50th Anniversary of Selma to Montgomery
March 7, 1965
About the march:
In 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. chose Selma, Alabama as the site of a renewed voting rights campaign. The growing militancy of the civil rights movement made it essential that he score a quick victory in order to restore confidence in his non-violent approach. When segregationist police attacked the peaceful marchers, King had his victory. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed through Congress shortly thereafter.
Selma was home to 14,400 whites and 15,100 blacks, but the city's voting rolls were ninety-nine percent white. Every time that an African American attempted to register to vote, Sheriff Jim Clark and his deputies, many of whom were Ku Klux Klan members, turned the would-be voter away. During one week, more than three thousand black protesters were arrested for protesting this voting ban. In February 1965, a mob of state troopers assaulted a group of blacks, fatally shooting a young man, Jimmie Lee Jackson, as he tried to protect his mother and grandmother.
Jackson's death inspired black leaders to organize a fifty-four-mile (eighty-seven-kilometer) march from Selma to Montgomery to petition Governor George Wallace for protection of blacks registering to vote. On March 7, the march began. King was absent, having returned to Atlanta because of pressure from White House officials. He missed the sixty helmeted state troopers and local police with gas masks who lined up opposite the six hundred marchers at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. While white spectators cheered and Sheriff Clark ordered them to attack, the troopers moved on the protesters, swinging bullwhips and rubber tubing wrapped in barbed wire. The marchers stumbled over each other in retreat and seventeen went to the hospital with injuries. That evening, horrified viewers throughout the nation watched the images from the Pettus Bridge on television.
This incident, known as Bloody Sunday, pushed the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson into action to protect the voting rights of African Americans. To keep the pressure on, King led a second march on March 9th. A federal injunction had forbidden the marchers to proceed to Montgomery while their case was investigated, but as a comrpomise King and his marchers were allowed to cross the Edmund Pettus bridge, pray and demonstrate, and then return to Selma voluntarily. Later, the federal courts ruled that the protest should be allowed to take place, and King led a third and final march from Selma to Montgomery, starting on March 21 and ending March 25th in front of the state capitol.
Source: Anonymous. "March from Selma." Government, Politics, and Protest: Essential Primary Sources. Ed. K. Lee Lerner, Brenda Wilmoth Lerner, and Adrienne Wilmoth Lerner. Detroit: Gale, 2006. 77-79. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 6 Mar. 2015.
Other resources:
60 Minutes on Selma
New-York Historical Society Exhibit
Smithsonian Institute
History Channel
Library Databases (for Freeport Library cardholders)
