This Sunday, March 7th marks the 58th anniversary of the historic march from Selma to Montgomery, a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement. President Joe Biden returns this weekend to Selma, Alabama, where six hundred marchers first crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, defying a line of state authorities and spectators blocking the bridge. Despite peaceful and non-aggressive protest, the marchers were brutally beaten by state troopers, a moment caught on film in 1965 and broadcast across the nation.

The images of men, women, and children screaming in terror, clouds of tear gas enveloping them and the deputies on horseback fiercely chasing the protesters back across the bridge with clubs, whips, and tubing wired with barbed wire shocked and enraged the nation. As a response, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed, ending discriminatory voting practices.