The events that led up to Bloody Sunday stemmed from the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson in Marion, Alabama on February 18, 1965. Jackson and his mother and grandfather were involved in a protest for voting rights. While attempting to shield his mother from the blows of a police baton, Jackson was beaten and murdered. Civil rights protestors were determined to voice their outrage by taking their case directly to Alabama Governor George Wallace. They proposed a 54-mile march from Selma to the state capital Montgomery. Wallace direct Alabama law enforcement to use all means to prevent the march. Led by Hosea Williams and John Lewis, the protestors set the march for March 7th and set out from Brown Chapel AME church.
The marchers moved undisturbed through downtown Selma. Once they began to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate general and former Grand Wizard of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, marchers could see Alabama State troopers in columns with billy clubs waiting for them at the other side of the bridge. Behind the troopers was county sheriff Jim Clark and dozen of spectators waving confederate flags. Major John Cloud, head of the Alabama State Police, announced on a bullhorn that the march was unlawful and should immediately disperse. Hosea Wiliams asked to speak with Cloud. Cloud refused to speak with either Williams or Lewis.
The State Troopers affixed their gas masks and begin to push against the marchers. Marchers began to fall ot the ground and were struck with clubs. Tear gas was deployed and marchers were chased back across with the bridge byu police on horseback wielding batons, clubs, whips, and rubber piping wrapped in barbed wire. The brtual images stunned the nation and became the impetus for two additional marches. One march on March 9, 1965, known as the Tuesday turnaround march, in which Civil Rights protestors were joined by clergy from around the country. Martin Luther King did not march but rather knelt and prayed and turned around in order not to violate the injunction not to march. In the interim, a white seminarian James Reeb was murdered. The Jackson and Reeb murders cast a heavy pale over the events in Selma. The actual march occurred on March 21st, after the courts issued an order to allow the march. Bloody Sunday and the March from Selma to Montgomery served as the catalyst for the passage of the Voting Rights Act. This year marchers commemorated the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday.
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