Two of the Democratic Party’s leading presidential candidates came to an emotionally evocative touchstone of the civil rights movement Sunday seeking to strengthen their bonds with African-American voters and tie their campaigns to the cause’s unfinished work.
Speaking at two of the city’s oldest black churches, located yards from each other, Sens. Barack Obama of Illinois and Hillary Clinton of New York presented their campaigns as legacies of the struggle for political equality.
With African-American votes crucial to winning Democratic primaries in the South, Clinton and Obama have been making a determined effort to win over black voters. The candidates came to Selma for the 42nd commemoration of Bloody Sunday, when civil rights marchers were beaten by state troopers as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Sunday marked the first entrance into the presidential campaign by former President Bill Clinton, a popular figure with African-Americans whom writer Toni Morrison once called “our first black president.” He avoided upstaging his wife at her speech by staying away from the church. But people cheered and rushed to be near him when he joined his wife and Obama for a re-enactment of the 1965 march.
In a keynote address for the commemoration, Obama declared himself part of a new wave of black political leaders that he called “the Joshua Generation.” It was Joshua, the biblical successor to Moses, who led the Jewish people to the Promised Land after Moses delivered them from slavery in Egypt.
“We are in the presence today of a lot of Moseses, … of giants whose shoulders we stand on,” Obama said, surrounded by civil rights veterans. But, he added, “We’ve got to remember now that Joshua still has a job to do.”
While Obama did not explicitly claim for himself the role of Joshua, that was clearly the implication, coming during a campaign to be elected the nation’s leader.
Speaking at the First Baptist Church, Hillary Clinton said that three Democratic contenders for the presidency–Obama, an African-American; New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a Latino; and herself, a woman–benefited from the civil rights movement.
“I come here as a … great beneficiary of what happened in Selma,” Clinton said.
“In the last two elections, we have seen our right to vote tampered with … in state after state,” Clinton said.
Clinton began the presidential race with a huge lead among African-Americans, many of whom have deep affection for the former Clinton White House, but recent polls have shown Obama leading her among black voters. Though Obama is African-American, he is a newcomer to national politics and is not as well-known as the former first lady.
Black voters could play an important role in the selection of the next Democratic nominee. South Carolina, where blacks make up about half of the Democratic primary electorate, will hold one of the earliest nominating contests. Several other Southern states, including Alabama, are considering moving up their primaries.
Marching at the front of the procession through downtown Selma and across the bridge, the Clintons and Obama were separated in line by two black congressmen and several other civil rights leaders. People along the route snapped pictures and yelled out the names of Obama and the Clintons. Many of them joined the march as it passed.
“It is important for us to see what they stand for,” Patrick Dick, a 33-year-old heating and ventilation technician from Birmingham, said of the candidates. “It will be a difficult decision because both of them seem like they are there for us and want to make the world better.”
Before the procession, Obama spoke at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, the meeting place for Selma civil rights organizers during the 1960s and the starting point for the Bloody Sunday march. Obama was joined there by the local congressman, Artur Davis (D-Ala.), who has endorsed Obama, and by Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who was badly beaten on the bridge and returns for every anniversary.
Obama placed his own life in the broader experience of black Americans and noted recent news accounts of his genealogy showing a white ancestor once owned slaves.
He acknowledged that his mother’s “great-great-great-great grandfather had owned slaves.”
Some commentators have argued that Obama’s biography–he is the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya and was raised by white grandparents in Hawaii–gives him a different experience from most black Americans.
But he asserted his ancestors in colonial Africa suffered many of the same humiliations as blacks in the Jim Crow-era South, noting that his African grandfather was a “house boy” whom even in old age his British employers addressed by his first name, rather than his last.
“Sound familiar?” Obama said, rousing a chorus of affirmations.
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He offered his life story as a legacy of the civil rights movement, asserting formative events in his life as touchstones of the movement’s achievements: election to high office, the opportunity to study at prestigious Ivy League universities, and even his birth of a mixed-race marriage.
“There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Ala., because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born,” Obama said.
Obama was born in 1961, four years before the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. But spokesman Bill Burton said Obama was “speaking metaphorically about the civil rights movement as a whole.”
During Sunday’s commemoration, Bill Clinton was inducted into the National Voting Rights Museum Hall of Fame.
His wife said much work remains to be done in this country, including providing health care for 46 million uninsured Americans, creating an efficient energy policy and taking care of U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
“How do we refuse to march when our young men and women are in harm’s way and when they come back our government does not take care of them?” she said.
She added, “The brave men and women [in the 1960s] did not lose heart. We can do no less.”
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March 7, 1965: `Bloody Sunday’ in Selma
On Sunday, March 7, 1965, some 600 people embarked on a march from Selma to the Alabama Capitol in Montgomery to protest voting discrimination against blacks. At the time, most Southern states effectively denied blacks the right to vote through discriminatory application of literacy tests, poll taxes and other measures.
The march was stopped at Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. Alabama state troopers attacked the non-violent protesters with billy clubs, bullwhips and tear gas. The attack was shown on national television, bringing the world’s attention to the struggle for voting rights. Ten days later, President Lyndon Johnson proposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which passed Congress later that year.
–Dahleen Glantonand Mike Dorning
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