50 years after 'Bloody Sunday,' where are the Selmas of today?
(The Christian Science Monitor) President Barack Obama paid respects to his benefactors in Selma, Ala., on Saturday, 50 years after the incident at the foot of the Edmund Pettus bridge, where white Alabama state troopers beat black people who had gathered to protest a police shooting and to demand a full franchise.
The shocking images at a bridge named after a Ku Klux Klan grand dragon woke the country up to a human and constitutional injustice being perpetrated. The violence and a march two weeks later, led by Martin Luther King Jr., tipped the hand of President Lyndon Johnson, who signed the Voting Rights Act just a few months after the "Bloody Sunday" events in 1965.
When the U.S. Supreme Court largely gutted the act in 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts noted that Congress has to use contemporary data when placing restrictions on nine states, mostly in the South, that need to get federal preclearance before changing voting laws.
