Selma March 50 Years Later

Dr.Martin Luther King called Bloody Sunday “the greatest confrontation so far in the South”

Selma March 50 Years Later

Saturday, March 7, 2015

Saturday marked the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when peaceful civil rights protesters marched across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Ala. only to be brutally beaten by police on the other side. The Obama family, along with members of Congress and civil rights leaders, made a symbolic walk across the bridge (Times Sat 3.7.15)

President Obama spoke before thousands on Saturday during a commemorative ceremony for the 50th anniversary of the events of “Bloody Sunday” when over 600 non-violent protesters were attacked by Alabama state troopers as they attempted to march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights.

Here is the full text of Saturday’s speech, as prepared for delivery

President Barack Obama speaks in front of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. on March 7, 2015.  Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

President Barack Obama’s Speech:






President Barack Obama hugged his fellow speaker congressman John Lewis, who was injured at Selma 50 years ago, on Saturday, March 7, 2015

President Barack Obama’s Speech



Selma is such a place.          




President Barack Obama’s Speech



President Barack Obama’s Speech



“We shall overcome.”


Some 40,000 people came to watch the president speak at the foot of the Edmund Pettus bridge

President Barack Obama’s Speech



President Barack Obama led a crowd onto the bridge to mark the 50th anniversary of the civil rights march

President Barack Obama’s Speech




President Barack Obama’s Speech






President Barack Obama’s Speech




President Barack Obama’s Speech




President Barack Obama’s Speech

What a glorious thing, Dr. King might say.

What a solemn debt we owe.





President Barack Obama’s Speech



President Barack Obama’s Speech






President Barack Obama’s Speech






President Barack Obama’s Speech













John Lewis fifty years ago at The Selma civil rights march in Alabama on March 7, 1965, when security forces attacked black demonstrators, called “Bloody Sunday”.

President Barack Obama’s Speech








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Most of the media applauded President Barack Obama’s speech, which rings all over the land on radio and television in the households of families.  I hope it rings in the jails where the majority of inmates are African American and many of them very young.

I hope it rings in the poor neighborhoods of Newark, New Jersey, Chicago, Illinois, Detroit, Michigan, and other poor black and white communities.  There is an almost 40% unemployment rate among AfricanAmerican youths.  I wonder how many of these young people and their poor families will listen to President Barack Obama speech.

One part of President Obama speech states the following.


Do we think the unemployed poor and their families will worry about going to vote for their rights?  Their priority is to find money in any way they can for their food and other expenses for survival.

The government and most of the politicians outside of government are only concerned about the middle class therefore they are not going to get the votes of the poor  Besides lacking money, the poor also lack education not in the traditional form of a university degree but in the education of common sense.  How can we get politicians to listen to the voice of the poor, not only the middle class?  How can we make them announce in their campaigned advertisements or any speeches that they are going to fight for the rights of the poor.  I never hear politicians announce in their campaigned that they want to help the poor.  I only hear that they are going to help the middle class.  The poor citizens are left to rot in their own neighborhoods only use the police to patrol the parameter in order to prevent them from coming out cause trouble for the rich and the middle class.

When the pressures inside the poor are so great they are going to explode and it will burst out all over the country.  Groups of poor people will grow bigger and bigger and eventually will be a majority of the population of the country.  I only hope that it will not be like the French revolution that used the Galantine to chop off heads of Royalty and the bourgeoisie.

It is so sad that a group of congress members cut down the food stamp budget but kept the farm subsidize budget for rich families and themselves to profit.  According to records, a lot of poor children rely on food stamps for their daily food consumption. If this group of congress members does not feel sympathy toward poor adults, should they at least be concerned about children?  Maybe they lack concern because the children cannot vote and they have no voice.  These congress members cut the food stamp budget that helps the poor by millions but promote war which will cost billions or even trillions.

Some people abuse the poor by taking their money to gain revenue such as administrators of the city of Ferguson.  The poor have hard time earning money to buy food and pay rent for living quarters for themselves, their children, and family, but they still get abused by authority and the rich, who do so without shame.  Where is their integrity?

If the poor ask for mercy from authority, such as the Supreme Court, but the five member majority of the Supreme Court say that corporations are people too.  Do you think that the corporations that have budgets in billions and can donate money in millions to politicians of their preference are the same as the poor who need food stamps for their children?  Do you think that corporations are the same as the 40% of unemployed black youths?

 In general groups of the same ethnicity tend to support each other because they understand each other and have similar experiences. Supreme Court Justice Clearance Thomas used the Affirmative Action policy when he studied at Yale Law School.  Now he is in the highest position of the land and his decisions will make differences to help the poor and minorities. But he says that the US does not need an Affirmative Action Policy, because there are no longer problems of racism in America..  I wish he had studied the reports from Attorney General Eric Holder about how the city of Ferguson abused the poor, especially black citizens.  The city of Ferguson is only one small city.  We do not know how many more cities practice the same policy.

We still need Affirmative Action and need to help the poor because society is still not equal.  Yes, there are many who have tried to improve the situation. But some minority people are selfish and greedy.  We need to convince these people not to be penny wise and pound foolish. Spending money to help the poor feed their children and families, pay for places to live and education for their children will eventually allow them to work for the rich and for corporations and will allow them to pay tax helping to increase the revenue for  government expenses.

The rich and corporations need educated workers.  If they do not help educate the poor how are they are going to get workers in America?  We do not want poor children to starve.  Uneducated children become desperate adults and we know what desperate people can do.  It is not good to be rich without peace because there will be no peace if the majority of people are poor and desperate.

As we see all around the world many countries are fighting with each other for different reasons.  Most of the fighting is between the minority rich and majority poor.  There is no peace between these countries or within these counties.

The United States will try to learn and try to improve the situation for the country to be more fair and equal.  One of the primary goals is to help the poor survive and become educated so they can see the validity of voting.  Their votes will be meaningful and significant.  They will be able to vote for politicians that are honest and want to serve all the people rather than politicians that serve only those that donate large sum of money for their own benefit.

Ing-On Vibulbhan-Watts, Friday, March 16, 2015

For more information please visit the following links:

President Barack Obama Praises Selma’s ExampleObama Cabinet: We Don’t Use Only Personal EmailBlack Teen Shot Dead by Wisconsin Cop Was Unarmed NBC News‘Our March Is Not Yet Finished,’ Obama Says in Selma NBC NewsRising Panda Numbers Are Tempered By a Virus NBC News

Credit: NPR



The Crisis in Black and Brown Youth Unemployment


Total incarceration in the United States by year



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DOJ Finds Pattern of Racial Discrimination in Ferguson Police

Affirmative action

Clarence Thomas

In 2009’s Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder, Thomas was the sole dissenter, voting in favor of throwing out Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Section 5 requires states with a history of racial voter discrimination—mostly states from the old South—to get Justice Department clearance when revising election procedures. Though Congress had reauthorized Section 5 in 2006 for another 25 years, Thomas said the law was no longer necessary, pointing out that the rate of black voting in seven Section 5 states was higher than the national average. Thomas said “the violence, intimidation and subterfuge that led Congress to pass Section 5 and this court to uphold it no longer remains.”[130] He again took this position in Shelby County v. Holder, voting with the majority and concurring with the reasoning which struck down Section 5.[131]

Equal protection and affirmative action

Thomas believes that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment forbids consideration of race, such as race-based affirmative action or preferential treatment. In Adarand Constructors v. Peña, for example, he wrote “there is a ‘moral [and] constitutional equivalence’ between laws designed to subjugate a race and those that distribute benefits on the basis of race in order to foster some current notion of equality. Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law. That [affirmative action] programs may have been motivated, in part, by good intentions cannot provide refuge from the principle that under our Constitution, the government may not make distinctions on the basis of race.”[150]

Among the nine justices, Thomas was the second most likely to uphold free speech claims (tied with David Souter), as of 2002.[132] He has voted in favor of First Amendment claims in cases involving a wide variety of issues, including pornography, campaign contributions, political leafleting, religious speech, and commercial speech.

On occasion, however, he has disagreed with free speech claimants. For example, he dissented in Virginia v. Black, a case that struck down part of a Virginia statute that banned cross burning. Concurring in Morse v. Frederick, he argued that students’ free speech rights in public schools are limited.[133]

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French Revolution

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