N 25 March 1965, Martin Luther King led thousands of nonviolent
demonstrators to the steps of the capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, after a
5-day, 54-mile march from Selma, Alabama, where local African
Americans, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
had been campaigning for voting rights. King told the assembled crowd:
‘‘There never was a moment in American history more honorable and more
inspiring than the pilgrimage of clergymen and laymen of every race and
faith pouring into Selma to face danger at the side of its embattled
Negroes’’ (King, ‘‘Address at the Conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery
March,’’ 121).
On 2 January 1965 King and SCLC joined the SNCC,
the Dallas County Voters League, and other local African American
activists in a voting rights campaign in Selma where, in spite of
repeated registration attempts by local blacks, only two percent were on
the voting rolls. SCLC had chosen to focus its efforts in Selma because
they anticipated that the notorious brutality of local law enforcement
under Sheriff Jim Clark would attract national attention and pressure President Lyndon B. Johnson and Congress to enact new national voting rights legislation.
The
campaign in Selma and nearby Marion, Alabama, progressed with mass
arrests but little violence for the first month. That changed in
February, however, when police attacks against nonviolent demonstrators
increased. On the night of 18 February, Alabama state troopers joined
local police breaking up an evening march in Marion. In the ensuing
melee, a state trooper shot Jimmie Lee Jackson,
a 26-year-old church deacon from Marion, as he attempted to protect his
mother from the trooper’s nightstick. Jackson died eight days later in a
Selma hospital.
In response to Jackson’s death, activists in
Selma and Marion set out on 7 March, to march from Selma to the state
capitol in Montgomery. While King was in Atlanta, his SCLC colleague Hosea Williams, and SNCC leader John Lewis
led the march. The marchers made their way through Selma across the
Edmund Pettus Bridge, where they faced a blockade of state troopers and
local lawmen commanded by Clark and Major John Cloud who ordered the
marchers to disperse. When they did not, Cloud ordered his men to
advance. Cheered on by white onlookers, the troopers attacked the crowd
with clubs and tear gas. Mounted police chased retreating marchers and
continued to beat them.
