Headline Roundup • March 8th, 2015
Selma 50th Anniversary
Featured Coverage of this Story
Wall Street Journal (News)
Fifty years after a historic civil-rights confrontation at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., President Barack Obama traveled there to commemorate the marchers with a soaring speech that celebrated how far the U.S. has come, but also criticized what he considers modern-day assaults on voting rights.
Mr. Obama spoke at the foot of the bridge before some 40,000 people, at an event fraught with symbolism, as the nation’s first African-American president honored those who fought to enfranchise blacks. Among those who joined him on stage were first lady Michelle...
President Barack Obama joined nearly 100 members of Congress in Selma, Alabama, on Saturday for the 50th anniversary of "Bloody Sunday" -- a watershed moment of the civil rights movement -- where he honored the men and women who stood their ground in a violent confrontation with police at the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
"We gather here to honor the courage of ordinary Americans willing to endure billy clubs and the chastening rod, tear gas and the trampling hoof; men and women who despite the gush of blood and splintered bone...
Washington Times
Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the bloody civil-rights march in Selma, Alabama, President Obama said Saturday that America’s history of racial conflict “still casts its long shadow” and he called on Congress to strengthen voting-rights laws for minorities.
Speaking to a crowd of about 40,000 at the Edmund Pettus bridge where marchers were attacked by state troopers in 1965, Mr. Obama said it’s a “common mistake” for Americans to believe that “racism is banished.” He pointed to this week’s Justice Department report that found widespread patterns of racial bias in...
