What was it like to be a child in Selma, Alabama, during the civil rights movement? Writer Willie Mae Brown was 12 when Martin Luther King Jr. first came to town and visited her church:
When Selma, Alabama, was recently torn apart by that tornado, it was hard not to think of another time when it was rent asunder by racism.
On March 7, 1965 — a day known as Bloody Sunday — Black nonviolent protesters attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge to walk to Montgomery to confront racist Gov. George Wallace over voting rights. John Lewis and other organizers were beaten by white men, deputized for the day by the county Sheriff Jim Clark.
Two days later, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led more than 2,000 marchers over the bridge and then turned them around, obeying a court order that became Turn Around Tuesday. Marchers eventually made it to Montgomery and helped pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act. But before that, King made earlier visits to Selma, where for months, Black residents had been protesting Jim Crow laws that denied them the ballot. Some had been killed.
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