Bloody Sunday March 7, 1965, hundreds of people are waiting around Brown Chapel in Selma, Alabama. The youth receiving instructions from Charles Mauldin on how to protect themselves when the police attack them. “Tear gas will not keep you from breathing. You may feel like you can’t breathe for awhile. Tear gas will not make you permanently blind. It may blind you temporarily. Do not rub your eyes.” Partridge, Elizabeth Marching For Freedom Scholastic Inc. 2009. All of this advice on how to avoid violence was so that these marchers could peacefully protest their rights as black people. Tear gas is a pepper spray based gas which makes your eyes, nose and chest hurt. It causes excessive salivation and skin irritation. Bloody Sunday was a messy …show more content…
The 54 mile march went through downtown Selma all the way to Montgomery, the state capital of Alabama. The marchers walked two by two to Edmund Pettus Bridge, the connector between Selma and Montgomery where the police were waiting to stop them. There was an unnecessary amount of racism in this march. On the roads to the side, whites jeered and shouted at the marchers. The police were equipped with gas, batons, and guns. The marchers armed with nothing but their beliefs. The officers put on their gas masks and reached for their batons, warning the marchers, who stood 50 feet away that they had 2 minutes to “go home or go to your church.” After a minute and 5 seconds, the police began their attack. They threw gas canisters straight into the crowd of marchers. Since they had gas masks, they walked right in there and just started swinging their clubs. Whether they were on the ground or standing, the marchers were clubbed, punched, or shoved ruthlessly. March leader John Lewis’s skull was cracked while trying to defend himself. Clouds of gas surrounded the marchers, forcing them to the ground until the gas rose. “From the hospital came a report that the victims had suffered fractures of ribs, heads, arms and legs, in addition to cuts and bruises.” learning.blogs.nytimes.com Some people were to slow to get to the ground, their lungs imploding. The most common injuries were lacerations …show more content…
She was taken to the hospital and required more than 30 stitches to close up her wounds. She claimed “It was pure hatred. They came ready to do what they did. They would go to any means necessary to keep us subservient and docile. These people beating us, they took pleasure in it.” As the beaten children from the march stumbled home, their parents became furious. Some of the kids’ fathers came to Brown Chapel with .32 or .38 shotguns and requested to fight back. Andrew Young, the march leader that stayed in the Chapel to help the wounded when they came back had to talk these fathers down. The police on the bridge were armed with semi-automatic rifles and ten-gauge shotguns with buckshot in them. If the upset fathers of the marchers were to go back to the bridge and return the fight, they would have surely
The Los Angeles riots kicked off on the twenty-ninth day of April 1992 following the acquitting of four officers who had beaten and injured a motorist in the previous year. In the year 1991, California Highway Patrol officers detected Rodney King speeding as he drove in Los Angeles. King then led the officers on a high speed chase for the fear that the court would revoke his probation for a robbery offense he had committed (Gray, 2014). He was caught and ordered out of his car surrounded by several L.A.P.D cars and this led to a struggle between him and the police officers with some of them thinking that he was resisting arrest. One sergeant, Stacey Koon, used a Taser gun to fire at him before they beat him with their buttons mercilessly. He was struck with police batons more than fifty times and suffered eleven fractures besides other injuries. George Holiday, who was a nearby resident, videotaped the ordeal and delivered it to a local television station the following day (CNN Library, 2014). The tape sparked tension between the black Americans and the whites. The blacks saw the beating as racial discrimination against their community. However, no violence was recorded from the blacks du...
Tragedy hit the docks of Everett, Washington, Sunday November 5, 1916 which would be known as “Bloody Sunday.” On November 5, 1916 the Everett Massacre was the culmination of labor trouble which had been brewing for months. It was one of the bloodiest single episodes of labor-related violence in the Pacific Northwest.
On the first day of the march, nicknamed Bloody Sunday, the activists made it to the Edmund Pettus Bridge before being stopped and brutally beaten by police officers. The activists persevered after the beatings, returning the two days later chanting “we’re gonna march!” (March Book Three 212). Their hope far outweighed any fear of being beaten again. Finally, two weeks after Bloody Sunday, they were allowed to march all the way to Montgomery. The perseverance of those who still marched to Montgomery after all of the violence that had been committed against them shows that the hope they had far superseded any doubts or fears they
On February 18 the SCLC leader James Orange was arrested in Perry County. That evening hundreds of blacks gathered and marched on the jail. On the way they were attacked. Among the victims of the attacks were Jimmey Lee and his mother. Lee was beaten and then shot in the stomach, later dying in the hospital. At a large memorial service for Lee, a march from Selma to Montgomery was announced that would take place on March 7th. The marchers set off for Montgomery, but as they crossed the Pettus Bridge, they were attacked by troopers. As the New York Times reported the next day: "The first 10 or 20 Negroes were swept to the ground, screaming, arms and legs flying, and packs and bags went skittering across the grassy divider strip and onto the pavement on both sides.
Even though whites and blacks protested together, not all of them got punished in the same ways. Even though it wasn’t folderol committed by either race, racists saw it as this and would do anything to keep segregation intact. Sometimes, the whites would be shunned, by society, and not hurt physically. While the blacks, on the other hand, were brutally kille...
Over 200,000 demonstrators participated in the March on Washington in the nation’s capital on August 28, 1963. The purpose of the march was to gain civil rights for African Americans. There was a wide diversity in those who participated, with a quarter of all the demonstrators being white (Ross). Even southern people came to contribute, which caused them to be harassed and threatened for coming to the march. The March on Washington became a very successful event for the rights of African Americans, and amended several peoples’ view-points towards the topic, even President John Kennedy’s.
...DuBois, a black civil rights activist, wrote “During that year seventy-seven Negroes were lynched, of whom one was a woman and eleven were soldiers; of these, fourteen were publicly burned, eleven of them being burned alive.” In most of the race riots the problem was started by a white person attacking a black person. However in almost every riot the police force sided with the white people by either participating in the riot and attacking the black people or by failing to stop the fight. One major reason for this is because the black people had no power, the entire police force and justice system was made of only white people.
The article begins by describing that, on the night of Sunday, March 7th, 1965, millions watched as their regularly scheduled television programs were interrupted with disturbing images of unarmed African American men and women being brutally assaulted by state troopers and mounted deputies dressed in full riot equipment with nightsticks in a cloud of teargas during a peaceful march from the small town of Selma, Alabama to Montgomery, the state capital, to protect the murder of an individual and the obstruction of their constitutional right to vote; the article provides an instance of this interruption by detailing that the broadcast of the movie “Judgement at Nuremberg” was interrupted on
Political protesting within today’s society is often relegated to mass marches, social media usage, and other large acts. Unfortunately, small and simple everyday acts of protest are often overlooked or deemed useless in the long run. Sadly, this diminishes most of the protests that take place within America. However, this is not a new trend, but one that can be seen throughout American history, specifically within Jim Crow laws and segregation Deep South during World War II. Within Robin Kelley’s “Congested Terrain,” the way lower and middle-class black citizens fought for their rights to the public spaces within Birmingham Alabama are explored. Because the space in buses was much less defined that other public, segregated spaces, black
Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots She became queen when she was only 6 days old. She was sent to France at age six to get married. She is the cousin of Queen Elizabeth I. Who is this elegant, yet struggling woman?
Some police departments, particularly in the South, violently suppressed these marches. In Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, for example, protesters demanding an end to segregation were beaten by officers, sprayed by high-pressure fire hoses, and attacked by police dogs (Police Brutality).
... set on fire. As a result, the governor called in the National Guard. On May 4, 1970 the guardsmen confronted students at a rally. The students threw rocks and bottles and the guards retaliated with tear gas. However, without warning, a group of guardsmen fired their rifles into the crowd and killed four students and wounding nine. New of this violence soon spread to other campuses and more protests erupted nationwide.
“Back then, we didn’t have any civil rights. It was just a matter of survival, of existing from one day to the next. I remember going to sleep as a girl hearing the Klan ride at night and hearing a lynching and being afraid the house would burn down.”(Rosa Parks Biography). She’s tired and her feet are absolutely aching, but the only feeling going through forty-two year old Rosa Park’s mind is anger. She has just been told by the bus driver to relocate to the back of the bus and join the rest of the colored people that had been moved; so a white man could occupy her seat. He tells her to move again. She doesn’t. What happens next on this first day in December is a middle-aged seamstress being tossed out of a bus and subsequently arrested. The beginning of the Montgomery bus boycotts is about to begin.
...te police officers of charges stemming from the videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney King. As a result of this verdict, thousands of citizens rioted for six days. Mass amounts of looting, murder, arson and assault took place.” Riots are one of the most common forms of mob mentality and are shown in this book several times.
Enraged with the death of Jim, around 650 protestors gathered again on March 7 and attempted a march through Selma to Montgomery, ignoring Governor Wallace’s orders not to march. They again met with state troopers and a crueler response. A wall of state troopers was formed at US Highway 80 to stop the march. After refusing the orders from the police to stop the march, the troopers took action. The prot...