Clinical Law Prof Blog

Never Call Retreat: Martin Luther King's Prophetic Stand in the Shadow of the Confederacy

In March 1965, Dr. King, his team, and the community led the Selma to Montgomery March. After a state trooper’s murder of activist Jimmie Lee Jackson, after Bloody Sunday when Alabama State Troopers sicced dogs on the marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, after Fred Gray and his legal teams secured orders from Judge Frank Johnson against Gov. Wallace and the State of Alabama, the numbers swelled until 25,000 marched into Montgomery, up Dexter Avenue and to the steps of the Alabama State Capitol on Goat Hill.

They marched for voting rights. Lyndon Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but, as King said in his speech in Montgomery, “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave Negroes some part of their rightful dignity, but without the vote it was dignity without strength.” Against all odds, these marchers were calling for the American aspirations of self-governance, self-determination, enfranchisement, liberty and freedom. They marched for a full voice in democracy, and they aimed to deliver a petition George Wallace and the Alabama Legislature. Wallace denounced the march and ordered state troopers to use whatever means necessary to stop them. He failed.

As they approached Montgomery, march organizers petitioned for a permit to set up a stage and have speakers address the crowd from the steps of the Capitol. Wallace refused, so they set up a stage on the street at the top of Goat Hill, just feet from the sidewalk and the steps up the Capitol.

This is the Alabama State Capitol Building where Alabama adopted its Ordinance of Secession on January 11, 1861. It hosted the Montgomery Convention in February 1861 where the rebel states attempted to establish a new sovereign, the Confederate States of America, and to establish a new government that would protect and promote the institution of white-supremacist slavery. On February 18, 1861, Jefferson Davis stood on the Capitol steps and gave his inaugural address. There’s a gold star on the spot where he stood to memorialize the moment to this day.

At the end of the Selma to Montgomery March, across the street from Dexter Avenue Memorial Baptist Church where he was pastor a decade earlier and helped organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and at the very threshold of the Confederacy, and in the shadow of a white-supremacist, segregationist, Jim Crow government, the speakers called for a full measure of human dignity, a full franchise under the law, the promise of a beloved community built on inalienable rights. Dr. King noted the significance of the place:

Now it is not an accident that one of the great marches of American history should terminate in Montgomery, Alabama. Just ten years ago, in this very city, a new philosophy was born of the Negro struggle. Montgomery was the first city in the South in which the entire Negro community united and squarely faced its age-old oppressors. Out of this struggle, more than bus [de]segregation was won; a new idea, more powerful than guns or clubs was born. Negroes took it and carried it across the South in epic battles that electrified the nation and the world.

Yet, strangely, the climactic conflicts always were fought and won on Alabama soil. After Montgomery’s, heroic confrontations loomed up in Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, and elsewhere. But not until the colossus of segregation was challenged in Birmingham did the conscience of America begin to bleed. White America was profoundly aroused by Birmingham because it witnessed the whole community of Negroes facing terror and brutality with majestic scorn and heroic courage.

Then he took a poetic turn, a prophetic charge, an outright provocation rooted deep in faith and nobility. Surrounded by all the intimidating vestiges of the Lost Cause and at the door of a governor who declared, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” Dr. King quoted a Christian hymn at the climax of his speech:

How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

How long? Not long, because:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword;

His truth is marching on.

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;

He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat.

O, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant my feet!

Our God is marching on.

Glory, hallelujah! Glory, hallelujah!

Dr. King did not cite his source or name the hymn, but he and they all knew. Those verses are from the Battle Hymn of the Republic, the marching song of the Union Army in the Civil War, the anthem of liberation for the forces of the Republic that crushed the Confederacy and abolished slavery. Dr. King was nonviolent, but this was rhetoric to leave a mark. He planted the flag of Union and freedom, of American liberty for black people, right in the still twitching heart of the Confederate corpse. This was not mere “emotional bosh” as he said, it was a declaration of independence, rooted in faith and the righteous call of God, in the very shadow of the broken empire that would later kill him because he dared to humiliate them and expose the evil of comfortable racism. Dr. King brought the death of the Confederacy back to its home as he stood with 25,000 others demanding the full promise of the United States.  

President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in August, 1965.  

Since 2020, at the other end of Dexter Avenue, a mural around the Court Square fountain declares that Black lives matter, on the very spot were white Americans sold black human beings into captive labor for decades before the Civil War.

(These photos are from our annual Faith and Justice Spring Break trips when I asked students and staff to read Dr. King's speech on our walking tour up Dexter Ave.)  

CLEA Newsletter, Winter 23-24

Please read the Winter 23-23 CLEA Newsletter for many wonderful updates from clinical professors around the nation and insightful articles on our work. 

CLEA Statement on US News Rankings for Clinical Programs

From the CLEA Board of Directors and Executive Committee:

The Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) continues to oppose the ranking system used by U.S. News and World Reports (USNWR). CLEA exists to advocate for clinical legal education as fundamental to the education of lawyers, and one of our core points of advocacy is to pursue and promote justice and diversity as core values of the legal profession. CLEA has long recognized that the USNWR ranking system is at odds with our central mission, as it rewards schools who rely on high standardized test scores in admissions decisions and punishes schools who offer public interest fellowship programs to their graduates. CLEA’s recent restatement of our opposition to the standardized testing requirement in law school admissions before the ABA Council reiterated our position that the use of standardized tests to assess students and schools negatively impacts legal education and is racially discriminatory.

With regard to clinical rankings, the current USNWR ranking system places us in competition with each other, when we as a group see ourselves in a shared struggle for social justice and equity in legal education. Second, there are no articulated factors for ranking clinical programs, including whether to recognize the work of externship programs, so the voting can be arbitrary and inconsistent. Third, some schools may unfairly suffer because they do not have the budget or the support of their administration to market their program or send their clinical faculty to annual conferences.

For clinic faculty who are in a position to take action against the use of USNWR rankings, possible alternatives to participating in the ranking of clinical programs could include: (1) declining to submit a ballot at all and sending a letter to USNWR explaining why; (2) requesting that USNWR remove the school from the clinical ranking survey; (3) submitting a ballot in which the response for every school is "no answer;” and/or (4) making a public statement against the use of USNWR rankings requesting that others do not rank the school in the survey.

We understand that each law school has a unique set of needs and priorities. Some clinical programs outside the top-tier rankings have achieved recognition of their respective programs through the USNWR; and this, in turn, has allowed them to further advance the goals of their clinical education programs. Individual faculty may choose to continue to participate, or may not be in a position to refuse to submit a rankings ballot or ask that their program not be ranked.

If faculty do vote, CLEA urges those ranking clinical programs to focus on factors that promote the principles for which CLEA advocates, namely the increased presence of clinical education (law clinics and externships) in law school curricula, security of position for clinical faculty, and diversity and equity. In evaluating clinical programs, CLEA urges voters to consider: 1) the number of law clinic and externship slots available relative to the student population at a school; 2) the breadth and quality of clinical curricular offerings available to students; 3) the school's security of position, academic freedom, and governance rights for faculty who teach clinics or externships; and 4) the extent to which the school has committed to pursuing racial justice in its clinical program through its course offerings, impact on the community, and demonstrated commitment to diversity and equity in hiring and promotion of clinical faculty.

CLEA urges voters to score only those programs for which they have sufficient information to make informed decisions. It urges voters to choose the “No Answer” option when they have insufficient information to assess a particular clinical program. Last, CLEA also urges those who receive ballots to consult their clinical colleagues for their views to increase the range of informed opinions reflected in the balloting.

We are grateful to the growing list of law schools who have removed themselves from the rankings system for their advocacy and for raising awareness about the destructive consequences of the current system. We hope that our collective efforts move legal education towards greater equity and accessibility for future students and the legal profession.