Sunday in Selma

March 3, 2007 — -- Bloody Sunday. March 7, 1965. The day state and local police clubbed and tear-gassed 600 peaceful marchers, black and white, as they tried to begin their 50-mile march from Selma to Alabama's state capital, Montgomery. It's a major part of the story of the struggle for civil rights.

This Sunday it will be hard to separate history from present-day politics. Two hard-charging presidential contenders, Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, will be in Selma. So will former president Bill Clinton. The organizers of the 42nd anniversary commemoration first said the former president was not expected to attend. Then came late word he would be there after all. Sen. Clinton's aides deny that she belatedly decided she needed her husband for more political firepower.

The former president will be inducted into the Hall of Fame at Selma's National Voting Rights Museum. A spokesman said he rearranged his schedule so he could accept the honor in person.

Before that ceremony both his wife and Obama will speak at different churches. Obama will speak at historic Brown Chapel AME Church where civil rights activists gathered before their march. At the same time Senator Clinton will speak at the First Baptist Church.

Even this early in the campaign Senators Clinton and Obama are aggressively courting the votes of African-Americans. But few political observers believe either will make a direct pitch for votes in Selma, which is hallowed ground for those who painfully recall the blood spilled there.

Democratic Rep. John Lewis remembers: "They stampeded us with whips, nightsticks and horses. They tear-gassed us. They turned our non-violent protest into blood." A state trooper clubbed Lewis until he was unconscious. Lewis has not decided which Democrat he will support in the upcoming campaign, but he says he is pleased that the two rivals will both come to Selma.

Both Clinton and Obama will have to calibrate their speeches to the mood of the thousands who will come for the ceremonies including the annual march across what was once the most famous, or infamous, bridge in America, the Edmund Pettus bridge. Two days after Bloody Sunday Martin Luther King Jr. led marchers to the bridge, but told them to go no further because of a court order prohibiting the march to the Montgomery. Later that day, a white clergyman from Boston who had come to join the march was fatally injured by attackers.

A federal judge ruled a third march to Montgomery could go ahead. It did. On March 25, Dr. King delivered a stirring speech from the Capitol steps. On August 6 President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act.

In 2000 Bill Clinton, then president, spoke to a large throng in Selma: "It has been said that the Voting Rights Act was signed in ink in Washington. But it was signed in blood in Selma."

Thirty-five years after Bloody Sunday politicians well realize the importance of the "black vote." Some months ago Hillary Clinton's camp felt she could count on overwhelming black support, partly because of the popularity of her husband. Obama's entry into the race has dramatically cut into that support.

In ABC/Washington Post polls of African-Americans taken in December and January Clinton held a solid 60 percent to 20 percent lead over Obama. But, as blacks learned more about him, they became enthusiastic. In ABC News' most recent poll Obama had moved ahead of Clinton, 44 percent to 33 percent.

Sen. Clinton's campaign aides hope she can halt this slide, partly by going to Selma. If nothing else, she can try to show she is not afraid to go head-to-head against Obama in a setting so important to African-Americans and to all Americans who care deeply about the civil rights struggle. She is expected to say that more must be done in the struggle.

Sen. Obama told ABC News that " … when I was born in 1961, most blacks in the South still weren't voting. Many were still using separate facilities. And for me now to be sitting here as (a) United States Senator and a presidential candidate is astonishing." But, he added, "We still see the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow in the gaps in healthcare, in the achievement gap in education."

In 1965 Alabama's white establishment would have been stunned to know that a man of mixed-race would make a serious run for the presidency. They probably would have been equally stunned that a woman of any race would also be a serious contender. This Sunday will be historic, but in a very different way from the violence of Bloody Sunday.