The Selma to Montgomery Marches
Selma, Alabama / 1965
On March 7th, 1965, hundreds of people began to march peacefully in Selma, but the work leading up to that day began well before. For years, groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had been holding lunch counter sit-ins and Freedom Rides to advocate for equal rights for Black Americans.
In anticipation of the violence they would encounter, they held nonviolent action workshops, during which they simulated the harassment they might face from supporters of segregation. They practiced responding to antagonization and violence with nonviolent discipline, song, and prayer. Organizers ensured photographers would be at the marches to capture evidence of any violence and injustice carried out against them.
On the day the march began, facing imminent violence from state troopers in Selma, organizers knew that the images of peaceful marchers being tear gassed and beaten by state troopers would reveal the grave injustices they had been suffering to the world.
Footage of the brutality they endured on “Bloody Sunday” was shown on national TV and in newspapers across the country. The images of Black people in their Sunday best being battered by white state troopers also pushed back on assumptions that the demonstrators were an angry and unruly mob.
And photos capturing the diversity of people who supported the movement by marching helped to re-frame the narrative that only Black Americans were participating in the Civil Rights movement. As organizers predicted, exposing these abuses led to widespread outrage that they were able to redirect into action.
Leaders in the movement sprang to action. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called on religious leaders across the country to join them in their “peaceful, nonviolent march for freedom.” On March 9th, 2,000 people, marched to the Edmund Pettus Bridge where they knelt in prayer. And on March 21, they marched from Selma to Montgomery with the protection of federalized Alabama National Guardsmen and FBI agents.
The strategic efforts and actions of Civil Rights supporters at Selma are incredible examples of how a nonviolent movement can make violence perpetrated against it “backfire” and even leverage it to strengthen and advance its goals.
The power of these nonviolent strategies live on today, as activists and advocates around the world continue to use these tactics to make violence “backfire.”
