Jan. 19, 1965 - A group of Negroes who have been trying to register to vote in Selma, Ala., refused today to return to a courthouse alley assigned to them and wound up in jail.
Sheriff James Clark (pictured) arrested 62 on a charge of unlawful assembly and five others for “criminal provocation.”
One of those arrested on the latter charge, a misdemeanor, was Mrs. Amelia Boynton (pictured), an insurance agent and local civil rights leader. When she refused to leave the sidewalk in front of the courthouse, Sheriff Clark grabbed her by the back of her collar and pushed her roughly and swiftly for half a block into a patrol car.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was watching from a car parked across the street. He stepped out of the car, walked into the Federal building, which faces the courthouse, and asked the Justice Department to file for a court injunction against Sheriff Clark.
Dr. King, who is leading a voter registration drive throughout Alabama, charged that the arrests were unlawful and that the sheriff had been brutal.
“I met with two officers of the Justice Department and filed a complaint that is to be immediately sent to Washington,” he told reporters later. “It was one of the most brutal and unlawful acts I have seen an officer commit.”
Dr. King left Selma tonight after telling a rally of 800 Negroes he would return at the end of the week to continue “plaguing Dallas County — creatively and nonviolently.”
Sheriff Clark, who has become a symbol of aggression to Selma Negroes, has been named a defendant in previous Justice Department suits, now pending in the courts.

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