Letters and More

In the first two weeks of March, 1965, while a producer for the CBS Evening News, I was assigned to cover the voting rights movement in the streets and backroads of Alabama. My appointments book became a notebook, recording moments that became a date with history on March 7 at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. At the beginning of a planned march to the state capitol in Montgomery, the relentless courage of the demonstrators faced the relentless resistance of the Old South, and state troopers armed with clubs and tear gas. As much as they resented our being there, the CBS station in Montgomery processed our film and provided an editing room. Selma became a confrontation seen around the world. On that day, the cause of voting rights and the fate of racist politics were changed forever, accounting for the importance of Selma and its lasting place in the history of the civil rights movement.