Black Lives Matter takes the baton from the Civil Rights Movement
CIVIL RIGHTS supporters march from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama on March 9, 1965, in a campaign to register Black voters. Days earlier a similar group of nonviolent protesters had been brutally beaten by state troopers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. This time Martin Luther King, Jr., who led the march, avoided confronta- tion and asked the campaigners to kneel and pray at the site of the attack before walking back to Selma, in an effort to morally pressure President Lyndon B. Johnson to extend federal protection to the peaceful protest. / FLIP SCHULKE Getty Images
