By 1965, activists such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Amelia Boynton, and John Lewis had been organizing demonstrations for several years in Alabama in order to secure voting rights for African Americans. Voter qualification tests, threats, and outright violence kept the number of Black registered voters in many areas vanishingly small. During a protest in Marion, an Alabama state trooper murdered activist Jimmie Lee Jackson, catalyzing plans for a march in Selma.