect of my life that wasn’t affected,’ says Jean Wiley about her involvement in the Southern Freedom Struggle. ‘It wasn’t an episode, it was a way of life and a way of viewing life and living life. Living my beliefs. It affects everything.’

It was a struggle for which many people gave their lives, including Jimmie Lee Jackson, whose killing late in February brought matters to a head in Selma, and led to the protest march on March 7th. Jackson had been part of a demonstration in nearby Marion that was attacked by state troopers. His mother and grandfather had been assaulted, and he had gone to help them, when he was shot in the stomach by a state trooper. On February 26th, at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Selma, he died of his injuries. At his funeral, the Reverend Jim Bevel suggested that ‘it would be fitting to take Jimmie Lee’s body and march it all the way to the state capitol in Montgomery’. Marion civil rights leader Albert Turner agreed:

[W]e wanted to carry Jimmie’s body to George Wallace and dump it on the steps of the Capitol. We had decided that we were going to get killed or we was going to be free.

Bloody Sunday

On the morning of March 7th 1965, Sheyann Webb, Martin Luther King’s ‘Smallest Freedom Fighter’, was woken by the sound of car horns and shouting. Albert Turner had arrived with 300 people from Perry County, Alabama in readiness for the march to Montgomery. Sheyann was determined to join the protest, despite her young age and her mother’s reservations:

She had sat up with me the night before, telling me that if I didn’t feel well I didn’t have to march. In fact, she was hoping I wouldn’t. But…I knew I belonged there with the people. It was important that I try to go with them to Montgomery in hopes of seeing Governor Wallace and telling him we wanted the right to vote, the right to be free.

Sheyann got her wish. Just before 2.00pm that afternoon she set out with 600 fellow marchers, led by SCLC’s Hosea Williams and SNCC chairman John Lewis, towards Broad Street and the Edmund Pettus Bridge. At first they were surprised that Sheriff Clark’s men were nowhere to be seen. However, as they reached the centre of the bridge, they saw a line of Alabama state troopers, helmeted and carrying clubs, waiting for them on the other side. ‘They were wearing blue helmets, blue jackets, and they carried clubs in their hands; they had those gas-mask pouches slung across their shoulders,’ Sheyann later recalled.

As soon as they had reached the troopers, the marchers were ordered to disperse and to return to Brown Chapel. They refused to comply, and there followed a short standoff, which ended when Major John Cloud gave the order for his men to break-up the march. The troopers moved into the protestors, clubbing John Lewis to the ground, and then setting about the mass of the crowd.

‘I heard all this screaming and the people were turning and I saw this first part of the line running and stumbling back toward us,’ remembers Sheyann Webb. ‘They came running and some of them were crying out and somebody yelled, “Oh, God, they’re killing us!” I think I just froze then.’ The troopers fired tear gas, and then the masked horsemen of Sheyann’s nightmares charged.

‘The horses…were more humane than the troopers; they stepped over fallen victims,’ Amelia Boynton later recalled. ‘As I stepped aside from a troopers club, I felt a blow on my arm…Another blow by a trooper, as I was gasping for breath, knocked me to the ground and there I lay, unconscious…’.

The marchers had no chance; bruised and bleeding, they retreated under the police assault back into Selma. Many of the activists who were not hospitalised or otherwise incapacitated headed for Brown Chapel.

Rachel West, Sheyann’s young friend, relates what she witnessed there in the aftermath of the attack:

[T]he faces of the people. They were like masks. Some of them were still crying, but they all just sat there staring to the front. I had never seen such looks before…And everything was so quiet. The only sound was the sobbing. We had really been hurt…There had never been a time like this. Nobody was praying, nobody was singing.

But then almost miraculously, the atmosphere changed. Sheyann Webb takes up the story:

[A]ll of a sudden somebody there started humming. I think they were moaning and it just went into the humming of a freedom song…At first I didn’t even know what it was, what song, I mean. It was like a funeral sound, a dirge. Then I recognized it – Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round…it just started to catch on, and the people began to pick it up. It started to swell, the humming. We was singing and telling the world that we hadn’t been whipped, that we had won.

Just all of a sudden something happened that night and we knew in that church that – Lord Almighty – we had really won, after all. We had won!

Aftermath

And they had. The events of that afternoon, caught on television for the whole world to see, outraged public opinion. The clamour for equal voting rights became irresistible. Just a week later President Johnson announced that he would be sending a comprehensive Voting Rights Bill to Congress for approval. And on March 21st, under the protection of federal forces, Martin Luther King led a triumphant march of 4000 people out of Selma, and on the road towards Montgomery. It took them four days to reach the State Capitol, by which time the march had swelled in size until it numbered 25,000 people. In Montgomery, King gave one of the great speeches of his life, promising the assembled throng that black people were on the road to freedom.

Footnote

1. Many of the direct quotes in this article are from Selma, Lord, Selma: Girlhood Memories of the Civil-Rights Days by Frank Sikora, Sheyann Web & Rachel West Nelson.

©2009, Jeremy Stangroom.