Civil-rights figures and a bipartisan congressional delegation walked across an Alabama bridge with a throng of thousands to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Selma voting-rights marches that opened ballot boxes to blacks across the US South.
Among those participating on Sunday was Coretta Scott King, whose husband, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., led a 1965 march to the state capitol after participants in an earlier march were turned back by law enforcement.
"The freedom we won here in Selma and on the road to Mont-gomery was purchased with the precious blood of many," said King, who crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in a car.
Police estimated the crowd at nearly 10,000.
Others on hand to commemorate the marches across the bridge included singer Harry Belafonte, who also took part in the demonstration 40 years ago; the Reverend Jesse Jackson; Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and Lynda Johnson Robb, whose father, former US president Lyndon Johnson, signed the Voting Rights Act into law in 1965.
"President Johnson signed that act, but it was written by the people of Selma," said Congressman John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat who was clubbed on the head during the "Bloody Sunday" attack on marchers by state troopers and sheriff's deputies on March 7, 1965.
He was among 17 blacks hospitalized as that march was turned back while crossing the bridge.
A second march two weeks later, under the protection of a federal court order and led by King, went 80km from the bridge over the Alabama River to the steps of the state capitol in Montgomery.
The attack and the marches inspired passage of the Voting Rights Act, which barred obstacles such as literacy tests that were set up by segregationists to keep blacks from registering to vote.
A re-enactment of the five-day march is planned, culminating with a rally at the Capitol this Saturday.
Currently, 74 percent of voting-age blacks in Alabama are listed as active voters. That compares with 77 percent of voting-age whites, based on figures compiled by the secretary of state and the Census Bureau's estimates of voting-age residents.
In March 1965, only 19.3 percent of eligible blacks were registered in Alabama, compared with 69.2 percent of whites.
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