“Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965, was a significant milestone in the Civil Rights Movement. That day some six hundred demonstrators marched east out of Selma, Alabama en route to the state capital in Montgomery. They got only as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge six blocks away, where state and local lawmen attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas and drove them back into Selma. Media coverage of the confrontation galvanized the American public and inspired President Johnson to call for new voting rights legislation.