President Obama Delivers Remarks on the 50th Anniversary of the Selma Marches

“The Americans who crossed this bridge, they were not physically imposing. But they gave courage to millions.”

“They held no elected office. But they led a nation. They marched as Americans who had endured hundreds of years of brutal violence, countless daily indignities — but they didn’t seek special treatment, just the equal treatment promised to them almost a century before.”

“What they did here will reverberate through the ages. Not because the change they won was preordained; not because their victory was complete; but because they proved that nonviolent change is possible, that love and hope can conquer hate.”

President Obama delivers remarks from the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 2015.

“What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this, what greater form of patriotism is there than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?”

“We know the march is not yet over. We know the race is not yet won. We know that reaching that blessed destination where we are judged, all of us, by the content of our character requires admitting as much, facing up to the truth. “We are capable of bearing a great burden,” James Baldwin once wrote, “once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.””

Read the full speech at www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/barackobama/barackobamaselma50anniversarymarch.htm.