Bloody Sunday: The Bridge, the Troopers, and John Lewis's Skull

Six hundred people walked two by two through downtown Selma on the morning of March seventh, nineteen sixty-five. They crossed Broad Street and started up the arc of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The bridge is not long. It takes perhaps two minutes to walk. From its crest they could not see the far bank until they were almost at the top, and when they crested the rise, they saw what was waiting for them.

Major John Cloud of the Alabama State Troopers stood at the foot of the bridge with a line of officers in blue helmets. Behind them, possemen on horseback. Cloud announced through a bullhorn that this was an unlawful assembly. He told the marchers they had two minutes to turn around and go home. Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee stood at the front of the column. Williams asked if they could pray. Cloud said no. Troopers advance, Cloud ordered, and that was the end of the two minutes.

What followed lasted less than sixty seconds. Tear gas canisters arced into the column. Troopers on foot moved forward with billy clubs. Possemen on horseback rode into the crowd from the sides. John Lewis was struck across the head. His skull was fractured. Amelia Boynton Robinson, a veteran Selma organizer who had spent years fighting for the right to vote, was beaten unconscious. A newspaper photographer captured her lying in the road, her coat spread around her on the pavement. That photograph ran on the front page of nearly every American newspaper the following morning.

ABC News was airing a Sunday broadcast of the film Judgment at Nuremberg when the footage arrived from Selma. The network interrupted its program to air sixteen minutes of what reporters were calling a police assault on peaceful marchers. The switchboards lit up. Letters poured into Congress. Lyndon Johnson submitted the Voting Rights Act to Congress eight days later, on March fifteenth.

The bridge was named for Edmund Pettus, a Confederate brigadier general, a United States Senator, and the Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. The marchers walked across his name to get to the troopers. They have been walking across it ever since.