The Bridge They Would Not Abandon

On March 7, 1965, six hundred marchers led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams stepped onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. State troopers met them with tear gas and billy clubs. The nation watched in horror as peaceful demonstrators were beaten bloody on what became known as Bloody Sunday.

Two days later, Martin Luther King Jr. led a second attempt. At the crest of the bridge, facing another wall of troopers, he knelt in prayer — then turned the marchers around, honoring a federal court restraining order. Critics called it a retreat.

But they were not finished.

On March 21, after Federal Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. ruled in their favor and President Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard, approximately 3,200 marchers set out from Brown Chapel AME Church a third time. They crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge without violence. Four days later, 25,000 people walked into Montgomery.