The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was created on the streets of Selma, Alabama. The accepted history of the Civil Rights Movement maintains that it was the police violence, where unarmed protestors were beaten by Alabama law enforcement officials in full-view of television cameras, which birthed the most important Civil Rights initiative since the Emancipation Proclamation. W hat that history generally fails to discuss is how Civil Rights leaders developed increasingly confrontational strategies to

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... provoke and display segregationist violence. The events at Selma were a modern morality play, composed by the ministers of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to illuminate the legal injustice under which the American Negro had long suffered. This thesis places those protests in their global, national, regional, state, and local contexts