NOTE: A computer glitch blacked out the showing of “Selma” at the local metroplex. This account relies on written descriptions of the plot.

In Alabama, 1965 was a bad year.

There was “Bloody Sunday,” subject of the much-acclaimed movie “Selma,” about which more will be said later.

In Anniston, there was a Ku Klux Klan march downtown. One hundred or so white-robed Klansmen and women marched in unmilitary imprecision, their peaked wizard hats strange against the familiar Victorian buildings — like a scene from a movie.

That was followed by two days of “White Man’s Rallies” on the steps of the Calhoun County Courthouse, during which the Reverend Connie Lynch of the National States Rights Party exhorted the crowd, “If it takes killing to get the Negroes out of the white man’s streets, I say: Yes, kill ’em.”

Fired up by the rally, a carload of white thugs happened upon and followed a group of blacks driving home from their shift at a pipe plant. The white thugs fired deer slugs into the workingmen’s car, mortally wounding Willie Brewster, a hobbyist gardener with no connection to civil rights.

Two Alabama towns, like other cities such as Birmingham, prove that when the decent majority is rallied, light can be poured in to illuminate their darkest hour.

In Anniston, a local doctor led an effort, which raised in six hours a $20,000 reward for Brewster’s killer, and 300 donors signed their name to a full-page advertisement, which was a kind of manifesto for justice.

The reward (worth five times the amount in today’s dollars) was essential in capturing the young white killer, who was tried and convicted by an all-white jury of good citizens.

Selma was a hinge of history. Neither the baton-wielding State Troopers, nor Sheriff Jim Clark’s mounted irregulars, nor the frightened and wounded marchers knew it at the moment, but at one side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge was a dying civilization and at the other side was a still-to-be-defined New South civilization.

In terms of official sanction for bigotry, Selma then and now could almost compare with 1938 Berlin during Kristallnacht attacks on Jewish synagogues and shops and the Berlin of today.

Outrage stirred by Bloody Sunday led to quick passage of the Voting Rights Act. Within five years of the Selma melee, progressive nonracist governors were elected all over the South: Askew of Florida, Bumpers of Arkansas, Carter of Georgia, West of South Carolina and Republican Linwood Holton of Virginia.

Controversy about the film deflating President Johnson’s role seems overwrought. The film is about the dangerous, frightening, suspenseful events of the day. Lyndon Johnson may have resisted King’s timing, but he had nothing to do with those specific events. He did have everything to do with the subsequent legislative fruits of the day.

Therein lie the terms of the essential partnership between LBJ and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Neither could accomplish alone what each did without the other.

President Johnson’s passionate sincerity for giving a helping hand to the downtrodden is without question but the poor hill country of Texas, which taught him compassion, also gave him a grating twang. Even with the poetic speechwriting of Richard Goodwin, Johnson could not have rallied the country for civil rights bills of 1964 and 1965.

Had Dr. King chosen a frontal assault on Congress, he would have become a frustrated and cynical loser. Instead, through words and actions he demonstrated ancient wrongs to the heart and mind of the country and turned statecraft over to his partner.

Because of their unintended, unplanned partnership, Americans who were lucky enough to see the film left a darkened theater into the sunlight of a better America.

Mr. Ayers is chairman of the Anniston Star.