[6] In Selma, the SNCC campaign was met with violence and intimidation by Clark, who waited at the entrance to the county courthouse, beating and arresting registrants at the slightest provocation.

[7] At one point, Clark arrested around 300 students who were holding a silent protest outside the courthouse, force-marching them with cattle prods to a detention center three miles away.

[7] At another point he was punched in the jaw and knocked down by a demonstrator, Annie Lee Cooper, whom he was trying to make go home by poking her in the neck with either a nightstick or a cattle prod after she had stood for hours at the courthouse in an attempt to register to vote.

[3] These actions led to a widespread comparison of Clark to Eugene "Bull" Connor,[3] and to James Baldwin saying of Clark: I suggest that what has happened to the white Southerner is in some ways much worse than what has happened to the Negroes there ... One has to assume that he is a man like me, but he does not know what drives him to use the club, to menace with a gun, and to use a cattle prod against a woman's breasts ... Their moral lives have been destroyed by a plague called color.

[9] After The New York Times and The Washington Post published photos of an SCLC protest at which Clark wielded a club and pushed Amelia Boynton to the ground, Ralph Abernathy nominated him for honorary membership in the Dallas County Voters League, a local voting rights organization, for "publicity services rendered".

[11] A young protester, Jimmie Lee Jackson, attempted to protect his mother and octogenarian grandfather from police beating, and was shot in the stomach by Corporal James Bonard Fowler of the highway patrol.

George C. Wallace, who had earlier sparked a national showdown over a refusal to integrate public schools, reprimanded the state troopers and Mr.

[3] On July 22, 1965, the Texarkana, Texas local branch of the Citizen's Council, a white supremacist organization, sponsored Clark's appearance as a guest at their meeting.

"[14] Mayor of Selma Joseph Smitherman and Wilson Baker wanted to blunt the force of the campaign by exercising restraint but the voter registration offices were Clark's responsibility.

These included being a broker for 'the Tangible Risk Insurance Company' in Birmingham, which got him indicted with eight other men for mail fraud, to which he pleaded no contest.