The Selma-to-Montgomery March, the Whole Story

The two roads between Selma and Montgomery, United States Highway Eighty, and the sixty-plus miles of state highway that runs alongside it, are the most consequential stretch of asphalt in twentieth-century American political history. What happened on those roads in March of nineteen sixty-five produced the Voting Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act transformed American democracy more completely than any single piece of legislation since the Civil War amendments. The context was a statewide crisis.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had been working in Selma and Dallas County since nineteen sixty-three, trying to register Black voters in a county where Black residents were a majority but almost none could vote. The Dallas County Courthouse processed applicants so slowly, and failed them so routinely, that after two years of intense organizing, fewer than three hundred Black voters were registered out of a potential fifteen thousand. In February of nineteen sixty-five, a state trooper shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, a twenty-six-year-old deacon from Marion, Alabama, while he was trying to shield his mother during a nighttime voting-rights march.

Jackson died eight days later. The march to Montgomery was planned as a response. On March seventh, six hundred demonstrators set out across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, named for a former Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon.

At the end of the bridge, Alabama state troopers and Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark's posse were waiting. The troopers gave the marchers two minutes to turn back, then immediately attacked. Men and women were beaten with clubs, hit with tear gas, run down by horses.

John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and later a Congressman, had his skull fractured. The footage was broadcast on national television that night, interrupting the movie Judgment at Nuremberg. President Johnson's aides later said the juxtaposition had made the political case for federal action more powerfully than any speech could.

Two weeks later, under federal protection ordered by a judge, the full march proceeded. It left Selma on March twenty-first and arrived on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery on March twenty-fifth, five days and fifty-four miles, camping in farm fields along the route. An estimated twenty-five thousand people converged on Montgomery for the final rally.

Martin Luther King Junior spoke. On the Capitol steps, behind him, flew the Confederate battle flag that George Wallace had ordered raised there four years earlier. President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on August sixth, nineteen sixty-five.