The Rev. James Orange was kind, generous, smart, large and in charge.

Born to march, he lived to lead, and he died last Saturday having done what God called him to do.

Over 6 feet tall and 300 pounds, Orange stood heads and shoulders above the crowd. Blessed with a humble spirit and a booming baritone voice, Orange was the conductor on the Martin Luther King Jr. nonviolent freedom express from Alabama to Atlanta to Africa.

Had he lived during biblical times, he could have been the Good Samaritan on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. But he lived during the Martin Luther King Jr. era, and King affectionately dubbed him the movement's Ground Crew Leader.

If the arrest of Rosa Parks was the spark that set Montgomery blacks on a 381-day march from the back to the front of the bus, and ultimately to passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, then the arrest of James Orange in 1965 was the earthquake that rearranged the political landscape in the South.

That George Wallace's baton-wielding, tear-gas-tossing state troopers were a catalyst for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a given to almost anyone familiar with the civil rights movement. Their behavior on Bloody Sunday in March 1965 simply provided evidence of the evil that men do.

Less obvious, even to the historian, are the roots of that event.

A couple of weeks before Bloody Sunday and up the road a piece from the Edmund Pettus Bridge, an Alabama state trooper fatally shot young Jimmie Lee Jackson during a nighttime demonstration.

That demonstration in the town of Marion on Feb. 18, 1965, had been called to protest the incarceration of one James Orange.

Before he was put in a tiny cell in the town lockup by the chief of police, Orange had been working ever so quietly, organizing and planning, with the local residents.

King had dispatched him to this corner of the Black Belt probably knowing the kind of quiet that dwelled within him, possibly sensing people would respond to his polite nudges.

Orange made his way around little Marion and out in the countryside, working with the local foot soldiers of the time, Albert Turner and James Dobynes, pushing, not shoving, for change.

In a short time, his work resulted in a full-scale boycott of local businesses and a walkout by students.

The local police responded by locking up 600 schoolkids and Orange.

As he sat in a cold cell that February night, police, state troopers and local toughs lay into the peaceful demonstrators. Later, jailers brought many of them in, bruised and bloody, to be put into adjacent cells.

At some point that night, Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot and the movement organizers came up with the idea of taking his body to Montgomery, to put it before Gov. Wallace. The Selma-to-Montgomery march was born, from the blood of Jimmie Lee Jackson, from the sacrifice of Orange.

On the 40th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery march, a reporter handed Orange a newspaper article, an interview in The Anniston Star with trooper James Bonard Fowler, revealing for the first time that he was the man who'd shot Jackson so many years ago, in self-defense, the trooper claimed.

Orange took the paper, held it firmly in his big hands for some time, looked up at the reporter and said in the humble way of a preacher, "Well, I'll be, what do you know about that."

Orange loved to sing, "Freedom, oh freedom, freedom over me.

"And before I'll be a slave, I'll be buried in my grave and go home to my lord and be free."

Well-done; and march on, leader.

> Ira Joe Johnson is a writer and historian living in Atlanta. John Fleming is editor at large of The Anniston [Ala.] Star.