The Brennan Center for Justice had this article by Michael Waldman

Modern American democracy began in a hail of police batons and kicks on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

On March 7, 1965, 25-year-old John Lewis led 600 others to march for voting rights. They were met by a phalanx of state troopers in gas masks. The brutal police attack fractured Lewis’s skull. Broadcast on television, the attack sparked a nationwide demand for action. One week later, President Lyndon Johnson went before Congress to propose the Voting Rights Act, declaring in the words of the protest song, “We shall overcome.” 

In years since, on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, Lewis led lawmakers and activists on a pilgrimage to the spot where blood was shed. Last Sunday was the first such anniversary since Lewis’s passing, amid the most significant attempts at targeted, racist voter suppression since the Jim Crow era.

Read the full article here.