Bloody Sunday at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the Law Signed Five Months Later

The bridge rises as you walk onto it, so the marchers who set out from Brown Chapel in Selma, Alabama, on Sunday, March 7, 1965, could not see what waited on the far side until they reached the crest. About six hundred people walked two by two, many in church clothes, some carrying bedrolls because they meant to walk fifty-odd miles to the state capitol in Montgomery. At the front were John Lewis, the twenty-five-year-old chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, wearing a trench coat and a backpack, packed in case of a night in jail, and Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. When they came over the top of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they saw a wall of Alabama state troopers across U.S. Highway 80, and behind them the mounted possemen of the Dallas County sheriff, Jim Clark. A trooper major told them they had two minutes to disperse. The marchers stood still. Before two minutes had passed, the troopers advanced with clubs, then tear gas, then horses. Lewis's skull was fractured. Dozens of marchers were injured badly enough to need treatment. That night ABC interrupted its Sunday movie to show the film.

In short: Bloody Sunday turned a long, grinding voter registration campaign in Selma into a national emergency. Within days the president went before Congress to demand a voting rights law, and on August 6, 1965, he signed one that transformed Southern politics. Courts have since cut back its strongest tools, which makes the history less a closed chapter than an open argument.

A bridge with a name

The bridge's name is a detail that pays off. Edmund Pettus was a Confederate general who later led the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, according to historians, and served two terms as a U.S. senator from Alabama. The bridge, opened in 1940, was named for him. In 1965 that fact was not a subject of national debate. The marchers walked under his name toward a line of men enforcing the political order he had helped build.

Decades later, as the national conversation about Confederate monuments grew, campaigns arose to rename the bridge, including one to name it for Lewis. Others in Selma, including some Black leaders, argued for keeping the name, on the theory that the place's meaning had been changed by what happened on it and that the name itself now testified to the victory. That disagreement is a good small example of how people of goodwill can read the same history differently.

Why Selma, and why that Sunday

Selma had been a battleground for years before the cameras arrived. Dallas County was majority Black, and only a sliver of Black adults were registered to vote. The county's registration board opened only on a few days a month and rejected most Black applicants. Local organizers, among them Amelia Boynton and her husband, Samuel, had been pushing for decades. SNCC sent workers in 1963. A local court injunction for a time barred gatherings of three or more people to discuss civil rights.

Early in 1965 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led by Martin Luther King Jr., joined the campaign in force. Hundreds were arrested at the courthouse, including King. Sheriff Clark's temper and his posse made national news, which the organizers counted on.

The immediate spark for the march was a death. On the night of February 18, 1965, in the nearby town of Marion, state troopers broke up a night march. A young church deacon named Jimmie Lee Jackson, trying to protect his mother and grandfather, was shot by a trooper and died some days later. Organizers proposed carrying his grievance, and the cause, to Governor George Wallace in Montgomery. The governor banned the march. They marched anyway.

The woman in the photograph

One of the most reproduced images from that afternoon shows a woman lying unconscious on the pavement, held up by another marcher. She was Amelia Boynton, the Selma organizer who had spent decades urging her neighbors to register and who had helped invite King's organization to the city. A trooper had clubbed her, and the tear gas did the rest. She was in her fifties.

Boynton had already done something few Black women in Alabama had attempted: in 1964 she ran for Congress as a Democrat, the first Black woman to seek that office in the state, at a time when most of the people who might have voted for her could not get on the rolls. She lost, as she knew she would. The campaign was itself an argument about who counted.

She lived long enough to cross the bridge again on its fiftieth anniversary, in a wheelchair, beside the first Black president. That is not a tidy ending to her story, which included many more years of hard work in obscurity, but it is a true one, and it shows how long the people at the center of these events had to wait to be seen.

Three marches, not one

People often remember Selma as one march. There were three, and the differences between them explain how the movement used the law and the law used the movement.

The first was Bloody Sunday. King was not there; he was in Atlanta, and the leaders on the bridge were from SNCC and SCLC. Its brutality, on film, moved public opinion faster than years of registration drives had.

The second came two days later, on Tuesday, March 9. King led some two thousand marchers, including clergy who had flown in from across the country, to the bridge. A federal judge had asked the movement to wait while he held hearings. King faced a choice between defying a friendly federal court and disappointing the people who had come. At the crest he knelt, prayed and turned the march around. Many in SNCC were furious, and the day became known as Turnaround Tuesday. That night, a white Unitarian minister from Boston, James Reeb, who had come for the march, was attacked by white men in Selma. He died two days later.

The third march began on March 21, under the protection of federal troops and a federal court order. The judge was Frank M. Johnson Jr. of the Middle District of Alabama, a Republican appointee whom Wallace loathed, and who ruled that the marchers had a right to petition their government even by walking along a highway. With the Alabama National Guard federalized under the president's orders, thousands walked out of Selma, narrowed to a few hundred where the highway shrank to two lanes, slept in fields and arrived at the capitol in Montgomery on March 25, where the crowd had swelled to around twenty-five thousand. That night a white volunteer from Detroit, Viola Liuzzo, was shot dead by Klansmen while driving marchers home. One of the men in the car was an FBI informant.

The president's speech

Between the second and third marches, on March 15, 1965, Lyndon Johnson went before a joint session of Congress, on national television, and asked for a voting rights bill. He spoke about Selma directly, and he spoke about the teaching job he had held as a young man in a poor Mexican American school in Cotulla, Texas. Near the end of the speech, the president of the United States, a Southerner, used the anthem of the movement and said "we shall overcome."

It is fair to ask why it took so long. Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act less than a year earlier and had a long list of other programs he wanted through Congress first. Selma changed the calculation. The images made delay costlier than action. That is the political mechanism in its plainest form: the movement could not write the law, but it could change what the law's writers were willing to risk.

What the law did

Congress moved quickly by its standards. The Voting Rights Act was signed on August 6, 1965, in the Capitol, five months after Bloody Sunday. Lewis was among the people in the room.

The Act did several distinct things, and it helps to separate them.

Section 2 prohibits any voting practice that results in denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race, nationwide. It is the general rule.

Section 4 created a formula identifying jurisdictions with a history of discrimination, based on whether they had used a test or device and had low registration or turnout. In those places, literacy tests were suspended.

Section 5 required those covered jurisdictions to get approval from the Justice Department or a federal court in Washington before changing any voting rule, from district lines to polling locations. This was called preclearance, and it shifted the burden: instead of voters suing after a discriminatory change, the state had to show its change was not discriminatory before using it.

The Act also authorized federal examiners to register voters directly where local registrars would not.

Preclearance turned out to matter more than its authors may have guessed. When literacy tests disappeared, some jurisdictions turned to subtler tools: switching from district elections to at-large elections that let a white majority win every seat, annexing white suburbs to dilute Black city voters, moving polling places, or redrawing lines. Under Section 5, each of these needed approval first, and the Justice Department objected to many of them over the decades. The law worked less like a wall than like a filter, catching new devices before they took effect.

The effect in the Deep South was dramatic and fast. Black registration in Alabama and Mississippi rose sharply within a few years. Black officials began to win local and state offices across the South. The number of Black members of Congress from the South grew in the decades that followed, often from districts drawn under the Act's protection.

The other side's case, and the Court's turn

Congress renewed the Act several times, in 1970, 1975, 1982 and 2006, with large bipartisan majorities; the 2006 renewal was signed by President George W. Bush. Then in 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court ruled five to four that the coverage formula in Section 4 was unconstitutional because it relied on decades-old data. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the country had changed and that current burdens must be justified by current needs. The ruling did not strike down Section 5 itself, but without a formula, no jurisdiction was covered. Congress has not written a new one.

The Court's majority made a real argument, and it should be stated fairly. Preclearance was an extraordinary federal intrusion into the states' power to run elections, applied unevenly to some states and not others, and the gap in Black and white registration in many covered states had narrowed or closed. A formula built on 1960s and 1970s turnout figures, the majority argued, could not justify treating Alabama differently from Ohio decades later.

The answer from the dissent, written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was that the law was working because it was in place, and that throwing it out was like throwing away an umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet. That image is hers, and it has been quoted widely. After the ruling, several formerly covered states and counties moved quickly to change voting rules, close polling places or purge rolls in ways that would previously have needed approval.

Section 2 remains. In 2023, in Allen v. Milligan, a case from Alabama, the Court upheld its application to congressional maps and required the state to draw a second district in which Black voters had a real chance to elect a candidate of their choice. Other challenges to how Section 2 works continue to reach the Court. Our court watch page tracks the Court's opinions this term with its own summaries.

Lewis, sixty years on

John Lewis went on to serve more than three decades in the House from Georgia. He returned to the bridge many times, often with members of both parties, for the annual commemoration. He died in July 2020. Congressional Democrats have since introduced a bill bearing his name that would restore a modernized preclearance system; it has not become law.

That is where the history meets the present. In 2026, Democrats won both houses of Congress, and a voting rights bill is certain to be among the arguments of the new session, though nobody should treat passage, or a presidential signature, as a given. The fights over maps and rolls are followed on our voting rights and redistricting page.

Here is my view, labeled as such: the deepest lesson of Selma is not that a beating on television moves Congress. It is that the people of Dallas County had been doing the unglamorous work for years, at the courthouse, in the churches, in the jail, so that when the moment came there was an organization ready to use it. The camera arrived for the last chapter of a long book.

What you can do

• Confirm your registration and your polling place well before any election. Our voting page gives registration deadlines, voter ID rules and mail and early voting options for every state, linked to each state's election office.
• Ask your members of Congress where they stand on restoring preclearance. Find your U.S. representative, senators and state legislators, with phone numbers, contact forms and latest votes, on our representatives page.
• Follow the Supreme Court's voting cases as they come down. Court watch lists this term's opinions with the Court's summaries, the emergency docket and Senate votes on judges.
• Volunteer with a local voter registration or protection group. Your county election board publishes meeting schedules; poll workers are always needed, and nonpartisan voter groups train people to help.