On March 7, 1965, a march by over 500 civil rights demonstrators was violently broken up at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama; state troopers and a sheriff’s posse fired tear gas and beat marchers with batons in what became known as “Bloody Sunday.”

The world saw that. Alabama lawmen, strongarms of the state, swung batons. Lewis fell, his head cracked open by a club. Others collapsed, crying from tear gas, as men on horseback charged with whips as if in battle. Like overseers on a plantation. “The whole nation was sickened by the pictures of that wild melee,” Mrs. King wrote.

Charles Mauldin was near the front of a line of voting rights marchers walking in pairs across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965.