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Fifty Years Ago Today: “Bloody Sunday” UPDATED with President Obama’s Speech

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UPDATED: The president’s speech :





Rep. Terri Sewell at 1:59:20

Rep. John Lewis at 2:04:00

President Obama at 2:12:00

Transcript: Remarks by the President at the 50th Anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery Marches

Today, CSPAN-3 will cover the commemoration of Bloody Sunday live at 12 noon Eastern Time.

Six hundred marchers assembled in Selma on Sunday, March 7, and, led by John Lewis and other SNCC and SCLC activists, crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River en route to Montgomery. Just short of the bridge, they found their way blocked by Alabama State troopers and local police who ordered them to turn around. When the protesters refused, the officers shot teargas and waded into the crowd, beating the nonviolent protesters with billy clubs and ultimately hospitalizing over fifty people.

President Obama on this weeks events:

“When I take Malia and Sasha down with Michelle next week, down to Selma, part of what I’m hoping to do is to remind them of their own obligations. Because there are going to be marches for them to march, and struggles for them to fight”

There are many stories about the march, few as imbued with symbolism as this one Tweeted by @splcenter: The Untold Story of Why MLK Wore a Hawaiian Lei at Selma



Bright Hawaiian lei will be on full display this weekend when President Barack Obama, civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis and others march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to mark the anniversary of the civil rights protests.[…]

In photos of the 54-mile third march from Selma to Montgomery on March 21, 1965, Martin Luther King, John Lewis and other demonstrators can be seen wearing the iconic Hawaiian flower garlands.

The journey of those flowers from Hawaii to Alabama started a year earlier, when King delivered a lecture at the University of Hawaii. It was there that he met Rev. Abraham Akaka, the brother of future U.S. Sen. Daniel Akaka.

In the lead-up to the third march, as President Lyndon Johnson was making preparations to protect the demonstrators with military policemen and the Alabama National Guard, Rev. Akaka sent gifts of bright white lei from the Pacific Ocean to the Deep South to be draped on the marchers.

For the reverend, it was a symbolic gesture that affirmed Asian-American support for the civil rights movement.

Now, 50 years later, Lewis and Hawaii native Obama will join Asian-American lawmakers Sen. Mazie Hirono and Rep. Mark Takai, among nearly 100 lawmakers, to pay homage to the civil rights movement and “Bloody Sunday.”

The first black president, born in Hawaii, will be wearing a lei to honor the civil rights movement.

This past week, lawmakers have been visiting Selma and the recording their thoughts and impressions about the event today.

Rep. Keith Ellison ‏@keithellison

When John Lewis began March from Selma to Montgomery, he had in his backpack, apple, toothbrush, journal, book


The National Journal published 20 photos of the march:

During the first Selma-to-Montgomery march, 600 civil rights demonstrators were attacked by local and state police. The attack bolstered support for the movement, and the demonstrations that followed eventually led to the Voting Rights Act.



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50 years later, voting rights are still under attack:

Tens of thousands of people-including President Obama-will travel to Selma this weekend to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” the infamous march that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

The progress since then has been remarkable. Because of the VRA, the number of black, Hispanic and Asian officeholders has skyrocketed from under 1,000 in 1965 to over 17,000 today. “African-Americans went from holding fewer than 1,000 elected offices nationwide to over 10,000,” according to a new report from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, “Latinos from a small number of offices to over 6,000, and Asian Americans from under a hundred documented cases to almost 1,000.” In Alabama, the birthplace of the VRA, the number of black elected officials has increased from eighty-six in 1970 to 757 today.[…]

Despite these dramatic improvements, the right to vote is currently under the most sustained attack since the passage of the VRA.

In 2011 and 2012, 180 new voting restrictions were introduced in forty-one states, with new laws adopted in nineteen states that made it harder to vote, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Many of these laws were blocked in court in 2012, but a year later the Supreme Court gutted the VRA, dealing a devastating blow to voting rights. As a result, twenty-one states had new restrictions in place in 2014.

This trend is getting worse in 2015. In the first few weeks of this year, forty new voting restrictions were introduced in seventeen states. That number will grow as state legislatures consider proposed legislation. Nevada, New Mexico and Missouri are among the states moving to pass voter-ID laws. “It’s surprising and remarkable that in 2015 we’re fighting over the same thing we fought over 50 years ago-the right to vote,” says Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center. […]

The Selma anniversary offers lawmakers a prime opportunity to move from symbolism to substance. Congresswoman Terri Sewell of Selma recently told me: “My hope is that the bipartisan efforts we’ve made will move people to recommit themselves to restore the teeth back into the Voting Rights Act. Gold medals are great-I think it’s long overdue and much deserved that the foot soldiers are going to finally get their place in history, but the biggest tribute that we can give to those foot soldiers is fully restoring the Voting Rights Act.”


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/ 45 Comments

45 comments

  2. Diana in NoVa

    Fifty years ago the march in Selma got right by me, I’m ashamed to say. I was on the verge of my 21st birthday and just about to depart for London via New York. I was totally preoccupied with my own concerns at the time.

    Now I want to give this important piece of history the attention it deserves.

    Isn’t it disheartening that we have to fight the battles for civil rights and reproductive rights all over again? These are battles we thought we’d won. After the rights to birth control and abortion were secured I wanted, in my activist days, to work to end homelessness. That didn’t happen.

    Ye gods, how I despise patriarchy! I still have hopes, though, because of the (so far) free Internet. Flash mobs, social media, texting–these are tools that people can use to mobilize and act. Long ago, when ARPAnet transformed itself into the Internet, I grasped the anarchic possibilities offered by this communications highway. And indeed, it has upended several industries and made itself as necessary as the automobile.

    We just have to keep on keeping on. Thanks for the diary!

  3. DeniseVelez

    round up!

    Want to also remember Jimmie Lee Jackson

    Jimmie Lee Jackson (December 16, 1938-February 26, 1965)[1][2] was a civil rights activist in Marion, Alabama, and a deacon in the Baptist church. On February 18, 1965, he was beaten by troopers and shot by Alabama State Trooper James Bonard Fowler while participating in a peaceful voting rights march in his city. Jackson was unarmed; he died several days later in the hospital.

    His death inspired the Selma to Montgomery marches in March 1965, a major event in the American Civil Rights Movement that helped gain Congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This opened the door to millions of African Americans being able to vote again in Alabama and across the South, regaining participation as citizens in the political system for the first time since the turn of the 20th century, when they were disenfranchised by state constitutions and discriminatory practices.

    In 2007 former trooper Fowler was indicted in Jackson’s death, and in 2010 he pleaded guilty to manslaughter. He was sentenced to six months in prison.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J…

  4. JanF

    Obama Returns To Selma For 50th Anniversary Of Historic March

    In March of 2007 on a Sunday morning, he stood in the pulpit of Brown Chapel AME Church. It was another anniversary weekend in Selma. Then-U.S. Sen. Obama was, at the time, a newly declared presidential candidate. The churchgoers who listened to Obama that day included some of those who’d been on that bridge when troopers moved in with tear gas and billy clubs. The future president was greeted with thunderous applause. “We’re in the presence today of giants whose shoulders we stand on,” he said. He called them: “People who battled on behalf not just of African-Americans but on behalf of all Americans, who battled for America’s soul, that shed blood, that endured taunts and torment.”

    Obama said those who marched that day on Bloody Sunday helped make it possible for him to stand before them as a candidate.

    Less than two years later, Obama would again stand on those shoulders of his civil rights heroes as he took the oath as president.

    Here is a link to the C-Span video of the speech:

    Senator Barack Obama, a Democratic presidential candidate, delivered the keynote speech at a commemoration of “Bloody Sunday.”.

    Transcript: Brown Chapel Speech

  6. JanF

    Say what ???

    In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down a requirement that nine states and parts of six others obtain Justice Department approval before making election changes that might disproportionately affect minority voting. The court said Congress should update the law.

    Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., an honorary co-chairman of the Selma trip and the only African-American Republican in the Senate, said voting rights and the commemoration of Selma should be “de-coupled.”

    “The issue of voting rights legislation and the issue of Selma, we ought to have an experience that brings people together and not make it into a political conversation,” Scott said.

    Does he not know that that is what they were marching for?????

  7. JanF

    Fifty years after ‘Bloody Sunday’ march, struggles endure in Selma

    On Tuesday morning, though, the celebration hadn’t begun; the celebrities hadn’t started to arrive. Selma wasn’t so much a place of imagination and triumph as a poor Alabama city where more than 40 percent of the population lives in poverty and the unemployment rate is twice the state average. It was a place still struggling to overcome the racial divisions that have in many ways defined it for generations.[…]

    Selma’s longest-lasting wound – and its biggest barrier to attracting outside industry – remains its schools, which have been effectively segregated since the early 1990s. A bitter fight over whether to renew the contract of the superintendent led the white population of the city to abandon the system en masse.

    Today, the public schools in Selma are 99 percent black. “The first thing my daughter said to me when she came home from school the first day was ‘Where’s all the white people?’ ” said Selma Police Chief William Riley, who moved to the city from Newport News, Va., seven years ago to run the department. […]

    Fifty years after Bloody Sunday, the brutal, institutionalized racism that outraged much of the country is gone from Selma, replaced with murkier problems that cannot be repaired by a brave stand on a bridge or a single sweeping piece of legislation.

  12. JanF

    From VOX

    President Obama’s supporters sometimes wonder where the inspirational candidate of 2008 has gone. The answer is to the White House. Obama’s presidency is about smaller, less inspiring questions than his 2008 campaign.

    Obama’s presidency is bounded by the limits of the office and the demands of the moment. It is about what America needs to do right now – the next budget, the next bill, next year’s taxes, the last war. Candidates can muse. Presidents must govern.

    Exactly.

    That article also talks about how the president directly answered those who say he does not love America.

    In this speech, Obama’s answer to this criticism was direct:


       Fellow marchers, so much has changed in fifty years. We’ve endured war, and fashioned peace. We’ve seen technological wonders that touch every aspect of our lives, and take for granted convenience our parents might scarcely imagine. But what has not changed is the imperative of citizenship, that willingness of a 26 year-old deacon, or a Unitarian minister, or a young mother of five, to decide they loved this country so much that they’d risk everything to realize its promise.

       That’s what it means to love America. That’s what it means to believe in America. That’s what it means when we say America is exceptional.

    There is an implicit radicalism in what Obama is saying here. To believe America is good enough is to abandon the tradition of criticism and activism that has made America great.

    Obama’s answer to Giuliani is that Giuliani has mistaken uncritical adoration for the hard work required of true love. Patriotism is active, not passive. Those who love America prove it by working to perfect America. They continue marching.

    Bolding and underlining is mine.

  13. JanF

    In Selma, GOP Lawmakers Explain Why They Don’t Support John Lewis’ Bill To Restore Voting Rights Act

    Some lawmakers told ThinkProgress the event highlighted the urgency of passing a currently languishing bill that would restore the full powers of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Others showed little interest in doing so.

    On his way to the commemoration ceremony, Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) said it’s been “powerful” to hear stories from Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), who helped lead the Selma march 50 years ago and was severely beaten by police. But when ThinkProgress asked if he supports Lewis’ voting rights bill, he replied, “I haven’t looked at it. Is there a Senate version?”

    A Senate version was introduced several weeks ago, and currently has zero Republican sponsors.

    Portman, who has advocated for cuts to Ohio’s early voting period and voted against the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, added before walking away: “This day is about more than just tweaks to the Voting Rights Act. This is about ensuring equal justice and learning from the lessons of the past.”

    Yes, we learn from the past that voting is a Big Huge Deal. And disenfranchising people because your party can no longer win on the issues, should not be allowed.

    This sums it up:

    Selma isn’t just a photo op, it’s a solemn remembrance of the blood, sweat, tears, and lives that went into securing voting rights for racial minorities in this country,” [Wade Henderson with the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights] said. “The Bloody Sunday march is not a parade, and it is hypocritical for members to attend the event and then do nothing to advance a VRA restoration.”

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