Selma's Bloody Sunday

"One can point to more than a few 'critical moments' in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Even so, few incidents so starkly etched the just-treatment claims of the struggle and the raw brutality of the forces arrayed against its protagonists as did the attempted marches from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery, Alabama, in the spring of 1965. ... In March of that year the full force of the state of Alabama--state troopers with nightsticks, some mounted--fell on unarmed protestors as they crossed a bridge leading out of Selma, beating them and continuing to flail at them most of the way back into town. This ... event, much of it caught on television tape, helped the president and fellow Democrats decide to make enforcement of voting rights in the South the subject of special federal legislation. Pratt makes 'Bloody Sunday' the focus of a short book on the civil rights as voting rights movement, its background, and the continuing controversy over federal laws that benefit blacks specifically and impose sanctions on states with histories of impeding voting rights for all citizens"--