Led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams, marchers set out from Selma toward Montgomery to demand voting rights for Black Americans. State troopers and a posse under Sheriff Jim Clark charged the crowd on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, beating marchers and firing tear gas. Televised images of the brutality shocked the nation and galvanized support for the Voting Rights Act, signed into law five months later.
John Lewis, 25 years old and chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, wore a light overcoat and carried a small backpack as he led roughly 600 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. He expected to be arrested. Instead, Alabama state troopers and a mounted posse deputized by Sheriff Jim Clark charged the column, swinging billy clubs and firing canisters of tear gas into a crowd that never raised a hand in resistance.
Lewis suffered a fractured skull. Amelia Boynton Robinson was beaten unconscious, and a photograph of her lying on the pavement circulated worldwide. ABC News interrupted its Sunday broadcast of 'Judgment at Nuremberg' to air footage of the attack, and the juxtaposition, Nazi atrocities on one channel, American police brutality on the same screen minutes later, was not lost on viewers. President Lyndon Johnson, who had been reluctant to push voting rights legislation immediately, went on television eight days later to introduce what became the Voting Rights Act of 1965, telling Congress 'their cause must be our cause too.' Selma's Bloody Sunday is remembered as one of the turning points that forced America to confront its own apartheid.