Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights March

On March 7, 1965, over 600 people lined up by twos prepared to walk from Selma to Montgomery to protest voting rights violations.  Led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams, they walked through Selma peaceably, before state troopers met them at the Edmund Pettus bridge and ordered them to go home.

John Lewis (white coat) and others chose to stand still

Instead, they stood still.  The troopers swept forward, pushing the marchers back and knocking them to the ground.  Dogs were unleashed on them.  Tear gas was sprayed.  As the marchers struggled to breathe, men on horseback - local deputies and posse members - joined in the assault, using cattle prods, clubs wrapped with barbed wire - and bullwhips! 

"Prods" used that day

 John Lewis suffered a skull fracture; fifty-seven others were sent to the hospital.  This day became known as “Bloody Sunday.” 

Jim and I visited Selma very close to the anniversary of “Bloody Sunday.”  We knew there was going to be a Bridge Crossing re-enactment and jubilee this year on March 3 and 4.  We debated whether to go then, or to go earlier in order to allow for more solitary reflection.  We decided on the latter.

U.S. Highway 80

So, on March 1, we left Montgomery and slowly drove U.S. Highway 80, going backwards along the fifty-four miles the marchers eventually walked.  I looked at the rural countryside and tried to imagine walking beside them -- spending four nights along the road, sleeping in ditches, on farmland and in a Catholic churchyard.  The ultimate Selma to Montgomery March helped win passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  However, the story behind the march began much earlier than that.

State Constitutions amended to restrict Black voting 

As you recall, the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed blacks the right to vote back in 1870.  But, in 1901, Alabama amended its state constitution with requirements that African Americans could not meet: such as literacy tests, comprehension tests, poll taxes (i.e. fees to vote) and grandfather clauses.  (“Grandfather clauses” – often used today to “protect” someone’s previous rights – were literally used here to exclude any person from voting whose grandfather had not voted – namely, any descendant of an enslaved grandfather.)

Disenfranchisement – the denial of the right to rote – was swift.  Within one year, the number of black voters in Alabama dropped 98 percent!   Blacks who tried to vote faced threats, harassment, the loss of the jobs and even their lives.

When they tried to register to vote, the tests were applied very subjectively.  For example, a person recounted at the Selma museum that one comprehension question was: “How many bubbles does a soap bar make?”  For some “strange” reason, a black person always got the answer wrong.  By 1940, only 3 percent of Black Alabamans were registered to vote.  By 1961, a federal civil rights report revealed that, in Montgomery County, fewer than 1 percent of the voting-age black population was registered.  In another county, Blacks comprised more than 80 percent of the population, but none were registered.  Oh, disenfranchisement was effective! 

In 1964, voting registration campaigns and voting rights protests became more organized.  This all came to a head in the small town of Marion, Alabama.  On February 18, 1965, during a peaceful protest there against voting barriers, state law enforcement officers began once again to beat the demonstrators.  Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year old Vietnam veteran and church deacon, was fatally shot when a state trooper attacked his mother and grandfather and he tried to defend them.  At his funeral, an outraged Reverend James Bevel urged the community “to march Jackson’s body to Montgomery, lay his coffin at the feet of the Governor and demand action”. 

March 7^th was the date chosen for that first march – and, as I described earlier on, it became known as Bloody Sunday.  But, something new occurred that day, too.  For the very first time, national television broadcasts were interrupted to bring live coverage of the violence wrought upon the protesters.  The images stunned the nation.  A lawsuit quickly won stipulated that marchers were to receive police protection the next time. And, while the court order also said that only 300 could march from Selma, it went on to say that others could join them along the route.  Due in part to the televised coverage of the beatings, 8000 marchers poured in from across the country to walk some or all of the path to Montgomery.

           

With the protection of the National Guard, the ultimate Selma to Montgomery walk occurred on Sunday, March 21.  It was led by Dr. Martin and Coretta Scott King, John Lewis, and Cager Lee -- the grandfather of Jimmie Lee Jackson.  They walked for five days along U.S. 80 to the Capitol steps in Montgomery where Dr. King delivered a speech to 25,000 people – a speech that has become known as “How Long? Not Long!”  

As a result of the events that occurred in Selma, on August 6, 1965, five months after “Bloody Sunday,” President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

While Jim and my time in Selma was short, the small museum at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge included the original film coverage of Bloody Sunday.  Viewing that footage again caused me to greatly increase my respect for John Lewis, who still serves our country as Congressman from the state of Georgia.  The son of a share-cropper, he was only 25 when he led much of the voter registration drives of what's called Freedom Summer.  He also looked so small at the front of that line of marchers who faced dogs, horses, whips, and cattle prods.  Yet, neither he nor the marchers turned to violence themselves.  

I also thought about those of us who maybe don’t even vote.  I thought about the many who lost their lives in order to vote.  Never should we take this right for granted.

Last, one final injustice.  Here is my picture of the Edmund Pettus bridge.  Since I had never heard of Edmund Pettus, after we left Selma I looked him up.  Edmund Pettus was a Confederate general, and a Grand Dragon of the Klu Klux Klan!  In my opinion, this bridge connecting Selma to Montgomery should be renamed for John Lewis.