Author: Randy
Date: 2006-03-08
Hits: 10116
Recommendations: 75
Recommend this Journal

Bloody Sunday

I can remember a time in my life when a span of 41 years seemed like an eternity. Now it seems like a blink of an eye.

The year was 1965. Great unrest was growing daily across the nation, especially in the south. History would later look back on March 7, 1965 as a horrendous day for the nation, for the state of Alabama and for the towns of Selma & Marion in particular. That day would show just how terrible one human could treat another. However, history would also look back on that day as a galvanizing event that helped catapult the nation's collective conscience to a point where something had to be done about the racial inequality so prevalent for the time.

That day would be forever known as "Bloody Sunday".

Similar events leading up to Bloody Sunday happened a few days earlier in Marion, Alabama, a small town of approximately 3,000 about 30 miles northwest of Selma. Over 600 people, most of them students, had been arrested in Marion. The latest of these was James Orange, a field secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Local black leaders persuaded C.T. Vivian, an assistant for Martin Luther King Jr., to come to town and speak, hoping to call attention to the arrests.

On February 18, a crowd of over 500 people gathered at Zion United Methodist Church to hear Vivian speak. Afterward, Rev. James Dobynes and Albert Turner led a large group of the congregation (almost all of them) in a peaceful march to the city jail, not quite a block away. They planned to sing songs and protest the incarceration of Orange and others. They formed a line and marched two by two out into the night air. The press was there also; having received word that Vivian was speaking and they (the press) were expecting heightened tension...how right they were. The local police had anticipated a protest and had called in the Alabama State Troopers. There were approximately 50 troopers on hand as well as the Marion police and others.

As the protesters approached the jail in song, "law" enforcement stretched across the road, blocking their path. Marion Chief of Police Harris yelled out loudly over his bullhorn for the crowd to cease and desist. Rev. Dobynes kneeled down to pray and was promptly rewarded by being clubbed in the head by a state trooper and dragged off to jail.

Then...someone cut the power to the streetlights and the beatings began. News reporters and crews were not left out, they were caught up in the melee as well, with several receiving serious wounds as well as their cameras and other equipment being destroyed or vandalized. Not one photograph survived to be published.

As the crowd began to break up and flee police, troopers and others followed in pursuit. Several troopers chased a group of protesters into Mack's Café. They clubbed Cager Lee to the floor. Lee was 82 years old. When his daughter, Viola Jackson ran to help him she also was clubbed. Her son, Jimmie Lee Jackson rushed to aid his mother and grandfather. As he did, a state trooper shot him in the stomach. Regardless of his severe stomach wound, Jackson was hauled to jail and booked for assault and battery before being taken for medical care. He was taken to a hospital in Selma two hours later. On February 26, Jackson died from his wounds.

The entire black community of Marion turned out for Jackson's funeral march. Jim Bevel, one of the organizers, stated "it would be fitting to take Jimmie Lee's body and march it all the way to the state capitol in Montgomery." The march from Selma was organized around bevel's statement. They planned to march the 54 miles to Montgomery in protest of the death of Jackson as well as unfair voting practices.

Approximately 550 people gathered on March 7 at Brown's Chapel in Selma for the march to Montgomery. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge they were greeted by police, police dogs and state troopers...many on horseback. Gov. George Wallace had given instructions to stop the march. The marchers were told, "It would be detrimental to your safety to continue this march. You are ordered to disperse, go home or to your church. This march will not continue. You have three minutes to disperse." One and one-half minutes later, they attacked the crowd, brutally and relentlessly. They chased and beat men, women and children all the way across the bridge, even back to the chapel. This time however, the press would bear witness to the sheer brutality.

That very evening news stations across the land broke into their regular programming with the news of Selma. As ABC aired a documentary, "Judgment at Nuremberg", they interrupted the program with pictures of the violence in Selma...viewers at first thought they were still seeing the documentary. George B Leonard would later say, "A shrill cry of terror, unlike any that had passed through a TV set, rose up as the troopers lumbered forward, stumbling sometimes on the fallen bodies . . . . Periodically the top of a helmeted head emerged from the cloud, followed by a club on the upswing. The club and the head would disappear into the cloud of gas and another club would bob up and down. Inhuman. No other word can describe the emotions . . ."

No other word indeed.


Civil Rights Memorial: Selma Alabama