Selma’s Bloody Sunday: Protest, Voting Rights, and the Struggle for Racial Equality

The march from Selma to Montgomery starkly illustrated the claims of the civil rights movement―and the raw brutality of the forces arrayed against it.
On Sunday afternoon, March 7, 1965, roughly six hundred peaceful demonstrators set out from Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church in a double-file column to march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery. Leading the march were Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Upon reaching Broad Street, the marchers turned left to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge that spanned the Alabama River. “When we reached the crest of the bridge,” recalls John Lewis, “I stopped dead still. So did Hosea. There, facing us at the bottom of the other side, stood a sea of blue-helmeted, blue-uniformed Alabama state troopers, line after line of them, dozens of battle-ready lawmen stretched from one side of U.S. Highway 80 to the other. Behind them were several dozen more armed men―Sheriff Clark’s posse―some on horseback, all wearing khaki clothing, many carrying clubs the size of baseball bats.”
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