March 7, 1965 | Bloody Sunday
- On Sunday, March 7, 1965, about six hundred people began a fifty-four mile march from Selma, Alabama to the state capitol in Montgomery.
- They were demonstrating for African American voting rights and to commemorate the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was shot three weeks earlier by a state trooper while trying to protect his mother at a civil rights demonstration.
- SCLC's Hosea Williams and SNCC's John Lewis led the group of silent marchers from the Brown AME Church to the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where they were ordered to disperse by mounted troopers.
- On the outskirts of Selma, the marchers were brutally assaulted by heavily armed state troopers and deputies when they attempted to cross Pettus Bridge.
- The marchers were attacked in plain sight of photographers and journalists. When ABC television interrupted a Nazi war crimes Documentary Judgement in Nuremberg, to show footage of violence in Selma, a powerful metaphor was presented to the nation.
- Dr. Martin Luther King arrived in Selma on March 9 and led another group of protesters to Pettus Bridge.
- At the same time, Judge Frank M. Johnson of the federal district court in Montgomery issued an order enjoining King and the local Selma leadership of the nonviolent voting rights movement from peacefully marching to Montgomery.