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Jun 23, 2020 · Four lives were lost: Jimmie Lee Jackson, rev. James Reeb, Viola Liuzzo, and Jonathan Daniels. All four men that assaulted Reverend James Reeb were acquitted. Right after the third march concluded, Viola Liuzzo was shot by Ku Klux Klansmen who were driving past the protesters. In 1965, three protest marches were held in the United States to ...
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- State Troopers Fatally Shoot Black Demonstrator in Marion
- Demonstrators Reach Edmund Pettus Bridge
- HISTORY Vault: Voices of Civil Rights
The assault on civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama helped lead to the Voting Rights Act.
Nearly a century after the Confederacy’s guns fell silent, the racial legacies of slavery and Reconstruction continued to reverberate loudly throughout Alabama in 1965.
On March 7, 1965, when then-25-year-old activist John Lewis led over 600 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama and faced brutal attacks by oncoming state troopers, footage of the violence collectively shocked the nation and galvanized the fight against racial injustice.
March from Selma to Montgomery
The passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 months earlier had done little in some parts of the state to ensure African Americans of the basic right to vote. Perhaps no place was Jim Crow’s grip tighter than in Dallas County, Alabama, where African Americans made up more than half of the population, yet accounted for just 2 percent of registered voters.
For months, the efforts of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to register Black voters in the county seat of Selma had been thwarted. In January 1965, Martin Luther King Jr., came to the city and gave the backing of the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) to the cause. Peaceful demonstrations in Selma and surrounding communities resulted in the arrests of thousands, including King, who wrote to the New York Times, “This is Selma, Alabama. There are more negroes in jail with me than there are on the voting rolls.”
The rising racial tensions finally bubbled over into bloodshed in the nearby town of Marion on February 18, 1965, when state troopers clubbed protestors and fatally shot 26-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson, an African American demonstrator trying to protect his mother, who was being struck by police.
In response, civil rights leaders planned to take their cause directly to Alabama Governor George Wallace on a 54-mile march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery. Although Wallace ordered state troopers “to use whatever measures are necessary to prevent a march,” approximately 600 voting rights advocates set out from the Brown Chapel AME Church on Sunday, March 7.
The demonstrators marched undisturbed through downtown Selma, where the ghosts of the past constantly permeated the present. As they began to cross the steel-arched bridge spanning the Alabama River, the marchers who gazed up could see the name of a Confederate general and reputed grand dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, Edmund Pettus, staring right back at them in big block letters emblazoned across the bridge’s crossbeam.
Once Lewis and Williams reached the crest of the bridge, they saw trouble on the other side. A wall of state troopers, wearing white helmets and slapping billy clubs in their hands, stretched across Route 80 at the base of the span. Behind them were deputies of county sheriff Jim Clark, some on horseback, and dozens of white spectators waving Confederate flags and giddily anticipating a showdown. Knowing a confrontation awaited, the marchers pressed on in a thin column down the bridge’s sidewalk until they stopped about 50 feet away from the authorities.
“It would be detrimental to your safety to continue this march,” Major John Cloud called out from his bullhorn. “This is an unlawful assembly. You have to disperse, you are ordered to disperse. Go home or go to your church. This march will not continue.”
“Mr. Major,” replied Williams, “I would like to have a word, can we have a word?”
“I’ve got nothing further to say to you,” Cloud answered.
SNCC leader John Lewis (light coat, center), attempts to ward off the blow as a burly state trooper swings his club at Lewis' head during the attempted march from Selma to Montgomery on March 7, 1965.
A look at one of the defining social movements in U.S. history, told through the personal stories of men, women and children who lived through it.
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Apr 23, 2024 · Selma March, political march led by Martin Luther King, Jr., from Selma, Alabama, to the state’s capital, Montgomery, that occurred March 21–25, 1965. The march became a landmark in the American civil rights movement and directly led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Mar 7, 2021 · The Selma Bridge Crossing Jubilee marks the 56th anniversary of Bloody Sunday — the day on March 7, 1965, that civil rights marchers were brutally beaten by law enforcement officers on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. Lewis, the Rev. Joseph Lowery, the Rev. C.T. Vivian, and attorney Bruce Boynton were the late civil rights leaders honored on ...
Mar 7, 2021 · If you were in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965, and would like to tell your story or can help identify marchers, contact Auburn University’s Keith Hébert at heberks@auburn.edu or Richard Burt ...
Mar 5, 2023 · Few moments have had as lasting importance to the civil rights movement as what happened on March 7, 1965, in Selma and in the weeks that followed.
Dec 11, 2023 · The Selma Marches were a series of three marches that took place in 1965 from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. These marches were organized to protest the blocking of Black Americans' right to vote by the systematic racist structure of the Jim Crow South. With the leadership of groups such as the Dallas County Voters League (DCVL), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the ...
