1965
THE SELMA MARCHES
In early 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC decided to make Selma, located in Dallas County, Alabama, the focus of a Black voter registration campaign. King had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and his profile would help draw international attention to the events that followed.
After the February 26 death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a young Black veteran in Marion, Alabama who was shot on February 18 while demonstrating for voting rights, King and the SCLC planned a massive protest march from Selma to the state capitol of Montgomery, 54 miles away. A group of 600 people, including activists John Lewis and Hosea Williams, set out from Selma on Sunday, March 7, 1965—a day that would come to be known as “Bloody Sunday.”
The marchers didn’t get far before Alabama state troopers, wielding whips, nightsticks, and tear gas, rushed the group at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The brutal scene was captured on television, enraging many Americans and drawing religious and civil rights leaders of all faiths to Selma in protest. Hundreds of ministers, priests, rabbis, and social activists soon headed to Selma to join the voting rights march.
On March 9, King led more than 2,000 marchers, Black and white, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge but found Highway 80 blocked again by state troopers. King paused the marchers and led them in prayer, then led the crowd back to Selma. Many of those present were not aware that a compromise was reached the night before with representatives of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who suggested that it be postponed.
Further violence was carried out that evening when members of the Ku Klux Klan attacked Unitarian minister James Reeb, who later died from his injuries.
On March 15, President Lyndon B. Johnson went on national television to pledge his support to the Selma protesters and to call for the passage of a new voting rights bill that he was introducing in Congress.
The federally sanctioned march left Selma on March 21. Protected by hundreds of federalized Alabama National Guardsmen and FBI agents, the demonstrators covered between 7 to 17 miles per day, camping at night in supporters’ yards. Limited by Judge Frank Johnson’s order to 300 marchers over a stretch of two-lane highway, the number of demonstrators swelled on the last day to 25,000. They gathered in front of the state capitol to hear King and other speakers, including Ralph Bunche (winner of the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize), address the crowd.
“No tide of racism can stop us,” King proclaimed from the building’s steps, as viewers from around the world watched the historic moment on television.
That evening, Viola Liuzzo, who had come from Detroit to Alabama to support the voting rights movement, was shot to death by KKK members when they saw her driving a Black marcher, Leroy Moton, back to Selma from Montgomery. Immediately following her murder, Liuzzo became the target of a smear campaign, mounted by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, as a means of diverting attention from the fact that a key FBI informant was in the car with Liuzzo’s killers. Despite this attempt to discredit her, Liuzzo became a martyr whose brutal murder drew national attention to the cause of voting rights.
The three Selma marches were a pivotal turning point in the civil rights movement. Because of the powerful impact of the marches, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was presented to Congress on March 17, 1965. President Johnson signed the bill into law on August 6, 1965.
Sources
History.com – Selma Montgomery March
King Institute – Selma Montgomery March
Zinned Project – Viola Liuzzo Murdered by the KKK
Zinned Project – Why We Should Teach About the FBI’s War on the Civil Rights Movement