 On March 7, 1965, 26 days less than a century after Union troops first broke through the town's defenses, the Second Battle of Selma was fully and irrevocably joined. Within a week, the issue was clear. The power of the Union had triumphed again, and two weeks from the day it began came the breakthrough, when Dr. Martin Luther King led an army numbered at 5,000 and growing each day over the Edmund Pettus Bridge and on its way to Montgomery 50 miles away.