In Selma, McCain Recalls Civil Rights March

SELMA, Ala., April 21, 2008— -- Far from the Democratic battlefield of Pennsylvania, Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, was campaigning where GOP candidates for president rarely go because they don't have to.

McCain chose Alabama, one of the reddest states on the Electoral College map, to launch a week-long swing through some of the nation's economically distressed areas.

Even more extraordinary, McCain went to Selma, the site of one of the most notorious episodes of the Civil Rights movement, and talked about that episode.

Instead of a standard stump speech, he used vivid imagery to describe a dark chapter in the city's racially-divided history. When Republicans running for president campaign in the South, they don't often raise the uncomfortable subject of its racially segregated and violent past.

"Forty-three years ago, an army of more than 500 marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, an army that brought with them no weapons, which intended no destruction, that sought to conquer no people or land," McCain said standing a few hundred yards away from bridge, bathed in the warm spring sunlight.

"They were people who believed in America, in the promise of America," he said. "And they believed in a better America. They were patriots, the best kind of patriots."

On March 7, 1965, the protesters, almost all of them black, had gathered to march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery.

They never made it across the bridge. At its crest, police and state troopers attacked them, unleashing a vicious assault on the demonstrators that was captured on film. When it was shown on television, it shocked the nation. March 7 would come to be known as Bloody Sunday.

Selma is now a small, decaying city of 20,000 people, nearly 70 percent of whom are African-American. About 100 of Selma's residents gathered on a bluff above the Alabama River to hear McCain speak. No more than a dozen of them were black.

McCain was asked about the small turnout of African-Americans and if it reflected his difficulty in appealing to them for votes.

"I'm aware of the challenges," he said. "I'm aware of the fact that there will be many people who will not vote for me. But I'm going to be the president of all the people and I will work for all of the people and I will listen to all of the people, whether they decide to vote for me or not. ... I am aware that the African-American vote has been very small in favor of the Republican Party."