On March 7, 1965, 600 people put their lives on the line for justice as they marched from Selma, Alabama, to the capital city of Montgomery only to be met and assaulted by state troopers. The 54-mile march became known as "Bloody Sunday" and is a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement leading to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. 

With information from the 2008 book "On the Road to Freedom" by Charles Cobb, we can detail what happened that fateful day that many may not know.

1. The march commemorated the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, who had been shot on Feb. 18, 1965, by a state trooper while trying to protect his mother during a civil rights demonstration.

2. Bloody Sunday commenced with white state troopers assaulted marchers as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Selma’s outskirts. Seventeen marchers were hospitalized and 50 were treated for minor injuries.

3. A national uproar ensued when footage was broadcast to millions all over the country. 

4. On March 9, Martin Luther King Jr. led an integrated group of protesters to the Pettus Bridge; however, that night, white vigilantes murdered a Northern minister.

5. On March 15, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress, saying, “There is no issue of states’ rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights. We have already waited 100 years and more, and the time for waiting is gone.”

6. On March 17, Federal District Court Judge Frank Minis Johnson ruled in favor of the demonstrators.

7. On March 21, roughly 3,200 voting rights advocates left Selma and set out for Montgomery, walking 12 miles a day and sleeping in fields. They stood 25,000 strong on March 25 at the Alabama State Capitol. 

8. The Voting Rights of 1965 was signed into law by President Johnson on August 6, 1965, which overrode the racist barriers put into place to stop African-Americans from exercising their 15th Amendment right to vote.

We are forever grateful for how far we've come, those who sacrificed for us to be here and ever conscious of how far we have to go.