Photo: William Lovelace / Getty Images
The activist John Lewis, then with 25 years, led the iconic and bloodiest protest with more than 600 people all over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where there were brutal attacks by state police .
The images of this event marked not only the country, but also promoted and made visible the fight against racial injustice.
Perhaps nowhere like in Dallas County, Alabama, African Americans were more than half the population, but represented only 2% of registered voters, despite the historic approval of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 months before.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in English) struggled for months to register black voters at the Selma county seat, but the attempts were thwarted.
In January 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. was in town to toast the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC). in English).
In Selma, peaceful demonstrations resulted in thousands of arrests, including King’s own arrest.
In Marion, a nearby town, rational tensions reached violence on 21 February 1965, when state police fired on protesters, killing Jimmie Lee Jackson, aged 26, who was trying to save his mother from being beaten by the uniformed men.
Civil rights leaders responded to this terrible event by calling a march directly from Selma to the state capital, Montgomery.
Alabama Governor, George Wallace, at that time ordered the state police to use “the necessary measures” so that it does not they gave
On Sunday March 7th at least 600 defenders of the right to vote departed from the Brown Chapel Ame church through downtown Selma.
The violence began when people began to cross the bridge of the Alabama River, those who were marching saw the name of the great dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, Edmund Pettus, staring at them.
Seeing the top of the point, they detailed another problem, a wall of state policemen with clubs in their hands awaited them on the other side. Behind them were County Sheriff’s deputies Jim Clark, some on horseback, and white flag-waving spectators Confederates.
The soldiers knocked the protesters to the ground, beat them with sticks, the clouds by the gases Tear gas mixed with the terrifying screams of the protesters.
Police on horseback he chased children, women and men all over the bridge while beating them with clubs, whips and rubber tubes wrapped in barbed wire.
The demonstrators backed down, but did not defend themselves.
After this, Lewis testified in court
that they threw him to the ground and that a state policeman hit him on the head with a baton. Also, that the police officer hit him again when he was trying to get up.
The cameras television captured all the violence of this event and transformed the local protest into a national demonstration for civil rights.
It took the movie several hours to fly from Alabama to New York, but when it was broadcast that same night, Americans were horrified by the sights and sounds of “Bloody Sunday.”
After this, sit-ins, traffic blockades and demonstrations in solidarity were organized. Some traveled to Selma, where King attempted another march two days later, but to the annoyance of some, he turned around when police again blocked their path on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
A federal court order allowed the protest, which allowed the protesters to leave from Selma on 21 March with the protection of National Guard troops. Four days later, they reached Montgomery.
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