Martin Luther King Jr and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), along with the Dallas County Voters League and Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee arranged the protest in part due to the death of a fellow protester earlier in the year. On March 7th, between 500 and 600 protesters came together to march out of Selma and to Dallas County to protest this death among many other things. It went well until they reached the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where County Sheriff Jim Clark and a large group of state troopers as well as several civilian "posses" (deputized by Jim Clark that morning) waited on the other side of the bridge. The protesters were told to go back the way they'd come, and when one of the leaders of the march tried to ask why, the police began to shove them. By the end of the confrontation, they had used batons to beat the protesters, used teargas, and even horses to attack the demonstrators. However, images of the attack on protesters were televised across the country, and drew monetary and physical support from all over. President Johnson immediately made a statement decrying the police violence and promised to send a voting rights bill to congress. A second march was scheduled for March 9th. King and fellow heads of the SCLC sent out a call for fellow religious and clergy leaders to join them. They also received a restraining order to keep the violence at bay. Though urged by representatives of the US government to postpone the march, the march went on as planned. They stopped at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, prayed, then turned around and headed back to Selma. One of the white clergymen in this march, James Reeb, was later attacked by KKK members, and his fellow protesters, not certain he would be willingly treated by Selma hospitals, took him to a hospital two hours away, where he later died. A week after his death, a judge ruled that the protesters had the right to march, and so a new march was organized. On March 21st, about 8,000 people gathered and commenced to march from Selma to Montgomery. Many spiritual leaders walked with King at the front of the march, representing all faiths and creeds. People continued to join the march as they moved through the county. They arrived in Montgomery on March 24th. It is still one of the best known protests of the time.
Sources:
- Selma (movie, dir Ava DuVernay)
- Wikipedia: Selma to Montgomery Marches
- CNN: 1965 Selma to Montgomery March Fast Facts
- History: How Selma's 'Bloody Sunday' Became a Turning Point in the Civil Rights Movement
- Bloody Sunday Protest March, Selma, Alabama
- Bloody Sunday
- Civil Rights march ends as ‘Bloody Sunday'
- Bloody Sunday: Civil Rights Protesters Brutally Attacked in Selma
- Selma to Montgomery March
The next post will go back another ten years to one of the most famous lynchings ever.
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