On Selma anniversary, Obama says racial progress made but more needed

By Jeff Mason SELMA, Ala. (Reuters) - With a nod to ongoing U.S. racial tension and threats to voting rights, President Barack Obama declared the work of the Civil Rights Movement advanced but unfinished on Saturday during a visit to the Alabama bridge that spawned a landmark voting law. Obama, the first black U.S. president, said discrimination by law enforcement officers in Ferguson, Missouri, showed a lot of work needed to be done on race in America, but he warned it was wrong to suggest that progress had not been made. "Fifty years from Bloody Sunday, our march is not yet finished, but we're getting closer," Obama said, standing near the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where police and state troopers beat and fired tear gas at peaceful marchers who were advocating against racial discrimination at the voting booth. The event became known as "Bloody Sunday" and prompted a follow-up march led by civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. that spurred the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

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