The Selma to Montgomery march set off under federal protection
On this day · 21 March 1965
After Bloody Sunday's beatings, marchers finally walked out of Selma toward the state capitol, shielded by federalized troops.
On March 21, 1965, about 3,200 demonstrators led by Martin Luther King Jr. set out from Brown Chapel in Selma, Alabama, bound for the state capitol in Montgomery. It was the third attempt: two weeks earlier, on March 7, state troopers had clubbed and gassed marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in the violence remembered as Bloody Sunday.
This time the marchers walked under guard. President Lyndon Johnson had federalized the Alabama National Guard and deployed U.S. Army troops, FBI agents, and federal marshals to protect the column. Walking roughly 12 miles a day and sleeping in roadside fields, the marchers reached Montgomery on March 25, by then swelling to some 25,000 people on the capitol steps.
The images of orderly, protected marchers helped turn national opinion decisively toward reform.
Months later, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the law the marchers had demanded.
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