Selma 1965 ─ The Photographs of Spider Martin

“Spider, we could have marched, we could have protested forever, but if it weren’t for guys like you, it would have been for nothing. The whole world saw your pictures. That’s why the Voting Rights Act passed.”
—Martin Luther King, 1965

“Spider Martin, more than any other photographer of our time, has used his camera to document the struggle for civil rights and social change in the State of Alabama. . . . In viewing Spider’s collection, one is literally walking through the pages of American history.”
—John Lewis, 1996

“It is largely because of [Martin’s] talent that we, as a people and a nation, so vividly remember ‘Bloody Sunday.’ Although violence broke out at many other places, and on many other days, the images from this critical day are forever emblazoned in the public consciousness.”
—Andrew Young, 1992

On March 7, 1965, six hundred people led by John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, set out to march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery to demand the right to vote. The march ended violently on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, as Alabama state troopers beat and gassed the unresisting marchers. But images of “Bloody Sunday” seared the national conscience and helped galvanize the passage of the Voting Rights Act later that year.

Spider Martin captured many indelible images of Bloody Sunday as a photojournalist for theBirmingham News. His photographs of the Selma marches and the civil rights struggle were seen all over the world, appearing in such publications asTime, Life, Der Spiegel, Stern, the Saturday Evening Post, andParis Match. Drawn from Martin’s archive at the Briscoe Center for American History, this book gathers several dozen of the most powerful and poignant images, many of which have never been published, for the first time in a single volume. A lasting testament to the courage of the civil rights generation, they also reveal a rookie photographer’s determination to bear witness to a movement that transformed the American nation.