SELMA, Ala. — People make the pilgrimage annually to walk across the iconic Edmund Pettus Bridge, where on March 7, 1965, law officers attacked civil rights activists in an incident that became known as Bloody Sunday.

Rev. Ralph Abernathy, James Forman, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rev. Jesse Douglas lead the voting rights march to the Montgomery County Courthouse.

Newly restored photos show the ruin of ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Selma on its 60th anniversary
The late Georgia Congressman John Lewis was one of the leaders of what was supposed to be a march from Selma to Montgomery, motivated by the killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a Black man shot by a state trooper after a civil rights demonstration in nearby Marion, Ala.
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The peaceful marchers, including youth, refused to turn back. They kneeled and prayed. Then troopers and sheriff’s deputies, some on horseback, attacked, beating people with batons and launching tear gas canisters.

Lewis’ head was cracked open. Local activist Amelia Boynton Robinson was bludgeoned. Dozens were injured. And later two white civil rights activists who came to Alabama to support the marchers were killed, the Rev. James Reeb, and Viola Liuzzo.

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/09/nx-s1-5312032/selma-bloody-sunday-60-years-edmund-pettus-bridge

REMEMBRANCE OF MODERATES PAST 1977

“I keep hearing about white people who say they’ve been working behind the scenes,” a black lawyer in New Orleans told me during the desegregation of the public schools there, in 1960—a time when the business and professional leadership of New Orleans stood silent while the city seemed to be taken over by a bunch of women in hair curlers screaming obscenities at six-year-olds. “Yes, sir,” he said. “It must be getting mighty crowded back there, behind the scenes.” From then on, and whenever somebody mentioned working behind the scenes during a time of racial turmoil in the South, a picture planted by that black lawyer came into my mind: Onstage, little of interest is going on—just the usual succession of Southern pols, often in chorus, doing their “never-never” number and dancing off into the wings to great applause from the cheap seats. Every so often, that routine is broken by the appearance onstage of a solitary figure who presents a declamation about obeying the law of the land and is, predictably, pelted with rotten tomatoes or worse. Behind the scenes, hordes of community leaders—prominent businessmen and pillars of the local bar and charity-drive chairmen and country-club presidents—are silently moving scenery around and around and around.

Jackson, 1964: And Other Dispatches from Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America
Calvin Trillin

Georgia governor Ernest Vandiver expressed open hostility towards King’s return to his hometown in late 1959. He claimed that “wherever M. L. King, Jr., has been there has followed in his wake a wave of crimes”, and vowed to keep King under surveillance. On May 4, 1960, several months after his return, King drove writer Lillian Smith to Emory University when police stopped them. King was cited for “driving without a license” because he had not yet been issued a Georgia license. King’s Alabama license was still valid, and Georgia law did not mandate any time limit for issuing a local license. King paid a fine but was unaware that his lawyer agreed to a plea deal that also included a probationary sentence.

Meanwhile, the Atlanta Student Movement had been acting to desegregate businesses and public spaces in the city, organizing the Atlanta sit-ins from March 1960 onwards. In August the movement asked King to participate in a mass October sit-in, timed to highlight how 1960’s Presidential election campaign had ignored civil rights. The coordinated day of action took place on October 19. King participated in a sit-in at the restaurant inside Rich’s, Atlanta’s largest department store, and was among the many arrested that day. The authorities released everyone over the next few days, except for King. Invoking his probationary plea deal, judge J. Oscar Mitchell sentenced King on October 25 to four months of hard labor. Before dawn the next day, King was taken from his county jail cell and transported to Georgia State Prison.

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