Jesse L. Douglas, Aide to King in Marches From Selma, Is Dead at 90

U.S.|Jesse L. Douglas, Aide to King in Marches From Selma, Is Dead at 90

The Rev. Jesse L. Douglas Sr., who as a longtime lieutenant to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. played a vital behind-the-scenes role in staging the historic civil rights marches from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama in 1965, has died in Charlotte, N.C. He was 90.

His daughter, Adrienne Douglas Vaulx, said he died in a nursing home on Feb. 17, 2021. His death was not widely reported at the time, and The New York Times, which had prepared an obituary in advance, did not learn of it until this week.

Mr. Douglas served the cause during the peak of the civil rights movement, from 1963 to 1966, as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, a civic group founded in 1955 in response to the arrest of Rosa Parks for sitting in a whites-only section of a public bus. It had then organized a 13-month bus boycott under Dr. King’s leadership, leading to a Supreme Court ruling barring segregation on public buses.

For more than three decades, Mr. Douglas was on the national board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights group that Dr. King helped form in 1957.

Mr. Douglas was respected for the calmness he displayed in handling the complicated logistics of the voting-rights marches that began in Selma.

The first, on March 7, a date now etched in history as “Bloody Sunday,” was brutally stopped in Selma along the Edmund Pettus Bridge by baton-wielding state troopers and local police. A second, smaller march was cut short by Dr. King two days later. A third try, beginning on March 21, swelled to some 25,000 participants escorted by the Alabama National Guard under federal control, as well as F.B.I. agents and federal marshals. It succeeded in reaching the State Capitol in Montgomery four days later.