The 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma has occasioned a wonderful movie and moving tributes yesterday by President Obama and Rep. John Lewis on the bridge named for a notorious racist where police forces of Alabama white supremacy bloodied scores of peaceful voting rights demonstrators.
Awful as that was, no one was murdered by government there.
Which cannot be said of two other 20th-century Bloody Sundays -- in Derry, Northern Ireland, on Jan. 30, 1972, and in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Jan. 22, 1905.
More, below.
In Northern Ireland, the issue was internment without trial and torture of Irish nationalists. A peaceful demonstration against the British internment policy in the Bogside neighborhood of Derry was met by British paratroopers who killed 14 people and wounded 14 others.
In Russia, the issue was labor rights. Several thousand unarmed marchers wanted to present a petition to Tsar Nicholas II at the Winter Palace. He wasn't there, but thousands of soldiers were. They fired on the crowd, killing at least 100 and wounding hundreds more.
As with the Selma Bloody Sunday, public revulsion caused immediate and longer-lasting political effects in Northern Ireland and Russia.
In Northern Ireland, the IRA was strengthened by the response to the Bogside Massacre, and launched attacks against British forces, including one that killed 18 paratroopers from the same regiment in 1979. Peace came much later, with the Good Friday power-sharing agreement in 1998 that ended much of the official discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland.
In Russia, Bloody Sunday essentially ended the people's general reverence for the Tsar, and the series of major strikes immediately after the massacre led to the Revolution of 1905, the resolution of which limited the Tsar's autocratic powers, granted many basic civil rights, and established the first Russian elected representative congress, the Duma. Twelve years later, the Tsar was forced to abdicate and the Russian Empire became the Soviet Union five years after that.
Of course, there are many examples in history of violent government repressions of peaceful protests that led to no change, or things getting worse.
But that did not happen after the three 20th-century Bloody Sundays.