As soon as news spread that police in Selma, Alabama attacked a peacefully marching crowd of black protesters, the nation was engulfed in riots in sympathy for the protesters. A week later, President Lyndon Johnson addressed the full Congress, citing the race riots as an indicator that laws and legal maneuvers to keep black Americans disenfranchised were on the wrong side of history.

On this day, March, 15, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson addressed Congress and the American people, saying “There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem.“

Martin Luther King flew down to Selma a week after the speech to stage another march for black enfranchisement, where the first one was broken up. It took the Alabama National Guard, under federal jurisdiction, and two thousand other armed soldiers, to maintain the safety of King’s march.