President Joe Biden traveled to Selma, Ala. over the weekend for the 58th anniversary of the deadly “Bloody Sunday” incident and declared the fight that began nearly six decades ago is still ongoing. In a speech, President Biden said that the right to vote is still under attack in the United States with the Voting Rights Act facing changes under the conservative-majority Supreme Court.
As the Associated Press and New York Times reports, President Joe Biden spoke to gatherers seated near the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the site of the “Bloody Sunday” event where peaceful demonstrators were assaulted on March 7, 1965, for simply crossing the bridge heading into Montgomery, Ala. Among those harmed that fateful day was the late congressman John Lewis before his vaunted political career took off.
A bill, The John Lewis Voting Rights Act, failed in Congress when the Democratic Party held a slim majority. With the House now controlled by the Republican Party, the bill has little chance of seeing the light of day as a full-on law.
“As I come here in commemoration, not for show, Selma is a reckoning,” Biden said. “The right to vote, the right to vote, to have your vote counted, is the threshold of democracy and liberty. With it, anything’s possible. Without it, without that right, nothing is possible.”
The disturbing images of the Bloody Sunday event still shock the senses as police and townsfolk unleashed violent rage on the marchers simply angling for a right to the democratic process and having their voices count among their fellow countrymen.
President Joe Biden also spoke widely about the state of the economy and also spoke directly to the concerns of local residents still recovering from the destruction of storms that erupted in the area on January 12.
President Biden’s full speech can be read here.
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Photo: Anadolu Agency / Getty
