Selma+to+Montgomery+March+Notes

Selma Montgomery Notes


 * Tear gas fumes fill the air as state troopers ordered by Gov. George Wallace break up a demonstration march in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965, a date that is known as "Bloody Sunday." State troopers assaulted the crowd with clubs and whips.


 * The first march from Selma to Montgomery on March 7, 1965 was planned to highlight the abysmal segregation in Alabama. The 600 marchers got no further than the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where Alabama state troopers struck the marchers with clubs and fired tear gas canisters into the crowd.


 * The second march two days later ended peacefully, again at the Pettus Bridge, the result of negative press coverage of the first march.


 * In January 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. and members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference came to Selma to join in the voter registration canvass and to protest a 1964 court decision that banned all public meetings of three or more people.


 * On March 16, after MLK and James Forman were attacked during a voting rights rally, the district judge issued an injunction saying that state and local police could not stop a third march to Selma


 * Four days later the president Lyndon B Johnson sent 4,000 national guard troops down to protect the marchers.


 * More than 320 people white and black were in the 54-mile march, and this time they finally crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge with the national guard watching them.


 * On March 24 the protesters were joined by an additional several thousand protesters


 * On the last day on the march MLK gave a speech saying that even though "are feet are tired are souls are rested"


 * President Johnson sent what would become the Voting Rights Act to Congress in light of the violence committed against civil rights workers and African Americans. The third and successful Selma march helped to speed the act's passage, and on May 26, the U.S. Senate approved the act by a vote of 77 to 19. The House passed it overwhelmingly on July 9, and on August 6, Johnson signed it into law.


 * Designed to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave African-American men the right to vote, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 abolished literacy tests and other methods of voter discrimination and mandated that all changes in election law be cleared through the courts or the U.S. Justice Department.


 * African-American voter registration shot up after passage of the act and continued to rise in the following decades.