UPDATE: 4.30PM ET SAT – President Obama delivered a remarkable speech – one that some observers said the best of his Presidency – at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Saturday afternoon. It was, one commentator said, a love letter to America and to the next generation.
MIDNIGHT FRI:
(image: Spider Martin – Two Minute Warning) NPR: Photographer Helped Expose Brutality of Selma’s Bloody Sunday
Saturday sees the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when police viciously attacked protest marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.
(image: Selma50)
In the New York Times, Gay Talese returns to the scene he covered as a reporter in 1965 and writes how the town still “defies neat storylines.”
CBS’s Bill Plante was also there that day, and, fifty years later, spoke to other witnesses to this “watershed moment in the civil rights movement.” NBC talks with the day’s youngest marcher.
One of the leaders of the march, Georgia Congressman John Lewis told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell recently: “We were prepared to die for what we believed in.”
MSNBC looks at how events that day changed America forever, while the Washington Post considers how far the nation has still to go, particularly in the wake of this week’s Justice Department report into racial discrimination in Ferguson, Missouri.
Politico hosts a discussion on race and justice in the millennial age, and asks: is Ferguson the new Selma?
The events of Bloody Sunday proved to be a catalyst for the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but as Aamer Madhani writes in USA Today: “in moves that activists call sweeping erosions of voting rights that disproportionately affect minority communities, several states have passed more stringent voter ID rules after the Supreme Court in 2013 struck down a key provision of the landmark legislation that was birthed with the blood and sweat of the Selma protesters.”
In Echoes of Selma at CNN John Blake looks at whether Martin Luther King’s greatest victory is being undone.
President Obama will travel to Alabama to mark the anniversary, where he is expected to lay out what he sees as the next steps in Americans’ fight for equality. Civil rights is an “unfinished project” the President said on Friday. Don Gonyea at NPR writes:
It’s the kind of moment rich with history — a moment to reflect on a searing date in the civil rights struggle, and to do so with the nation’s first African-American president taking center stage at the memorial ceremonies. It’s a time and place to reflect on where we have been and where we have come as a nation. But also to ponder the future for Barack Obama and whether the discussion of race and inequality will become major themes of his post-presidency, which begins in less than two years.
Senior Republican politicians had drawn criticism by plans to skip the event, before House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a friend of Rep Lewis, said he would attend.
And, finally;
The Overnight Note 