Waging a good war: a military history of the civil rights movement, 1954–1968

Abstract

On 7 March 1965, a young activist named Willie Emma Scott noted that approximately 600 unarmed Black protesters were organizing ‘into companies and squads, with company commanders and squad leaders’ and preparing to walk the 54 miles (87 kilometres) from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama (p. 267). Their aim was to draw attention to their quest for voting rights. Standing in their path, at the eastern edge of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, were hundreds of enemy troops, mostly state police officers, who attacked the marchers with steel pipes, clubs, whips, tear gas and pieces of hard rubber wrapped in barbed wire. The demonstrators were forced to retreat after suffering horrific casualties. Their leader, future Congressman John Lewis, suffered a fractured skull and 140 others were injured, 70 of whom required hospitalization. Fay Powell, an organizer listening to events unfold on the telephone, stated: ‘We could hear people screaming and sirens blaring; it sounded like the soundtrack from a war movie’ (p. 269).