(SUMMARIZE THIS NOW )Millions of people all over the United States were watching television on Sunday night, March 7, 1965, when their programs were interrupted with shocking images of African-American men and women being beaten with billy clubs in a cloud of tear gas. Attempting to march peacefully from the small town of Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, the state capital, to protest a brutal murder and the denial of their constitutional right to vote, six hundred people were attacked by state troopers and mounted deputies dressed in full riot gear. ABC interrupted its broadcast of the movie Judgment at Nuremberg to show the violence, suggesting to many a parallel between the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany and the treatment of blacks in the South. Most viewers had never heard of Selma, but after March 7, they would never forget it. Eight days after “Bloody Sunday,” President Lyndon Johnson made a famous and powerful speech to a joint session of Congress introducing voting rights legislation. He called the events in Selma “a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom,” comparing them to the Revolutionary War battles of Concord and Lexington. On March 21, more than one thousand people from all over the United States again left Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Selma and set out for Montgomery. This time they were watched over by regular Army and Alabama National Guard units ordered by President Johnson to protect the marchers against further violence. At the successful completion of the march on March 25, Martin Luther King, Jr., addressed a crowd estimated at 25,000 in front of the Alabama State Capitol, quoting the Battle Hymn of the Republic: “His truth is marching on.” 1 Many of the same people who had seen the earlier violence saw or heard the speech. Five months later, on August 6, 1965, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, “generally considered the most successful piece of civil rights legislation ever adopted by the United States Congress.” 2 . . . [If you would like to learn more about the details of this event and view photos on the National Park Service’s Historic Places Lesson, click here.] Some of the participants in the events of March 1965 are still alive to tell their stories. This lesson is based, in part, on a rich trove of oral histories. (Source: National Park Service at: http://www.nps.gov/nr/twhp/wwwlps/lessons/133SEMO/133selma.htm) 1Quoted in Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 170. 2The Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division website (accessed January 27, 2006).