President Joe Biden will visit Alabama on Sunday to commemorate the 58th anniversary of the landmark Bloody Sunday march that galvanized the Civil Rights movement and helped lead to an expansion of voting rights.
Biden’s stop in Selma comes as he and fellow Democrats struggle to pass their own sweeping voting rights measures, with dim prospects of passage in a Republican-controlled House of Representatives.
Still, Biden plans to make fresh calls for new voting protections when he speaks from the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where in 1965 a group of civil rights marchers were beaten by White state troopers as they attempted to cross.
The president will participate in the yearly walk across the bridge to commemorate the events, which sparked outrage and helped rally support behind the Voting Rights Act. Among the protesters beaten was the late US Rep. John Lewis.
Aside from its place in history, Selma is also still recovering from devastating tornadoes that struck two months ago.
It’s not Biden’s first time attending the anniversary events in Selma; in 2020, during his run for the presidency, he spoke at historic Brown Chapel AME Church as he worked to court Black voters ahead of Super Tuesday.
“We’ve been dragged backward and we’ve lost ground. We’ve seen all too clearly that if you give hate any breathing room it comes back,” he said in his speech then.
Biden would go on to win the Democratic nomination and the presidency, due in large part to his support from Black voters.
Last year, Vice President Kamala Harris represented the administration at the anniversary event. She said she and Biden had “put the full power of the executive branch behind our shared effort” while criticizing Republican lawmakers for voting to block passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act.
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