Alabama State troopers attack civil-rights demonstrators outside Selma, Alabama, on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965
The three
Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965 were part of the Selma Voting Rights Movement and led to the passage that year of the
Voting Rights Act, a landmark federal achievement of the
1960s American Civil Rights Movement. Activists publicized the three
protest marches to walk the 54-mile highway from
Selma to the Alabama state capital of
Montgomery as showing the desire of black American citizens to exercise their constitutional right to vote, in defiance of segregationist repression.
A voters registration campaign in Selma had been launched in 1963 by local African Americans, who formed the Dallas County Voters League (DCVL). Joined by organizers from the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), they began working that year in a renewed effort to register black voters. Most of the millions of African Americans across the South had effectively been
disenfranchised since the turn of the century by a series of discriminatory requirements and practices. Finding resistance by white officials to be intractable, even after passage of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 ending segregation, the DCVL invited Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr. and the activists of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to join them. SCLC brought many prominent civil rights and civic leaders to Selma in January 1965. Local and regional protests began, with 3,000 persons arrested by the end of February.
On February 26, activist and deacon
Jimmie Lee Jackson died after being mortally shot several days earlier by a state trooper during a peaceful march in
Marion, Alabama. The community was sorrowed and outraged. To defuse and refocus the anger, SCLC Director of Direct Action
James Bevel, who was directing SCLC’s Selma Voting Rights Movement, called for a march of dramatic length, from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery.
[1][2] Bevel had been working on his Alabama Project for voting rights since late 1963.
The first march took place on March 7, 1965. Bevel,
Amelia Boynton, and others helped organize it. The march gained the nickname “Bloody Sunday” after its 600 marchers were attacked at the Edmund Pettus Bridge after leaving Selma; state troopers and county posse attacked the unarmed marchers with
billy clubs and tear gas. Boynton was one of those beaten unconscious; a picture of her lying wounded on the bridge was published and televised around the world.
[3] The second march took place March 9; troopers, police, and marchers confronted each other, but when the troopers stepped aside to let them pass, King led the marchers back to the church.
[4] He was seeking protection by a federal court for the march. That night, a white group beat and murdered civil rights activist
James Reeb, a Unitarian Universalist
[5] minister from Boston, who had come to Selma to march in the second march, which had been joined by many other clergy and sympathizers from across the country.
The violence of “Bloody Sunday” and of Reeb’s death led to a national outcry and some acts of
civil disobedience, targeting both the Alabama state and federal governments. The protesters demanded protection for the Selma marchers and a new federal voting rights law to enable African Americans to register and vote without harassment. President
Lyndon Johnson, whose administration had been working on a voting rights law, held a televised
joint session of Congress on March 15 to ask for the bill’s introduction and passage.
With Governor Wallace refusing to protect the marchers, President Johnson committed to do so. The third march started March 21. Protected by 2,000 soldiers of the U.S. Army, 1,900 members of the Alabama National Guard under Federal command, and many FBI agents and Federal Marshals, the marchers averaged 10 miles (16 km) a day along
U.S. Route 80, known in Alabama as the “
Jefferson Davis Highway“. The marchers arrived in Montgomery on March 24 and at the
Alabama State Capitol on March 25.
[6] With thousands having joined the campaign, 25,000 people entered the capital city that day in support of voting rights.
Source:
http://www.americanfreedombybarbara.com/2015/03/50-years-ago-on-march-7th-selma-to.html
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