Query: The Selma to Montgomery marches were in defiance of something.

Relevant passages:
Selma to Montgomery marches <=SEP=> The Selma to Montgomery marches were three protest marches , held in 1965 , along the 54-mile ( 87 km ) highway from Selma , Alabama to the state capital of Montgomery . The marches were organized by nonviolent activists to demonstrate the desire of African-American citizens to exercise their constitutional right to vote , in defiance of segregationist repression , and were part of a broader voting rights movement underway in Selma and throughout the American South . By highlighting racial injustice , they contributed to passage that year of the Voting Rights Act , a landmark federal achievement of the Civil Rights Movement .   Southern state legislatures had passed and maintained a series of discriminatory requirements and practices that had disenfranchised most of the millions of African Americans across the South throughout the 20th century . The African-American group known as the Dallas County Voters League ( DCVL ) launched a voters registration campaign in Selma in 1963 . Joined by organizers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ( SNCC ) , they began working that year in a renewed effort to register black voters .   Finding resistance by white officials to be intractable , even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended legal segregation , the DCVL invited Rev. Martin Luther King , Jr. and the activists of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference ( SCLC ) to join them . SCLC brought many prominent civil rights and civic leaders to Selma in January 1965 . Local and regional protests began , with 3,000 people arrested by the end of February . According to Joseph A. Califano Jr. , who served as head of domestic affairs for U.S. President Lyndon Johnson between the years 1965 and 1969 , the President viewed King as an essential partner in getting the Voting Rights Act enacted . Califano , whom the President also assigned to monitor the final march to Montgomery , noted that Johnson and King talked by telephone on January 15 to plan a strategy for drawing attention to the injustice of using literacy tests and other barriers to stop black Southerners from voting and that King later informed the President on February 9 of his decision to use Selma to achieve this objective .   On February 26 , 1965 , activist and deacon Jimmie Lee Jackson died after being mortally shot several days earlier by a state trooper , James Bonard Fowler , during a peaceful march in nearby Marion , Alabama . To defuse and refocus the community 's outrage , SCLC Director of Direct Action James Bevel , who was directing SCLC 's Selma voting rights movement , called for a march of dramatic length , from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery . Bevel had been working on his Alabama Project for voting rights since late 1963 .   The first march took place on March 7 , 1965 , organized locally by Bevel , Amelia Boynton , and others . State troopers and county possemen attacked the unarmed marchers with billy clubs and tear gas after they passed over the county line , and the event became known as Bloody Sunday . Law enforcement beat Boynton unconscious , and the media publicized worldwide a picture of her lying wounded on the Edmund Pettus Bridge .   The second march took place March 10 . Troopers , police , and marchers confronted each other at the county end of the bridge , but when the troopers stepped aside to let them pass , King led the marchers back to the church . He was obeying a federal injunction while seeking protection from federal court for the march . That night , a white group beat and murdered civil rights activist James Reeb , a Unitarian Universalist minister from Boston , who had come to Selma to march with the second group . Many other clergy and sympathizers from across the country also gathered for the second march .   The violence of the `` Bloody Sunday '' and of Reeb 's death led to a national outcry and some acts of civil disobedience , targeting both the Alabama and federal governments . The protesters demanded protection for the Selma marchers and a new federal voting rights law to enable African Americans to register and vote without harassment . President Lyndon Johnson , whose administration had been working on a voting rights law , held a historic , nationally televised joint session of Congress on March 15 to ask for the bill 's introduction and passage .   With Governor Wallace refusing to protect the marchers , President Johnson committed to do so . The third march started March 21 . Protected by 1,900 members of the Alabama National Guard under federal command , and many FBI agents and Federal Marshals , the marchers averaged 10 miles ( 16 km ) a day along U.S. Route 80 , known in Alabama as the `` Jefferson Davis Highway '' . The marchers arrived in Montgomery on March 24 and at the Alabama State Capitol on March 25 . With thousands having joined the campaign , 25,000 people entered the capital city that day in support of voting rights .   The route is memorialized as the `` Selma To Montgomery Voting Rights Trail , '' and is designated as a U.S. National Historic Trail .