The House by the Side of the Road: The Selma Civil Rights Movement

By Richie Jean Sherrod Jackson

On Sunday, March 7, 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. and six hundred followers set out on foot from Selma, Alabama, bound for Montgomery to demand greater voting rights for African Americans. As they crossed the city’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, state and local policemen savagely set on the marchers with tear gas and billy clubs, an event now known as “Bloody Sunday” that would become one of the most iconic in American history.
 
King’s informal headquarters in Selma was the home of Dr. Sullivan and Richie Jean Sherrod Jackson and their young daughter, Jawana. The House by the Side of the Road is Richie Jean’s firsthand account of the private meetings King and his lieutenants, including Ralph David Abernathy and John Lewis, held in the haven of the Jackson home.
 
Sullivan Jackson was an African American dentist in Selma and a prominent supporter of the civil rights movement. Richie Jean was a close childhood friend of King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, a native of nearby Marion, Alabama. Richie Jean’s fascinating account narrates how, in the fraught months of 1965 that preceded the Voting Rights March, King and his inner circle held planning sessions and met with Assistant Attorney General John Doar to negotiate strategies for the event.
 
Just eight days after Bloody Sunday, President Lyndon Johnson made a televised addressed to a joint session of Congress on Monday, March 15. Jackson relates the intimate scene of King and his lieutenants watching as Johnson called the nation to dedicate itself to equal rights for all and ending his address with the words: “We shall overcome.” Five months later, Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act on August 6.
 
The major motion picture Selma now commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In it, Niecy Nash and Kent Faulcon star as Sullivan and Richie Jean Jackson among a cast including Oprah Winfrey, Tom Wilkinson, and Cuba Gooding Jr. A gripping primary source, The House by the Side of the Road illuminates the private story whose public outcomes electrified the world and changed the course of American history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Mar 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9780817383268

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Introduction

In the South the month of March is a beautiful time of year, as winter lets go its grip and Spring is slowly pushing her way in. It's March now as I write this, back in my home in Selma after recovering from illness in the good care of my daughter Jawana at her home in Atlanta. Looking out into my backyard from where I like to sit when I'm home alone, I remember a spring day just like this one, almost fifty years gone. I was enjoying the sight of the new green leaves on the trees in our yard as they replaced the darker green of last year's leaves. I was home alone then also, my husband was at his office, my little daughter was off visiting her grandmother, and I was beginning to settle into the quiet so different from the energy and noise that had ruled in our house for months.

Interrupting the quiet, I heard a car door shut behind the house, soon followed by the doorbell. I wasn't expecting anyone but as I got to the door I saw the familiar old blue Pontiac. It was Martin. I looked past him for the cluster of young committed staff members who were always at his side, day and night, but none of them were there. For a moment I thought he might have come with Ralph Abernathy or Andy Young for some high-level planning, but no, he was alone.

I had never seen Martin like this. He would often sit deep in thought while his staff and local leaders came and went and argued out a problem in front of him, waiting for his decision, but he wasn't going over something in his mind. He looked worn down, exhausted, almost asleep on his feet. Where is everyone? I asked.

He then looked at me without his usual warm smile and replied, I just had to get away. I am so tired, and your house is the only place I could think of where I can be left alone, get some sleep, and be by myself to think.

I opened the door and told him, Martin, you know this home is always open to you. You're family. Come on in. You know where everything is, take the room you want. We'll see that no one bothers you.

1

The Blueprint of My Life and the House

There is a single thread going through my life, from the very beginning that leads to the house by the side of the road. I believe that when we are born God has a certain plan for our lives—a sort of blueprint. Sometimes the plan may not be seen in our lifetime. We may be the lifeline to a greater person, or a person that will provide a piece in the greater mosaic of God's intentions.

God gave each of us the gift of thought, and as individuals we are each free to alter the plan with the decisions we make as we travel life's path.

Let me stop here and share with you a poem that has been a tremendous influence in my life.

There are hermit souls that live withdrawn

In the place of their self content;

There are souls like stars, that dwell apart,

In a fellowless firmament;

There are pioneer souls that blaze their paths,

Where highways never ran;

But let me live by the side of the road

And be a friend to man.

Let me live in a house by the side of the road

Where the race of men go by

The men who are good and the men who are bad,

As good and as bad as I.

I should not sit in the scorner's seat,

Or hurl the cynic's ban;

Let me live in a house by the side of the road

And be a friend to man.

I see from my house by the side of the road

Where the race of men go by

The men who press with ardor of hope,

The men who are faint with the strife.

But I turn not away from their smiles nor their tears,

Both parts of an infinite plan;

Let me live in a house by the side of the road

And be a friend of man.

I know there are brook-gladdened meadows ahead

And mountains of wearisome heights;

That the road passes on through the long afternoon

And stretches away into the night.

But still I rejoice when the travelers rejoice,

And weep with the strangers that moan,

Nor live in my house by the side of the road

Like a man who dwells alone.

Let me live in my house by the side of the road

It's here the race of men go by,

They are good, they are bad, they are weak, they are strong,

Wise, foolish—so am I;

Then why should I sit in the scorner's seat

Or hurl the cynic's ban?

Let me live in my house by the side of the road

And be a friend to man.

—Sam Walter Foss, 1899

Let me tell you about the house by the side of the road where I live. Even better let me be the voice that tells the story that these walls would tell if they could speak.

I was born in Mobile, Alabama, on August 30, 1932, to Juanita Barnett Richardson and John William Sherrod. Both parents were natives of Sumter County in the west Alabama Black Belt. Both came from small but nurturing Alabama communities. My mother is from Hamner and my father from York, small towns where everyone knows one another.

My father was a brakeman on the Alabama-Tennessee and Northern Railroad, a plum of a job for a black man in the 1930s. I can remember as a small child my mother taking me to the last stop before the train reached York so I could ride the train into the station with my daddy. What a wonderful life this was—pure and simple. I also wanted to look like my daddy, so the smallest pair of overalls was purchased although my mother still had to do a lot of alterations to make them fit. To complete the outfit, I had my very own brakeman's hat and lunch pail filled with a lunch my mother had prepared for the day! I was so excited before the planned trip. I was off to work with my daddy. I sat in the caboose with the other members of the crew, each of whom welcomed me with open arms. A father somehow has a special place for his little girl, and I was indeed special to mine.

My mother, who lived to be 102 years old, had seen it all. How many times over the years did I hear her say, I never thought I would live to see this or that happen. Having to sit in the back on trains and buses and go to separate toilets, not being able to try on clothes because of your color, to have to drink out of a colored water fountain. All of this was part of her life. She often stated, Everyone just knew their place.

My parents, just as their parents had, tried to make life and its experiences better. They knew the bumps we would find along the road, the hatred and division that existed. They tried to protect me from that as much as they could. I was taught that I was no better than anyone else, and there was no one better than I was. They wanted the best for me, and for me to be my best—to be better than those who are filled with hate, to get an education, to be ready for opportunity. Yes, I did run into people who called me nigger, and I knew what it felt like to have to enter a theater after the whites were seated and then to sit separately upstairs. I knew something about this was wrong, but there was only one theater in town. Yes, I knew segregation well. In York the black schools had a split session so the children could help pick cotton in the fields; the white schools stayed open. My parents had to send me away to school to get a full year's education, first to Selma and then to Washington, D.C.

I also felt Jim Crow when he got personal: once traveling to Washington on the train, I sat near a couple who owned one of the best dress shops in Selma; when my mother or I went in their store, they were all smiles and full of glad to see you and let me help you. On the train they looked right into my eyes and would not smile or speak.

Nevertheless my family did fare better than some. My father was able to buy my mother a full-length mink coat in the 1930s, and he sought to give my mother and me the best that life could offer at that time. After my mother was given the coat, she was advised that she could not wear that coat in York, Alabama! So she wore it when she and my father would go to Mobile, Selma, and other bigger towns. She seemed to be able to get away with wearing the coat in these places.

My mother's family in the late 1800s did have a very different experience than most blacks in the South at that time. Her father, my grandfather Tom Richardson, was the first Negro postmaster in the state of Alabama and was a registered voter in Sumter County even in the early 1900s. He was also the owner of several hundred acres of land so they were considered good livers and were afforded a few extra privileges. He believed that education was the route to better opportunities, that we should become professionals as educators and doctors, even if we were still just niggers to some, including some that were related to us.

After I was born, I spent the first four years of my life in Mobile. My father's base was then changed to York. Because my father was originally from York and as his parents were getting up in age, my parents decided to move to York. We lived with them in a house high on a hill. That hill was in many ways the hub of the community. Much of the land on that hill was owned by my paternal grandfather, Jim Sherrod. He and his parents had lived there for more years than I