Big Optimism: "Major, may I have a word?"

Good trouble, and Bloody Sunday

John Lewis was 25 years old, and he thought he was going to die.

It was March 7, 1965. Lewis and 600 other marchers had walked six blocks from Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Alabama, heading for the Edmund Pettus Bridge, as a protest for the right to vote.

In Dallas County, Alabama, only 2 percent of Black citizens were registered voters. When they tried to register, they were asked to count the bubbles on a bar of soap, or the jellybeans in a jar. They were turned away because they spelled out their middle name instead of using an initial, or showed up on the wrong day, or because the registrar just didn’t feel like it.

So they marched.

At the crest of the bridge, Lewis—chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—and Hosea Williams stopped. On the other side, Alabama State Troopers waited in formation. Behind them, sheriff’s deputies on horseback.

Major John Cloud called out through a bullhorn. The march was unlawful. They had two minutes to disperse.

“Major, may I have a word?” Williams asked.

“There will be no word.”

One minute and five seconds later, Cloud ordered: “Troopers, advance.”

They came with billy clubs raised, bullwhips, and tear gas. They trampled marchers with horses. Lewis was clubbed in the head. He fell. As he tried to get up, the trooper hit him again. His skull fractured. Seventeen marchers were hospitalized and 58 were treated for injuries.

TV Changes Everything

What made Bloody Sunday different? America watched it happen.

That evening, ABC interrupted its broadcast of *Judgment at Nuremberg*—a film about Nazi war crimes—to show footage of American state troopers beating peaceful protesters. Within 48 hours, demonstrations erupted in 80 American cities.

Five days later, Lewis testified before a federal judge, his skull still fractured. He described the trooper’s nightstick, the tear gas, being knocked to the ground. Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. ruled that the demonstrators had a constitutional right to march.

”We Shall Overcome”

Eight days after Bloody Sunday, President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress.

LBJ was a Texan who had spent decades in Congress weakening civil rights bills. But he’d watched the footage from Selma. And he’d decided.

“At times,” he told Congress, “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 at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.”

Then he did something unprecedented. He borrowed the language of the movement itself.

“Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

The chamber erupted. Members of Congress—except for the Southerners—stood and cheered. Martin Luther King Jr., watching on television in Selma, reportedly cried.

Johnson told Congress about his first job teaching Mexican-American students in Cotulla, Texas. Kids who came to school hungry, who knew the pain of prejudice but didn’t know why.

“I often walked home late in the afternoon, wishing there was more that I could do,” he said. “But now I do have that chance. And I’ll let you in on a secret—I mean to use it.”

The Law

On March 21, under federal protection, 3,200 marchers set out from Selma. This time, they made it across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. John Lewis was at the front, a few feet from Martin Luther King Jr. They walked 54 miles over five days. By the time they reached Montgomery, 25,000 people had joined them.

Congress debated the Voting Rights Act through the spring and summer. The Senate passed it 77-19. The House passed it 333-85.

On August 6, 1965—five months after Bloody Sunday—President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, banning literacy tests and poll taxes, and establishing federal oversight of elections in areas with histories of discrimination.

The results were immediate. In Alabama, Black voter registration jumped from 23 percent in 1964 to 57 percent in 1968. In Mississippi, it went from 7 percent to 59 percent. The number of elected Black officials in the South exploded.

John Lewis kept one of the pens Johnson used to sign the law. It hung, framed, in his living room for the rest of his life.

Good Trouble

Lewis served in Congress for 33 years, representing Georgia’s 5th district. He called what happened in Selma “good trouble”—the kind of trouble that changes things.

Every year, on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, Lewis walked back across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. In 2015, President Obama walked with him. In 2020, sick with cancer but still fighting, Lewis crossed the bridge one last time. He died that July at age 80.

Within five months, America went from Bloody Sunday to the Voting Rights Act. The march worked. The testimony worked. The pressure worked. Democracy, battered and broken on a bridge in Alabama, bent toward justice.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• March 1: “[A] public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” — From the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act, signed by President Ulysses S. Grant, creating the world’s first national park this day in 1872. The act set aside 3,500 square miles of wilderness in Montana and Wyoming territories, launching the global national park movement.

• March 2: “I congratulate you, fellow-citizens.” — President Thomas Jefferson, who on this day in 1807 signe the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves. The law did not abolish slavery or stop the domestic slave trade, but it ended legal importation of enslaved people from abroad.

• March 3: “O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light” — Opening lines of “The Star-Spangled Banner” by Francis Scott Key, which Congress designated as the national anthem on this day in 1931 after a contentious 15-year campaign. The debate largely broke along regional lines: Northerners favored “America the Beautiful” by Katharine Lee Bates, while Southerners championed Key’s composition.

• March 4: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” — President Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, delivered this day in 1933. FDR took office at the height of the Great Depression, with 25% unemployment and 11,000 banks failed. This was the last presidential inauguration held in March; the 20th Amendment moved future inaugurations to January 20.

• March 5: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” — Winston Churchill, speaking at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, with President Truman on the platform, this day in 1946. The speech marked the beginning of the Cold War. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin denounced Churchill’s remarks as “war mongering.”

• March 6: “At long last, the battle has ended! And thus Ghana, your beloved country is free forever!” — Kwame Nkrumah, declaring Ghana’s independence from Britain this day in 1957. Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African nation to gain independence from colonial rule, inspiring liberation movements across the continent. Martin Luther King Jr. attended the independence ceremony.

• March 7: “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.” — Alexander Graham Bell, speaking the first intelligible words over a telephone, after receiving Patent No. 174,465 for his method of “transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically...by causing electrical undulations” on this day in 1876. Bell had filed his patent application just hours before rival inventor Elisha Gray filed a similar claim.