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Hopefuls battle for black vote
05/03/2007 12:25 - (SA)
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| Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton smiles while waiting to speak at a church service in Selma, Alabama. (Kevin Glackmeyer, AP) |
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Selma, Alabama - US Democratic presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama took to separate church pulpits on Sunday, using a civil rights commemoration to battle for support among the country's crucial black electorate.
Speaking at churches less than a block apart, Clinton and Obama both credited the seminal Selma, Alabama march against racial segregation 42 years ago with opening the door to their own political careers, as they vie for the Democratic nomination next year.
"I'm here because somebody marched. I'm here because you all sacrificed for me," said Obama, who hopes to become the nation's first black president.
For her part, Clinton, explaining that the movement opened doors to women in many areas as well, said: "I know where my chance came from, and I am grateful to all of you, who gave it to me."
They then laid aside the already-growing enmity between their campaigns, and - together with Hillary's husband, former president Bill Clinton - led thousands of people in a symbolic march across Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge, where state troops and police in 1965 brutally beat hundreds of demonstrators marching for voting rights for disenfranchised blacks.
With the brutality, shown nationwide on television, turning into a national scandal, later that year president Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act to ensure blacks were no longer prevented from voting.
Civil rights movement
Obama won standing ovations as he paid homage in his church speech to the "giants" who led the civil rights movement.
The son of a Kenyan father and a white American mother, he sought to answer sceptics who doubt that he understands the experience of African-Americans.
He credited the civil rights struggle with creating the circumstances which allowed his parents to flout racist conventions in their mixed-race marriage.
"Not only is my career the result of the work of the men and women who we honour here today, my very existence might not have been possible had it not been for some of the folks here today," he said to an overflow audience including major figures from the civil rights era.
"So don't tell me I don't have a claim on Selma, Alabama ... I'm here because somebody marched. I'm here because you all sacrificed for me. I stand on the shoulders of giants," said Obama.
Clinton, who seeks to become the first US female president, earned a similarly enthusiastic reception at the First Baptist Church nearby, where she delivered a rousing speech praising Martin Luther King, the black leader who organised the 1965 protest.
"Dr King said quality for African-Americans would also free white Americans of the staining legacy of slavery. And so it has."
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