In Selma, Biden stresses voting rights in face of divided Congress

SELMA, Ala. — President Biden came to this seminal site of the civil rights movement — one that led to the signing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 — to try to inject urgency into changing the country’s voting rights laws once more.

Standing near the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where on March 7, 1965, marchers advocating for voting rights were attacked by police in a day that has become known as “Bloody Sunday,” Biden said that the right to vote “was under assault” by a conservative Supreme Court, a host of state legislatures and those who continue to deny the 2020 presidential election results.

“As I come here in commemoration, not for show, Selma is a reckoning,” Biden said. “The right to vote and to have your vote counted is the threshold of democracy and liberty. With it, anything’s possible. Without it, without that right, nothing is possible. And this fundamental right remains under assault.”

Biden is attempting to elevate an issue that he unsuccessfully fought for since the start of his presidency, channeling evocative images to urge Congress to pass voting rights changes despite hardened political divisions on Capitol Hill.

He invoked the legacy of John Lewis, the late congressman and civil rights icon who was beaten on the bridge that Biden came to walk across 58 years later. The president and other leaders have pushed for legislation named after Lewis that would reauthorize parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013. The House passed a bill in 2021, but the measure failed to get a vote in the Senate. Prospects for the legislation this year appear grim after the GOP gained control of the House in the 2022 midterms.

After the speech, Biden walked with several dozen Black leaders, lawmakers, and others across the bridge, linking arms as an act of solidarity in a place once symbolizing strife. One member of the group led spiritual songs as they crossed and, once they crossed to the other side, the Rev. Mark Thompson offered a prayer to “make this the day we never leave Selma behind.”

t was here in 1965 where demonstrators, Lewis among the leaders, gathered several weeks after an Alabama trooper shot a young Black man named Jimmie Lee Jackson. As a 25-year-old Lewis and 600 others walked across the bridge, they were beaten with whips and billy clubs by Alabama state troopers at the start of what was supposed to be a 54-mile walk to the state capital in Montgomery.

The images of police brutality galvanized the nation. Shortly after, President Lyndon B. Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

It has been a place where others — including Biden himself — have come and called for a renewed fight for voting rights, pushing for more early voting or combating voter ID laws and other barriers that have been introduced since the 2020 election, particularly in states with GOP-controlled legislatures.

It was the first time Biden visited the site as president, and even in his long political career, he has only come here a handful of times. While civil rights had often been a point of pride for Biden in his early years in politics, it has also been a source of regret.

In 2013, when he delivered remarks as vice president to the nation’s first Black president, he made some unscripted remarks before joining the crowd in walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

“I regret — and although it’s not a part of what I’m supposed to say — I apologize it took me 48 years to get here,” Biden said. “I should have been here. It’s one of the regrets that I have and many in my generation have.”