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Why did civil rights organizers choose the city of Selma in Alabama as the starting point for the 1965 voting rights marches?

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Selma March Arm in arm, Martin Luther King, Jr., and his wife, Coretta Scott King, leading the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, March 1965.

Civil rights organizers chose Selma, Alabama, as the starting point for the 1965 voting rights marches due to the city's extreme disenfranchisement of Black voters. In Selma, only about 1-2% of eligible Black citizens were registered to vote. This was due to registration offices being open only two days a month, the use of cumbersome application forms, and arbitrarily applied literacy tests. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had been working to register voters there since 1963, facing increasing violence from local law enforcement, led by Sheriff Jim Clark. The brutal attacks on peaceful demonstrators, particularly on "Bloody Sunday," garnered national attention and sympathy, directly contributing to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.12