| March 7, 1965
By March 1965, the
Dallas County Voters League, the Southern Christian Leadership
Council (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) were all working for voting rights in Alabama.
On March
7,
John Lewis, head of SNCC, and fellow activist
Hosea Williams led a group of silent marchers from the Brown
Chapel AME Church to the foot of the Pettus Bridge. The
subsequent police riot became known as "Bloody
Sunday."
When ABC television
interrupted a Nazi war crimes documentary, Judgment in Nuremberg, to
show footage of violence in Selma a powerful metaphor was
presented to the nation. Within forty-eight hours,
demonstrations in support of the marchers were held in eighty
cities and thousands of religious and lay leaders, including Dr.
Martin Luther King, flew to
Selma.
On March 9, Dr.
King led a group again to the Pettus Bridge where they knelt,
prayed, and, to the consternation of some, returned to Brown
Chapel. That night a Northern minister, who was in Selma to
march, was killed by white vigilantes.
Outraged citizens
continued to inundate the White House and the Congress with
letters and phone calls. On March 9, for example, Jackie
Robinson, the baseball hero, sent a telegram to the President:
IMPORTANT YOU TAKE
IMMEDIATE ACTION IN ALABAMA ONE MORE DAY OF SAVAGE TREATMENT BY
LEGALIZED HATCHET MEN COULD LEAD TO OPEN WARFARE BY AROUSED
NEGROES AMERICA CANNOT AFFORD THIS IN 1965
In Montgomery,
Federal Judge Frank Johnson, Jr. temporarily restrained all
parties in order to review the case. And, President Lyndon
Johnson addressed the American people before a televised 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 a hundred years and more,
and the time for waiting is gone . . ."
Allowing CBS
footage of "Bloody Sunday" as evidence in court, Judge
Johnson ruled on March 17, that the demonstrators be permitted
to march. Under protection of a federalized National Guard,
voting rights advocates left Selma on March 21 and stood 25,000
strong on March 25 before the state capitol in Montgomery.
As a direct
consequence of these events, the U.S. Congress passed the Voting
Rights Act of 1965, guaranteeing every American twenty-one and
over the right to register to vote. During the next four years
the number of U.S. blacks eligible to vote rose from 23 to 61
percent.
John Lewis, nearly
beaten to death at the bridge, went on to serve as Director of
the Voter Education Project, a program which eventually added
nearly four million minorities to the voter rolls.
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update 5 July 2008
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