The Road from Selma

On March 7, 1965, roughly 600 marchers left Selma, Alabama, intending to walk toward the state capital at Montgomery. At the far side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, state troopers and local law-enforcement officers blocked their path. The marchers were demanding a right supposedly protected by the Constitution. What followed showed how violently that promise could be denied on an ordinary stretch of American road.

The campaign had roots deeper than the bridge confrontation. Black residents and local organizers had long challenged exclusion from voter registration in Dallas County. The Dallas County Voters League and organizers associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee sustained work that was dangerous, frustrating and rarely nationally visible. The arrival of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference brought additional attention to a struggle that local people had not waited for outsiders to begin.