March 7, 1965. It was a Sunday. Most people in Selma, Alabama, had just finished church, but they weren’t heading home for a quiet lunch. Instead, about 600 people gathered at Brown Chapel AME Church. They were going to walk to Montgomery. They were tired of being denied the right to vote. They were tired of the literacy tests that were basically designed to make black citizens fail.
You’ve probably seen the grainy footage. It’s haunting.
The group made it to the crest of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Looking down, they saw a wall of blue. Alabama State Troopers, some on horseback, waiting with gas masks and nightsticks. John Lewis, just 25 years old at the time, led the line alongside Hosea Williams. He thought he was going to die that day. Honestly, looking at the photos of the aftermath, it's a miracle more people didn't.
When we talk about the Selma to Montgomery march and Bloody Sunday, we often treat it like a neat, inevitable chapter in a history book. It wasn't. It was messy, terrifying, and almost didn't happen the way we remember it.
Why Selma? It Wasn't Random
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had actually been working in Selma for years before 1965. They weren't getting much traction. Sheriff Jim Clark was a loose cannon, and the local power structure was iron-clad. Selma was chosen by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) specifically because they knew Clark would react violently.
It sounds cold, but it was a strategy.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his advisors knew that for the Voting Rights Act to pass, the rest of America had to see the raw, unfiltered face of Jim Crow. They needed the cameras. They needed the national news to care. Selma was the pressure point.
By early 1965, the tension was vibrating. On February 18, during a night march in nearby Marion, a young man named Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot by a state trooper while trying to protect his mother and grandfather. He died eight days later. That was the spark. The march from Selma to Montgomery wasn't just a general protest; it was a funeral procession for Jimmie Lee Jackson and a demand for the ballot.
The Horror on the Edmund Pettus Bridge
John Lewis once said he didn't know how to swim, and staring at the Alabama River below the bridge while troopers moved toward him was the most terrified he’d ever been.
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The troopers didn't just move the crowd. They surged.
They used tear gas. The canisters hissed and rolled, blinding the marchers. Then came the clubs. It wasn't just "police force"—it was a localized war. Troopers on horses chased people back toward the church, swinging bullwhips and rubber tubing wrapped in barbed wire.
The media was there. This is the part that changed everything. ABC interrupted the movie Judgment at Nuremberg—a film about Nazi war crimes, ironically enough—to show the footage from Selma. Millions of Americans sat in their living rooms watching their own police force beat peaceful citizens.
Bloody Sunday became the name because the bridge literally ran red. Amelia Boynton Robinson, one of the lead organizers, was beaten unconscious. The photo of her slumped on the pavement went around the world. People couldn't look away anymore.
The Turnaround Tuesday Confusion
A lot of people forget there was a second march.
After Bloody Sunday, Dr. King called for clergy from across the country to join them. Two days later, on March 9, thousands of people headed back to the bridge. But there was a federal injunction against the march. King was in a tough spot. He didn't want to violate a court order and lose the support of President Lyndon B. Johnson, but he couldn't just do nothing.
They walked to the bridge, the troopers stepped aside to let them pass (a weird, psychological trap), and King led the group in prayer before turning around. Many of the younger activists, especially from SNCC, felt betrayed. They called it "Turnaround Tuesday." It created a massive rift in the Civil Rights Movement that never quite healed.
That night, James Reeb, a white Unitarian Universalist minister who had come down from Boston to help, was beaten to death by a white mob in Selma. His death caused a massive outcry, though many black activists noted bitterly that it took the death of a white man to get the White House to truly move.
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Finally Making it to Montgomery
It took a federal judge, Frank M. Johnson Jr., to finally rule that the protesters had a right to march. He basically told the State of Alabama they couldn't stop it.
On March 21, the real march began.
It wasn't 600 people anymore. It was thousands. They walked 7 to 17 miles a day. They slept in fields. They dealt with rain and the constant threat of snipers. By the time they reached the steps of the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery on March 25, the crowd had swelled to 25,000 people.
Standing there, King gave his famous "How Long, Not Long" speech.
"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
But even that victory was soaked in blood. That night, Viola Liuzzo, a mother of five from Detroit who had been shuttling marchers in her car, was shot and killed by members of the KKK. One of the men in the car with the shooters was an FBI informant.
What the Selma to Montgomery March and Bloody Sunday Changed
The direct result was the Voting Rights Act of 1965. President Johnson signed it in August, just five months after the bridge.
It did away with the "literacy tests" that were rigged. In some counties, you had to recite the entire Constitution or guess how many jellybeans were in a jar to vote. If you were black, you failed. If you were white, you passed. The Act put federal observers in charge of registration in places with a history of discrimination.
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It worked. In Alabama alone, black registration went from 92,700 in 1964 to 250,000 by 1968.
But there’s a nuance here that often gets skipped in school. The march didn't just "fix" racism. It highlighted the deep divisions in how to achieve change. The tension between the non-violent approach of the SCLC and the more militant, frustrated energy of SNCC grew. It was the beginning of the shift toward the Black Power movement.
Why the Bridge Still Matters Today
The Edmund Pettus Bridge is still named after a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. There have been countless debates about renaming it, but many activists, including the late John Lewis, argued to keep the name. Why? Because the victory was in crossing it. Renaming it might sanitizing the history of what they were actually fighting against.
Today, we see the echoes of Selma in debates over the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. The 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder gutted parts of the original 1965 Act, arguing that the "coverage formula" was outdated. Since then, many states have passed new restrictive voting laws.
Whether you agree with those laws or not, the DNA of the conversation started on that bridge in 1965.
Actionable Steps for Understanding and Engagement
History isn't just something to read; it's something to interact with. If you want to really understand the legacy of the Selma to Montgomery march and Bloody Sunday, don't just stop at a Wikipedia page.
- Visit the Selma Interpretive Center: If you're ever in Alabama, stand on that bridge. It’s narrow. It’s steep. When you stand at the top, you realize how trapped the marchers felt. You can't see the other side until you're already committed.
- Read "Walking with the Wind": This is John Lewis’s memoir. It’s probably the most visceral account of what it felt like to be on the ground. He doesn't sugarcoat the internal politics of the movement.
- Research Local Voting Laws: Check the current status of the Voting Rights Act in your own state. Look at how polling places have changed in the last decade. The "voter suppression" debate is often framed in extremes, so looking at the raw data of precinct closures is eye-opening.
- Support the National Voting Rights Museum: Located right near the bridge in Selma, it houses the "I Was There" wall and personal artifacts from the foot soldiers who didn't get their names in the history books.
The march didn't end in 1965. It just changed shape. The bridge is still there, and the questions it raised about who gets to participate in a democracy are still being answered every election cycle.