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.)