Selma marks 50th anniversary of march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge

President Barack Obama says America's racial history "still casts its long shadow" despite a half-century of progress toward a more perfect union.

In Selma, Alabama, Obama stood in solidarity and remembrance Saturday with survivors of a civil rights era that he was too young to know.

He joined civil rights marchers of 50 years ago at the bridge where police brutality on "Bloody Sunday" galvanized America's opposition to racial oppression in the South and hastened passage of historic voting rights for minorities.

Thousands from across the U.S. packed the riverside town for commemorations of the march on March 7, 1965.

Obama said in his prepared remarks that police discrimination against blacks is not confined to Ferguson, Missouri — but that it's also no longer endemic or sanctioned by law in America. (AP)


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