Jim Clark (sheriff) - Bloody Sunday

Bloody Sunday

On February 18, 1965, in Marion, Alabama, a peaceful protest march was met by Alabama state patrolmen, who beat the protesters after street lights suddenly went out. A young protester, Jimmie Lee Jackson, attempted to protect his mother and octogenarian grandfather from police beating, and was shot in the stomach by Corporal James Bonard Fowler of the highway patrol. Jackson died eight days later of his injuries. Jim Clark was present on the police side at Marion, despite it being outside his jurisdiction.

In response to the failed registration campaign, and as a direct response to the killing of Jackson, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized a protest march from Selma to Montgomery. At one SCLC protest, he arrested Amelia Boynton, who was well-respected in the community. Pictures of the arrest, during which the club-wielding Clark pushed Boynton to the ground, ran in the New York Times and the Washington Post. Ralph Abernathy of the SCLC mockingly nominated Clark for honorary membership in the Dallas County Voters' League "for publicity services rendered." When Clark heard this on a surveillance tape made of the meeting, "e'd scream bloody murder that he'd never do it again, he wouldn't fall into that trap again and go out the next day and do the same thing," said Wilson Baker, director of public safety.

On March 7, 1965, around 600 protesters left Selma. Jim Clark's officers and posse joined with Alabama state troopers in attacking the protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the outskirts of Selma in an event that came to be known as Bloody Sunday, resulting in the hospitalization of over 60 protesters. That evening, the American Broadcasting Company interrupted the television premiere of Judgment at Nuremberg, to show scenes of the violence to around 48 million Americans. Clark manhandled activists such as Amelia Boynton Robinson, Rev. F.D. Reese and Rev. C.T. Vivian in front of news cameras gaining international coverage. This was a critical event in the United States Congress passing the Voting Rights Act.

In an obituary, the Washington Post noted:

Mr. Clark's most visible moment came March 7, 1965, at the start of a peaceful voting rights march from Selma to the capital city of Montgomery. Mr. Clark and his men were stationed near Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge. Alabama State Trooper John Cloud ordered the hundreds of marchers to disperse. When they did not, Mr. Clark commanded his mounted "posse" to charge into the crowd. Tear gas heightened the chaos, and protesters were beaten.... Captured on national television, the Bloody Sunday incident spurred widespread revulsion. Even Gov. George C. Wallace, who had earlier sparked a national showdown over a refusal to integrate public schools, reprimanded the state troopers and Mr. Clark.