In the third week of his drive to register Negro voters in Selma, Ala., and environs, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. deliberately set out to get himself and his followers arrested. He succeedd spectacularly, spending four days in jail himself and getting nearly 3,500 others booked by Alabama's remarkably stupid law enforcement officials, who fell hook, line and sinker for his bait. Toward week's end, King was accurately able to state in a national fund-raising "Letter from a Selma, Ala., Jail" newspaper advertisement that "there are more Negroes in jail with me than there are on the voting rolls."*
During the previous two weeks of his Selma drive. King had tried to steer clear of legal violations—particularly of breaking Selma's 1963 ordinance that bans "any parade or procession or public demonstration on the streets or other public ways of the city, unless a permit therefor has been secured from the council." Thus, in sending his followers to the county courthouse to try to register, he had carefully instructed them to move in groups of four or five, keeping at least 20 ft. apart.
Pied Piper Procession. By last week King decided to employ more dramatic tactics: he led 237 Negroes on a mass march to the courthouse, ignored the admonition of Selma's public safety director, Wilson Baker, who has been desperately trying to keep peace in the strife-stricken town and who kept running out to pluck at Parade Leader King's sleeve and saying: "This is a deliberate attempt to violate the city's parade ordinance. You know the law. You've been abiding by it for two weeks. You've had plenty of time to apply for a parade permit, and you haven't done it." As the Negroes marched on, Baker ordered them all arrested.
King's arrest, as he had anticipated, swiftly led to even more jailings. Some 474 Negro children deserted their classes to protest King's arrest; they were charged with juvenile delinquency. Another 36 Negro adults were charged with contempt of court for picketing the courthouse while state circuit court was in session. Next day another 111 adults were arrested on the same charge, despite their claim that they merely wanted to see the voting registrar: nearly 400 students were also arrested, packed into buses and driven to the old Selma armory.
And so it went. One day 355 Negro students locked arms on the sidewalk outside the courthouse, rocked to and fro while singing traditional civil rights songs, changing some of the words so as to include the name of Sheriff James Clark, the particular villain in the Selma drive. "I love Jim Clark in my heart," they sang, and "Ain't gonna let Jim Clark turn me 'round." Clark placed them all under arrest, but he provided no buses. Instead, he ordered them to follow two motorcycles in a Pied Piper procession through the center of Selma to the armory, where many spent a cold night sleeping on the cement floor.