On March 7, 1965, a march by over 500 civil rights demonstrators was violently broken up at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama; state troopers and a sheriff’s posse fired tear gas and beat marchers with batons in what became known as “Bloody Sunday.”

The Stallions’ first game in Birmingham will come against the Arlington Renegades at 7 p.m. April 11 at Protective Stadium. The opportunity to play back home is one reason that Simmons chose to join Birmingham.

Charles Mauldin was near the front of a line of voting rights marchers walking in pairs across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965.