The Children.

• Author: Meacham, Jon

By David Halberstam Random House, $29.95

John Lewis still can't remember how he got back to the church. The march had begun at Brown's Chapel, in Selma, Ala., just before 4 p.m. on March 7, 1965. tin Luther King Jr. had been held up in Atlanta. Lewis, the young chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was to lead the 600 well-dressed marchers who had gathered to protest Alabama's systemic refusal to allow blacks to register to vote. Though billed as a pilgrimage to Montgomery, the crowd didn't really expect to get to the state capital, which was 54 miles away down U.S. Highway 80; Lewis wore dress shoes and a light tan raincoat over a suit and tie. "Like everyone around me," Lewis writes in his moving new book, Walking with the Wind, "I was basically playing it by ear." Finally they set out down Water Street, then turned right and walked along the Alabama River to the base of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It was steep, and Lewis noticed a light breeze as he and Hosea Williams reached the crest of the bridge. "There, facing us at the bottom of the other side, stood a sea of white-helmeted, blue-uniformed Alabama state troopers, line after line of them, dozens of battle-ready lawmen ... ." As the marchers made their way down to the bottom of the bridge, toward the troopers, Lewis noticed several officers slipping on gas masks. Fifty feet from the line, he watched Major John Cloud put a bullhorn to his lips and bark, "This is an unlawful assembly. Your march is not conducive to the public safety. You are ordered to disperse ... . You have two minutes to turn around and go back to your church." Lewis turned to Williams: "We should kneel and pray." But one minute after Cloud's warning -- not two, Lewis noted as he glanced at his watch -- the major lost patience and cried, "Troopers, advance." Lewis saw blue shirts, billy clubs, and bullwhips; he heard the hoofbeats of horses, the clunk of police-issue boots, the rebel yells. Then he felt the club come crashing down on the left side of his head and smelled the tear gas as he faded out.

Just after 9:30 that night, the nation tuned in. Lewis was in a Selma hospital, his skull fractured and raincoat soaked with blood, unable to recall the retreat from the bridge to safety at Browns Chapel. ABC interrupted its Sunday night movie to play the footage of the attack. Anchor Frank Reynolds let the film speak for itself: For 1-5 minutes, the country watched Cloud, Sheriff Jim Clark, and their deputies beat the marchers; at one point, Clark's voice could be heard shouting, "Get those goddamned niggers!" Within a week, President Lyndon Johnson had summoned George Wallace to the White House. When the meeting broke up, LBJ announced he was sending voting-rights legislation to Congress. The next day -- just 10 days after "Bloody Sunday" -- Johnson gave perhaps the most memorable speech of his career: "At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom," he told Congress and 70 million Americans watching on...