50 Years On

President Obama was in Selma this weekend to mark the 50th anniversary of a peaceful civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery (the capital of Alabama) which was brutally attacked by organised racists within the local political establishment. 

If you haven't seen the movie Selma, then make the effort because the film is a very moving and accurate depiction of these momentous events while portraying the main characters as real human beings with doubts, misgivings and failings - including Martin Luther King.

Now America still has its problems with racism and many other issues, just like every other country in the world, but who would have thought that within 50 years a black American President would be standing on the same spot where open prejudice and discrimination once ruled the roost with the backing of the law.  

Obama in Selma: Ferguson report shows civil rights 'march is not yet finished'

President delivers passionate speech on 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday
One group in thousands at Edmund Pettus Bridge protests police shootings

Paul Lewis - The Guardian

Barack Obama address on civil rights in Selma, Alabama – full text

Barack Obama delivered one of the most poignant speeches of his presidency on Saturday, using the backdrop of Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge to call for an end to the discrimination he said still casts “a long shadow” over America.

“Fifty years from Bloody Sunday, our march is not yet finished,” the president told tens of thousands who converged on the Alabama town. “But we are getting closer.”

In a segment of the speech that linked this week’s Department of Justice (DoJ) report that condemned racist policing tactics in Ferguson, Missouri with a famous quote by civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Obama said it was a common mistake to assume racism had been banished from the US.

“We don’t need the Ferguson report to know that’s not true,” he said. “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.”

“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.”

Obama’s address from the bridge – commemorating the 50th anniversary of the crackdown on civil rights protesters that became known as Bloody Sunday – was laden with symbolism.

In 1965, television pictures of Alabama state troopers clubbing non-violent marchers who were crossing the bridge on route to Montgomery, Alabama’s state capital, shocked America.

The eventual triumph of the marchers, weeks later, was a landmark event in the civil rights movement, helping pave the way to that year’s Voting Rights Act and, the president has said, to his own ascendancy to the White House.

It was a largely positive, optimistic speech. “We shall overcome,” Obama said, fusing the words of the famous civil rights protest song with the slogan that first got him elected in 2008: “Yes We Can.”
‘We still got a white country club here’

The mood of those who had driven in some cases thousands of miles to mark a landmark in civil rights history was by turns raucous, celebratory and solemn.

There were screams when Obama’s motorcade appeared over the bridge and boos when Alabama’s current Republican governor, Robert Bentley, took to the stage.

One small group of demonstrators repeatedly interrupted the president with a drum beat and chants about police shootings of unarmed black men. Arguments broke out to the left of the stage and one woman was carried away by Alabama state troopers.

But during several long periods of Obama’s speech, the audience fell silent, listening intently.

On the day the marchers were beaten back, an 11-year-old boy named Marti Tolbert was standing on the roof of the tallest building in Selma, Teppers Department Store.

“I saw smoke,” said Tolbert, now 61. “People running, hollering. Blood on people’s faces. The terror of it. The thing I really remember is that white people weren’t just using billy clubs but beating down people with table legs."

 

A woman is carried away by police officers. Photograph: Paul Lewis/the Guardian

On Saturday, Tolbert, who still lives in Selma, watched the first black president shake hands with supporters at the foot of the same bridge, surrounded by white secret service agents.

Tolbert was tearful, but found it hard to explain his emotions. He said there was a disconnect between the symbolism of Obama’s visit and the everyday reality of living in a still effectively racially segregated town.

“We still got a white country club here. The only way I can go in there is if I cut the grass,” he said. “You ever go to a town, and when you arrive, you feel bad inside? There’s something still real bad about Selma today, but it is home.”

Six years into Obama’s presidency, the stark economic, racial and political inequality that constrains African Americans has barely changed. By some measures it has worsened.

The last 12 months have proved an especially turbulent period for race relations after a string of disturbing police killings of unarmed black men and boys, including Eric Garner in New York and Michael Brown in Ferguson.

Obama alluded to both deaths as well as that of a 12-year-old boy, Tamir Rice, who was shot by police while playing with a toy gun in Cleveland, Ohio.

“Citizens in Ferguson and New York and Cleveland just want the same thing young people here marched for,” the president said. “The protection of the law.”
‘The report’s narrative was woefully familiar’

Obama twice drew on the findings of a scathing DoJ report that concluded on Wednesday that there was a pattern of racist discrimination perpetrated by the police department and court system in Ferguson, Missouri, where Brown was shot dead last August.

“I was asked whether I thought the Department of Justice’s Ferguson report shows that, with respect to race, little has changed in this country,” he said.

“I understand the question, for the report’s narrative was woefully familiar. It evoked the kind of abuse and disregard for citizens that spawned the civil rights movement.”

Obama said that what happened Ferguson “may not be unique, but it’s no longer endemic”, and added: “We do a disservice to the cause of justice by intimating that bias and discrimination are immutable, or that racial division is inherent to America.”

While dedicating sections of the speech to the problems that afflict African Americans in particular, Obama’s address was a call to broaden the civil rights movement for the modern era, touching on the barriers to equality that still constrain the freedoms of women, Latino immigrants and gay people.

The speech mentioned Asian Americans, slaves, cowboys, Holocaust survivors, Native Americans, former presidents, Christians, poets, musicians, a journalist and a baseball player.

It was, at its heart, a stirring and optimistic speech about what Obama said was the exceptional diversity of America – and a celebration of what the country has achieved, and still can achieve, despite adversity.

“We respect the past, but we don’t pine for it,” Obama said. “We don’t fear the future: we grab for it.”

President Barack Obama, first lady Michelle Obama, Malia and Sasha Obama, members of Congress and civil rights leaders cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Photograph: Gerald Herbert/AP

Obama’s picture of a united, diverse citizenry was not, however, mirrored in the crowd. The audience was predominantly black – seemingly composed of fewer white faces than descended on Selma in a show of solidarity in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday.

Organisers said more than 100,000 were present, while city officials estimated the crowd was closer to 40,000.

Either way, tens of thousands intend to remain in the town for Sunday, when the official re-enactment of the bridge crossing will take place.

Also present on Saturday were Obama’s predecessor, George W Bush, and more than 100 representatives and senators, Democratic and Republican, who traveled from Washington.

The president used the appearance to urge those lawmakers to revive the Voting Rights Act – a legislative pillar that sprung from the civil rights movement, and Selma in particular, which in 2013 was weakened by a supreme court decision.

Since then states like Texas and North Carolina have introduced laws that experts say disenfranchise black and other minority voters.

Efforts to revive or rewrite the legislation have stalled amid opposition from conservative Republicans, at least one of whom was in the VIP section of the crowd.

“Right now, in 2015, 50 years after Selma, there are laws across this country designed to make it harder for people to vote,” Obama said.

“As we speak, more of such laws are being proposed. Meanwhile, the Voting Rights Act, the culmination of so much blood and sweat and tears, the product of so much sacrifice in the face of wanton violence, stands weakened, its future subject to partisan rancor. How can that be?”