Dhs Us History Ii

During 1961 and 1964, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had led a voting registration campaign in Selma, the seat of Dallas County, Alabama, a small town with a record of consistent resistance to black voting. Resistance from law enforcement cramped SNCC’s efforts. Local civil rights activists allured Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to turn Selma’s obstinacy to black voting into a national concern. SCLC also wanted to use the momentum of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to achieve federal protection for a voting rights statute. Over the course of January and February of 1965, King and the SCLC led many demonstrations to the Dallas County Courthouse in Selma. On February 17, during one of these demonstrations, an Alabama state trooper shot protester Jimmy Lee Jackson, fatally wounding him. A protest march from Selma to Montgomery was scheduled for the beginning of March in response to his killing. Six hundred protestors gathered in Selma on Sunday, M