Bloody Sunday commemoration continues in Selma after Obama marks anniversary
SELMA, Ala. -- The Bloody Sunday 50th anniversary commemoration continues Sunday with a series of events in Selma before a group retraces the steps that helped secure equal voting rights 50 years ago.
As dawn broke Sunday, a crowd gathered for the Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King Unity Breakfast at Wallace Community College. Other events Sunday are expected to include film screenings and a pre-march rally at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Police beat and tear-gassed marchers at the foot of the bridge in Selma on March 7, 1965 in an ugly spasm of violence that shocked the nation. The attack on demonstrators preceded the Selma-to-Montgomery march, which occurred two weeks later. Both helped build momentum for congressional approval of the Voting Rights Act later that year.
A march from Selma to Montgomery in remembrance of the journey the demonstrators took is scheduled to begin Monday morning and culminate with a rally at the Alabama state Capitol on Friday afternoon.
Thousands gathered Saturday in the town of roughly 20,000 to hear speeches from leaders including President Barack Obama and Georgia Rep. John Lewis - an Alabama native who was among the demonstrators that was attacked by law enforcement on a march for equal voting rights.
Both gave rousing speeches on the work left to be done to achieve equality and Obama also touched on improvements in American race relations. The president mentioned recent high profile clashes between citizens and law enforcement on the circumstances leading to fatal police shootings and law enforcement tactics toward minorities.
"We just need to open our eyes, and ears, and hearts, to know that this nation's racial history still casts its long shadow upon us," Obama said. "We know the march is not yet over, the race is not yet won, and that reaching that blessed destination where we are judged by the content of our character requires admitting as much."
The president also addressed notions that the prejudice that characterized the civil rights era exists in more insidious forms today and little or nothing has changed since then.
"Ask the female CEO who once might have been assigned to the secretarial pool if nothing's changed. Ask your gay friend if it's easier to be out and proud in America now than it was 30 years ago. To deny this progress - our progress - would be to rob us of our own agency, our responsibility to do what we can to make America better," he said.
On his way to Selma, Obama signed a law awarding the Congressional Gold medal to participants in a trio of marches in Selma, the last of which brought protesters all the way to Montgomery.
In New York, a bass-and-snare drum band led a multigenerational and racially mixed crowd of about 250 people across the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the violent confrontation of civil rights protesters and police in Selma, Alabama, known as "Bloody Sunday."
Elected officials and community leaders at the front of the procession linked arms as people walking in the "Selma is Everywhere" march carried signs emblazoned with photos of a 1965 solidarity march in Harlem and others invoking the recent high-profile deaths of black men by white police officers.
"We think it's important that people not forget Bloody Sunday," said David Dinkins, 87, who served as New York's first African-American mayor from 1990 to 1993. "To the day 50 years ago officers beat demonstrators marching for voting rights."
"You'd be surprised how many young people don't know," he said. "I'm not sure how many of us would have been willing to walk across that bridge in Selma, getting beat on every step of the way."
Thousands of people descended upon Selma for the anniversary of the landmark civil rights movement event.
In Brooklyn after the march, demonstrators were waiting inside Borough Hall to listen to televised remarks President Barack Obama was expected to deliver in Selma.
Organizers said the march from lower Manhattan to Brooklyn over the famed span was intended to remind the world that the struggle for equality for all has not ended.
"We're fighting now for not just civil rights but human rights," said Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams. "The right to housing, the right to employment, the right to health care, the right to not be prosecuted unfairly. All those who feel America has denied them, this is your Selma moment."
Mychal McNicholas, 74, a retired lawyer from Queens, said Saturday's march was yet another example of civil protest he's been engaged in for half a century to bring about social change.
"I was demonstrating in the '60s and we're still at it," he said.
Dianne Waterman, a spiritual leader with a prison ministry in Manhattan, said she joined because she was too young to have marched in Selma.
"I'm here because I wasn't in Selma 50 years ago," she said.
Obama said Friday that the 50th anniversary of the march in Selma to secure voting rights for black Americans is about today's youth.
"Selma is not just about commemorating the past, it's about honoring the legends who helped change this country through your actions today, in the here and now," Obama said at a town hall meeting at South Carolina's Benedict College. "Selma is now. It's about ordinary people doing extraordinary things because they feel they can shape the destiny of the country."
Told to go home in 1956, the group marched on. United by a cause, they were undeterred by threats of violence. Their efforts were met with tear gas and beatings. Eighty-four people were injured in what would be known as Bloody Sunday.
"It was young people who stubbornly insisted on justice, stubbornly refused to accept the world as it is that transformed not just the country but transformed the world," Obama said.
Civil Rights leader the Rev. Jesse Jackson said fighting for voting rights carries on with the Supreme Court decision to strike down a portion of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
"We got the right to vote in 1965 and it was protected until 2013. Now it's unprotected again," he said.
Last week, residents of Selma gathered on the Montgomery side of the bridge and marched in the opposite direction.
"I think it's really important that people see the progress that's been made in this great city. You know, there's a lot of unfinished business but white Selma, black Selma, young, old, we're all united in loving our city," Congresswoman Terri Sewell, (D) Alabama, said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
