60th Anniversary of Bloody Sunday
March 7th 1965

SELMA, Ala. — People make the pilgrimage annually to walk across the iconic Edmund Pettus Bridge, where on March 7, 1965, law officers attacked civil rights activists in an incident that became known as Bloody Sunday.

The late Georgia Congressman John Lewis was one of the leaders of what was supposed to be a march from Selma to Montgomery, motivated by the killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a Black man shot by a state trooper after a civil rights demonstration in nearby Marion, Ala.

“We got to the highest point on this bridge,” Lewis said in an interview with NPR, standing on the bridge ten years ago. “Down below we saw a sea of blue – Alabama state troopers.”