This Sunday, leaders from throughout Alabama and the entire country will commemorate the 60th Anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery March and the infamous Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It was a momentous occasion and needs memorializing.
Make no mistake about it, this event led to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which gave the right to vote to Black Americans throughout the country and primarily in the South. It is probably the most important event in the Civil Rights movement. The march on Washington was big and led to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but the Bloody Sunday Selma massacre that was seen on television throughout the country was the impetus for the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act had just been signed into law. It was a major historic Aat. It had been decades in the making. There had been hundreds of marches and murders, with the most horrific being the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, where four little innocent girls were murdered. However, it took the quiet but persistent demands of Dr. Martin Luther King, the hero of the Civil Rights movement, cajoling President Lyndon Johnson to use his legendary legislative power to pass this monumental 1964 Civil Rights Act. Johnson used all his powers of persuasiveness and political capital to pass it.
Johnson felt like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was his mountain on a hill, his coup de gras. He had no appetite for another battle a year later. However, Dr. Martin Luther King was not through. He knew that the right to vote was the brass ring. He was persistent with Johnson. LBJ would tell him yes, but he really did not intend to fight another fight. Johnson was foremost a pragmatist and political animal. Johnson was advocating for Civil Rights for political reasons. Dr. King’s heart and soul were in the battle.
As 1965 dawned, the king of the Civil Rights movement was Dr. Martin Luther King. Alabama’s pugnacious governor, George Wallace, had become the titular symbolic leader of the segregationist white south. They were both astute adversaries. King won in the end.
King and Wallace both knew that if violence occurred on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma that people throughout the country would lean in favor of giving Black people in the south the right to vote. Wallace had given Alabama Public Safety Director Al Lingo direct orders to not allow violence to occur. However, King and his people knew that they had an ace in the hole in the racist, vile Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark. They knew that Clark would ignore Wallace and Lingo. King knew that his people would be beaten. King had already fled to the sanctuary of his Atlanta church out of fear for his safety and life.
The scene that unfolded that day was beyond barbaric. As the Civil Rights leaders advanced peacefully, Clark and his posse of hundreds attacked them, viciously, with billy clubs, guns, and tear gas. They beat everyone, including women, savagely. The first to be attacked was a young leader, John Lewis, who was immediately knocked unconscious by a brutal blow to the head, which most people present thought had killed him. He survived with only a concussion. Clark and his posse continued to beat and maul innocent people in their homes. It was truly a brutal massacre of peaceful Civil Rights marchers. The Wallace-Clark segregationist team may have won the battle by beating innocent people, but they lost the war that day. King and Wallace both knew it. The entire nation was watching this horrific event on television, including Lyndon B. Johnson in the White House. The Voting Rights Act passed later that year.
Bloody Sunday was properly named. It was truly that, a Bloody Sunday. Selma was the impetus for the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Law. Bloody Sunday deserves to be commemorated.
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