The 54-mile walk was a pivotal moment of the civil rights movement
The Vote in Selma
Of the 15,000 black people old enough to vote living in and around Selma, Alabama in 1961, only 130 were actually registered on voter rolls. Beginning in 1963, civil rights groups like the Dallas County Voters League and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) began organizing voter registration drives in Selma and the surrounding regions, but their efforts were thwarted by local law enforcement officers like Dallas County Sherriff James Clark, who, in the February 1965 photo above, instructs blacks seeking to register to leave the county courthouse. When they refused, over 100 were arrested.Bettmann / Corbis
Just Cause
Hostile Territory
Star Power
As the marchers neared Montgomery, their numbers began to swell and attention to their cause began to increase. When they reached the capital, they would be entertained by some of the top celebrities of the day, like Peter, Paul and Mary, Sammy Davis, Jr., Leonard Bernstein and Harry Belafonte, above, photographed here with Dr. King and his wife, Coretta.Maurice Sorrell / Ebony Collection / AP
The State Capitol
On March 25, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered the petition calling for better treatment and voting rights for Selma's blacks to the statehouse. Governor George Wallace refused to accept it. Addressing the crowd of 25,000 that had gathered that day, King said, "Let us march on ballot boxes until race baiters disappear from the political arena...How long will it take? How Long? Not Long. Because the arm of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."AP
Selma Today
The impact of the march was long and profound. Within days of Bloody Sunday, president Johnson would present a bill to Congress that would gain passage later that year as the Voting Rights Act. Among those attending the signing was Amelia Boynton, the woman who had been so severely wounded during the March 7 attacks. Shortly after the passage of the bill, 7,000 blacks were added to the voting rolls. And in the coming decades, registration of black voters statewide would increase more than tenfold.Owaki / Kulla / Corbis
Bloody Sunday
Shocking
The attacks were captured by television and news cameras and the images of the angry, racist police beating on black marchers appeared on newspapers and in magazines around the world. IN particular, photographs of this woman, later identified as Amelia Boynton, a civil rights activist who had been beaten and gassed nearly to death, horrified all who saw them.Bettmann / Corbis
