Thursday, December 25, 2014

In ‘Selma,’ King Is Just One of Many Heroes - NYTimes.com

The cast of "Selma?
Video: Movie trailer

In ‘Selma,’ King Is Just One of Many Heroes - NYTimes.com

by A.O. Scott


On the afternoon of March 7, 1965, Alabama state troopers and members of a Dallas County posse, armed with clubs, cattle prods and tear gas, attacked civil rights demonstrators on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. The marchers had planned to walk the 50 miles to Montgomery, the state capital, as part of a long-building protest against the denial of basic voting rights to Southern blacks. The procession would have crossed Lowndes County, where not a single African-American voter had been registered in more than 60 years. Efforts to change this had been met with bureaucratic obstruction, intimidation and lethal brutality, including the killing, a week earlier, of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old laborer and protester, by a state trooper.

Film Shows a Selma Some Would Rather Not Revisit DEC. 24, 2014

A few days later, a second march, led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., turned back rather than risk further violence. By the time the third, ultimately successful effort left Selma on March 21, President Lyndon B. Johnson, pushed by Dr. King and televised images of official brutality as well as by his own political and moral instincts, had introduced the Voting Rights Act in a nationally televised address to Congress.'via Blog this'

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