Speaking in
Alabama, US President Barack Obama has said civil rights was just "one leg
in our long journey toward freedom." Thousands gathered in Selma to mark
an important milestone in the nation's civil rights history.
Deutsche Welle, 7 Mar 2015
On the 50th
anniversary of a police assault on civil rights protesters, the first black US
president said demonstrators had "proved that nonviolent change is
possible - that love and hope can conquer hate."
During the
"Bloody Sunday" protest march of March 7, 1965, many in a crowd of
600 were beaten bloody by state troopers as they tried to cross the Edmund
Pettus Bridge leading from Selma, Alabama, toward the state capital,
Montgomery.
"There
are places and moments in America where this nation's destiny have been
decided," Obama said Saturday, including the bridge on that list. "It
was not a clash of armies, but a clash of wills," he added.
Shocking
scenes of the brutality on the bridge - named after a Confederate general who
led the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan - helped galvanize the nation against
racial oppression in the South. Months after the police assault in Selma,
Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, making it more difficult for
states like Alabama to restrict registration through violent intimidation and bureaucratic
racism.
John Lewis,
a Democrat and one of the country's few black legislators, reminded those
assembled that "there's still work left to be done: Get out there and push
and pull until we redeem the soul of America."
"John
Lewis is one of my heroes," Obama said on Saturday.
I thought I saw death. I thought I was going to die. #Selma50 pic.twitter.com/AhM8ujpsYi
— John Lewis (@repjohnlewis) March 7, 2015
Those
present included Obama's wife, Michelle, and daughters, Sasha and Malia; former
President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura; about 100 members of Congress;
and the daughter of George Wallace, the governor who in 1965 had ordered
Alabama state troopers to attack the peaceful protesters.
'Black
lives matter'
New light
has been cast on racial tension in the US in the wake of the recent killings of
several unarmed men of color by white police officers. In January, the holiday
honoring the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. was marked by nationwide protests. Demonstrations have continued since last summer, when such killings
began receiving renewed widespread attention.
While
hundreds came together in Selma on Saturday, dozens also gathered at the police
headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin, a college town and state capital where
police killed an unarmed 19-year-old black man on Friday night. "Black
lives matter," read the familiar placards, a familiar sight at similar
protests over the last half year.
In
December, New York protesters chanted "I can't breathe" after a grand
jury declined to prosecute an officer for the July killing of Eric Garner with
a disallowed chokehold. Despite viewing a lengthy video in which Garner, unarmed
and black, said the three words over and over again as the white officer choked
him from behind with a nightstick while a gang of police wrestled him to the
ground, and a coroner ruling the death a homicide, the jury decided it did not
have enough evidence to send the case to trial.
'Sustained
racial profiling'
On Thursday
in Ferguson, Missouri, the parents of Michael Brown, an unarmed black
18-year-old killed by a white officer last August, announced a suit against the
city after US Attorney General Eric Holder announced that he wouldn't prosecute
Officer Darren Wilson.
However,
Holder did say that police in the St. Louis suburb had engaged in sustained
racial profiling, with the mostly white city administration raising municipal
funds by having the almost entirely white police force repeatedly search,
ticket and arrest the largely black population on trumped-up charges.
On
Saturday, Obama called the narrative of a report compiled by the US Justice
Department on the Ferguson Police Department's civil rights record "sadly
familiar." The world was shocked by the near-military police response to protests against the man's shooting.
Of the
Selma protesters, Obama said on Saturday, "they didn't seek special
treatment - just the equal treatment promised to them a century before."
He added: "Our march is not yet finished."
mkg/cmk (Reuters, AFP, AP)
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