■ Vice President Kamala Harris led a Bloody Sunday memorial.
Harris leads memorial noting Bloody Sunday
SELMA, Ala. — Vice President Kamala Harris told thousands gathered for the 59th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday attacks on civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama, that fundamental freedoms are under attack in America even today.
Harris joined those gathered at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where voting rights activists were beaten back by law enforcement officers in 1965. The vice president praised the marchers’ bravery as they engaged in a defining moment of the civil rights struggle.
“Today, we know our fight for freedom is not over, because in this moment we are witnessing a full on attack on hard-fought, hard-won freedoms, starting with the freedom that unlocks all others, the freedom to vote,” Harris said.
She criticized attempts to restrict voting, including limits on early voting, and said the nation is again at a crossroad.
“What kind of country do we want to live in? Do we want to live in a country of freedom, liberty and justice? Or a country of injustice, hate and fear?” Harris asked, encouraging people to answer with their vote.
She said other fundamental freedoms under attack include “the freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body.”
Harris paid tribute to the civil rights marchers who walked across the bridge in 1965 knowing they would face certain violence in seeking “a future that was more equal, more just and more free.”
Harris drew parallels between those who worked to stifle the Civil Rights Movement and “extremists” she said are trying to enact restrictions on voting, education and reproductive care.
Earlier, Attorney General Merrick Garland spoke at a Selma church service commemorating the anniversary of the attack by Alabama law officers on civil rights demonstrators. He said recent court decisions and certain state legislation have endangered voting rights in much of the nation.
“Since those (court) decisions, there has been a dramatic increase in legislative measures that make it harder for millions of eligible voters to vote and to elect representatives of their choice,” Garland told worshippers at Selma’s Tabernacle Baptist Church, the site of one of the first mass meetings of the voting rights movement.
“Those measures include practices and procedures that make voting more difficult; redistricting maps that disadvantage minorities; and changes in voting administration that diminish the authority of locally elected or nonpartisan election administrators,” he said.
Decisions by the Supreme Court and lower courts since 2006 have weakened the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was passed in the wake of the police attacks in Selma, Garland said. The demonstrators were beaten by officers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, as they tried to march across Alabama to support voting rights.