BLOODSHED IN ALABAMA

Two weeks before Grissom and Young’s launch, the gradual progress of the American civil rights movement exploded into violence when 600 protestors marching from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama were attacked by club-wielding, tear-gas-spraying police. As a result, 7 March 1965 would become forever known as ‘Bloody Sunday’.

At the time, Selma – seat and main town of Dallas County – had a population that was 57 per cent black, although fewer than one per cent was actually registered to vote. The vast majority of the black community lived beneath the poverty line in mundane, unskilled occupations, a situation which the Boynton family and others sought to rectify. Their efforts to achieve this had been hampered since the late Fifties by the White Citizens’ Council, the Ku Klux Klan and direct violence. The situation reached a head in February 1965, when an Alabama state trooper shot Jimmie Lee Jackson as the latter tried to protect his mother and grandfather during a nocturnal demonstration.

Jackson’s murder was the catalyst for the first of three Selma-to-Montgomery marches. The initial plan was for the marchers to ask Alabama Governor George Wallace if he had authorised the troopers to shoot during the demonstration, which ultimately broadened with Martin Luther King’s desire to request better protection of black voting registrants from Wallace.

The reaction from the governor, disturbingly, was that the march represented a threat to public safety and he opposed it. Mounted police awaited the marchers and, in the presence of journalists, attacked them with clubs, tear gas and bull whips. Amelia Boynton, one of the organisers, was beaten and gassed and 17 other marchers were hospitalised.

Two days later, on 9 March, King organised a second march. Numbers had by now swelled to more than 2,500 in outraged reaction to the images from Bloody Sunday. However, an attempt to gain a court order to prevent the police from interfering was rejected by a federal district judge, who instead issued a restraining order to stop the march until further hearings could be held. To avoid breaking the terms of the order, King led the marchers out to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, held a short prayer session, then turned them around and disbanded. Violence, however, was not far away. That evening, three white ministers involved in the second ‘march’ were clubbed by white supremacists. One of the ministers, James Reeb, later died from his injuries.

After finally gaining approval for an unimpeded march, the full journey along Route 80 through rain and cold was completed from Selma to Montgomery on 24 March. Five months later, President Lyndon Johnson signed the National Voting Rights Act, which prohibited states from preventing their citizens from voting on the basis of colour or race. Previous practices of requiring voters to pass literacy tests before being cleared to cast at the ballot box were abolished. Moreover, states with a history of abuses over voting rights could not make any changes without first requesting the consent of the Department of Justice. A wind of change had taken hold in America.