Obama says racial history still casts shadow on the nation

SELMA (Xinhua) - Half a century after the violent civil rights movement - known as the "Bloody Sunday" - - shocked the United States into awareness and provoked changes in equal rights for African-Americans, US President Barack Obama said on Saturday that the racial history still casts its shadow on the nation.

"A more common mistake is to suggest that racism is banished, that the work that drew men and women to Selma is complete, and that whatever racial tensions remain are a consequence of those seeking to play the 'race card' for their own purposes," said Obama at the 50th anniversary of "Bloody Sunday", the day in 1965 when police attacked activists demonstrating for voting rights for the black community.

"We don't need the Ferguson report to know that's not true. We just need to open our eyes, and ears, and hearts, to know that this nation's racial history still casts its long shadow upon us," Obama said.

The commemoration came at a time when the United States was thrust into heated debates about injustice in the US Justice system that victimized black communities.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) earlier this week released an investigation report into the Ferguson policing practices and found that a prevailing pattern of racial bias existed among the local police department and other law enforcement agencies in Ferguson, Missouri.

According to the report, apart from the excessive and unjustified use of force against black communities, Ferguson law enforcement officials, including the Municipal court officials, systematically relying on unlawful and hefty fine on the black community to create revenue increases.

"The notion that you would use a law enforcement agency or law enforcement generally to generate revenue, and then the callous way in which that was done and the impact that it had on the lives of the ordinary citizens of that municipality was just appalling," said US Attorney General Eric Holder on Friday.

The DOJ report concluded that the biased policing had created a lack of trust between the Ferguson Police Department and significant portions of Ferguson's residents, especially African- Americans.

"Together, we can raise the level of mutual trust that policing is built on - the idea that police officers are members of the communities they risk their lives to protect, and citizens in Ferguson and New York and Cleveland just want the same thing young people here marched for - the protection of the law," Obama said in an upbeat speech in Selma.

However, a new poll conducted by the US TV networks CNN suggested a rather dismal picture of racial relations under the presidency of the first African-American president.

According to the CNN/ORC poll, four in 10 Americans believe that racial relations have become worse under Obama's presidency, while the ratio was only 6 percent in May 2009.