Selma to Montgomery marches

In March 1965 civil rights activists set out three times to walk the length of US Highway 80 between Selma and Alabama's capital, Montgomery, to demand that Black citizens be allowed to register and vote. The first attempt, on 7 March, was broken up by state troopers and a county posse in an assault that became known as Bloody Sunday; the third, under federal protection, reached Montgomery on 24 March. The marches helped bring about the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the landmark achievements of the civil rights movement in the United States.

Since around 1900 Alabama's constitution had excluded most Black citizens, and many poor whites, from voting through a poll tax and literacy tests applied at the discretion of white registrars. In Dallas County, whose seat is Selma, Black residents made up 57 per cent of the population in 1961, yet only 130 of some 15,000 of voting age were registered. A registration drive begun in 1963 by the local Dallas County Voters League and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) met arrests and intimidation, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 changed little in Selma.

The Voters League invited Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to join the effort. Protests began in January 1965, and by late February some 3,000 people had been jailed. On 26 February Jimmie Lee Jackson, a church deacon shot by a state trooper during a peaceful protest in nearby Marion, died of his wounds. James Bevel, who directed the SCLC's Selma campaign, proposed a march of dramatic length to Montgomery to channel the community's anger.

On 7 March some 525 to 600 marchers, headed by SNCC's John Lewis and SCLC's Hosea Williams, crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge out of Selma and found troopers and newly deputised possemen waiting. Ordered to disperse, they were knocked down, beaten with nightsticks, tear-gassed and charged by mounted officers. Lewis suffered a fractured skull, the organiser Amelia Boynton was beaten unconscious, and 17 marchers were taken to hospital. Images of the attack were seen around the world.

Clergy and supporters from across the country answered a call to join a second march on 9 March. Because a federal judge had temporarily barred the march, King cut it short. That night members of an anti-civil rights group attacked and killed James Reeb, a Boston minister of the Unitarian Universalist church. On 15 March President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress on national television, calling Selma a turning point comparable to Appomattox in the American Civil War, and borrowed the movement's own words: "we shall overcome". His voting rights bill was introduced two days later.

On 17 March federal judge Frank Johnson ruled that the protesters had a right to march along the highway. Since Governor George Wallace would not protect them, the president federalised the Alabama National Guard to escort the march. Close to 8,000 people set out from Brown Chapel in Selma on 21 March, and the marchers reached Montgomery on 24 March. The next day about 25,000 people gathered at the State Capitol, where King gave the speech known as "How Long, Not Long". That night Ku Klux Klan members shot dead Viola Liuzzo, a white volunteer from Detroit, as she drove marchers back to Selma.

Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on 6 August 1965, removing obstacles that had kept Black Southerners from registering in large numbers. The route is now the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, and in 2015 Congress voted Congressional Gold Medals for the campaign's rank-and-file "foot soldiers".

Our 1960 map shows the United States in the years of the civil rights movement.