State troopers beat civil rights marchers on Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma

On March 7, 1965, 600 civil rights marchers led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams attempt to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on the first leg of a planned march to Montgomery to demand Black voting rights. Alabama state troopers under Sheriff Jim Clark and Col. Al Lingo attack the marchers with billy clubs and tear gas at the foot of the bridge, injuring 58 people including Lewis, who suffers a fractured skull. Televised footage of the attack, broadcast that evening as ABC interrupted Judgment at Nuremberg to air it, shocks the nation and generates immediate pressure on President Lyndon Johnson to pass federal voting rights legislation.