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First Baptist Church Photograph courtesy of Alabama Historical Commission
SNCC leader John Lewis arrested at the Edmund Pettus Bridge Photograph courtesy of Representative John Lewis
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First Baptist Church, along with its close neighbor, Brown
Chapel AME Church, played a pivotal role in the Selma, Alabama, marches
that helped lead to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The members
of First Baptist Church allowed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) to use their church as the planning site and organizational headquarters
of the Selma campaign. First Baptist Church, constructed in 1894 in the
Gothic Revival style by a local black architect, Dave Benjamin West, is
considered one of the most architecturally significant late-19th-century
black churches in the state. Despite a ban on protest marches by Governor
George Wallace, on Sunday morning, March 7, 1965, about 600 black protestors
gathered outside Brown Chapel to march from Selma to the state capital
in Montgomery. Leading the march were the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference's (SCLC) Hosea Williams and SNCC's John Lewis. At the Edmund
Pettus Bridge, six blocks from Brown Chapel, mounted troopers confronted
the marchers and ordered them to disperse. The marchers stood their ground
and the troopers advanced, billy clubs raised. Lewis fell, his skull fractured.
Others fell, screaming, as white onlookers cheered. Then Sheriff Jim Clark's
deputized posse charged the marchers, firing tear gas and swinging bullwhips
and rubber tubing wrapped in barbed wire. That night, ABC interrupted
its showing of the movie, Judgement at Nuremberg, to air footage
of "Bloody Sunday." By morning, news of the event had spread to nearly
every American household, and thousands of march supporters began to flock
to Selma. On March 9, Martin Luther King, Jr., led a "symbolic" march
to the bridge, and on March 21, after Governor Wallace's ban was overruled
by Federal Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr., King led
the five-day march to the capital. Less than five
months later President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act.
First Baptist Church is located at 709 Martin Luther King, Jr., Street.
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