US President Joe Biden (4th R) with Alabama Representative Terri Sewell, Revs Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, and Martin Luther King III, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 5, 2023. afp_tickers
US President Joe Biden insisted on Sunday that he recognizes all the “good” and “bad” in the country’s history as he recalled the brutal crackdown 58 years ago on the civil rights march in Selma, Alabama.
“The history of things,” Trump said of the Edmund Petto Bridge, where a march of hundreds of peaceful activists was crushed by police force on March 7, 1965.
That bloody Sunday was the catalyst for African-American rights and a few months later led to the approval of a federal law prohibiting racial discrimination in voting.
The protesters “forced the country to face the hard truth,” Biden added, accusing Republicans of trying to “hide” the truth from history.
“No matter how hard some people try, we can’t just choose to know what we want to know and not what we know,” Biden said, discussing how American history is taught in schools.
“We need to know everything. The good, the bad, the truth of who we are as a nation, and everyone needs to know the truth about Selma.”
As of 2020, several conservative states have passed laws to ban the teaching of “critical national theory,” an academic discipline that investigates systemic racism in American society.
Florida Gov. Ron de Santis, who considered the popularity of the 2024 presidential nomination of his party, recently defended the high school curriculum in African-American studies, criticizing the “indoctrination”.
Biden also called on the country to be vigilant in defending the right to vote, noting that the right to vote has been burned by the Supreme Court and threatens dozens of reformers in a conservative state.
The president, whose political career drew broad support from African-American voters, urged Congress to pass electoral reform, but the initiative was blocked by Republicans.
