To Be Equal: 60 Years Ago, the Brutality of Bloody Sunday Struck the American Conscience “Like Psychological Lightning”
“At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point that is man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.”
—President Lyndon Johnson
The headline on the front page of the New York Times, 60 years ago [last] week, read, “Alabama police use gas and clubs to rout Negroes.
The eighth paragraph: “John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was among the injured. He was admitted to the Good Samaritan Hospital with a possible skull fracture.”
The Selma Voting Rights Campaign had been going on for more than nine weeks at that point. Day after day, Black citizens, tried to enter the Dallas County Courthouse to register to vote. Day after day, Sheriff Jim Clark and his deputies blocked their path. Hundreds were arrested, and many were beaten. But the campaign had, so far, failed to attract the widespread sympathy of the nation.
“The world doesn’t know this happened because you didn’t photograph it,” Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., told Life magazine’s Flip Schulke, who’d put down his camera to assist a child who’d been knocked to the ground. “I’m not being cold-blooded about it, but it is so much more important for you to take a picture of us getting beaten up than for you to be another person joining in the fray.”
On March 7, 1965, photographers and network television captured the violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and changed the course of American history.
At 9:30 p.m., ABC interrupted the broadcast of Judgment at Nuremberg, an acclaimed 1961 film that explores Germans’ individual and collective responsibility for the Holocaust, to show the brutal footage.
“The juxtaposition struck like psychological lightning in American homes,” journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff wrote in The Race Beat, an account of the role newspapers and television played in the Civil Rights Movement.
Photographs of an unconscious Amelia Boynton—one showing a trooper wielding a billy club above her, another with a fellow marcher trying to lift her off the ground—were splashed across the front pages of newspapers and magazine covers not just in the United States but around the world.
On March 9, President Lyndon Johnson released a statement “deploring the brutality with which a number of Negro citizens of Alabama were treated when they sought to dramatize their deep and sincere interest in attaining the precious right to vote.”
On March 15, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was introduced in the U.S. Senate, jointly sponsored by majority leader Mike Mansfield, a Democrat, and minority leader Everett Dirksen, a Republican. President Johnson signed it on August 6, with Lewis, King, Rosa Parks and other civil rights leaders standing alongside him.
For decades, the Voting Rights Act enjoyed the full support of both parties. But around the moment Black voting rates started to reach parity with white rates, the
Supreme Court in 2013 gutted the Act to remove a provision that voting changes in states with a history of suppression must be approved by the Justice Department. Subsequent Supreme Court decisions have further weakened the Act, and states have rushed to enact racially-motivated restrictions on voting.
[Last] week, Rep. Terri Sewell—whose district includes Selma—reintroduced the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Among other provisions the legislation would require federal review of specific voting practices known to be used to discriminate against voters of color and restore voters’ ability to challenge racial discrimination in court.
When urging Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act in 1965, President Johnson said, “Rarely, at any time, does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, our welfare or security, but to the values and the purpose and meaning of our nation.”
Sixty years later, we face that challenge once again.
—March 7, 2025
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ChildWatch: Remembering Selma
Sixty years ago, on Sunday, March 7, 1965, John Lewis and Reverend Hosea Williams set out on a nonviolent march with a group of 600 men, women, young people, and children headed from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital in Montgomery. They were seeking the right to vote and protesting the tragic death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old Black church deacon and military veteran who had died February 26 from injuries he received eight days earlier when he, his mother, sister, and 82-year-old grandfather attended a nonviolent voting rights demonstration that was attacked by law enforcement officials. Jackson was beaten and shot by an Alabama state trooper while trying to shield his mother from a police nightstick. As the marchers left Selma’s Brown Chapel AME Church on the morning of March 7 and headed to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were
also immediately met by lawless state and local law enforcement officials and brutally attacked. The televised images of “Bloody Sunday” and the savage beatings of the marchers—including John Lewis, whose skull was fractured—were a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement and in America’s struggle to become America.
Two weeks later, I traveled from Mississippi to Alabama to join John Lewis, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and about 25,000 fellow citizens to walk the 54 miles from Selma to Montgomery and complete that March. This time we were safer thanks to Federal District Court Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr.’s order that we had a right to peaceful protest, and with National Guard protection. And we were buoyed by President Johnson’s March 15th Special Message to a Joint Session of Congress, “The American Promise,” calling on Congress to pass what became the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In that speech President Johnson said: “This was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose. The great phrases of that purpose still sound in every American heart, North and South: ‘All men are created equal’—‘government by consent of the governed’—‘give me liberty or give me death’. . . Those words are a promise to every citizen that he shall share in the dignity of man.” He continued: “To apply any other test—to deny a man his hopes because of his color or race, his religion or the place of his birth—is not only to do injustice, it is to deny America and to dishonor the dead who gave their lives for American freedom.” He said on the “issue of equal rights,” “should we defeat every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation.” The address is a profound contrast to the message of today’s President.
As Dr. King spoke to the crowd at the end of the exhilarating Selma to Montgomery March, like President Johnson, he reminded us that the work was not yet done. Dr. King said: “Let us therefore continue our triumphant march to the realization of the American dream. Let us march on segregated housing until every ghetto or social and economic depression dissolves, and Negroes and whites live side by side in decent, safe, and sanitary housing. Let us march on segregated schools until every vestige of segregated and inferior education becomes a thing of the past . . . Let us march on poverty until no American parent has to skip a meal so that their children may eat . . . Let us march on ballot boxes until we send to our city councils, state legislatures, and the United States Congress men who will not fear to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.”
Sixty years later, instead of making sure no child’s hopes will be denied in America because of color, race, religion, or place of birth, the same categories and more
are being used in new ways to try to erase and exclude. Racial inequities in education, housing, and other measures still loom large, but face new prohibitions on attempts to acknowledge them, study them, or correct them. Voting rights remain under attack, and voting rights protections, including those created in the 1965 Voting Rights Act, have continued to be weakened. And we remain in desperate need of more leaders who will not fear to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God. But the courage that propelled the Selma marchers forward in the face of brutal systemic resistance must keep pushing all Americans closer to the day our nation finally realizes President Johnson’s American promise and Dr. King’s American dream.
—March 7, 2025
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