The Alabama Freedom March began on this date in 1965. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther
King and 3,200 demonstrators set off on a 54-mile march from Selma to
Montgomery, Alabama, to protest the disenfranchisement of black voters. They
had tried to set off on this march twice before; the first time, state troopers
and deputies attacked them with clubs, whips, and tear gas. The second time,
they were turned back by a human barricade of state troopers at the foot of the
Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. On March 10, the Justice Department filed suit
in Montgomery to block the troopers from punishing the protestors. President
Lyndon Johnson, in a special address, said: “Their cause must be our cause too.
Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome
the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”
The judge
ruled in favor of the marchers, but Alabama governor George Wallace complained
that deploying the Alabama National Guard to protect the marchers would be too
expensive. He appealed to Johnson for help. Johnson signed an executive order
to federalize the Alabama National Guard, and deployed them to protect Dr. King
and the other civil rights protestors on their march.
The
marchers traveled about 12 miles a day, and slept in the fields at night. By
the time they reached Montgomery on March 25, their numbers had swelled to
25,000. King gave an address from the steps of the state capitol. He said: “The
end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its
conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man.
That will be the day of man as man.”
President
Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — which prohibits racial
discrimination in voting — in August, less than five months after the Selma
march. Today's Writer's Almanac
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