Vice President Joe Biden led civil rights leaders and national political figures in a ceremonial crossing of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama this afternoon, the site where voting rights marchers were brutally beaten by police in 1965.
On live television Joe Biden put his arm around U.S. Representative John Lewis of Georgia, one of the original activists to be attacked by state troopers at the onset of the symbolic march to Montgomery 48 years ago.
Civil Rights Movement Co-Founder Dr. Ralph David Abernathy and his wife Mrs. Juanita Abernathy marched with John Lewis, Rev. Hosea Williams and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King as the Abernathy children marched on the front line.
Biden said Lewis and the other marchers showed that “courage and determination in the name of justice always prevails.”
DC teachers and students watched a pivotal action in civil rights history come back to life just as many of their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents watched, both live and on television 48 years ago.
More than 20 U.S. senators and representatives, Attorney General Eric Holder and veteran civil rights leaders including the Reverend Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, Sr. joined the historic re-enactment Sunday afternoon.
Approximately 5,000 people joined the re-enactment, 10 times the number of original marchers on the day in 1965 that has become known as "Bloody Sunday."
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