Civil Rights march ends as ‘Bloody Sunday,’ March 7, 1965
On this day in 1965, known in history as “Bloody Sunday,” some 600 people began a 54-mile march from Selma, Alabama, to the state Capitol in Montgomery. They were commemorating the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, who had been shot on Feb. 18 by a state trooper while trying to protect his mother during a civil rights demonstration.
After the marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Selma’s outskirts, white state troopers assaulted them, knocking many to the ground and beating them with nightsticks. Another detachment of troopers fired tear gas while mounted troopers charged the marchers. In all, 17 marchers were hospitalized and 50 treated for lesser injuries.
A national uproar occurred when footage of the melee was broadcast on tens of millions of television sets across the country.
At the time, 100 years after the end of the Civil War, the 15th Amendment had been effectively nullified by discriminatory laws in much of the South, keeping many blacks from the polls. In Selma, where African-Americans made up more than half the population, they constituted about 2 percent of the registered voters.
ABC News interrupted its television premiere of the movie “Judgment at Nuremberg,” about the postwar Nazi war-crimes trials, to show footage of the violence in Selma. Soon thereafter, demonstrations in support of the Selma marchers occurred in 80 U.S. cities, while thousands of religious and lay leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., flew to Selma.
In Montgomery, U.S. District Court judge Frank Johnson Jr. issued a restraining order barring the march from proceeding while he reviewed the case. President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress, saying, “There is no issue of states’ rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights. ... We have already waited 100 years and more, and the time for waiting is gone.”
On March 9, King led an integrated group of protesters to the Pettus Bridge. That night, white vigilantes murdered a Northern minister.
On March 15, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress, saying, “There is no issue of states’ rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights. We have already waited 100 years and more, and the time for waiting is gone.”
On March 17, Judge Johnson ruled in favor of the demonstrators. “The law is clear,” the judge wrote, “that the right to petition one’s government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups ... and these rights may be exercised by marching, even along public highways.”
On March 21, protected by federalized National Guard troops, about 3,200 voting rights advocates left Selma and set out for Montgomery, walking 12 miles a day and sleeping in fields. They stood 25,000 strong on March 25 at the state Capitol in Montgomery. (The route along U.S. Highway 80 is now memorialized as the Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights Trail, and is designated as a U.S. National Historic Trail.)
These events proved to be the key to congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Source: “ON THE ROAD TO FREEDOM,” BY CHARLES COBB (2008); U.S. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS