Blood on the Bridge: Selma's Bloody Sunday Sparks Civil Rights Victory

State troopers and county deputies attacked 600 civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965, using tear gas, bullwhips, and nightsticks. The marchers, led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams, were attempting to walk to Montgomery to demand voting rights. Lewis suffered a fractured skull. ABC interrupted its Sunday night broadcast of Judgment at Nuremberg to show footage of the assault, and the juxtaposition of Nazi brutality on screen with American police violence in Alabama was devastating. The broadcast transformed Selma from a local struggle into a national crisis overnight. Martin Luther King Jr. led a second march to the bridge two days later but turned the marchers around at the bridge to avoid a court injunction. A third march, protected by federalized National Guard troops, completed the journey to Montgomery on March 25. President Johnson addressed Congress on March 15, adopting the movement's anthem: 'We shall overcome.'