Joseph Califano’s statement that Selma was President Lyndon B. Johnson’s idea is patently false. Although the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Com- mittee had come to Alabama earlier to organize to obtain the right to vote, the Alabama Right to Vote movement began for me the day the four little girls were killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham.

That was Sunday, Sept. 15, 1963, before Mr. Johnson became president. James Bevel, my then-husband, and I believed that a man and a woman should not allow those four little girls to be murdered and do nothing.

On that fateful Sunday, in Edenton, N.C., in Golden and Mrs. Frinks’ living room (Golden Frinks was a Southern Christian Leadership Conference staff person.), James Bevel and I conceptualized and wrote the plan that became the Selma Right to Vote movement. We believed that if Negroes inAlabama could vote, they could better protect their children from things like the church bombing.

Mr. Bevel and I resolved that, no matter how long it would take, we would get the right to vote in Alabama. We took the plan to the SCLC and subsequently, the SCLC, including us as staff persons, began organizing in Alabama for the right to vote.

When Jimmie Lee Jackson was killed — he died Feb. 26, 1965 — Mr. Bevel said we should take his body to Gov. George C.

Wallace and present to him the results of his racist policies. Within a day or so, Mr. Bevel apparently recognized that Mr. Jackson should be buried and modified his proposal. He called for the Selma-to- Montgomery March.

Lyndon Johnson was president — the executive branch of the federal government. It was his job to enforce the law. He should not have waited until Jimmie Lee Jackson’s, James Reeb’s and Viola Liuzzo’s lives were taken. He should not have waited until people were beaten and bloodied on the Edmund Pettus Bridge before he enforced the Negroes’ right to vote in the South. I appreciate President Johnson enacting and signing the Voting Rights Act. But I wish he had been a self-starter when it came to our right to vote so it would not have been necessary to go to the lengths that we did — organizing a mass movement and risking our safety — in order to get the vote.

It was the courage, work, thoughtfulness, sacrifice, discipline and determination of citizens of the United States that obtained our right to vote.

Historically, inventions, musical innovations and many more accomplishments and contributions developed by descendants of enslaved Africans in America have been misappropriated. We learn about presidents, battles and dates. The impression too often perpetuated in history books and in popular culture is that you have to be a president, someone special or a white person to have an important idea or to achieve major accomplishments. This is an idea that disempowers citizens and should not be propagated further.

DIANE NASH

The writer is a founder of SNCC, who worked with SNCC and the SCLC from 1961 through 1965.