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Selma to Montgomery Civil Rights March |
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Selma to Montgomery March
Martin Luther King Jr. and wife Coretta lead march into Montgomery, Alabama 1965
The Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma, Alabama
Photograph courtesy of the Alabama Historical Commission
Alabama Police confront the Selma Marchers
Federal Bureau of Investigation Photograph
Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Photograph courtesy of Kentucky Department of Public Information Collection
The Selma-to-Montgomery March for voting rights ended three weeks--and three events--that represented the political and emotional peak of the modern civil rights movement. On "Bloody Sunday," March 7, 1965, some 600 civil rights marchers headed east out of Selma on U.S. Route 80. They got only as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge six blocks away, where state and local lawmen attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas and drove them back into Selma. Two days later on March 9, Martin Luther King, Jr., led a "symbolic" march to the bridge. Then civil rights leaders sought court protection for a third, full-scale march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery. Federal District Court Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr.,weighed the right of mobility against the right to march and ruled in favor of the demonstrators. "The law is clear that the right to petition one's government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups...," said Judge Johnson, "and these rights may be exercised by marching, even along public highways." On Sunday, March 21, about 3,200 marchers set out for Montgomery, walking 12 miles a day and sleeping in fields. By the time they reached the capitol on Thursday, March 25, they were 25,000-strong. Less than five months after the last of the three marches, President Lyndon Johnsonsigned the Voting Rights Act of 1965--the best possible redress of grievances.
At the Edmund Pettus Bridge, six blocks from Brown Chapel, mounted troopers confronted the marchers and ordered them to disperse. The marchers stood their ground and the troopers advanced, billy clubs raised. Lewis fell, his skull fractured. Others fell, screaming, as white onlookers cheered. Then Sheriff Jim Clark's deputized posse charged the marchers, firing tear gas and swinging bullwhips and rubber tubing wrapped in barbed wire. That night, ABC interrupted its showing of the movie Judgement at Nuremberg to air footage of "Bloody Sunday." By morning, news of the event had spread to nearly every American household, and thousands of march supporters began to flock to Selma.
Brown Chapel AME Church
Photograph courtesy of the Alabama Historical Commission
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