'Bloody Sunday' marchers were beaten in Selma
On this day · 7 March 1965
On March 7, 1965, state troopers attacked voting-rights marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and the televised brutality changed America.
On March 7, 1965, about 600 marchers set out from Selma, Alabama, intending to walk to the state capital in Montgomery to demand voting rights. Led by activists including a young John Lewis, they moved silently, two by two, through the city.
As they crested the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they met a wall of roughly 150 state troopers and possemen. After a brief warning, the officers charged with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. Seventeen marchers were hospitalized; Lewis suffered a fractured skull.
Photographs of the bloodied marchers ran on front pages around the world.
Televised footage of the assault, which became known as Bloody Sunday, stunned the nation and built momentum that could not be ignored. Within months, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, outlawing the racial barriers that had kept millions of Americans from the ballot box.
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