George Wallace guessed what was coming.

On Saturday, March 6, 1965, the segregationist governor of Alabama declared that a planned

march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery on U.S. Highway 80 was illegal and authorized

to state troopers to use whatever measures are necessary to prevent a march.

And so they would for a time.

But in their violent attempt on a March Sunday to end a movement to make an American promise

real, they would only fuel the fires of progress.

The day of evil came good, out of darkness light, out of anguish, justice.

The day was called Bloody Sunday.

I'm John Meacham and this is Hope Through History Episode 5, a battle for justice.

There's going to be groups of people within the movement who want more than just demonstration.

He was hoping for some kind of issue that would convert undecided Americans to the view that

this is something that we have to do right now.

Every ordinary people stood before the forces of the state and the state literally bulldozed

them.

At the midpoint of the 1960s, the focus of the Black Freedom struggle had moved to voting

rights.

World War II had signaled the possibilities of a new era in race relations in a nation

long defined by slavery and segregation.

President Truman had desegregated the military and proposed a civil rights program that had

divided the Democratic Party in 1948.

The Brown School decision came in 1954, followed by the non-violent student sit-ins of 1960,

...