Biden to visit Selma for voting rights anniversary

 1664192973 
1677590942
A large group of people, including Joe Biden and John Lewis, walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.

Vice President Joe Biden and U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., lead a group across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., Sunday, March 3, 2013.

Dave Martin, AP Photo

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — President Joe Biden will travel to Alabama on Sunday to mark the 58th anniversary of a landmark event of the civil rights movement.

Biden will speak in Selma for the annual remembrance of “Bloody Sunday,” the day in 1965 that white police beat Black civil rights marchers as they attempted to cross the city’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. The White House announced the visit on Tuesday.

The visit comes as the city that served as a crucible of the civil rights movement is fighting to recover from a January tornado. The EF-2 twister, with winds of 130 mph, cut a wide swath and ripped through the city, destroying and severely damaging hundreds of homes.

Biden has twice visited Selma for the annual voting rights commemoration. Three years ago during the 2020 election he spoke at the city’s historic Brown Chapel AME Church hours after strong support from Black voters in South Carolina lifted Biden to his first primary victory. He also visited the city as vice president in 2013. In both stops, Biden warned of erosions to the protections for voting rights won in the city decades ago.

President Barack Obama in 2015 spoke in Selma to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1965 marches.

On March 7, 1965, Alabama state troopers beat and tear-gassed voting-rights demonstrators — including a young John Lewis — as they tried to cross the bridge over the Alabama River. Weeks later, the Rev. Martin Luther King successfully led marchers on the 50-mile march to the state capital of Montgomery.

The marches, and photos of the violent beatings on Bloody Sunday, galvanized Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that struck down impediments to voting by African-Americans and ended all-white rule in the American South.

The annual commemoration has become a regular stop for politicians to pay homage to the fight for voting rights in America and to court Black voters in election years.

Rep. Terri Sewell, the only Democrat in Alabama’s congressional delegation, urged Biden, when she greeted him following his State of the Union address, to visit Selma to see the tornado damage in the city.

“What I asked him was to come to Selma, to see first-hand and to help Selma,” Sewell said earlier this month.

 

There was no rapture this week, so the quiz returns. Can you score a perfect 11?

This week, Jimmy Kimmel returned, a weird statue vanished and no one (to our knowledge) got snatched up to heaven.

Trump’s TikTok deal payment criticized as ‘shake-down scheme’ by experts

The U.S. government will collect a multibillion-dollar fee from the American investors who will take over TikTok. Some experts call the fee and other deals like it "extortion."

What schools stand to lose in the battle over the next federal education budget

Education researchers warn budget proposals from the White House and House Republicans would impose steep cuts on some of the nation's most vulnerable students and disadvantaged school communities.

I remember doing the Time Warp: The ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’ turns 50

Fifty years ago, on Sept. 26, 1975, The Rocky Horror Picture Show flopped at the U.S. box office — then became the longest-running theatrical release in history.

Fired feds, Trump lovers and veterans: Meet the people applying for ICE jobs

At a recent DHS career expo in Provo, Utah, many attendees hoped to get hired to help with the Trump administration's deportation efforts.

Trump’s Tylenol warning echoes past misconceptions about mothers and autism

Medical scholars say, efforts to find a singular cause for autism has historically led to scrutinizing parents and fueling stigma about autism

More Front Page Coverage