On March 7, 1965, roughly 600 voting-rights marchers led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams were attacked by Alabama state troopers and Dallas County possemen with tear gas and clubs as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge en route to Montgomery. Televised footage of the beatings — Lewis suffered a fractured skull — galvanized national support and pressured Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed five months later. The march, and Lewis’s subsequent congressional career, are central to civil-rights pedagogy.

Why it’s been targeted

John Lewis’s March graphic-novel trilogy (with Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell) has been challenged or removed in Pennsylvania (Central York 2021), Texas (Krause list), and across multiple Pennsylvania and Tennessee districts per PEN America. Florida’s Duval County initially pulled The Life of Rosa Parks and over 70 other “diverse” titles during HB 1467 compliance reviews in 2022–23.