Mar 9, 2015 4 min read

Fifty years ago, as tear gas filled the air on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., and brutal police tactics were being unleashed upon African-American citizens seeking basic rights, the prospect that the United States would ever have a black president seemed altogether unreal, like something that could only transpire in some novel like “The Man,” an Irving Wallace potboiler that had hit bookstore shelves the year before.

It’s a mark of how much progress America has made since March 1965 that it took only 43 years from that point for America to elect an African-American to the nation’s highest office. Some of the younger protesters who were there on that bridge on “Bloody Sunday” lived to see it. And President Obama acknowledged the enormous distance the country has traveled over the last half-century in an eloquent address Saturday afternoon at a commemoration of the march on Selma.

“We do a disservice to the cause of justice by intimating that bias and discrimination are immutable, or that racial division is inherent in America,” Obama said. “If you think nothing’s changed in the past 50 years, ask somebody who lived through the Selma or Chicago or L.A. of the Fifties. Ask the female CEO who once might have been assigned to the secretarial pool if nothing has changed. Ask your gay friend if it’s easier to be out and proud in America now than it was 30 years ago. To deny this progress – our progress – would be to rob us of our own agency; our responsibility to do what we can to make America better.”

But both Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, who followed the president with an address in Selma on Sunday, acknowledged the work still to be done. The report by the Justice Department on the tactics and disposition of the police force in Ferguson, Mo., in the months and years before the shooting last summer of the young, unarmed black man Michael Brown was cited, though Obama cautioned that the conduct of the police in that St. Louis suburb was “not unique, but it’s no longer endemic, or sanctioned by law and custom; and before the civil rights movement, it most surely was.”

The president and the attorney general also noted the pernicious intent of voter ID laws that have been approved in several states which are designed to dampen turnout by blacks and other minorities under the guise of fighting “voter fraud,” which is a virtually nonexistent problem that was never in need of a solution so stringent. In Pennsylvania, a proposed voter ID law was thankfully ruled unconstitutional. Meanwhile, a 2013 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act, the law that so many of the protesters at the Edmund Pettus Bridge were fighting for 50 years ago.

“It has been clear in recent years that fair and free access to the franchise is still, in some areas, under siege,” Holder said, adding, “We will march on until the self-evident truth of equality is made real for every American. We will march on until every citizen is afforded his or her fundamental right to vote.”

One assumes the thousands of marchers who descended on Selma this weekend were in agreement with Holder. We all should be.

We do a disservice to all those people who fought for civil rights five decades ago when we curtail the ability of Americans to cast a ballot. And we also do a disservice to them when we fail to acknowledge the work that still needs to be done to make America a more equal, just and fair society.