1965 - "Bloody Sunday" Selma to Montgomery civil rights march

The Selma to Montgomery marches, which included Bloody Sunday, were three marches that marked the political and emotional peak of the American civil rights movement. They were the culmination of the movement in Selma, Alabama for voting rights, launched by Amelia Boynton Robinson and her husband, who brought many prominent leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement to Selma, including Martin Luther King Jr., Jim Bevel, and Hosea Williams.

"Bloody Sunday" occurred on March 7, 1965, when 600 civil rights marchers were attacked by state and local police with billy clubs and tear gas. Only the third, and last, march successfully made it into Montgomery. The route is memorialized as the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail. 

On March 7, 1965, 525 to 600 civil rights marchers headed east out of Selma on U.S. Highway 80. Discrimination and intimidation had prevented Selma's black population, roughly half of the city, from registering three weeks earlier, February 18, 1965, a trooper (Corporal James Bonard Fowler) shot Jimmie Lee Jackson as he tried to protect his mother and grandfather in a café to which they had fled while being attacked by troopers during a civil rights demonstration. Jackson died of a massive infection at Selma's Good Samaritan Hospital eight days later. The marchers hoped to bring notice to the violations of their rights by marching to the state capitol in Montgomery.

In their first march, led by John Lewis and the Reverend Hosea Williams, they made it only as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge, six blocks away. State troopers and the Dallas County Sheriff's Department, some mounted on horseback, awaited them. In the presence of the news media, the lawmen attacked the peaceful demonstrators with billy clubs, tear gas, and bull whips, driving them back into Selma.

Brutal televised images of the attack, which presented people with horrifying images of people left bloodied and severely injured, roused support for the US civil rights movement. Amelia Boynton Robinson was beaten and gassed nearly to death — her photo appeared on the front page of papers and newsmagazines around the world. Seventeen marchers were hospitalized, leading to the naming of the day "Bloody Sunday".

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