SELMA, Ala. -- 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 voting rights for members of minority groups.
Tens of thousands of people joined to commemorate the "Bloody Sunday" march of 1965 and take stock of the struggle for equality.
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 racial barrier 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 march met police violence.
"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, Rep. John Lewis, who was felled by police truncheons 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 so-called Big Six civil-rights activists, a group led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that had the greatest impact on the movement.
One of King's daughters, Bernice, was in Selma for the ceremony.
In the crowd also stood Madeline McCloud of Gainesville, Fla., who traveled overnight with a group of NAACP members from central Florida and marched in Georgia for civil rights in the turbulent era. "For me, this could be the end of the journey since I'm 72," she said. "I'm stepping back into the history we made." Also in attendance was Peggy Wallace Kennedy, a daughter of the late George Wallace, the Alabama governor who once vowed "segregation forever."
Selma's Fire Department estimated the crowd reached 40,000. Joining Obama on Saturday was former President George W. Bush, who signed the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act in 2006.
The walk progressed under the bold letters on an arch, identifying the bridge named after Pettus, a Confederate general, senator and purported Ku Klux Klan leader.
Obama, his wife, Michelle, and their daughters walked about a third of the way across, accompanied by Lewis. Bush, his wife, Laura, and scores of others went with them before a larger crowd followed.
M.D. Reese and Lewis were the two members of the original "Pettus Eight" who participated in Saturday's anniversary march.
Amelia Boynton Robinson, 103, who was tear-gassed and beaten during the original march, lined up in a wheelchair at the head of the procession.
turning point
The events of March 7, 1965, proved a turning point in the civil-rights movement, and were portrayed in the movie Selma.
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, Ala., to demand an end to discrimination against black voters and all such victims of segregation.
When 600 demonstrators embarking on the 50-mile march crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, state troopers and Sheriff Jim Clark's posse attacked with billy clubs and tear gas. National shock helped President Lyndon B. Johnson push the Voting Rights Act through Congress.
A voting-rights workshop underscored continuing battles over the law. The Supreme Court struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, in effect deeming it outdated and freeing nine states, including Alabama, to change election laws without advance approval. Obama called on lawmakers in Selma to return to Washington and pass legislation reviving the act.
But in an era of low turnout, the president said Americans as a whole needed to use their franchise. "What's our excuse today for not voting?" he asked. "How do we so casually discard the right for which so many fought? How do we so fully give away our power, our voice, in shaping America's future."
House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer, of Maryland, said he's using the occasion to push for passage of a strengthened Voting Rights Act.
Hoyer was among the approximately 100 members of Congress attending Saturday's commemoration. The group included five Republicans from the Senate and 19 from the House, said Todd Stacy, a spokesman for Rep. Martha Roby, an Alabama Republican. While House Speaker John Boehner wasn't there, he will bestow the Congressional Gold Medal to Selma marchers at the Capitol, Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said. Obama signed the bill aboard Air Force One on the way to Selma. Lewis each year organizes a delegation of lawmakers to travel to Alabama for the march's anniversary.
After criticism that no Republican leaders were attending, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California traveled to Selma for the commemoration.
Several prominent Democrats were missing, too. Former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is preparing to run for the White House next year, were in Miami for an event sponsored by the Clinton Global Initiative, a philanthropic venture.
'no longer endemic'
At the event Saturday, Obama addressed his government's investigation of the Ferguson, Mo., 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 last 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 LA 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."
Ferguson was on the minds of many. Dontey Carter, 24, traveled from Ferguson, saying he wanted to make a connection with protests he took part in back in Missouri. "I feel like it's critical for me to be here," said Carter, wearing a T-shirt with the words, "We Are Justice" on the front. "The same tactics they used in Ferguson is kind of close to what they did here."
Among residents in Selma, there has been an effort to heal racial scars in a town where no whites attend the public high school, opting instead for a private academy founded three months after Bloody Sunday. Jerry Light Sr., pastor of First Baptist Church, said hundreds of white and black residents marched over the Edmund Pettus Bridge together last weekend. "We're one Selma," he said. "We're unified."
Gov. Robert Bentley, a Republican who spoke Saturday, said he hoped the occasion would show how much Alabama has changed.
Bentley, who often is critical of Obama administration policies, was greeted by scattered booing.
"We want people in America and the world to realize that Alabama is a different place and a different state than it was 50 years ago," Bentley said in an interview. "It has become probably as much of a colorblind state as any state in the country, and we're very proud of the advancement we've made."
But that was not a universal view in a state where Obama received just 15 percent of the white vote in 2012.
"I think in many ways we've gone backwards on race in this country," former Rep. Artur Davis of Alabama, who is black and switched to the Republican Party, said in an interview. "There's obviously a very deep racial divide in Alabama when it comes to President Obama."
In New York, a multigenerational and racially mixed crowd of about 250 people crossed the Brooklyn Bridge in a "Selma is Everywhere" march.
"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," said David Dinkins, 87, who in the early 1990s was New York's first black mayor. "We think it's important that people not forget Bloody Sunday," he said. "You'd be surprised how many young people don't know."
Information for this article was contributed by Jay Reeves, Darlene Superville and staff members of The Associated Press; by Peter Baker, Richard Fausset and Julie Hirschfeld Davis of The New York Times; and by Angela Greiling Keane, Billy House, Margaret Talev, Justin Sink and Toluse Olorunnipa of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 03/08/2015