The air was cool and damp that Sunday afternoon. Six hundred people walked, a column of determination in their Sunday best, down the sloping pavement of Sylvan Street. They could see the Edmund Pettus Bridge ahead, its steel arch framing the Alabama River. The smell of wet wool and packed earth hung around them. They were singing, a low hum of "We Shall Overcome" that vibrated in chests more than it carried on the breeze.
Then they reached the crest. At the bottom of the bridge, the other side was a solid, silent line of blue. State troopers and county possemen, some on horseback. The singing stopped. There was only the sound of shuffling feet and the distant cry of a bird. A bullhorn crackled, words about an unlawful assembly dissolving into static.
The troopers put on gas masks. The world shrank to the sight of those blank, insect-like faces. A command was given, not heard by the marchers but seen in the sudden forward lurch of the line. The first canisters arced through the air, hitting the asphalt with a metallic *tink*, then erupting into white, acrid clouds that burned eyes and throats. Horses reared, their hooves clattering on the pavement. The sound then was chaos: screams, the thud of clubs on bone, the coughs of the suffocating, the thunder of hooves chasing people back up the hill they had just descended. Tear gas tasted like pepper and metal. Men and women stumbled, blinded, their good clothes stained with mud and blood, seeking any escape from the cloud and the violence at the bridge's base.