The Cold War and Civil Rights 273the way of Negroes.... A state that denies people education cannot
demand literacy tests as a qualification for voting.”
On “Bloody Sunday,” March 7 , some 600 civil rights activists headed
out of Selma, but they got only as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge,
where they were attacked by state and local police and driven back to
Selma. The leaders went to court. They demanded the court’s protec-
tion to hold another march, a fi fty-four-mile Freedom March from
Selma to the state capital in Montgomery. The court obliged, and on
Sunday, March 21 , some 3 , 200 men and women, black and white, set
out for Montgomery, walking twelve miles a day and sleeping in the
fields along the way. On Thursday, March 25 , now numbering ap-
proximately 25 , 000 , they reached their destination. Again, rioting oc-
curred, with state troopers and mounted policemen brandishing
nightsticks, firearms, and tear gas. A horrified nation watched on
television as screaming, bloody marchers fled in panic from their at-
tackers.
Demonstrations multiplied. Sit-ins became commonplace, and the
nation was forced once again to confront its history of racial strife and
violence. A nation that prided itself on being compassionate and gener-
ous toward the less fortunate had to face the fact that bigots and hood-
lums regularly sullied this image in the eyes of the world.
A week later President Lyndon B. Johnson, in a televised address to
a night session of both houses of Congress, urged passage of stronger
voter rights legislation. “It is not just Negroes,” he said, “but it is all of
us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.
And we shall overcome.” Congress followed through by passing the
Vot i n g R i g ht s A c t of 1965 , which was signed by Johnson on August 5.
It was, he said, “a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has
ever been won on the battlefield.” By this act, he declared, “we strike
away the last major shackle of those fierce and ancient bonds” that
have bound African-Americans to slavery since their arrival on this
continent.
The Voting Rights Act suspended literacy and other tests for voting
and authorized federal supervision of registration in districts that had
used such tests. Registrars were assigned to Alabama, Georgia, Louisi-
ana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, and