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| Thousands of residents await the arrival of Vice President Joe Biden for the annual Bridge Crossing Ceremony in Selma, Ala., Sunday, March 3, 2013. Biden is traveling to Selma on Sunday to participate in the Bridge Crossing Jubilee. The event commemorates the 1965 march, which prompted Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act and add millions of African-Americans to Southern voter rolls. |
SELMA, Ala.
(AP) -- The vice president and black leaders commemorating a famous
civil rights march on Sunday said efforts to diminish the impact of
African-Americans' votes haven't stopped in the years since the
1965
Voting Rights Act added millions to Southern voter rolls.
More
than 5,000 people followed Vice President Joe Biden and U.S. Rep. John
Lewis, D-Ga., across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma's annual Bridge
Crossing Jubilee. The event commemorates the "Bloody Sunday" beating of
voting rights marchers - including a young Lewis - by state troopers as
they began a march to Montgomery in March 1965. The 50-mile march
prompted Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act that struck down
impediments to voting by African-Americans and ended all-white rule in
the South.
Biden, the first sitting vice
president to participate in the annual re-enactment, said nothing shaped
his consciousness more than watching TV footage of the beatings. "We
saw in stark relief the rank hatred, discrimination and violence that
still existed in large parts of the nation," he said.
Biden
said marchers "broke the back of the forces of evil," but that
challenges to voting rights continue today with restrictions on early
voting and voter registration drives and enactment of voter ID laws
where no voter fraud has been shown.
"We will never give up or give in," Lewis told marchers.
Jesse
Jackson said Sunday's event had a sense of urgency because the U.S.
Supreme Court heard a request Wednesday by a mostly white Alabama county
to strike down a key portion of the Voting Rights Act.
"We've had the right to vote 48 years, but they've never stopping trying to diminish the impact of the votes," Jackson said.
Referring
to the Voting Rights act, the Rev. Al Sharpton said: "We are not here
for a commemoration. We are here for a continuation."
The
Supreme Court is weighing Shelby County's challenge to a portion of the
law that requires states with a history of racial discrimination,
mostly in the Deep South, to get approval from the Justice Department
before implementing any changes in election laws. That includes
everything from new voting districts to voter ID laws.
Attorneys
for Shelby County argued that the pre-clearance requirement is outdated
in a state where one-fourth of the Legislature is black. But Jackson
predicted the South will return to gerrymandering and more at-large
elections if the Supreme Court voids part of the law.
Attorney
General Eric Holder, the defendant in Shelby County's suit, told
marchers that the South is far different than it was in 1965 but is not
yet at the point where the most important part of the voting rights act
can be dismissed as unnecessary.
Martin Luther
King III, whose father led the march when it resumed after Bloody
Sunday, said, "We come here not to just celebrate and observe but to
recommit."
One of the NAACP attorneys who
argued the case, Debo Adegbile, said when Congress renewed the Voting
Rights Act in 2006, it understood that the act makes sure minority
inclusion is considered up front.
"It reminds
us to think consciously about how we can include all our citizens in
democracy. That is as important today as it was in 1965," he said.
Adegbile
said the continued need for the law was shown in 2011 when undercover
recordings from a bribery investigation at the Alabama Legislature
included one white legislator referring to blacks as "aborigines" and
other white legislators laughing.
"This was 2011. This was not 1965," he said.
