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The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) begin considering a campaign in Selma, Alabama, where less than 2 percent of eligible African Americans are registered to vote. Lyndon B. Johnson is re-elected to the US presidency
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King launches the Selma campaign with a rally at Brown Chapel.
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“Find the worst condition you can run into . . . get it on the radio, get in on television, get it in the pulpits, get it in the meetings.” (President Lyndon B. Johnson, in a phone call to Martin Luther King, January 15, 1965)
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King and 500 schoolchildren are arrested in Selma; 650 African Americans march in nearby Marion. Unitarian Universalist ministers Ira Blalock and Gordon Gibson arrive in Selma to work with the SCLC. The Rev. Dr. Dana McLean Greeley, president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, sends a telegram to King in jail, praising him as a “model of discipline and non-violence.” Greeley urges Johnson and Congress to guarantee voting rights to all citizens.
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A night march in Marion ends with a brutal attack. Dozens are injured; 26-year-old Jimmy Lee Jackson is shot by a state trooper.
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The march from Selma to Montgomery begins, but state troopers and a sheriff’s posse stop the marchers with clubs and tear gas on the far side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. TV news footage of “Bloody Sunday” interrupts a program about Nazi atrocities. King calls religious leaders to join him in Selma.
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Dr. Homer Jack receives King’s telegram at the UUA offices in Boston and begins calling UU ministers. Orloff Miller, James Reeb, and Clark Olsen are among 40 who leave for Selma that night
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450 religious leaders join 2,000 African Americans for a second march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. After praying at the site of Sunday’s attack, they return to Brown Chapel. That night, Reeb, Olsen, and Miller are attacked outside a whites-only restaurant; Reeb is fatally injured.
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eeb dies. Thousands protest outside the White House and in other major cities. “This was not so much the attempt to murder a man as an attempt to murder the hopes and dreams of a people.” (Martin Luther King, speaking to the press after learning of Reeb’s death, March 11, 1965)
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Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a UU laywoman and housewife enrolled at Wayne State University, decides to go to Selma after participating in a sympathy march in Detroit.
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Several hundred UU leaders join hundreds of others in Selma. King speaks at Reeb’s memorial service in Brown Chapel. President Johnson addresses a joint session of Congress to introduce the Voting Rights Bill. “Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” (President Johnson addressing Congress, March 15, 1965.
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With the National Guard protecting them, 3,200 marchers leave Selma for Montgomery. The Rev. Richard Leonard is the only UU among the 300 marchers who complete the full march.
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25,000 demonstrators join the marchers when they reach Montgomery for a final rally at the state capitol. That night, Viola Liuzzo is shot and killed by Ku Klux Klansmen as she drives toward Montgomery to pick up a carload of marchers.
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Jackson dies. The SCLC announces a protest march to Montgomery at his memorial service.
