President Joe Biden will pay back the heroes of “Bloody Sunday” when he commemorates the day he paid for the passage of the right-of-way legislation nearly 60 years ago.
Biden’s visit to Selma, Alabama, on Sunday is also an opportunity to speak directly with a generation of civil rights activists.
Many are disappointed that Biden has failed to deliver on his campaign promise to voter turnout and want to see the main issue remain in his administration.
In his speech on Sunday, Biden emphasizes the importance of commemorating Bloody Sunday so that history cannot be erased, while the struggle to vote remains a vital part of economic justice and civil rights for citizens. .
Selma is making this commemoration as the historic city of about 18,000 is still reeling from the aftermath of the January tornado, which destroyed thousands of properties here and in the surrounding area.
Few moments were as important to the civil rights movement as what happened on March 7, 1965 in Selma and the weeks that followed.
Some 600 peaceful protesters gathered with civil rights activists John Lewis and Hosea Williams that day, just weeks after the fatal shooting of a young black man, Jimmie Lee Jackson, by an Alabama police officer.
Lewis, who later became a congressman from Georgia, and other police officers from Alabama were brutally killed when they tried to cross the Edmund Chest Bridge at the beginning of the state’s march to the state capital, Montgomery, as part of a larger voter registration effort. . Blacks to the south
Images of police brutality shook the country, as civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. led large marches.
President Lyndon B. Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act of 1965 eight days after Bloody Sunday, and signed it into law five months later. As a 2020 White House candidate, Biden has promised to support voting rights.
