Alabama troopers attack voting-rights marchers on Bloody Sunday

Alabama state troopers and local officers attack peaceful voting-rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on March 7, 1965. The marchers are trying to walk from Selma to Montgomery after the killing of voting-rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson. Television images of officers beating and tear-gassing marchers shock the country. John Lewis, Hosea Williams, Amelia Boynton Robinson, and other organizers become central figures in the national push for federal voting-rights legislation. Public violence against Black voting-rights activists helps build the political pressure that leads to the Voting Rights Act.