The March 7, 1965 attack on voting-rights marchers in Selma is commonly called Bloody Sunday.
About 600 marchers left Selma, Alabama, intending to walk to Montgomery to protest barriers preventing Black citizens from voting. At the Edmund Pettus Bridge, state troopers and local law enforcement ordered them to disperse and then attacked them with clubs and tear gas.
Televised images of the violence shocked viewers across the United States. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders organized a second march, but a federal court order protected the successful third march from Selma to Montgomery later that month.
The events increased pressure on Congress and President Lyndon B. Johnson to advance voting-rights legislation. The Voting Rights Act became law on August 6, 1965.