On March 7, 1965, six hundred people—men, women, and children—gather in Selma. They plan to march the fifty-eight miles to Alabama's capital, Montgomery, where they intend to face Governor George Wallace and demand that all of Alabama's citizens be protected in their right to vote. They march the first six blocks, singing as they go. But when they mount the sloping crest of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they are stunned by what they see: state troopers are lined up, gas masks in place, bull whips and billy clubs raised. The officers move forward and release tear gas bombs. Sheyann Webb was among the marchers. She later recalled: "People were running and falling and ducking and you could hear the whips swishing and you'd hear them striking people. I tried to run home as fast as I could. Hosea Williams picked me up and I told him to put me down, he wasn't running fast enough."

But something new has come to this out-of-the-way southern town: television coverage. Camera crews are filming the action. Sheriff Clark's bullying is no longer just Selma's problem: it is national news. TV stations across the nation interrupt their regular programs to show scenes of policemen on horseback clubbing peaceful marchers. Most good people are sickened. So when Martin Luther King sends telegrams to prominent clergymen asking them to join him for a ministers' march to Montgomery, they come from many places and many faiths. Among them is a Unitarian minister from Boston named James Reeb. In Selma, he and some other white ministers make the mistake of eating in a black café. For Reeb, it is a fatal mistake. He is clubbed to death as he comes out of the restaurant.

In Washington, President Johnson makes a comment: "What happened in Selma was an American tragedy. At times, history and fate meet at a single time, in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was in Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama."