After the Tall Timber by RENATA ADLER

supply. The marchers had all along complained that the water tasted of kerosene, and, upon investigation, it turned out the water was in fact polluted, having come from a truck that was ordinarily used for draining septic tanks. (Fortunately, no other marchers seemed to suffer from the contamination.) Later, the singer Odetta appeared at the campsite, and found all the marchers, including another singer, Pete Seeger, fast asleep.
    Wednesday, the fourth and last full day of marching, was sunny again, and the marchers set out in good spirits. In the morning, a minister who had rashly dropped out at a gas station to make a telephone call was punched by the owner, and a freelance newspaper photographer was struck on the ear by a passerby. (Although he required three stitches, he was heartened by the fact that a Montgomery policeman had come, with a flying tackle, to his rescue.) There seemed, however, to be fewer segregationists by the side of the road than usual—perhaps because the Montgomery Advertiser had been running a two-page advertisement, prepared by the City Commissioner’s Committee on Community Affairs, imploring citizens to be moderate and ignore the march. The coverage of the march in the Southern press had consistently amused the marchers. “Civil Righters Led by Communists” had been the headline in the Birmingham weekly Independent; the Selma Times-Journal , whose coverage of the march was relatively accurate, had editorialized about President Johnson, under the heading “A Modern Mussolini Speaks, ‘We Shall Overcome,”’ “No man in any generation  . . . has ever held so much power in the palm of his hand, and that includes Caesar, Alexander, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Franklin D. Roosevelt”; and the Wednesday Advertiser’s sole front-page item concerning the march was a one-column, twenty-one-line account, lower right, of the Alabama legislature’s resolution condemning the demonstrators for being “sexually promiscuous.” (“It is well known that the white Southern segregationist is obsessed with fornication,” said John Lewis, chairman of SNCC. “And that is why there are so many shades of Negro.”) At 9 A.M., Ray Robin announced over radio station WHHY, in Montgomery, that “there is now evidence that women are returning to their homes from the march as expectant unwed mothers.” Several marchers commented, ironically, on the advanced state of medical science in Alabama.
    By noon, most of the marchers were sunburned or just plain weather-burned. Two blacks scrawled the word “Vote” in sunburn cream on their foreheads and were photographed planting an American flag, Iwo Jima fashion, by the side of the road. Flags of all sorts, including state flags and church flags, had materialized in the hands of marchers. One of the few segregationists watching the procession stopped his jeering for a moment when he saw the American flag, and raised his hand in a salute. The singing had abated somewhat, and the marchers had become conversational.
    “This area’s a study in social psychopathology,” said Henry Schwarzschild, executive secretary of LCDC (the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee). “In a way, they’re asking for a show of force like this, to make them face reality.”
    “And there’s the ignorance,” said another civil-rights lawyer. “A relatively friendly sheriff in Sunflower County, Mississippi, warned me, confidentially, that my client was a ‘blue-gum nigger.’ ‘Their mouths are filled with poison,’ he said. ‘Don’t let him bite you.”’
    “And what did you say?” asked a college student marching beside him.
    “What could I say?” the lawyer replied. “I said I’d try to be careful.”
    “The way I see this march,” said a young man from SNCC, “is as a march from the religious to the secular—from the chapel to the statehouse. For too long now, the Southern Negro’s only refuge has been the church. That’s why he prefers these SCLC