Selma and Bloody Sunday

Why Selma

Selma, Alabama, was chosen for a voter registration campaign in early 1965 for the same reason Birmingham had been chosen in 1963: its officials were reliably brutal. Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark was a volatile segregationist who could be counted on to overreact violently to peaceful demonstrations, generating the kind of television images that would shock the nation. Of the 15,000 Black residents eligible to vote in Dallas County, only 335 — about 2% — were registered.

SNCC had been organizing in Selma since 1963, but progress was agonizingly slow. When SCLC and Martin Luther King Jr. joined the campaign in January 1965, they brought national media attention. Over the following weeks, Clark obliged the movement's strategy perfectly: he was photographed clubbing a woman on the courthouse steps, and his deputies shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old deacon, during a nighttime march in nearby Marion. Jackson died eight days later.

Bloody Sunday: March 7, 1965

Jackson's death inspired a plan to march the 54 miles from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital, to demand voting rights. On Sunday, March 7, roughly 600 marchers set out from Brown Chapel AME Church, led by SNCC's John Lewis and SCLC's Hosea Williams. King was not present, having returned to Atlanta.

The marchers made it six blocks to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which spans the Alabama River. On the far side, they were met by a wall of state troopers and Clark's mounted posse. Without warning, the troopers attacked. They fired tear gas, charged on horseback, and beat the marchers with clubs and bullwhips. John Lewis's skull was fractured. Amelia Boynton Robinson was beaten unconscious. The marchers were driven back across the bridge in chaos.

ABC News interrupted its Sunday evening broadcast of Judgment at Nuremberg — a film about Nazi war crimes — to show footage of the attack. The juxtaposition was devastating. Over 70 million Americans watched as peaceful marchers were brutalized by their own government. The footage was broadcast around the world.

The March to Montgomery

After a federal court order and the federalization of the Alabama National Guard, the march from Selma to Montgomery finally proceeded on March 21, 1965. Starting with about 3,200 marchers, the procession grew to approximately 25,000 by the time it reached Montgomery on March 25. King addressed the crowd from the steps of the Alabama State Capitol — the same building where Jefferson Davis had been inaugurated as president of the Confederacy.

The Voting Rights Act was signed into law on August 6, 1965. It outlawed literacy tests, provided for federal registrars in counties where less than 50% of eligible voters were registered, and required states with a history of discrimination to obtain federal approval before changing their voting laws. The effect was immediate and dramatic: in Mississippi, Black voter registration jumped from 6.7% in 1964 to 59.8% by 1968.