On Sunday March 7, 1965, about six hundred people began a fifty-four mile march from Selma, Alabama to the state capitol in Montgomery. They were demonstrating for African American voting rights and to commemorate the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, shot three weeks earlier by a state trooper while trying to protect his mother at a civil rights demonstration. On the outskirts of Selma, after they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the marchers, in plain sight of photographers and journalists, were brutally assaulted by heavily armed state troopers and deputies.

When You Pray,
Move Your Feet.
African Proverb

“When You Pray, Move Your Feet.” Charles White(?), photographer, Selma, Alabama, March 7, 1965. Photo courtesy of Representative John Lewis.
John Lewis (on right in trench coat) and Hosea Williams (on the left) lead marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

One hundred years after the Civil War, in many parts of the nation, the 15th Amendment had been nullified by discriminatory laws, ordinances, intimidation, violence, and fear which kept a majority of African Americans from the polls. The situation was particularly egregious in the city of Selma, in Dallas County, Alabama, where African Americans made up more than half the population yet comprised only about 2 percent of the registered voters. As far back as 1896, when the U.S. House of Representatives adjudicated the contested results of a congressional election held in Dallas County, it was stated on the floor of Congress:

…I need only appeal to the memory of members who have served in this House for years and who have witnessed the contests that time and time again have come up from the black belt of Alabama—since 1880 there has not been an honest election in the county of Dallas…

Hon. W. H. Moody, of Massachusetts. In Contested Election Case, Aldrich vs. Robbins, Fourth District, Alabama: Speeches of Hon. W.H. Moody, of Mass…[et al.] in the House of Representatives, March 12 and 13, 1896. Washington: 1896, p3. African American Perspectives: Materials Selected from the Rare Book Collection. Rare Book & Special Collections Division

However, by March 1965, the Dallas County Voters League, the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were all working for voting rights in Alabama. John Lewis headed SNCC’s voter registration effort and, on March 7, he and fellow activist Hosea Williams led the group of silent marchers from the Brown Chapel AME Church to the foot of the Pettus bridge and into the event soon known as “Bloody Sunday.”

Allowing CBS footage of “Bloody Sunday” as evidence in court, Judge Johnson ruled on March 17, that the demonstrators be permitted to march. Under protection of a federalized National Guard, voting rights advocates left Selma on March 21 and stood 25,000+ strong on March 25 before the state capitol in Montgomery. As a direct consequence of these events, the U.S. Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, guaranteeing every American twenty-one and over the right to register to vote. During the next four years the number of U.S. Blacks eligible to vote rose from 23 to 61 percent.

John Lewis went on to serve as Director of the Voter Education Project, a program that eventually added nearly four million minorities to the voter rolls. To mark the thirty-fifth anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” on March 7, 2000, Lewis, then U.S. Congressman from Georgia’s 5th District, and Hosea Williams crossed the Pettus Bridge accompanied by President William Clinton, Coretta Scott King, and others. Asked to contrast this experience with that of 1965 the Congressman responded, “This time when I looked there were women’s faces and there were Black faces among the troopers. And this time when we faced them, they saluted.”

Learn More

• American Treasures is an exhibition of special items in the Library of Congress collections. The exhibition is divided into four sections: Top Treasures, Memory, Imagination, and Reason. The latter includes images taken about 1963 by Danny Lyon, staff photographer for SNCC, a key organizing body during the Civil Rights Movement.
• Congressman John Lewis spoke about his life experiences, civil rights actions and the books he had written on these topics at several Library of Congress sponsored events. Search for videos of these occasions in the Event Videos collection.
• The National Park Service has created the Travel Places of the Civil Rights Movement feature. Included is a section on the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail and the Selma to Montgomery marches.
• Search on terms Selma, Alabama in the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives collection to see images of the city taken during the 1930s by the photographer Walker Evans. Search on Alabama to see images taken by the FSA photographers Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Marion Post Wolcott, and Carl Mydans.
• Music drawn from a tradition of Southern spirituals helped sustain the Civil Rights Movement. Search on the term spiritual in Southern Mosaic: The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip to hear some of the tunes which comprise that tradition. Listen, for example, to versions of “This Little Light o’ Mine”, “Long Way to Travel”, and “Great Day” as they were rendered in the South back in 1939.
• African American Activists of the 20th Century: Selected Pictures presents frequently requested images from the Library’s Prints & Photographs Division. Except where otherwise noted in the “Reproduction Number” line, images are considered to be in the public domain. The selection includes images of Martin Luther King, John Lewis, and Ralph Abernathy.
• Search Today in History on the term states rights to learn more about an issue which lay at the heart of the American system. Ironically, on March 7, 1850, (exactly 115 years before “Bloody Sunday”) Daniel Webster gave his famous Seventh of March speech in favor of the Compromise of 1850, which, while it postponed the Civil War, strengthened states’ rights at the cost of African-American freedom. Search on the term Alabama to learn more about events in the state, such as the arrest of Rosa Parks.
• Find additional resources on civil rights in Civil Rights in America: A Resource Guide.

Following the lead of senators Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas, Webster endorsed Clay’s plan to assure sectional equilibrium in Congress. Passed after eight months of congressional wrangling, the legislation admitted California to the Union as a free state, permitted the question of slavery in Utah and New Mexico territories to be decided by popular sovereignty, settled Texas border disputes, and abolished slave trading in the District of Columbia while strengthening the Fugitive Slave Act.

[Henry Clay, head-and-shoulders portrait, facing front]. Produced by Mathew Brady’s studio, [Between 1850 and 1852]. Daguerreotypes. Prints & Photographs Division

The legislative package known as the Compromise of 1850 postponed the Civil War by a decade. However, like the 1820 Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850 failed to resolve the question of slavery in a meaningful way. Over the course of the 1850s, the inadequacies of both measures were made painfully clear. “Popular sovereignty” undermined the Missouri compromise by suggesting the earlier division of the country along the thirty-sixth parallel into free states and slave states no longer applied. Indeed, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 permitted slavery. The resulting bloodshed in Kansas, like later incidents at Harper’s Ferry, presaged the violent conflict of the Civil War.

[Incidents of the War. A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, July 1863]. Timothy H. O’Sullivan, photographer; Washington, DC: published by Philip & Solomons, c1865. Civil War Glass Negatives and Related Prints. Prints & Photographs Division

Learn More

• View John C. Calhoun’s speech to the United States Senate against the Compromise of 1850. This item is found in the Manuscript Division’s collection of John C. Calhoun Papers.
• Read the Documentary History of Slavery in the United States by John Larkin Dorsey. A contemporary of Webster and Clay, Dorsey reviews slavery in the U.S. from 1774 and the Continental Congress to 1850 with special attention to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and the probable dissolution of the Union. Search African American Perspectives: Materials Selected from the Rare Book Collection on slavery to access this document and many more.
• For more information about the movement to abolish slavery, visit the Abolition section of The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship exhibition and the Abolition section of The African-American Mosaic: A Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Black History & Culture. Also, read the Today in History features on Abolition in the District of Columbia and on the abolitionists Lucretia Coffin Mott and Elijah Parish Lovejoy.
• Browse The Frederick Douglass Papers. Many remarkable items are included in the papers of this nineteenth-century African-American abolitionist who escaped from slavery and then risked his own freedom by becoming an outspoken antislavery lecturer, writer, and publisher. The papers are divided into a series of nine sets. Set nine, for example, contains a booklet entitled Two Speeches by Frederick Douglass (on West Indian Emancipation and the Dred Scott Decision).
• A search on Daniel Webster across the Library of Congress website yields numerous items including correspondence, speeches, images of statues, books, and even sheet music.