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hree interrelated events in 1965 brought profound changes in American society. The first of them, the voting rights campaign that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led in Selma, Alabama, was designed to help bring about federal legislation to guarantee the black southerner ’s right to vote. Out of it grew the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act. In contrast to the effusions of hope that accompanied the Selma campaign and the Voting Rights Act, the Watts riots signaled that more and bloodier insurrections were coming, and they would occur across America. Armed with the Voting Rights Act authority, federal registrars were dispatched to the South, where they enrolled black voters in sufficient numbers to eventually bring about a political revolution in the region. Once black southerners were armed with the ballot, Jim Crow was doomed, as all but the most fanatical segregationists had to know. Yet racism would survive Jim Crow’s passing, and since de facto discrimination existed across America, it was the nation as a whole, not just the South, that would become the battleground. Even whites who had cheered on King’s campaigns against segregation had nursed hopes that reforms would quiet the anger in the hearts of their black countrymen. It was not to be. Instead, Selma created expectations of social change and improvements in the lives of African Americans that neither the events in a small Alabama town nor the Voting Rights Act could reach. On August 11, less than a week after President Johnson signed the bill into law, the Watts riot erupted. For his campaign in Selma, King returned again to the tested Gandhian strategy of creating a crisis that had served him well in Birmingham. His followers generally remained nonviolent, but their tactics were intended to prod policemen into open violence against peaceful demonstrators to unmask the brutality of segregation. After some preliminary skirmishing, the crisis was precipitated on March 7 when King’s forces—he himself CHAPTER 12 Selma and Watts 190 t SELMA AND WATTS 191 was not present—refused to turn back their protest march from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital. Alabama state troopers and Dallas County sheriff’s deputies charged into the ranks of the six hundred nonviolent marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and broke up the march. The confrontation came to be known as Bloody Sunday.1 Before the disrupted march could be resumed, two obstacles needed to be removed. One was cleared away when a federal judge lifted his injunction blocking the demonstration, and another was removed when President Johnson maneuvered Alabama governor George Wallace into acceding, in effect, to the federal government providing protection for the marchers. Wallace claimed that Alabama’s state government could muster only 450 of the 6,171 men he estimated would be needed for the security detail, a cost, he said, the state government could not afford. Johnson rebuked him and Alabama legislators for failing their responsibility to carry out simple police functions to protect the right of citizens “to walk peaceably and safely without injury or loss of life,” and the president ordered soldiers to accompany the march to Montgomery.2 King led the resumed demonstration , which received national and international media coverage, especially on its fifth and last day, March 25, when fifty thousand demonstrators followed him into Montgomery. The reactions to the abuses of human rights in Selma were international as well as domestic. As the journalist Jim Bishop wrote: “The sound of clubs on heads echoed all around the world.”3 News stories and pictures of lawmen charging on horseback and foot and flailing marchers with clubs were flashed to the world electronically, reaching the less-developed regions primarily in the form of wire service dispatches, still pictures, and radio news. Despite the growth of television between 1963 and 1965, that medium was mostly missing from or was scarce in most of Africa and Asia, where the United States and Soviet Union conducted their most intense propaganda struggle over race. Of the estimated 105 million television sets outside the United States and Canada at the end of 1965, Western Europe had 50,942,700; Eastern Europe 23,581,400; the Far East 23,842,300 (of which all but 592,300 were in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Thailand). Latin America and the Caribbean had 7,548,200 sets (Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico accounted for more than 5,215,000 of that total). The Near East and South Asia had 1,039,200 receivers. Last...

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