In 1965 Dallas County, Alabama had about 15,000 eligible Black voters and only 130 on the rolls. Registrars used arbitrary literacy tests, the White Citizens Council pressed employers and landlords, and Judge James Hare barred more than two people from discussing civil rights. The Courageous Eight of the Dallas County Voters League invited the SCLC despite friction with SNCC, which had organized locally since 1963. Police chief Wilson Baker tried quiet arrests while Sheriff Jim Clark used a posse armed with cattle prods. After a state trooper shot Jimmie Lee Jackson in a Marion cafe as he shielded his mother and grandfather, James Bevel proposed a 54-mile march to Governor George Wallace in Montgomery.
On March 7, Bloody Sunday, troopers and mounted deputies attacked about 600 marchers led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Judge Frank Johnson then blocked a second march, and under a deal brokered by LBJ’s envoy LeRoy Collins, King led 2,500 people over the bridge on March 9, prayed and turned back, angering SNCC. That night minister James Reeb was fatally beaten. SNCC opened a second front with sit-ins inside the White House East Wing, and on March 15 President Johnson told Congress we shall overcome. The final march began March 21 and reached the Capitol with 25,000 people on March 25. The Voting Rights Act became law that August.
- Nurse Annie Lee Cooper knocked Sheriff Clark to his knees and was photographed being clubbed while pinned down.
- A court order limited the two-lane Lowndes County stretch to 300 marchers.
- Viola Liuzzo was shot by Klansmen on Highway 80, and an FBI informant, Gary Rowe, was in the car.
- The FBI then spread false rumors about Liuzzo through COINTELPRO tactics.
- By March 1966 nearly 11,000 Black voters had registered in Selma, and Wilson Baker defeated Jim Clark for sheriff.
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