I ain’t scared of no dog!

“I ain’t scared of no dog!” is Mrs. Williams’s declaration as she enters the courtroom for Walter McMillian’s hearing. The words mark a reversal: the dog first brings back the violence she endured during the 1965 voting-rights march in Selma, but on her return she speaks them aloud and walks past it. Her phrase makes presence itself an act of courage.

The memory behind the words

At the hearing, a dog and a metal detector stood at the courtroom entrance. Mrs. Williams could not make herself pass the dog the first time. She explained to Bryan Stevenson that she had remembered gathering with others at Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965, when marchers seeking voting rights were beaten and police dogs were set on them. She had wanted to move, she said, but could not. The obstacle at the courthouse was therefore not simply a security measure: it had brought an earlier scene of racial violence into the present and stopped her at the threshold.

Repetition and return

Mrs. Williams’s daughter described what followed. At home, her mother was so upset that she did not eat or speak to anyone, and prayed through the night. The next morning she insisted on another chance to serve as a community representative at the hearing. On the journey back, she kept repeating, “Lord, I can’t be scared of no dog, I can’t be scared of no dog.” The words first appear as a struggle to master fear, spoken in preparation for facing the entrance again.

When Mrs. Williams arrived, she was impeccably dressed in a scarf and hat, clutching her handbag. She swayed at the doorway and repeated, “I ain’t scared of no dog, I ain’t scared of no dog.” Then she walked slowly through the metal detector, looked at the dog, and called out, “I ain’t scared of no dog!” The repetition changes in force as she moves: what began as private resolve becomes a declaration audible to everyone present. Officers let her continue, and she entered the courtroom.

Presence as an act

Black people already inside the courtroom beamed as Mrs. Williams passed them. Near the front, she turned to Stevenson and announced, “Attorney Stevenson, I’m here!” Her final words shift the emphasis from what she refuses to fear to what she has accomplished: she has made it inside, where her presence can support the hearing and the community’s claim to be heard. The phrase does not erase the memory of Selma or the distress the dog caused; its force comes from the fact that she returns despite both. In this scene, courage is not the absence of fear but the decision to cross the threshold with it.