le away in silence.

"Let us march on ballot boxes, until we send to our city councils, state
legislatures, and the United States Congress men who will not fear to do
justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God. Let us march on
ballot boxes until all over Alabama God's children will be able to walk
the earth in decency and honor.

"For all of us today the battle is in our hands. The road ahead is not
altogether a smooth one. There are no broad highways to lead us easily
and inevitably to quick solutions. We must keep going."

Later that evening, a white woman from Detroit was shot and killed on the
highway between Montgomery and Selma as she was ferrying marchers back
home.

President Johnson sent a new voting rights bill to Congress which gave
sweeping powers to the Attorney General's office allowing it to send
federal registrars into localities to register voters when local
officials were either unable or unwilling to do so. In the course of a
television appearance in which Johnson announced this legislation and in
which he expressed his own indignation at the events in Selma and
Montgomery, he acknowledged the impact of demonstrations in pushing both
the country and the Congress into taking positive action to remedy
injustices. He implied that, while he did not always approve of the
methods used, the demonstrators had done a positive service for justice
and for the country. He promised to see the fight through to the end, and
he said that it was the obligation of all good men to see that the battle
was fought in the courts and through the legislative process rather than
forcing it into the streets. He ended his speech by quoting the lead line
from the popular civil rights hymn, "We Shall Overcome."

By 1965, the Federal Government had enacted legislation guaranteeing
almost all the citizenship rights of America to Negroes and had also
provided mechanisms with which to enforce this legislation.
Nevertheless, the passage of a bill in Washington did not immediately
secure the same right in Selma, Montgomery, or in Philadelphia,
Mississippi. Each right, so it seemed, had to be fought for and won over
and over again in almost each locality. Although discrimination continued
and even seemed to intensify at times, it no longer carried with it the
force of law. The Civil Rights Movement had, no matter what its critics
said of it, accomplished one sweeping victory--the destruction of legal
segregation in the Unit