The black-and-white images that flickered across television sets from that Bloody Sunday in Selma horrified the nation.
Alabama state troopers savagely clubbing peaceful marchers as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The screams of terror. The thick clouds of tear gas. The deputies on horseback, chasing frightened men, women and children back across the steel-arched structure. Beating them again and again with clubs, whips and rubber tubing wrapped in barbed wire.
On that ghastly day, “we saw in stark relief the hatred, discrimination and violence that still existed in large parts of the nation,” Joe Biden, then the vice president, said in 2013 during a ceremony commemorating the voting-rights demonstration.
Biden, now the president, returns to Selma on Sunday to mark the 58th anniversary of the march, now regarded as one of the defining moments in the nation’s civil rights movement. He will deliver remarks at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and participate in the re-enactment of the bridge crossing.
