'Bloody Sunday' of 1965: New Film Rekindles Memories of March

Published: Sunday, January 18, 2015 at 12:48 a.m. Last Modified: Sunday, January 18, 2015 at 12:48 a.m.

"I was 15 then," said Doris Moore Bailey of Lakeland and founder of the Bailey Group, a consulting firm. "I watched the bit of news on the television back then. It was a scary and painful time, and the movie brought it all back.

"You saw part of it (the events at the time), but you didn't see anything like what the movie showed," she said, including representations of a church bombing two years before that killed four black girls and the brutal beatings that sent 55 of the 600 Selma, Ala., marchers to the hospital.

"We sat around and talked about it at the time. People would visit on porches, back when there were porches, and talk about it and there was pain and fear."

Bailey said she saw the movie with a group of people last weekend in Orlando.

"It is devastating. It brings back painful memories, and it was more graphic than the 1960s television reporting," she said.

"There was a lot of fear at that time. We didn't know what would happen next."

But the events in Selma moved many in the U.S. to fight the treatment of minorities.

On March 9, 1965, 3,000 marchers walked through Selma a second time and stopped to kneel and pray at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where Bloody Sunday had taken place, then returned to the city without going on to Montgomery.

On March 21, after Lyndon Johnson sent 2,000 Army troops and FBI agents and federalized the Alabama National Guard to give protection along the route, people marched again, this time making it to Montgomery. In the months that followed, black voters' rights were enforced throughout the nation, and "white only" signs began to come down.

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'Bloody Sunday' of 1965: New Film Rekindles Memories of March