Barack Obama Selma 50th anniversary speech
A few days earlier, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani had made remarks about whether President Obama loved America, leading Keenan to suggest that the speech focus on patriotism.
[4] The first draft was completed on March 5, two days before the address, and Obama instructed Keenan to add references to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman.
[5] He spoke of how the marches led to the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, "echoing their call for America and the world to hear: 'We shall overcome'".
He stated, "Selma is not some outlier in the American experience", but is "the manifestation of a creed written into our founding documents", quoting the Preamble to the United States Constitution: We the People...in order to form a more perfect union.We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.Obama then addressed the motivations behind the Civil Rights Movement, an "American instinct that led these young men and women to pick up the torch and cross this bridge".
Young people in Soweto would hear Bobby Kennedy talk about ripples of hope and eventually banish the scourge of apartheid.
[6]Continuing, Obama talked about the impact of campaigns such as the Selma marches, saying "the change these men and women wrought is visible here today in the presence of African Americans who run boardrooms, who sit on the bench, who serve in elected office from small towns to big cities; from the Congressional Black Caucus all the way to the Oval Office".
[6] Turning to the present day, Obama discussed the events of Ferguson, stating that the Department of Justice's report "evoked the kind of abuse and disregard for citizens that spawned the Civil Rights Movement."
However he "rejected the notion that nothing's changed", citing the de jure, and practical, advances in civil rights on the basis of race, gender and sexuality.
He praised the bipartisan efforts that contributed to the Act, citing the renewals of the bill that Presidents Reagan and Bush signed into law.
He called upon the 100 members of congress present to "go back to Washington and gather four hundred more, and together, pledge to make it their mission to restore that law this year.
