Selma blacks and whites make reconciliation efforts.

Byline: Bryan Woolley

SELMA, Ala. _ The Rev. James Bevel says he came up with the idea of a march to Montgomery after that Alabama state trooper shot Jimmie Lee Jackson.

The black people of Selma were in a fury, he says. Young hotheads were urging retaliation. Martin Luther King and the apostles of nonviolence were about to lose control. Surely that would bring a bloodbath.

"What are we going to do?" Bevel recalls thinking. "What are we going to do? The state is moving in on the people."

Jackson wasn't shot in Selma. It happened about 30 miles away, in Marion, Ala., during a night voting-rights march there. State troopers and local deputies fell upon the marchers like cats upon sparrows. They beat them with clubs. They chased them through the streets. Jackson and his mother and his 82-year-old grandfather ran into Mack's Cafe, seeking refuge. A squad of troopers followed them and beat them, and the others there. When Jackson tried to protect his mother, a trooper shot him in the stomach. A few nights later, he was dead at age 26. On Feb. 28, he was buried.

"The night Jimmie Lee died," Bevel says, "I was meditating back in the bushes behind the motel where I was staying. And I thought, `This is the time to march to Montgomery.' We had to find an outlet for all that angry energy. And we had to create a platform for King to bring the message of the right to vote to all the American people." He persuaded King that a march to Montgomery would work.

Jackson died 40 years ago. Bevel was 28 years old. He was a top aide to King in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which for months had been leading a drive to register black voters in Dallas County, Ala. Day after day, Sheriff Jim Clark and amateur thugs he called his posse had driven the would-be voters from the courthouse steps with clubs. They hauled many to jail.