"Bloody Sunday" Commemoration

"'Bloody Sunday' Anniversary Commemorated With March Across Selma Bridge"
By: Reuters
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/08/bloody-sunday-selma-march_n_6826932.html
Source: Huffington Post

To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of a turning point in the civil rights movement, a weekend of events was planned which consisted of reenacting the 1965 “Bloody Sunday” march across Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Some individuals who gathered in Selma were also planning to set out on Monday on a march to Montgomery. They plan to march along the same route that Martin Luther King Jr. and his supporters walked in the stir of Boody Sunday, which was crucial in helping the outgrowth of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. President Barack Obama attended the event and declared the work of the U.S. civil rights movement “advanced but unfinished” due to the presence of ongoing racial tension and limitation of voting rights. Standing near the bridge, President Obama said, “Fifty years from Bloody Sunday, our march is not yet finished, but we’re getting closer” (Reuters, 1). The fiftieth anniversary has come at a crucial time; the focus on racial discrepancies has been reintroduced with the unfair treatment of black civilians by white law enforcers, such as the shooting and killing of Mike Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Several instances similar to that of Ferguson have ignited widespread protests all over the country. United States Representative John Lewis, who led the march over the bridge in 1965, told NBC that what happened fifty years ago had led to permanent transformations in civil rights. When speaking about the bridge, 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, 1).

            Events like the march across the bridge in Selma are actions that have changed America both in history and in the present. It is pitiful that racial discrimination occurs today fifty years after occurrences like this one. The work of the civil rights movement, as President Obama said, has progressed but is still incomplete.