{"id":21491,"date":"2020-07-26T17:50:48","date_gmt":"2020-07-26T17:50:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=21491"},"modified":"2020-07-29T18:55:12","modified_gmt":"2020-07-29T18:55:12","slug":"how-the-images-of-john-lewis-being-beaten-during-bloody-sunday-went-viral","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/how-the-images-of-john-lewis-being-beaten-during-bloody-sunday-went-viral\/","title":{"rendered":"How the images of John Lewis being beaten during ‘Bloody Sunday’ went viral"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aniko Bodroghkozy<\/a>, University of Virginia<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

On March 7, 1965, Alabama state troopers beat and gassed John Lewis and hundreds of marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. <\/p>\n

TV reporters and photographers were there, cameras ready, and the violence captured during \u201cBloody Sunday\u201d would go on to define the legacy of Lewis, who died on July 17<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a media historian<\/a> who has written about television and the civil rights movement<\/a>. One of the remarkable features of the era\u2019s media environment, dominated by the relatively new medium of television news, is how quickly certain events could roil the conscience of the nation. <\/p>\n

Confrontations between police and protesters happened frequently during the 1960s. But a particular set of circumstances ensured that the images coming out of Selma galvanized politicians and citizens with remarkable speed and intensity. <\/p>\n

A prime-time event<\/h2>\n

Most Americans didn\u2019t see the footage on the 6:30 nightly news. Instead, they saw it later Sunday night, which, like today, drew the biggest audiences of the week. That evening, ABC was premiering the first TV airing of \u201cJudgment at Nuremberg<\/a>.\u201d An estimated 48 million people tuned in to watch the Academy Award-winning film, which dealt with the moral culpability of those who had participated in the Holocaust. <\/p>\n

News programs never got those kinds of ratings. But shortly after the movie started, ABC\u2019s news division decided to interrupt the movie with a special report from Selma. <\/p>\n

Viewers may have been peripherally aware of the marches that had been going on in the small city 50 miles from Alabama\u2019s capital, Montgomery. Martin Luther King Jr. had kicked off a voting rights campaign there in January, and the media had been regularly reporting on the standoffs between Blacks who wanted to register to vote and Selma\u2019s racist, volatile sheriff, Jim Clark<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Two years earlier, footage and photographs of Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor loosing police dogs and high-powered fire hoses on nonviolent marchers so alarmed the Kennedy administration that the president felt compelled to finally put forth<\/a> a robust civil rights bill to dismantle Jim Crow segregation in the South. <\/p>\n

But until Bloody Sunday, nothing had emerged out of Selma that gripped the nation\u2019s attention. Even the Birmingham images didn\u2019t have quite the immediate impact of those from Selma. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s largely because the special report interrupted a prime-time broadcast. But there was also the fact that the footage from Selma thematically complemented \u201cJudgment at Nuremberg.\u201d <\/p>\n

In the days after the news film aired, a dozen legislators spoke on the floor of Congress<\/a> linking Alabama Gov. George Wallace to Hitler and its state troopers to Nazi storm troopers. Ordinary citizens made the same connections.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have just witnessed on television the new sequel to Adolf Hitler\u2019s brown shirts,\u201d one anguished young Alabamian from Auburn wrote to The Birmingham News. \u201cThey were George Wallace\u2019s blue shirts. The scene in Alabama looked like scenes on old newsreels of Germany in the 1930s.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n