Just days after he arrived in Alabama in 1965, Clifford R. Montiero was given a crucial job: protect the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
It would not be easy.
King planned to walk from Selma to Montgomery to protest white resistance to black voter registration. On March 21, thousands of black and white marchers joined him.
“I was knocked around by the crowds of people who were joining the march,” says Montiero, who struggled to keep pace with the blue-suited King as he walked east on U.S. Highway 80 –– known locally as the Jefferson Davis Highway in honor of the Confederate Civil War leader.
At 27, Montiero was a big man: 6 feet 2 inches tall, 190 pounds. He had been a Providence police officer for nearly three years before switching jobs. A member of the Congress of Racial Equality, he was approached by civil-rights leader Hosea Williams for the security job.
Now he carried only a two-way radio. At night, he and another man kept an eye on King’s trailer.
“It was tense,” remembers Montiero, 75, a Johnston resident and former head of the Providence NAACP. “You didn’t know if someone was going to poison you or throw a bomb.”
Just two weeks before, state troopers and local police had beaten and tear-gassed 600 protesters on the first Selma-to-Montgomery march. More than 50 were hospitalized.
King, who had become a national symbol of the civil-rights movement since his famous “Dream” speech some 19 months earlier in Washington D.C., held a short “symbolic” protest after the first Selma march.
Then he and other civil-rights leaders won court protection for a third, full-scale march to Montgomery, Alabama’s capital.
The state had become a lightning rod for the movement, beginning with Rosa Parks, who had refused to sit in the back of a Montgomery city bus in 1955. Since then, blacks had staged boycotts, sit-ins and rallies. In the spring of 1963, Eugene “Bull” Connor, Birmingham’s public safety commissioner, turned dogs and fire hoses on protesters.
The federal government provided plenty of protection on the third Selma-to-Montgomery march: Army soldiers, Alabama National Guardsmen, FBI agents and federal marshals.
Still, it wasn’t an easy march, Montiero says. Angry whites in pickup trucks with Confederate flags yelled and spit at the marchers. “They called us communists. Little kids, I’m talking 5 and 6 years old, called us the N-word. It was like foam coming out of their mouths. I have never seen anything like that.”
The protesters reached the state capitol on March 25. In the wake of the protest, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — just two years after King’s “Dream” speech and a year after the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Montiero, who had attended the 1963 March on Washington, felt good about the Alabama protest.
But the struggle was far from over.
Other Rhode Islanders joined the civil-rights movement in the segregated South in the mid-1960s. They marched, registered black voters and defended civil-rights workers in court.
They were threatened and beaten.
From 1965 to 1967, Providence lawyer Malcolm Farmer III, then 25, worked with the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee, a group financed by the American Civil Liberties Union. He and other lawyers worked out Shreveport, La., and Jackson, Miss.
“There were very few black lawyers,” says Farmer. And white lawyers would not represent black civil-rights workers, he says.
In Belzoni, Miss., Farmer defended the Rev. W.M. Harper, a local civil-rights worker charged with assaulting Robert Bearden, a white Mississippian. Farmer’s cross-examination of Bearden angered Bearden’s brothers, who waited for him outside the courtroom.
They knocked him down and kicked and hit him.
Farmer curled up to protect his head.
“Get up! Get up!” yelled one of the men.
Farmer had spent most of his life in a comfortable home on Providence’s East Side. He had gone to Yale and Harvard law school. His family was Republican.
Now, in the summer of 1966, he was on the floor of the Humphreys County Courthouse, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta.
“They were stomping me and the sheriff had disappeared,” says Farmer.
Farmer, who had to change a slashed tire, later relied on local civil-rights workers to escort him to the county line. “I had to get out.”
Despite victories like the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Southern blacks faced virulent racism and state-sanctioned laws that “deprived people of freedom of speech and the freedom to gather,” says Farmer, now a lawyer with the Providence firm Hinckley Allen & Snyder. “Most of the criminal charges were really harassment cases — obstructing justice, disturbing the peace.”
In two years, Farmer handled hundreds of cases.
From the beginning, says Farmer, it was clear “it was going to be all-out combat.”
The violence worried Betty Lee Rickman.
In June 1966, her 16-year-old son, Ray, joined James Meredith on a 220-mile protest walk from Memphis to Jackson.
Meredith’s career was well known.
In 1962, Meredith became the first black student admitted to the University of Mississippi. His arrival sparked a riot. In response, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy sent 500 U.S. marshals to the college; President John F. Kennedy sent military police, troops from the Mississippi National Guard and officials from the U.S. Border Patrol.
Now, Meredith was embarked on a protest walk called March Against Fear.
Meredith had started on June 6. Shortly after, Aubrey Norvell, a white supremacist, wounded Meredith with a shotgun. After a hospital stay, Meredith renewed his march.
Rickman and 18 other protesters joined him. At night, they slept under the stars and sang songs.
But when a man in a truck forced them off the road and onto private property, a group of sheriff’s deputies arrested them for trespassing. In the back of the police station, the deputies beat Rickman.
“They probably hit me eight or nine times with a billy club,” says Rickman. “I woke up in a jail cell with blood everyplace.”
Rickman had experienced racism growing up in Detroit. His mother had been arrested for trying on a hat in a department store. And in high school, Rickman had protested the name of the school paper: Aryan.
But this was different, he says.
“They beat me so badly I went home.”
Rickman, 61, went on to become a Rhode Island lawmaker, historian and deputy secretary of state.
Things were not much different in Choctaw County, Alabama, near the Mississippi border, says Michael Van Leesten, who joined the Summer Community Organization and Political Education project in the summer of 1965.
A basketball player at Rhode Island College, the Providence student joined SCOPE after reading “The Negro Revolt,” by black author Louis E. Lomax.
As part of the project, he and hundreds of college students — including some from Brown University — helped blacks register to vote in six Southern states.
In towns like Lisman, Ala., blacks could register to vote only on the first Monday of the month, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., says Van Leesten, a consultant for the Providence-based Opportunities Industrialization Center of Rhode Island.
One night, Ku Klux Klansmen drove through the black neighborhood where Van Leesten was staying.
“They came down in a parade of cars. They had crosses on the top of their cars lit by Christmas tree lights. They were firing their guns, shooting up in the air. That was a scary night,” he says.
Registering new voters was scary, too, he says. “Fear –– it was there every day.”
The segregationists pushed back. “They hit us with pepper gas and smacked us around,” says Van Leesten, now 74.
Eventually, the federal government required officials to accommodate black voters through longer hours, he says. “By the end of the summer we registered over 1,000 people to vote.”
Their time in the South changed Van Leesten, Montiero, Farmer and Rickman.
“You didn’t want to die. You didn’t want to get beat up,” says Van Leesten, who later helped minorities find jobs through the OIC. “But you were so idealistic then, that these concerns became secondary.”
It was a different time, adds Rickman. The world was changing. “People of color would be treated the same as white people. Motown music made us all feel good and tomorrow would be perfect.”
Even the violence helped to move us forward, he says. “Dr. King was a giant and the March on Washington was the most exciting event on the planet.”
With reports from Tatiana Pina, Journal staff writer
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