Selma to Montgomery: Bloody Sunday and the Marches That Won the Vote
Updated: 7 days ago
On the afternoon of Sunday 7 March 1965, around 600 people walked in pairs out of Brown Chapel church in Selma, Alabama. They were heading for Montgomery, the state capital, 54 miles away. Most of them were wearing their Sunday best. Some carried bags with a toothbrush and a change of clothes. None of them got further than the other side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Waiting for them at the bottom of the bridge was a wall of Alabama state troopers, and behind them a posse of local men on horseback. The marchers were given two minutes to turn around. About a minute later, the troopers charged. They beat people with clubs and whips, fired tear gas into the crowd and chased them back through the streets of Selma.
That night, ABC interrupted its Sunday film to show footage of the attack to millions of Americans. The day became known as Bloody Sunday, and within five months it had helped change American law.
Quick Answers
What were the Selma to Montgomery marches? Three protest marches in Alabama in March 1965, planned to walk the 54 miles from Selma to the state capital, Montgomery, to demand voting rights for Black Americans.
What happened on Bloody Sunday? On 7 March 1965, state troopers and sheriff's deputies attacked about 600 peaceful marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge with clubs, whips and tear gas. At least 50 people needed hospital treatment.
Who led the marches? The first was led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams. Martin Luther King Jr led the second and third, alongside local activists from the Dallas County Voters League.
Did the marchers reach Montgomery? Yes, on the third attempt. About 3,200 people left Selma on 21 March, and by the time they reached the Alabama State Capitol on 25 March there were 25,000.
What did the marches achieve? They pushed Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act, which President Lyndon Johnson signed on 6 August 1965.
Selma, Alabama, 1965
Selma was a small cotton town on the Alabama River, and more than half the people in Dallas County, where it sat, were Black. But when it came to elections, they barely existed. In the early 1960s, only around 2 per cent of the county's Black residents were registered to vote. In neighbouring Lowndes County, where Black people outnumbered white people by four to one, not a single one was registered.
That wasn't an accident. Since the end of Reconstruction, Southern states had built a whole system to stop Black people voting without ever saying so out loud. In Selma, the registration office was only open two days a month, and it often opened late and closed early. Applicants had to fill in long forms where one tiny mistake meant rejection, and pass a literacy test that could include questions nobody could answer. White applicants didn't get the same treatment.
It went back a long way. After the Civil War, Black men in Alabama had briefly been able to vote and even hold office. Then in 1901 the state wrote a new constitution with the openly declared aim of restoring white supremacy. It brought in poll taxes, property requirements and literacy tests designed so that Black citizens could be turned away while white ones were waved through. Within a few years, the number of Black voters in Alabama had collapsed from well over a hundred thousand to a few thousand.
Sixty years later, little had changed. Black people in Selma paid taxes, served in the army and raised families there, but in the county that ran their lives, they had no say at all.
Trying to register could also cost you your job or your home, or get you a visit from the Ku Klux Klan. Even the bridge the marchers would cross was a reminder of who ran things. It was named after Edmund Pettus, a Confederate general who went on to become a leader of the Klan in Alabama and a US senator.
The Fight Comes to Selma
Local activists had been fighting this for years. The Dallas County Voters League, led by people including Amelia Boynton, a businesswoman who'd been trying to get Black residents registered since the 1930s, kept up the pressure. From 1963 young organisers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, known as SNCC, came to help. They were met with arrests, beatings and a local judge who banned any gathering of more than three people to talk about civil rights.
In February 1963, a young SNCC couple named Bernard and Colia Lafayette moved to Selma to start organising. At the time, fewer than 1 per cent of the county's Black residents were registered. They held meetings in churches and taught people how to tackle the registration forms. That June, Bernard Lafayette was attacked and beaten outside his home, on the same night that Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi. The beating didn't scare people off. More of them started coming to the meetings.
On 7 October 1963, which the activists called Freedom Day, hundreds of Black residents lined up outside the Dallas County courthouse to try to register. They stood there all day while Sheriff Clark and his armed deputies watched. Anyone who tried to bring them food or water was beaten and arrested. The writer James Baldwin came to see it for himself, while Justice Department lawyers watched from the federal building across the street and did nothing. Baldwin told reporters he couldn't believe the federal government was powerless to act.
The man they were up against was Jim Clark, the sheriff of Dallas County. He wore a badge saying Never on his lapel, carried a cattle prod and had a posse of deputised white locals to back him up. In January 1965, a 54-year-old woman named Annie Lee Cooper, who'd been standing in line for hours to try to register, punched him in the face after he shoved her. It took several deputies to pin her down.
By then, the local activists had invited in Martin Luther King Jr and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to help bring national attention to Selma. King was arrested there in February, along with hundreds of others, including schoolchildren.
One of the most striking protests came on 22 January 1965, when more than a hundred of Selma's Black schoolteachers marched to the courthouse, led by Frederick Reese, the president of the local teachers' association. Teachers were among the most respected people in the community, and they had the most to lose, because the school board could sack them. Clark's deputies pushed them back down the courthouse steps with billy clubs. They came back and were pushed down again. Then they marched back to Brown Chapel, where they were greeted as heroes. After that, other professions followed them to the courthouse, including the town's undertakers and beauticians.
From his cell in the Selma jail in February, King wrote a letter that was published as a full-page advert in The New York Times. One line from it summed up the whole campaign:
"This is Selma, Alabama. There are more Negroes in jail with me than there are on the voting rolls."
While King was behind bars, an unexpected visitor turned up in Selma. Malcolm X came to town in early February 1965 and spoke at Brown Chapel. He warned the white authorities that they'd be wise to deal with King, because if they didn't, others would come along who wouldn't be so patient. Less than three weeks later, Malcolm X was shot dead in New York.
The Death of Jimmie Lee Jackson
On the night of 18 February 1965, around 500 people held a peaceful march in the nearby town of Marion. The streetlights suddenly went out, and state troopers and local police attacked them.
A 26-year-old church deacon named Jimmie Lee Jackson fled with his mother and his 82-year-old grandfather into a small café. Troopers followed them in. When Jackson tried to protect his mother as she was being beaten, a state trooper named James Bonard Fowler shot him twice in the stomach. He died eight days later.
Nobody was held responsible for decades. Fowler wasn't charged until 2007, more than 40 years later, and in 2010 he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanour manslaughter charge and served less than six months in jail.
At Jackson's funeral, the SCLC organiser James Bevel came up with a plan. They would march from Selma all the way to Montgomery and take their demands straight to the governor, George Wallace, a man who'd promised segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.
Bloody Sunday
The march set off on 7 March. King was away in Atlanta, so it was led by John Lewis, the 25-year-old chairman of SNCC, and Hosea Williams of the SCLC. Lewis had already been beaten bloody as a Freedom Rider in 1961, alongside a white student named James Zwerg. He walked at the front in a raincoat, carrying a backpack with an apple, an orange, a toothbrush and a couple of books, because he expected to be arrested.
As the marchers reached the top of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they could see what was waiting for them. Major John Cloud of the Alabama state troopers told them through a megaphone that it was an unlawful assembly and gave them two minutes to go back to their church. Williams asked if they could have a word. Cloud said there was nothing to talk about.
The marchers knelt to pray. The troopers moved forward, knocking people down and beating them with nightsticks. Then came the tear gas, and then Sheriff Clark's mounted posse, who rode into the choking crowd swinging clubs, whips and lengths of rubber tubing wrapped in barbed wire. Bystanders cheered.
John Lewis was clubbed on the head and suffered a fractured skull. Amelia Boynton was beaten unconscious, and a photograph of her lying in the road, held up by another marcher, went around the world. At least 50 people had to be treated in hospital.
Some of the marchers were children. Sheyann Webb, who was eight years old, had slipped out to join the march without telling her parents. When the tear gas hit, she ran, and as she fled back towards the church, Hosea Williams scooped her up in his arms to carry her. She later remembered telling him to put her down, because he wasn't running fast enough. Back at Brown Chapel, people sat stunned and bleeding, singing to hold themselves together.
The cameras caught everything. That evening, ABC broke into its Sunday night film, Judgment at Nuremberg, a drama about Nazi war crimes, to show the footage. The parallels weren't lost on anyone watching. Before he was taken to hospital, Lewis told reporters he didn't see how President Johnson could send troops to Vietnam and not send them to Selma.
Turnaround Tuesday
King put out a call for clergy and supporters from across the country to come to Selma, and hundreds did. On Tuesday 9 March, he led around 2,500 people back to the bridge. But a federal judge had asked him to wait until a hearing could take place, and King was torn between the movement and the courts.
At the far end of the bridge, the troopers were lined up again. This time the marchers knelt and prayed, and then, to the confusion of many of them, King turned them around and led them back to Brown Chapel. Some of the younger activists were furious. The day became known as Turnaround Tuesday.
The Murder of James Reeb
That evening, three white Unitarian ministers who'd come to Selma to support the march went for dinner at a Black-owned café. As they walked back, a group of white men attacked them. James Reeb, a 38-year-old minister from Boston, was hit on the head with a club.
He was taken to the hospital in Selma, which couldn't treat him, and then on to Birmingham, two hours away. He died on 11 March. Three men were later tried for his murder and acquitted by an all-white jury.
Jimmie Lee Jackson's death had barely made the national news. Reeb's death, the killing of a white minister from the North, caused a national outcry. President Johnson phoned his widow and sent flowers. Many civil rights activists noticed the difference.
We Shall Overcome
On 15 March 1965, Lyndon Johnson went before a joint session of Congress, watched by an estimated 70 million people on television, and announced that he was sending a voting rights bill. He told the country that what had happened in Selma was part of a struggle that belonged to every American, and finished by quoting the anthem of the civil rights movement: we shall overcome. In Selma, watching on television, King is said to have wept.
Two days later, Judge Frank Johnson, a federal judge in Montgomery, ruled that the marchers had a constitutional right to make their walk, and ordered the state not to interfere. Governor Wallace said he couldn't afford to protect them, so the president federalised the Alabama National Guard and sent in the army.
The Final March
On Sunday 21 March, about 3,200 people set off from Brown Chapel once more, this time protected by soldiers, federal marshals and FBI agents. Helicopters flew overhead. King marched at the front, arm in arm with leaders including the rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and the diplomat Ralph Bunche.
Under the judge's order, only 300 marchers were allowed on the narrow two-lane stretch of Highway 80 through Lowndes County. They walked around 12 miles a day and slept in fields on farms owned by Black families, while white locals jeered from the roadside and planes dropped leaflets attacking them.
Among those who walked the whole 54 miles was Jim Letherer, a white man from Michigan who'd lost a leg to cancer and made the entire journey on crutches. The marchers camped on farms along the route, the first night on land owned by a Black farmer just outside Selma, where volunteers served hot food under big tents. On the third day it poured with rain, and people trudged on through the mud singing freedom songs, some of them made up on the spot about Governor Wallace.
As they got closer to Montgomery, thousands more joined in. On the last night, performers including Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr, Nina Simone and Joan Baez put on a concert for the marchers. And on Thursday 25 March, about 25,000 people walked up Dexter Avenue to the Alabama State Capitol, where the Confederacy had been founded in 1861.
How Long? Not Long
Wallace refused to come out and meet them. From a platform on the Capitol steps, King gave one of the greatest speeches of his life. He asked how long it would take for justice to come, and answered: not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
He also warned that the fight wasn't over. That night, it claimed another life.
The Murder of Viola Liuzzo
Viola Liuzzo was a 39-year-old white mother of five from Detroit. She'd been so upset by the television pictures of Bloody Sunday that she drove all the way to Alabama to help. After the rally, she spent the evening ferrying marchers back from Montgomery to Selma in her car, with a 19-year-old Black volunteer named Leroy Moton.
On Highway 80, a car full of Klansmen pulled up alongside them and opened fire. Liuzzo was shot in the head and killed instantly. Moton, covered in her blood, lay still and pretended to be dead when the killers came back to check, then ran for help.
One of the four men in the Klan car, Gary Thomas Rowe, turned out to be an FBI informant. The others were acquitted of murder by all-white juries, but later convicted under federal civil rights law and sentenced to ten years. Meanwhile, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI quietly spread smears about Liuzzo's private life to deflect attention from its own informant. A cross was burned outside her family's home in Detroit.
The Voting Rights Act
On 6 August 1965, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, with Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders standing behind him. It banned literacy tests, allowed federal officials to take over voter registration in places with a history of discrimination, and required those places to get permission from Washington before changing their voting rules.
The effect was immediate. Within months, federal examiners were registering Black voters across the South. In Alabama, the number of registered Black voters went from around 53,000 in 1960 to more than half a million by 1990. In 1966, Black voters helped vote Sheriff Jim Clark out of office.
The price was high. Within just over a month, three people had been killed because of what happened at Selma. A few years later, King himself was assassinated in Memphis, in 1968.
What Happened Next
The Voting Rights Act didn't end the violence overnight. In August 1965, a white seminary student from New Hampshire named Jonathan Daniels, who'd come to Alabama after answering King's call in March, was shot dead in Hayneville, in Lowndes County, as he stepped in front of a young Black woman to protect her from a man with a shotgun. His killer was acquitted by an all-white jury.
In Lowndes County, where not one Black person had been able to vote, SNCC organiser Stokely Carmichael helped local people form their own political party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. Alabama law said every party needed a symbol, so they picked a crouching black panther. Within months, two young activists in Oakland, California, borrowed the emblem for their own new group, which Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale called the Black Panther Party.
Sheriff Jim Clark lost his job in 1966, when newly registered Black voters helped throw him out. Major John Cloud, who ordered the troopers forward on Bloody Sunday, was never punished.
Nearly 50 years later, in 2013, the US Supreme Court struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act in a case called Shelby County v. Holder. It meant states with a history of discrimination no longer had to get federal approval before changing their voting rules. John Lewis called it a dagger in the heart of the Voting Rights Act, and the fight over voting rights in America is still going on. For the rest of his life, Lewis told young activists to get into what he called good trouble, necessary trouble.
The Bridge Today
Selma and the Edmund Pettus Bridge became pilgrimage sites. In 1996 the route was designated the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail. In 2015, on the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, Barack Obama, the first Black president, walked across the bridge alongside John Lewis, by then a long-serving congressman.
When Lewis died in July 2020, his coffin was carried across the Edmund Pettus Bridge one last time on a horse-drawn carriage, over the rose petals scattered on the spot where he'd been beaten 55 years earlier. Campaigners have spent years asking for the bridge to be renamed after him rather than a Klan leader. So far, it still carries Edmund Pettus's name.
The story was turned into the 2014 film Selma, directed by Ava DuVernay, with David Oyelowo as King and Oprah Winfrey as Annie Lee Cooper. But the best memorial is probably the one Lewis spent the rest of his life pointing to: the right to vote, which so many people risked so much to win.
Suggested Reading
Want to dig deeper into Selma and the fight for the vote? These are worth a look.
Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement by John Lewis. Lewis's own account of Bloody Sunday and a lifetime in the civil rights movement.
Selma, Lord, Selma: Girlhood Memories of the Civil Rights Days by Sheyann Webb and Rachel West Nelson. Two young girls who marched on Bloody Sunday tell the story as they lived it.
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