Selma Voting Rights Movement

Selma to Montgomery marches
Part of the Civil Rights Movement
Alabama State troopers attack civil-rights demonstrators outside Selma, Alabama, on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965
Date	March 7–25, 1965 (7001180000000000000♠18 days)
Location	Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, Edmund Pettus Bridge, U.S. Route 80, Alabama State Capitol, Selma and Montgomery, Alabama
Caused by	Death of Jimmie Lee Jackson African Americans obstructed from registering to vote Failed voter registration campaign
Resulted in	Speech "The American Promise" delivered by Lyndon B. Johnson as Special Message before Congress Introduction of Senate bill 1564, a voting rights bill, in the 89th United States Congress Hastened passage of voting rights bill in Congress Speech "How Long? Not Long" delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Alabama State Capitol
Parties to the civil conflict
Dallas County Voters League (DCVL) Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Governor of Alabama Department of Public Safety Dallas County Circuit Court Dallas County Sheriff Board of Registrar Mayor of Selma Selma Department of Safety Dallas County Citizens' Council
Lead figures
DCVL members Ulysses S. Blackmon, Sr. Amelia Boynton Samuel Boynton Bruce Boynton Rev. Frederick Reese Rev. L.L. Anderson J. L. Chestnut Annie Lee Cooper Marie Foster James E. Gildersleeve SCLC members Martin Luther King, Jr. James Bevel Diane Nash James Orange Hosea Williams SNCC members Stokely Carmichael James Forman Prathia Hall Bernard Lafayette John Lewis Fay Bellamy Powell State of Alabama George Wallace, Governor Albert J. Lingo, Director of the Alabama Department of Public Safety Major John Cloud, Commander of Alabama State Troopers Dallas County Judge James Hare, Circuit Court Jim Clark, Sheriff of Dallas County J. P. Majors, Dallas County Registrar City of Selma Joseph Smitherman, Mayor Wilson Baker, Public Safety Director of Selma

DCVL members

SCLC members

SNCC members

State of Alabama

Dallas County

City of Selma

The Selma to Montgomery marches were three protest marches, held in 1965, along the 54-mile (87 km) highway from Selma, Alabama to the state capital of Montgomery. The marches were organized by nonviolent activists to demonstrate the desire of African-American citizens to exercise their constitutional right to vote, in defiance of segregationist repression, and were part of a broader voting rights movement underway in Selma and throughout the American South. By highlighting racial injustice, they contributed to passage that year of the Voting Rights Act, a landmark federal achievement of the Civil Rights Movement.

Southern state legislatures had passed and maintained a series of discriminatory requirements and practices that had disenfranchised most of the millions of African Americans across the South throughout the 20th century. The African-American group known as the Dallas County Voters League (DCVL) launched a voters registration campaign in Selma in 1963. Joined by organizers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), they began working that year in a renewed effort to register black voters.

Finding resistance by white officials to be intractable, even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended legal segregation, the DCVL invited Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the activists of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to join them. SCLC brought many prominent civil rights and civic leaders to Selma in January 1965. Local and regional protests began, with 3,000 people arrested by the end of February. According to Joseph A. Califano Jr., who served as head of domestic affairs for U.S. President Lyndon Johnson between the years 1965 and 1969, the President viewed King as an essential partner in getting the Voting Rights Act enacted. Califano, whom the President also assigned to monitor the final march to Montgomery, noted that Johnson and King talked by telephone on January 15 to plan a strategy for drawing attention to the injustice of using literacy tests and other barriers to stop black Southerners from voting and that King later informed the President on February 9 of his decision to use Selma to achieve this objective.