HISTORY MAKING
Improvement Association of East Arkansas is looking to collect history related to Lee County. The letter above was submitted to the NAACP by B.M. Lockhart, seeking help in maintaining land ownership in the face of white threats.
MEETING MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
One of our own, Mr. Richard Montgomery, who works in the Lee County School District’s Physical Plant, had the good fortune of meeting with and having a conversation with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during one of the most trying and important events of the Civil Rights Movement. The meeting happened in Selma, Alabama in 1965 when King was 36 years old.
Montgomery moved to Selma, Alabama with his family in 1957, eight years before the famous Selma effort. He was there when Dr. King, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and other organizations converged on Selma to fight for voting rights for its black citizens.
Montgomery was in his late teens when he and some of his friends went to the church from which Dr. King was to speak that night. (The church could have been Brown’s Chapel where many of the meetings were held, but Montgomery wasn’t sure.) The young men were to make sure the church was ready for the crowd that would later congregate. King and some of his allies came to the church early and the only other people in attendance were Montgomery and his friends. Montgomery states that King seemed “very humble and approachable.” When asked what they talked about Montgomery answered that “he emphasized to us the importance of remaining non-violent, sensing that we were kind of hot-heads. Dr. King felt that the only way that blacks could gain their rights was through non-violence because we’d never win a shooting war. As a young man I felt that we had guns just like they had guns and we could use ours too.”
During the meeting that night Montgomery and the other young men patrolled around the church, making sure that everyone remained safe. He said that “sheriff deputies would stand outside the church door listening to the speeches and comments and relaying that information to the Sheriff’s Office.” To counter the spying, Montgomery and the others were told to put aluminum foil around the walls to disrupt the deputy’s transmission. At Selma meetings whites would gather, threateningly, outside the church with shotguns prominently held in the back of pick-up trucks. “None of these things turned us around, we stuck together, I remember people coming to church in wheelchairs, everybody wanted to be part of it,” Montgomery said.
(The author hopes it is not lost on young men today that the young men
of Selma were protectors of their communities and not predators
against their communities.)
“I was in Arkansas during Bloody Sunday [when marchers were attacked by law enforcement, had tear gas sprayed on them, were beaten with billy clubs and attacked by dogs] and didn’t take part in that March but I was back the next week when we marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge although I didn’t march to Montgomery,” Montgomery explained.
A little-known fact mentioned by Montgomery was that Selma had earlier held its own bus boycott, targeting the discrimination that existed in public transportation in Selma; Montgomery, Alabama and throughout the south. “Instead of settling the city of Selma cut out bus services altogether,” said Montgomery.
While in Selma Montgomery worked as a delivery man for Pearson-McBride Drug Store located at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. “At the drug store I worked with Jim Clark’s wife, she was real nice but he was mean,” expressed Montgomery. (Jim Clark was the Dallas County Sheriff and the perpetrator of many of the misdeeds against the protestors).
Montgomery experienced and observed the discrimination common for the day as an employee at the drug store. “There was a soda fountain inside the drug store but blacks couldn’t come inside. Blacks also had to come to the back door of the drug store to get anything. Even if you were being waited on the pharmacist would leave you to help a white who just came in the store,” Montgomery remembered.
In closing Montgomery said that “I later moved to Arkansas but have sisters still living in Selma, I go back to visit when I can.”