Montgomery, Ala. – Former Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark, whose violent confrontations with voting-rights marchers in Selma shocked the nation in 1965 and gave momentum to the civil-rights movement, has died at 84.
Clark, who wore a “Never” button on his sheriff’s uniform to show his opposition to black voter registration, died at an Elba nursing home late Monday after years of declining health due to a stroke and heart surgery, Hayes Funeral Home officials said Wednesday.
Clark was voted out of office in 1966, in large measure because of opposition from newly registered black voters, but through his life he maintained he had done the right thing in 1965 “to uphold the law.”
He and his deputies joined state troopers in attacking civil-rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in March of that year, an event that became known as “Bloody Sunday.”
The incident prompted the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to lead a voting-rights march from Selma to Montgomery and got Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act that same year.
“He was a very, very mean man. His meanness really served simply to express the subtle evil of the system of segregation,” said Andrew Young, the former Atlanta mayor and United Nations ambassador who organized voter-registration efforts in Selma in 1965.
