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Expensive Hamburgers. The demonstration spread to nearby Marion, Ala., seat of Perry County, in which Negroes outnumber whites 11,500 to 6,000, but only 300 are registered to vote. There Negroes tested the public-accommodations section of the civil rights law, entered a Marion drugstore, were served Cokes laced with salt and informed that the price of a hamburger had risen to $5. Next day 15 Negroes protesting this were arrested. This brought nearly 700 Negro students into the streets.
Boycotting classes, they marched in orderly fashion, observing traffic lights, toward the jail. There they sang civil rights songs until warned by a state trooper: "Sing one more song and you are under arrest." One of King's Alabama aides, James Orange, told the students: "Sing another song." Sing another they did; troopers arrested all 700, ordered them into school buses, sent them off to be booked.
Even while King's nonviolent strategy was working the way he wanted it to, he faced trouble from extremist Northern Negroes. While King was still in jail, New York's Black Nationalist Malcolm X visited Selma, spoke to an audience of some 500, cried: "The white man should thank God that Dr. King is holding his people in check, because there are others who don't feel that way, and there are other ways to obtain their ends." If King's tactics fail, Malcolm threatened, those "other ways" will be tried. And at week's end a group of 15 Northern and Western Congressmen visited Selma on an "inspection" trip.
Significant Breakthrough. Under the pressures already brought by King, Selma Negroes were actually beginning to make some progress in speeding the registration procedure. The county board of registration, which ordinarily sits for only two days a month, in January sat for twelve days, and on a single day last week processed 60 Negro applications—although there was no indication that any had been declared qualified to vote. Moreover, a federal judge, responding to a suit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice, decreed that Alabama's onerous 20-page voting test on government and the U.S. Constitution, aimed at disqualifying Negroes, must be discarded and that Dallas County registrars must process at least 100 applicants each day their offices are open.
With the breakthrough under his belt and his cause dramatized before the world, Martin Luther King finally paid his $200 bond, emerged from jail to propose a meeting with President Johnson in which he would urge that federal registrars replace local officials to assure racial equality in voting registration throughout the South.
Despite their gains, Negroes continued to protest. Another 525, including 450 children, were arrested in Selma at week's end. And King announced that his drive would continue there and would spread to such other Alabama cities as Montgomery, Gadsden, Anniston, Tuscaloosa and Dothan.
-As of then, only 335 of the 32,700 Negroes in Dallas County, of which Selma is the county seat, were registered to vote.