Lessons in Black History - Teachers Take a Stand

The year was 1965, and Lyndon B. Johnson had just been elected to his first full term as president of the United States. His inauguration was spectacular; an estimated 1.2 million people gathered on the Washington Mall, which was 60 times more people who had watched John F. Kennedy become president.
The war in Vietnam was a sore reality, already cutting into the legacy that LBJ would leave, even while another part of his legacy was the passage of the Civil Rights Bill into law. Although fiercely opposed, there was in America a sense of a passage traveled; people said then, as they said after Barack Obama was elected president, that the race problems of America had ended because of the bill’s passage.
People said that even as citizens and civil rights volunteers worked in the South to get black people the right to vote. The resistance to black voter registration was stubborn, unfair and violent…and persistent. People in the South objected to “outsiders” telling them what to do and how to run their states. White violence against black people trying to register was rampant and largely supported by white law enforcement officers and courts, presided over by racist judges.
In Selma, Alabama that year, African American schoolteachers decided to take a stand. Many of their young students had faced angry police officers and dogs, been burned with cattle prods, and gone to jail, fighting for the right of “grown folks” to vote. The teachers resolved that they had to support their students and the cause.
And so they arrived at Clark Elementary School, dressed in their Sunday best, according to author Taylor Branch, and marched, two by two, from the school toward the voting registrar’s office. Their action was a bold move, for not only did they face certain violence, they could have lost their jobs as well. Branch states that most of them owed their very jobs to white politicians. Nevertheless, they were moved to march, and march they did.
It was January 22 at 3:24 p.m. The teachers arrived at the registrar’s office to be told by the president of the school board that the office was closed. He also said that the teachers’ written requests to be allowed to register after classes were done had been denied. They were advised to leave.
The group’s leader, a Rev. F.D. Reese, asked if one or two teachers could be allowed to walk past the closed voting registrar’s office as a sign of their resolve to get the right to vote, but his request made the sheriff angry. Sheriff Jim Clark ordered the teachers off the premises, then proceeded to launch into them, nightstick flailing. He succeeded in shoving the teachers down the stairs, causing many to fall onto the sidewalk.
The teachers gathered themselves up and ascended the stairs two more times, only to pushed down the stairs both times. They defied authorities; 95 percent of the African American schoolteachers of Selma were represented in this march, and police knew they’d have a hard time if all were arrested. Finally, Andrew Young appeared and called the march to a halt; the teachers got back into their double line and marched back to Clark Elementary School.
The action garnered huge support for the teachers from the youth, who, up to this point, had scorned their apparent reluctance to “get involved.” And all of this happened while up north, people said the passage of the Civil Rights Bill into law had showed that America’s race problems had ended.