10 famous faces from past Bloody Sunday commemorations in Selma
President Joe Biden is the latest in a long line of famous participants who have marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, to commemorate Bloody Sunday and honor the civil rights activists who secured the Black right to vote.
Of course, activists like John Lewis, Rosa Parks, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Rev. Al Sharpton and the family members of Martin Luther King Jr., have attended many Bridge Crossing Jubilees and celebrated the change they helped make. Biden also joined that celebration a decade ago when he was vice president.
Here are ten other big names who have marched across the bridge in the last 58 years.
Barack and Michelle Obama
On March 8, 2015, then-President Barack Obama and the First Family traveled to Selma to honor the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. He also attended the march eight years earlier while on the campaign trail for the 2008 Presidential Election.
In 2015, the president addressed the crowd at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge before leading them across it, hand-in-hand with civil rights icons John Lewis and Amelia Boynton Robinson. Both Lewis and Robinson suffered injuries on Bloody Sunday and returned years later to complete the march once again.
“There are places and moments in America where this nation’s destiny has been decided. Many are sites of war — Concord and Lexington, Appomattox, Gettysburg. Others are sites that symbolize the daring of America’s character — Independence Hall and Seneca Falls, Kitty Hawk and Cape Canaveral,” Obama said in his speech that day. “Selma is such a place.”
George W. and Laura Bush
Former President George W. Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush were also in attendance at the bridge crossing in 2015. While neither of them gave speeches, the former president posted photos from the event on social media. In his caption, he called Bloody Sunday “a seminal date in the history of human rights and dignity.”
The violence on Bloody Sunday was broadcast nationally in 1965, and it garnered support for the Voting Rights Act, which President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law that August. Almost 41 years later, in July of 2006, Bush signed the law’s reauthorization, as former President Ronald Reagan had done before him.
“The Voting Rights Act that broke the segregationist lock on the ballot box rose from the courage shown on a Selma bridge one Sunday afternoon in March of 1965,” Bush said in 2006. “In four decades since the Voting Rights Act was first passed, we've made progress toward equality, yet the work for a more perfect union is never ending. We'll continue to build on the legal equality won by the civil rights movement to help ensure that every person enjoys the opportunity that this great land of liberty offers.”
Bill and Hillary Clinton
Former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have visited Selma several times.
In 2000, President Clinton led the bridge crossing alongside Coretta Scott King.
“I loved that day in Selma. Once again, I was swept back across the years to my boyhood longing for and belief in America without a racial divide,” he later wrote in his autobiography. “Once again, I returned to the emotional core of my political life in saying farewell to the people who had done so much to nourish it: ‘As long as Americans are willing to hold hands, we can walk with any wind, we can cross any bridge. Deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome.’”
In 2007, he returned to the march with the former First Lady, who was a senator from New York at the time. She was on the campaign trail for the 2008 Presidential Election that year, and when the Clintons crossed the bridge, they were beside her opposition for the Democratic nomination, Barack Obama.
12 years later, after having ruled out another run for the Oval Office, Hillary Clinton traveled to Selma for Jubilee once again.
"Don't just come to Selma once a year," Clinton said in a speech inside Brown Chapel. "Don't just walk across the bridge. Don't just join hands and sing. We've got to get to work. That means registering each person and persuading them that their future depends on them showing up to vote."
Drew Barrymore
While in the process of making her documentary titled The Best Place to Start, actress Drew Barrymore attended the Selma Jubilee in 2003. She was on a mission to learn about the importance of elections and voting, and she started by interviewing children across the country about their understanding of politics.
She stopped in Selma the first weekend of March.
“That, for me, was the catalyst for making me feel like it was my responsibility [to vote],” she told CNN in 2016. “But not in a bad way, in a beautiful, blessed way. It was a blessing and a responsibility.”
Terrence Howard
Terrence Howard, a SAG award-winner for his role as Lucious Lyon on Empire, attended the Selma bridge crossing in 2010. He took the Evelyn Gibson Lowery Civil Rights Heritage Tour alongside Rev. Jesse Jackson, John Lewis and others.
Tony Bennett and Harry Belafonte
Grammy-winning singers Tony Bennett and Harry Belafonte participated in the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, led by Martin Luther King Jr.
Belafonte, Bennett’s close friend, was planning on marching after hearing about Bloody Sunday, and he called Bennett up to see if he wanted to join too. Bennett said yes.
Hadley Hitson covers the rural South for the Montgomery Advertiser and Report for America. She can be reached at hhitson@gannett.com.