Selma and Voting Rights

On March 7, 1965, Lewis and Hosea Williams led marchers across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, where Alabama officers attacked them. Images of Bloody Sunday intensified national pressure for federal voting-rights legislation.

Lewis’s fractured skull became an enduring symbol, but the campaign’s power came from years of local organizing and repeated collective action. The Voting Rights Act emerged from that larger movement, not from one march alone.