March 7, 1965: Bloody Sunday | Selma, Alabama

DHS US History II

During 1961 and 1964, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had led a voting registration campaign in Selma, the seat of Dallas County, Alabama, a small town with a record of consistent resistance to black voting. Resistance from law enforcement cramped SNCC’s efforts. Local civil rights activists allured Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to turn Selma’s obstinacy to black voting into a national concern. SCLC also wanted to use the momentum of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to achieve federal protection for a voting rights statute. Over the course of January and February of 1965, King and the SCLC led many demonstrations to the Dallas County Courthouse in Selma. On February 17, during one of these demonstrations, an Alabama state trooper shot protester Jimmy Lee Jackson, fatally wounding him. A protest march from Selma to Montgomery was scheduled for the beginning of March in response to his killing. Six hundred protestors gathered in Selma on Sunday, March 7. They crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River on their way to Montgomery. Just before the bridge, they found their route blocked by Alabama State troopers and local police who ordered them to turn around back towards Selma. When the protesters refused to turn around, the officers used teargas and entered the enormous crowd, beating the passive protesters with billy clubs and sending over fifty people to the hospital. The big difference between this demonstration and bloodshed and demonstrations before it was that it was televised nationally and internationally. This embarrassed Americans and let Americans who had never witnessed the barbarity of racism see it for the first time. After this atrocity, Martin Luther King, Jr. asked civil rights supporters to come back to Selma for a second march. Members of Congress urged Martin Luther King, Jr. to hold off on the march until a court could decide whether the protesters deserved federal protection. With many prominent civil rights activists now in Selma at Martin Luther King, Jr.’s call, they didn’t want to sit around, they wanted to make change. King found it hard to elect the correct action. Should he passively listen to the government’s requests for patience or should he continue to lead demonstrations and protests to actively help his cause? On March 9, MLK did end leading the second protest. This time, however, he turned the protest around at the beginning of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s decisions at this demonstration aggravated the tension between SCLC and the more radical SNCC. The SNCC wanted more violent tactics to be used in order to win reforms to active opposition to racist programs. On March 21 of 1965, the last, and successful march began with federal protection. On August 6 of the same year, the federal Voting Rights Act was passed, making the process successful. In the end, the world witnessed change after bloodshed and a testament to what civil rights can do.