Selma to Montgomery Marches (1965): Bloody Sunday and the Vote

The Selma to Montgomery marches were three protest marches in Alabama in March 1965 demanding voting rights for Black Americans. The first, on 7 March, ended in a brutal attack by state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge that became known as Bloody Sunday. The televised violence shocked the United States, and the final, federally protected march to the state capital helped push Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Background: voting in Dallas County

The Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 barred racial discrimination in voting, but across the South Black citizens were kept from the polls by literacy tests, poll taxes, complex registration rules, economic pressure and violence. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregation in public places but did little to protect the vote.

Selma, the seat of Dallas County, was a stark example. Black residents made up roughly half of the county’s population, yet in early 1965 only around 2 per cent of eligible Black adults were registered. The registration office opened only two days a month, and applicants faced difficult tests and hostile officials. Sheriff Jim Clark and his deputies were known for their aggressive treatment of Black residents.

Local activists had worked for years to change this. The Dallas County Voters League, with leaders such as Amelia Boynton and Frederick Reese, and organisers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had campaigned since 1963. In July 1964 a local judge issued an injunction banning gatherings of three or more people to discuss civil rights, which halted much of their work.

The campaign begins

At the invitation of local leaders, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) made Selma their focus. King spoke at Brown Chapel AME Church on 2 January 1965, and through January and February hundreds of people marched to the courthouse to try to register. Thousands were arrested, including schoolchildren and, on 1 February, King himself.

On the night of 18 February, in nearby Marion, state troopers attacked a night march. A trooper shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old church deacon who was trying to protect his mother and grandfather. Jackson died on 26 February. His death prompted the idea of a march of about 54 miles (87 km) from Selma to Montgomery to take the protesters’ grievances directly to Governor George Wallace.

Bloody Sunday: 7 March 1965

On Sunday 7 March about 600 marchers set out from Brown Chapel. They were led by John Lewis, chairman of SNCC, and Hosea Williams of SCLC; King was in Atlanta. The marchers walked two by two through Selma and over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which carried U.S. Highway 80 across the Alabama River.

On the far side they met a line of Alabama state troopers under Major John Cloud, together with Sheriff Clark’s mounted posse. After ordering the marchers to disperse, the troopers advanced with clubs, while posse members used whips and rubber tubing wrapped in barbed wire. Tear gas filled the road. Lewis suffered a fractured skull, and Amelia Boynton was beaten unconscious. Dozens of people were injured, with around 17 taken to hospital.

That evening ABC interrupted its broadcast of the film “Judgment at Nuremberg” to show footage of the attack. Millions of Americans saw peaceful protesters beaten by state police. Sympathy marches took place across the country, and hundreds of clergy and supporters travelled to Selma.

Turnaround Tuesday and the road to Montgomery

King called for a second march on Tuesday 9 March. Federal judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. had asked the organisers to wait while he held hearings on their right to march. King led about 2,500 people to the bridge, stopped, knelt in prayer and then turned back. Some SNCC activists felt betrayed, but King avoided both a direct breach of a federal order and another violent confrontation.

That night, James Reeb, a white Unitarian minister from Boston who had come to join the protest, was beaten by a group of white men in Selma. He died on 11 March. His death drew national outrage, more than Jimmie Lee Jackson’s had, a contrast that many activists noted bitterly.

On 15 March President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress, calling for a strong voting rights law. Echoing the movement’s anthem, he declared “we shall overcome”. Two days later Judge Johnson ruled that the marchers had a constitutional right to march to Montgomery.

Governor Wallace refused to protect the march, so President Johnson federalised the Alabama National Guard and sent army troops, federal marshals and FBI agents. On Sunday 21 March about 3,200 people set out from Selma. Among them were King, Ralph Abernathy, John Lewis, the theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel and the diplomat Ralph Bunche.

Because a section of Highway 80 through Lowndes County narrowed to two lanes, the court order limited the marchers there to 300. They walked about 10 to 17 miles a day and camped in fields lent by Black farmers. On 24 March they reached the City of St. Jude on the edge of Montgomery, where entertainers including Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr., Nina Simone and Joan Baez performed at an evening rally.

On 25 March the column, now about 25,000 strong, marched to the Alabama State Capitol, where Wallace refused to meet a delegation. King spoke from the steps. He told the crowd that the struggle would not take long, because “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”.

That night Viola Liuzzo, a white mother of five from Detroit who had volunteered to drive marchers home, was shot dead by Ku Klux Klan members on Highway 80 in Lowndes County. One of the Klansmen in the car was an FBI informant.

Key people

• Martin Luther King Jr., SCLC president, who led the campaign’s public strategy and the final march.
• John Lewis, SNCC chairman, who led Bloody Sunday and later served in the US Congress from 1987 until his death in 2020.
• Hosea Williams, SCLC organiser who led Bloody Sunday alongside Lewis.
• Amelia Boynton, a leader of the Dallas County Voters League, beaten on Bloody Sunday.
• Jim Clark and George Wallace, the sheriff and governor whose forces opposed the marchers.
• Lyndon B. Johnson, who used the crisis to push the voting rights bill through Congress.

Consequences: the Voting Rights Act

The marches transformed the political climate. Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Johnson signed it on 6 August 1965. The law suspended literacy tests in areas with low registration, allowed federal examiners to register voters and required those areas to get federal approval before changing voting rules.

The marches also exposed tensions inside the movement. Many SNCC activists, frustrated by Turnaround Tuesday and by the violence they faced, grew sceptical of SCLC’s approach. In 1966 Stokely Carmichael, who had worked in Lowndes County after the march, became SNCC chairman and popularised the slogan “Black Power”.

The effect in Alabama was rapid. Within a few years most eligible Black adults in Dallas County were registered, and in 1966 Sheriff Clark lost his re-election bid as Black citizens voted in large numbers.

By the numbers

Legacy

Selma became one of the defining episodes of the civil rights movement, alongside the March on Washington and the Birmingham campaign. In 1996 Congress designated the route the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail. The Edmund Pettus Bridge, named after a Confederate general and later US senator who had been a leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama, became a National Historic Landmark in 2013.

Anniversary marches are held every year. On the 50th anniversary in 2015, President Barack Obama spoke at the bridge. After John Lewis died in July 2020, his coffin was carried across it one last time. The 2014 film “Selma” brought the story to a new generation.

Timeline

• 1965, 2 January: Martin Luther King Jr. launches the SCLC campaign at Brown Chapel in Selma.
• 1965, 1 February: King is arrested with hundreds of protesters.
• 1965, 18 February: Jimmie Lee Jackson is shot by a state trooper in Marion; he dies on 26 February.
• 1965, 7 March: Bloody Sunday: troopers and posse attack marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
• 1965, 9 March: Turnaround Tuesday; that night James Reeb is fatally beaten.
• 1965, 15 March: President Johnson calls for a voting rights law before Congress.
• 1965, 17 March: Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. rules the march can proceed.
• 1965, 21–24 March: The protected march walks from Selma to Montgomery.
• 1965, 25 March: About 25,000 rally at the Alabama State Capitol; Viola Liuzzo is murdered that night.
• 1965, 6 August: Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act.

Why it matters

The Selma marches showed how nonviolent protest, met with televised state violence, could move national opinion and federal power. They led directly to the Voting Rights Act, which ended most legal barriers to Black voting in the South and reshaped American politics.