On March 20, 1854, former Whig Party members met in Ripon, Wisconsin, to establish a new party, the Republican Party, that would oppose the spread of slavery into the western territories.
On March 20, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson notified Alabama’s Governor George Wallace that he would use federal authority to call up the Alabama National Guard in order to supervise a planned civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, after violence by state troopers and local police against a group of demonstrators had broken up their March 7 walk from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital city, in what became known as the “Bloody Sunday.”