March 7 · This Day in America
About six hundred people set out from Selma toward Montgomery to demand the right to vote, walking two by two, calm and unarmed. At the crest of the Edmund Pettus Bridge they meet a wall of state troopers and mounted possemen. The order to disperse is barely given before the clubs and tear gas come. John Lewis, twenty-five years old and at the front, has his skull fractured. Fifty-eight people are hospitalized. But the cameras are there, and that night the footage runs into living rooms across America, and a nation that had looked away cannot anymore. Within days, marchers return. Within weeks, they finish the walk to Montgomery, three thousand strong. Within months, President Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act. The march was stopped on that bridge. The country it was marching toward was not.
Source: nmaahc.si.edu
Also on this day · 1876
A 29-year-old teacher of the deaf named Alexander Graham Bell receives U.S. Patent 174,465 for a device that can carry the human voice over a wire. Three days later, in a Boston attic, he spills acid and calls for help — "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you" — and his assistant, in another room, hears him through the machine. The world's distances had just gotten smaller, forever.
Source: www.history.com