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arrest them? Look at them so-called white men with church collars that they bought for fifty cents! And them de vir ginated nuns! I’m a Catholic myself, but it turns my stomach to see them. They said there was thousands yesterday, but there wasn’t near a thousand. Them niggers and them girls! I’ve watched the whole thing three times, and there isn’t a intelligent-looking one in the bunch. I feel sorry for the black folks. If they want to vote, why don’t they just go out and register? Oh, honey, look! There goes a big one. Go home, scum! Go home, scum!” The procession began to sing a not very hearty version of “A Great Camp Meeting in the Promised Land.”
    Not all the bystanders along the road were white. At the boundary of Lowndes County (with a population of fifteen thousand, eighty per cent of them blacks, not one of whom had been registered to vote by March 1, 1965), John Maxwell, a black worker in a Lowndes County cotton-gin mill (at a salary of six dollars for a twelve-hour day), appeared at an intersection.
    “Why don’t you register to vote?” a reporter from the Harvard Crimson asked Mr. Maxwell.
    “They’d put us off the place if I tried,” Mr. Maxwell said.
    In the town of Trickem, at the Nolan Elementary School— a small white shack on brick stilts, which had asbestos shingles, a corrugated-iron roof, six broken windows, and a broken wood floor patched with automobile license plates—a group of old people and barefoot children rushed out to embrace Dr. King. They had been waiting four hours.
    “Will you march with us?” Dr. King asked an old man with a cane.
    “I’ll walk one step, anyway,” said the man. “Because I know for every one step I’ll take you’ll take two.”
    The marchers broke into a chant. “ What do you want? ” they shouted encouragingly to the blacks at the roadside. The blacks smiled, but they did not give the expected response—“ Freedom! ” The marchers had to supply that themselves.
    Late in the afternoon, as Route 80 passed through the swamps of Lowndes County, the marchers looked anxiously at the woods, covered with Spanish moss, which began a few yards back from the road. They reached Rosa Steele’s farm at sunset. Many of them seemed dismayed to find that the campsite lay right beside the highway. Fresh rumors began to circulate: a young man had been seen putting a bomb under a roadside bridge; twenty white men, with pistols and shotguns, had been seen prowling through a neighboring field; testing security, a representative of the Pentagon had managed to penetrate the security lines without being asked to show his pass. Mr. Rosenthal again put these fears to rest. “The field has been combed by Army demolition teams,” he said. “If anyone from the Pentagon had made it through unchecked, you can bet there would have been one hell of a fuss. And as for the man under the bridge, it was a little boy who got off his bicycle to relieve himself. The troopers found out these things. It’s nice to know that they are this aware.”
    As darkness fell, Dr. King held a press conference. A black woman lifted up her three-year-old son so that he might catch a glimpse of Dr. King. She soon grew tired and had to put him down. “I’ll take him,” said a white man standing beside her, and he lifted the boy onto his shoulders. The boy did not glance at Dr. King; he was too busy gazing down at the white man’s blond hair.
    Again the night was cold and damp. At the entrance to the field, there was so much mud that boards and reeds had been scattered to provide traction for cars. Most of the marchers went to sleep in their four tents soon after supper, but at Steele’s Service Station, across the highway, a crowd of blacks from the neighborhood had gathered. Some of them were dancing to music from a jukebox, and a few of the more energetic marchers, white and black, joined them.
    “This is getting to be too much like a holiday,” said a veteran of one of the