A freedom fighter looks back
Almost half a century ago, a cohort of Alabama state troopers and Dallas County sheriff’s deputies confronted about 600 civil rights protesters in Selma. The resulting mayhem — a melee of stinging tear gas, lunging police dogs, and a charging white civilian posse on horseback — injured 60 marchers. Captured by television cameras and later broadcast on ABC to 48 million viewers, the attack on March 7, 1965, became known as “Bloody Sunday,” the emotional climax of a movement that later that summer led to the landmark Voting Rights Act. At the time of the march, about 15,000 black adults in Dallas County were old enough to vote. But only 130 were registered, having slipped past a literacy test and other civil impediments. “It is hard for us to comprehend,” said Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, chair of Harvard’s Department of African and African American Studies, starting a panel discussion Thursday at Tsai Auditorium...