President Joe Biden is facing criticism for his walk at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 5 in Selma, Alabama. Biden was with Rev. Al Sharpton and Rev. Jesse Jackson to march along the bridge to mark the anniversary of Bloody Sunday.
On March 7, 1965, white law enforcement from the state troopers and sheriff’s department attacked 600 peaceful civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and beat them with billy clubs and sprayed them with tear gas.
Civil rights activist John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was leading the march with Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The march was to protest the beating and fatal shooting of 26-year-old church deacon Jimmie Lee Jackson by Alabama state trooper James Bonard Fowler during a voting rights march in Selma.
As the group marched from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery, they were ordered to disperse when they reached the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside of Selma. The police attacked them minutes later, attacking men, women and children with tear gas, billy clubs and bullwhips.
The violence broadcasted on television and printed in newspapers nationwide, prompting more protests in 80 cities across the country within days. Martin Luther King Jr. led more than 2,000 marchers to the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 9 and finished the march to the capital with more than 25,000 protesters on March 25. The U.S. military and the FBI protected the protesters from local law enforcement, and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law five months later, an important issue for Selma activists.
During…
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