Selma civil rights milestone marked by first black president

[Lite Beer]

Selma civil rights milestone marked by first black president
JAY REEVES, Associated Press
DARLENE SUPERVILLE, Associated Press

SELMA, Alabama (AP) — America's racial history "still casts its long shadow upon us," President Barack Obama said Saturday as he stood in solidarity and remembrance with civil rights activists whose beatings by police a half-century ago galvanized much of the nation against racial oppression and hastened passage of historic legislation guaranteeing voting rights for minorities. Tens of thousands of people joined to commemorate the "Bloody Sunday" march of 1965 and take stock of the struggle for equality.

Under a bright sun, the first black U.S. president praised the figures of a civil rights era that he was too young to know but that helped him break the ultimate racial barrier in political history with his ascension to the nation's highest office. He called them "warriors of justice" who pushed America closer to a more perfect union.

"So much of our turbulent history — the stain of slavery and anguish of civil war, the yoke of segregation and tyranny of Jim Crow, the death of four little girls in Birmingham, and the dream of a Baptist preacher — met on this bridge," Obama told the crowd before taking a symbolic walk across part of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where the 1965 marchers were attacked by police.

"It was not a clash of armies, but a clash of wills, a contest to determine the meaning of America," Obama said. He was 3 years old at the time of the march.

A veteran of that clash, U.S. Rep. John Lewis, who was severely beaten by police that day in 1965 and suffered a skull fracture, exhorted the crowd to press on with the work of racial justice.

"Get out there and push and pull until we redeem the soul of America," Lewis said. He was the youngest and is the last survivor of the Big Six civil rights activists, a group led by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. that had the greatest impact on the movement.

Among those in attendance was Peggy Wallace Kennedy, a daughter of the late George Wallace, the Alabama governor in 1965 who once vowed "segregation forever."

Selma's fire department estimated the crowd reached 40,000. Former President George W. Bush shared the platform. Republican congressional leaders were mostly absent but one, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, joined the walk.

The walk progressed under the bold letters on an arch, identifying the bridge named after Pettus, a Confederate general in the Civil War, senator and Ku Klux Klan leader.

Obama, his wife, Michelle, and their two daughters walked about a third of the way across, accompanied by Lewis, who has given fellow lawmakers countless tours of this scene. Bush, his wife, Laura, and scores of others came with them before a larger crowd followed.

Two years after King's historic "I have a dream" speech in Washington, the Bloody Sunday march became the first of three aiming to reach Montgomery, Alabama, the state capital. to demand an end to discrimination against black voters. Scenes of troopers beating marchers on the bridge shocked the nation, emboldening leaders in Washington to pass the Voting Rights Act five months later.

On his way to Selma, Obama signed a law awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to participants of the trio of marches, the last of which brought protesters all the way to Montgomery.

The shadow of enduring discrimination touched the event as Obama addressed his government's investigation of the Ferguson, Missouri, police department. The investigation, he said, "evoked the kind of abuse and disregard for citizens that spawned the civil rights movement."

"What happened in Ferguson may not be unique, " he said, "but it's no longer endemic, or sanctioned by law and custom. And before the civil rights movement, it most surely was."

The Justice Department concluded this past week that Ferguson had engaged in practices that discriminated against the city's largely black population. The department also declined to prosecute the white police officer who shot and killed an unarmed black 18-year-old last year, sparking days of violent protests and marches.

"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.

Yet, he said, "if you think nothing's changed in the past 50 years, ask somebody who lived through the Selma or Chicago or L.A. of the '50s. 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."

In New York, a multigenerational and racially mixed crowd of about 250 people crossed the Brooklyn Bridge in a "Selma is Everywhere" march to mark the anniversary.

-- (c) Associated Press 2015-03-08

[Godders]

Nauseatingly impressive performance by the Great Pretender, a dire President but by far the most convincing actor on the global political stage. For a few gob-smacking moments he actually managed to look and sound like the dead doctor he pretends to eulogise - and whose shoes he is not fit to lick.

[chuckd]

Following is a stirring speech President Obama gave in 2007 commending the Selma marchers and telling them they inspired his mother and father to marry and have a child, thus he was a result of their efforts.

One teensy little problem.

Obama was born in 1961. The march was in 1965.

PS: Love that down home southern accent.

[Publicus]

America has come a long way.

Such a long way it was inevitable that some people would insist on remaining behind.

The states rights reactionary right just can't keep up so they keep carrying on as they dig their heels in deeper.

Heels.

[Bangkok Herps]

White Democrats were mostly segregationists until the Civil Rights Movement.

Then they became Republicans.

That's what the whole "Southern Strategy" was all about. Robert Byrd was one of the tiny percentage of "Dixiecrats" who stayed on, most of whom were not even in the South (Byrd is a West Virginia Senator - West Virginia seceded from Virginia to join the North).

Although I see you completely ignored Strom Thurmond, the long-time South Carolina Republican Senator who ran for president on a strictly pro-segregation platform and was praised for it by Republican leadership as recently as 2005.

If you're talking about Republicans in the 1800s, you're talking about champions of Civil Rights. However, those Republicans didn't even exist in the South for the most part, which is why Republican President Abraham Lincoln couldn't even run in the South.

If you're talking about Southern Republicans post-1980, you're just talking about former Southern Democrats.

Please, if you really are ignorant on this topic and aren't just pretending, look up the Southern Strategy. Republican leaders and strategists openly admitted race-baiting in order to get as many anti-Black votes from the Southern White population as they possibly could.

[snarky66]

My point was that if Democrats had been in charge since 1840 we would still have slavery. Notwithstanding the mixed race president.

Edited March 10, 2015 by snarky66

[Publicus]

White Democrats were mostly segregationists until the Civil Rights Movement.

Then they became Republicans.

That's what the whole "Southern Strategy" was all about. Robert Byrd was one of the tiny percentage of "Dixiecrats" who stayed on, most of whom were not even in the South (Byrd is a West Virginia Senator - West Virginia seceded from Virginia to join the North).

Although I see you completely ignored Strom Thurmond, the long-time South Carolina Republican Senator who ran for president on a strictly pro-segregation platform and was praised for it by Republican leadership as recently as 2005.

If you're talking about Republicans in the 1800s, you're talking about champions of Civil Rights. However, those Republicans didn't even exist in the South for the most part, which is why Republican President Abraham Lincoln couldn't even run in the South.

If you're talking about Southern Republicans post-1980, you're just talking about former Southern Democrats.

Please, if you really are ignorant on this topic and aren't just pretending, look up the Southern Strategy. Republican leaders and strategists openly admitted race-baiting in order to get as many anti-Black votes from the Southern White population as they possibly could.

Yes, I'd posted about Nixon's Southern Strategy to previous threads that had in recent years presented Ferguson and events a bit further back, but I don't recall ever getting a single reply. So it is great to see it brought up again because it is central to the present ongoing events and to our discussions of them.

Silence was the response then and remains so now because presenting the Southern Strategy here touches too closely to the personal experience of the transition that so many have had who dwell at these threads during recent times.

While I worked in Washington a gal I worked with from Texas used to tell me how after school she and her classmates used to crawl up to the door of a teacher who was a Republican so they could actually see such a rare and ugly beast in their midst. Now they're all Republicans and most of 'em are ugly tea party zealot beasts.

This is a legacy of Selma but then, as Prez Obama pointed out during his brilliant speech in Selma, George Wallace's daughter was in attendance, which is the opposite legacy of segregationist and Jim Crow Selma.

[snarky66]

Racial hatred and division will be obama's legacy. He is 0 for 3 on the big cases.

[Publicus]

Racial hatred and division will be obama's legacy. He is 0 for 3 on the big cases.

That is the fiction the extreme and militant outlier right is trying to create for their own purposes down the road.

Virtually anyone who saw the president's Selma speech agrees the speech itself was a tour de force and its delivery was awesome.

The vast majority of Americans do not think in the way the extremist states rights poster does to include his far out friends ....not at all.

[snarky66]

Richard Nixon desegregated the schools peacefully. so as I said before Democrats need to stop telling the lie that they were the champions of civil rights for blacks. That is just a flat out lie.