Thousands of people began walking across a Selma, Alabama bridge yesterday in a re-enactment of the 1965 "Bloody Sunday" march, part of a weekend of events marking the 50th anniversary of a turning point in the United States civil rights movement.
Some of those gathered in Selma also planned to set out today on a march to Montgomery along the route Martin Luther King and his followers walked in the wake of Bloody Sunday, a march that helped spur the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Bloody Sunday on March 7th, 1965, took its name from the beating that roughly 600 peaceful civil rights activists sustained at the hands of white state troopers and police who attacked them with batons and sprayed them with tear gas on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Immigration and gay rights
“It’s very crowded but at the same time it’s fun and really great to see everybody coming together all races, all people,” one woman said as marchers began moving across the bridge. Among the demonstrators were those calling for immigration and gay rights.
President Barack Obama visited Selma on Saturday and declared the work of the US civil rights movement advanced but unfinished in the face of ongoing racial tension.
“Fifty years from Bloody Sunday, our march is not yet finished, but we’re getting closer,” said Mr Obama as he stood near the bridge.
The anniversary comes at a time of renewed focus on racial disparities in the US and anger over law enforcers' treatment of black civilians, among them 18-year-old Michael Brown, whose killing by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, last year sparked widespread protests.
On Friday, Tony T Robinson jnr (19), a black man who appeared to be unarmed, was shot dead by a white police officer in Madison, Wisconsin, sparking protests there.
US congressman John Lewis, who led the march across the bridge 50 years ago and was knocked out by a state trooper, told NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday that what happened that day had led to lasting changes in civil rights.
“When I go back, I remember the bridge for me is almost a sacred place,” the Georgia Democrat said.
“That’s where some of us gave a little blood and where some people almost died. “What happened on that bridge has changed America forever.” – (Reuters)