Bloody Tuesday, 1964

June ninth, nineteen sixty-four. A group of civil rights marchers left the First African Baptist Church in Tuscaloosa and walked toward the County Courthouse to protest the segregated restrooms and drinking fountains in a public building. Tuscaloosa police intercepted them before they reached the courthouse.

Thirty-three people were sent to the hospital for treatment of injuries. Ninety-four were arrested. The event would later be called Bloody Tuesday.

There were no outside journalists present. The beatings, the tear gas, and the mass arrests happened without witnesses from the national press, so the story traveled slowly and quietly compared to the footage from Selma or Birmingham. This relative obscurity did not make what happened there less real.

It made it typical of a particular kind of civil rights violence, the kind that unfolded in medium-sized Southern cities where local police had enough latitude and enough cover from inattention to act without much national consequence. Tuscaloosa's civil rights history runs in a different register than the more famous events at Selma or Montgomery. The Stand in the Schoolhouse Door in nineteen sixty-three got enormous coverage, partly because Wallace was performing for cameras as much as resisting the law.

Bloody Tuesday, the year after, barely made the national wires. The gap between those two events in the historical memory says something about how location, timing, and the presence of press shaped what the country came to know about what happened in Alabama. A historical marker now notes Bloody Tuesday.

The First African Baptist Church still stands. The courthouse where the marchers were trying to go still stands too, a few blocks away from where thirty-three people went to the hospital for walking on a public street.