【明報專訊】On 7 March 1965 the first Selma (塞爾瑪) to Montgomery (蒙哥馬利) march in the US took place. Together with the other two Selma marches, it ultimately led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act, another key achievement of the American Civil Rights Movement (美國公民權利運動).

◆Events leading to the Selma marches

1. Montgomery Bus Boycott

The American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s was a series of protests targeting racial inequality in the US, especially in the South (美國南部), where racial segregation (種族隔離) was in force. Those protests spanned altogether fifteen years.

Historians attribute its beginning to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. On 1 December 1955 Rosa Parks (pictured), an African American woman, refused to give up her seat on a public bus to make room for a white passenger, which the segregation law required her to do. She was subsequently arrested. That sparked a mass boycott of buses in Montgomery led by Martin Luther King (馬丁路德金) and Ralph Abernathy (阿伯納西). The boycott, which lasted 381 days, led to the desegregation of Montgomery buses.

2. Desegregation of public facilities

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which emerged from a student meeting that was held at Shaw University in April 1960, led a series of boycotts and sit-ins in early 1960s with the aim of desegregating many public facilities. The movement (in which Mahatma Gandhi's non-violent methods were used) spread, forcing the desegregation of department stores, supermarkets, libraries and movie theatres.

In spite of such developments, however, the Deep South, which includes states like Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana, remained dead set against most desegregation measures. Violent means were used to resist the civil rights movement. Protesters were attacked and occasionally killed.

3. Washington March

It was against such a backdrop that the march on Washington, DC, took place in 1963. Also called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, it was one of the largest political rallies for human rights in America's history. The march culminated in Martin Luther King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

The Washington March was followed, in the following year, by President Lyndon B Johnson's (林登•詹森，pictured) signature of the Civil Rights Act (民權法案) into law.

◆The Selma marches

Despite the watershed moment of the Civil Rights Acts, activists found white officials' resistance intractable. They turned their aim to voting rights. The three Selma to Montgomery marches, which took place respectively on 7 March, 9 March and 21 March 1965, ultimately led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

The Selma marches were beset with difficulties from the very beginning. 600 people set out for the first march on March 7, but they did not get far before Alabama state troopers beat them back to Selma. The brutal scene enraged many Americans and galvanised civil rights and religious leaders in protest.

Martin Luther King (pictured)led another attempt on March 9, but the state troopers again blocked the road. That night, a group of segregationists beat a protester to death. Alabama state officials tried to prevent the march from going forward, but a district court judge ordered them to permit it. President Johnson also backed the marchers, going on national television to pledge his support and appeal for the passage of new voting rights legislation he was introducing in Congress. On March 21 around 2,000 people set out from Selma, protected by US Army troops and Alabama National Guard forces. They reached Montgomery on March 25.

◆The aftermath

After 1965, disagreements over the means of protest began to emerge among civil rights activists. Militant groups such as the Black Panther Party, a revolutionary black nationalist and socialist organisation whose core practice was its armed citizens' patrols to monitor police officers and challenge police brutality, split off from the movement. The assassination of Dr King in 1968 made even more supporters withdraw from the movement.

Racial discrimination remains one of the thorniest (棘手的) social issues in the US despite Barack Obama's (pictured)presidency the first of an African American.