America
Obama says, fight against racism in US not over
Washington, March 8
US President Barack
Obama said Saturday that the fight against racism in the US is not yet
over, during a speech in Selma, Alabama on the 50th anniversary of the
peaceful march of African Americans demanding the right to vote, which
was the catalyst of the Voting Rights Act.
"We know the march is
not yet over," the president said to the thousands of people on the
Edmund Pettus Bridge where the activists were harshly repressed by
police in 1965, an incident that has gone down in history as "Bloody
Sunday."
"We just need to open our eyes, and ears, and hearts, to
know that this nation's racial history still casts its long shadow upon
us," Obama said.
The president referred to cases like that of
Michael Brown, an 18-year-old African American who was shot and killed
August last year on a street of Ferguson, Missouri, by a white policeman
in an incident that sparked protests, disturbances and a national
debate about police racism.
This week the Department of Justice
published a report accusing the Ferguson Police Department of racial
discrimination and of systematically violating the civil rights of the
black population, with arrests for no apparent reason and the excessive
use of force.
"Selma teaches us, too, that action requires that
we shed our cynicism. For when it comes to the pursuit of justice, we
can afford neither complacency nor despair," the president said