State Troopers Attack Marchers on "Bloody Sunday" at the Edmund Pettus Bridge
600 marchers headed for Montgomery are beaten back with billy clubs and tear gas six blocks into their walk
Quick facts
- Location
- Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma, Alabama
- Led by
- Hosea Williams, John Lewis
- Injuries
- At least 50 hospitalized
What happened
SNCC and SCLC had spent early 1965 pushing voter registration in Selma, Alabama, where Black residents faced systematic obstruction despite being a majority of the county's population. On March 7, 1965, about 600 marchers led by Hosea Williams and John Lewis set out from Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church toward Montgomery to protest the recent killing of activist Jimmie Lee Jackson by a state trooper. They got only as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge, six blocks away, where Alabama state troopers and a posse under Sheriff Jim Clark attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas, driving them back into Selma. At least 50 marchers required hospital treatment. Televised footage of the attack, which became known as Bloody Sunday, ran nationally that evening.
Why it matters
Bloody Sunday's televised violence turned Selma into a national crisis that President Johnson addressed directly before Congress eight days later, and it produced the successful third march, 3,200 strong on March 21 and 25,000 by the time it reached Montgomery, that Johnson's Voting Rights Act followed within five months.
How we know
The National Park Service, which administers the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, documents the march's route, the attack, and the injury count from period accounts and its own historical markers at the bridge.
Sources
- Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, National Park Service. Bloody Sunday · Primary source (author-declared)nps.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- National Archives. Selma Marches · Primary source (author-declared)archives.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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