Since the late 19th century, Southern state legislatures had passed and maintained a series of Jim Crow laws that had disenfranchised the millions of African Americans across the South and enforced racial segregation.

On February 26, activist and deacon Jimmie Lee Jackson died after being shot several days earlier by state trooper James Bonard Fowler during a peaceful march in nearby Marion.

President Lyndon B. Johnson seized the opportunity and held a historic, nationally televised joint session of Congress on March 15, asking lawmakers to pass what is now known as the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

At that time, more than 80% of Dallas County blacks lived below the poverty line, most of them working as sharecroppers, farmhands, maids, janitors, and day laborers, but there were also teachers and business owners.

[citation needed] On July 6, 1964, one of the two registration days that month, John Lewis led 50 black citizens to the courthouse, but County Sheriff Jim Clark arrested them all instead of allowing them to apply to vote.

They had become distrustful of SCLC's spectacular mobilizations which were designed to appeal to the national media and Washington, DC, but which, most of SNCC believed, did not result in major improvements for the lives of African Americans on the ground.

Baker believed that the most effective method of undermining civil rights protests was to de-escalate them and deny them publicity, as Police Chief Laurie Pritchett had done against the Albany Movement in Georgia.

[20] The Selma Voting Rights Campaign officially started on January 2, 1965, when King addressed a mass meeting in Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church in defiance of the anti-meeting injunction.

"[30] Fay Bellamy and Silas Norman attended a talk by Malcolm X to 3,000 students at the Tuskegee Institute, and invited him to address a mass meeting at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church to kick off the protests on the morning of February 4.

On February 6, the White House announced that it would urge Congress to enact a voting rights bill during the current session and that the vice-president and Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach would meet with King in the following week.

SCLC was less concerned with Dallas County's immediate registration figures, and primarily focused on creating a public crisis that would make a voting rights bill the White House's number one priority.

[46] The death of Jimmie Lee Jackson prompted civil rights leaders to bring their cause directly to Alabama Governor George Wallace by performing a 54 mi (87 km) march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery.

[60] The executive board of the NAACP unanimously passed a resolution the day after "Bloody Sunday", warning If Federal troops are not made available to protect the rights of Negroes, then the American people are faced with terrible alternatives.

[61]In response to "Bloody Sunday", labor leader Walter Reuther sent a telegram on March 9 to President Johnson, reading in part: Americans of all religious faiths, of all political persuasions, and from every section of our Nation are deeply shocked and outraged at the tragic events in Selma Ala., and they look to the Federal Government as the only possible source to protect and guarantee the exercise of constitutional rights, which is being denied and destroyed by the Dallas County law enforcement agents and the Alabama State troops under the direction of Governor George Wallace.

[63] But some movement activists, both local and from around the country, were determined to march on Tuesday to protest both the "Bloody Sunday" violence and the systematic denial of black voting rights in Alabama.

King led about 2,500 marchers out on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and held a short prayer session before turning them around, thereby obeying the court order preventing them from making the full march, and following the agreement made by Collins, Lingo, and Clark.

[65][67] As only SCLC leaders had been told in advance of the plan, many marchers felt confusion and consternation, including those who had traveled long distances to participate and oppose police brutality.

But many activists were bitter that the media and national political leaders expressed great concern over the murder of Reeb, a northern white in Selma, but had paid scant attention to that of Jackson, a local African American.

At a mass meeting on the night of the 16th, Forman "whipped the crowd into a frenzy" demanding that the President act to protect demonstrators, and warned, "If we can't sit at the table of democracy, we'll knock the fucking legs off.

On March 12, President Johnson had an unusually belligerent meeting with a group of civil rights advocates including Bishop Paul Moore, Reverend Robert Spike, and SNCC representative H. Rap Brown.

[80][81] In this same period, SNCC, CORE, and other groups continued to organize protests in more than eighty cities, actions that included 400 people blocking the entrances and exits of the Los Angeles Federal Building.

That night on a makeshift stage, a "Stars for Freedom" rally was held, with singers Harry Belafonte, Tony Bennett, Frankie Laine, Peter, Paul and Mary, Sammy Davis Jr., Joan Baez, Nina Simone, and The Chad Mitchell Trio[98] all performing.

[101] Later that night, Viola Liuzzo, a white mother of five from Detroit who had come to Alabama to support voting rights for blacks, was assassinated by Ku Klux Klan members while she was ferrying marchers back to Selma from Montgomery.

Afterward, the FBI's COINTELPRO operation spread false rumors that Liuzzo was a member of the Communist Party and had abandoned her children to have sexual relationships with African-American activists.

After witnessing TV coverage of "Bloody Sunday", President Lyndon Baines Johnson met with Governor George Wallace in Washington to discuss the civil rights situation in his state.

According to C. T. Vivian, an SCLC activist who was with King at Richie Jean Jackson's home when the speech was broadcast I looked over ... and Martin was very quietly sitting in the chair, and a tear ran down his cheek.

This act prohibited most of the unfair practices used to prevent blacks from registering to vote, and provided for federal registrars to go to Alabama and other states with a history of voting-related discrimination to ensure that the law was implemented by overseeing registration and elections.

The Civil Rights Commission described this as a major contribution to expanding black voters in 1965, and the Justice Department acknowledged leaning on the work of "local organizations" in the movement to implement the Act.

Katzenbach did concentrate examiners and observers in Selma for the "high-visibility" election between incumbent County Sheriff Jim Clark and Wilson Baker, who had earned the grudging respect of many local residents and activists.

[143] Among the serious environmental issues identified by EPA has been the presence of active and abandoned gas stations along the highway, with potential contamination from petroleum leaks from underground storage sites.