March 21 · This Day in America
Two weeks after troopers clubbed them back across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday, they try a third time. On March 21, about 3,200 people step off from Selma behind Dr. King, federal protection finally in place because Governor Wallace would not provide it. They walk twelve miles a day on Highway 80 and sleep in muddy fields, Black and white, clergy and sharecroppers, the famous and the unknown. Each day more join. By the time they reach the Alabama State Capitol on March 25, they are 25,000 strong, standing where the Confederacy was born to demand the simple right to vote. Five months later, the Voting Rights Act becomes law. The bridge they were beaten on now carries their names in the history books, and a nation that watched it on television could no longer call this someone else's problem.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1963
At 10:50 on a Thursday morning, a prison launch pulls away from the dock with the final 27 inmates of America's most infamous penitentiary. The last man off The Rock is a 29-year-old gun smuggler named Frank Weatherman. Twenty-nine years of escape attempts, salt air, and legend end quietly. The crumbling island in San Francisco Bay would sit empty before becoming, fittingly, a national park anyone can visit.
Source: www.history.com
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”Martin Luther King Jr., Montgomery, March 25, 1965