Selma and Bloody Sunday:
The Bridge That Produced the Voting Rights Act

In January 1965, SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) has been working in Selma, Alabama for two years, trying to register Black voters in Dallas County — where Black people comprise 57% of the population but only 2% of registered voters. Every attempt to register has been blocked: literacy tests designed to fail, registration offices open one day a month, economic retaliation against those who try.

King and SCLC arrive in January 1965 to escalate the campaign. The choice of Selma is strategic: its Sheriff, Jim Clark, is predictably brutal — exactly the kind of opponent who could be counted on to provide the violent imagery the movement needed to force federal action. On February 18, during a night march in nearby Marion, state troopers attack the crowd. Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old church deacon, is shot in the stomach by a trooper while trying to protect his mother. He dies eight days later. His death produces the decision to march from Selma to Montgomery — 54 miles to the state capital.

On March 7, 1965, 600 people — led by John Lewis of SNCC and Hosea Williams of SCLC — walk in two columns toward the Edmund Pettus Bridge (named for a Confederate general and Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan). King is not present; he is in Atlanta. As the marchers crest the bridge's high arc, they see Alabama state troopers lined across the highway below.

The troopers give one minute to disperse. Then they advance on horseback and on foot, swinging clubs, firing tear gas, and using electric cattle prods. John Lewis's skull is fractured. At least 58 people are treated for serious injuries. The attack is captured on film by network television cameras. ABC News interrupts a broadcast of Judgment at Nuremberg — a film about Nazi atrocities — to air footage of American law enforcement beating peaceful marchers. The comparison is not lost on viewers. More than 50 million Americans watch the footage. Within days, protest marches are held in 80 cities across the country.

Eight days after Bloody Sunday, President Lyndon Johnson addresses a joint session of Congress in the most important speech of his presidency. He says: "At times, history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama." He then uses the movement's own language: "And we shall overcome."

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is signed on August 6. It prohibits discriminatory voting practices — literacy tests, grandfather clauses, all the mechanisms that had kept Black voters off the rolls for a century. In the year following passage, Black voter registration in Alabama rises from 19% to 52%. In Mississippi, from 6% to 59%. The act is the most effective piece of civil rights legislation in American history. It is also the piece that the Supreme Court will gut 48 years later, in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), by eliminating the preclearance requirement that forced states with histories of discrimination to get federal approval before changing voting laws.