Obama points to Selma as lesson for the young
COLUMBIA, S.C. — President Barack Obama said Friday that this weekend’s 50th anniversary commemoration of historic civil-rights marches is as much about stirring young people to change as about honoring yesterday’s legends, calling the push for “a fair and more just criminal justice system” part of the modern struggle.
Obama is leading today’s tribute in Selma, Ala., where 50 years ago police beat scores of people who were marching from Selma to Montgomery to protest the lack of voting rights for blacks. The marches helped lead to passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
“Selma is not just about commemorating the past; it’s about honoring the legends who helped change this country through your actions today, in the here and now,” Obama said at a town-hall meeting at South Carolina’s Benedict College. “Selma is now.”
In a radio interview broadcast earlier Friday, Obama said improving civil rights and liberties along with police is an area that “requires collective action
and mobilization” a half-century after an earlier generation of activists changed the nation. He made his first remarks about this week’s Justice Department report of racial bias in Ferguson, which found officers routinely discriminated against blacks by using excessive force.
“I don’t think that is typical of what happens across the country, but it’s not an isolated incident,” Obama said in an interview that aired
Friday on The Joe Madison Radio Show on Sirius XM radio’s Urban View channel.
“I think that there are circumstances in which trust between communities and law enforcement have broken down, and individuals or entire departments may not have the training or the accountability to make sure that they’re protecting and serving all people and not just some,” Obama said.
Obama said his administration will act on recommendations from a presidential task force, which called for greater oversight of police departments and the use of independent prosecutors to investigate use of deadly force by officers.
The president also called for communities to work together to address tensions between police and communities without succumbing to cynical attitudes that say “this is never going to change, because everybody’s racist.”
“That’s not a good solution,” Obama said. “That’s not what the folks in Selma did.”
Obama told students at Benedict College that the changes in the country after the Selma marches were possible because of the young people who decided to act. He noted that one of the most famous leaders of the Selma marches — John Lewis, who is now a Democratic U.S. House representative from Georgia — was just 23 years old at the time.
“It was young people who stubbornly insisted on justice, stubbornly refused to accept the world as it is that transformed not just the country but transformed the world,” Obama said.
“The civil-rights movement … at its best” is how the marches in Selma are described by Lewis, whose head was cracked open by state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on what has become known as “Bloody Sunday.”
Some 600 peaceful protesters set out that day on a march to Montgomery to call for voting rights in Alabama. Police met them on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma and brutally attacked them with clubs, whips and tear gas.
In the coming days, more than 30,000 protesters from across the country — college students, pastors, businessmen and homemakers — converged on Selma.
Obama said during the radio interview Friday that the work started by that march and other marches in the next days is not finished.
“When it comes to voting, we still see big chunks of the community disenfranchised,” Obama said. “Part of that is the responsibility of Congress to pass and renew a Voting Rights Act, the seminal capstone of the civil-rights movement and the march on Selma.”
In 2013 the Supreme Court struck down the way the 1965 law determined which jurisdictions needed pre-clearance to change their voting laws. Some Democratic lawmakers have called on Congress to strengthen the law, but the Republicans in Congress have argued that there are still strong protections in place.
The president added that while the generation after the civil-rights movement made great strides “by walking through the doors of opportunity that those giants helped to open up,” black Americans also “disempower ourselves by not voting.”
“When you think about the mighty battles that were fought, the notion that you’d only have a third or a half of African-Americans voting at this stage, that is not living up to the legacy that has been presented,” he said.
The visit was Obama’s first to South Carolina as president. He spoke there before heading to Selma for the commemoration with his wife and daughters.
At least 95 members of Congress — Republicans and Democrats — were expected to travel to Selma.
Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, one of the co-leaders of the delegation with Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., said he believes that the trip could help spur some Republicans to reconsider their positions on voting-rights legislation. “I hope we can help change some hearts here,” said Brown, who will be making the trip to Selma for the fourth time.
Civil-rights groups also are using the occasion to push for new voting-rights legislation.
Cornell William Brooks, president and chief executive officer of the NAACP, said in a message to supporters Thursday that “while we commemorate the anniversary of this great march, we must also remember that our rights are still not secured — Selma is now.” He cited new laws since the Supreme Court decision, such as state ID requirements, that he argued imperiled voting rights.
Scott, one of just two blacks in the Senate, had a more modest goal than pushing through new legislation: “Hopefully we will form the bond of friendship,” he said.
Obama recently met with some of the activists who were part of the voting-rights battles in Selma in the 1960s. His message to them was that his presidency was their legacy. “I wouldn’t be where I am if it was not for you,” he told them, according to senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett.
Aides said the president had been writing parts of today’s speech himself, rather than leaving it to speechwriters. One of his goals was to link the spirit of the 1960s Selma protests to today’s battles over issues such as gay marriage, income inequality and immigration.
“I think one of the great reasons we celebrate that heyday of the civil-rights movement and we celebrate the march at the Edmund Pettus Bridge is because it didn’t just open up the doors for black folks,” Obama said. “It was about America and who we are and a legacy that then opened the doors for Americans with disabilities and Latinos and Asian Americans and women and that’s a legacy we have to be proud of.”
Vice President Joe Biden, an early supporter of gay marriage, also sought to draw parallels between civil rights for gays and blacks as he addressed a meeting Friday of the Human Rights Campaign, a major gay-rights group.
“Selma and Stonewall were basically the same movement,” Biden said, invoking the 1969 Stonewall Inn riots in New York that marked the symbolic start of the modern gay-rights movement.
ECONOMIC TENSION
Fifty years after Bloody Sunday, the brutal, institutionalized racism that angered 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.
More than 40 percent of the population lives in poverty and the unemployment rate is twice the state average. In the past few months, Selma has lost two of its biggest department stores: J.C. Penney and Goody’s. This week, a ribbon cutting at a fast-food restaurant offered a rare bit of good economic news.
“Technically it’s more of a reopening than an opening,” said Kimbrough Ballard, who serves as the elected head of the county government. “The place looked terrible. Thank God Sonic saw fit to invest thousands of dollars in it instead of picking up and leaving.”
For the past five decades, Bloody Sunday has been as much burden as blessing to Selma. Now, Ballard and other elected officials are hoping that positive attention might provide their town with a much-needed jolt after some negative attention in the past.
“Something very insignificant can happen here and it will make national news, just because we’re Selma,” Ballard said.
When the all-white Selma Country Club initially rejected a Japanese businessman’s application in the early 1990s, it was national news. The club, in a county that is 80 percent black, still does not have any black members, an omission that Ballard, who is white, said has more to do with tradition than with any current racial tension.
More recently, the city has received attention for a disagreement over whether to repair a monument honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general who unsuccessfully defended Selma during the Civil War and later became the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. The monument, which sits on city property, was unveiled in 2000 and has been a target of vandals and a source of contention ever since.
“There’s such a small segment of the population that even gives a crap” about the monument, Ballard said. “It isn’t important to anyone.”
Selma’s longest-lasting wound — and possibly 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.
But in spite of the city’s problems, Ballard and Mayor George Evans, who is black, said this week that they didn’t see any lingering racial divide in the city.
“I don’t see it,” Ballard said. “I’m elected to office in a population that is 80 percent African-American. I had very strong African-American opponents both times.”
Evans — who will be marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge today with a group that includes Obama, Lewis and Republican Gov. Robert Bentley — offered a similar assessment.
“Hearts change, minds change, people change,” he said. “I am proud of our city.”