Hundreds Come Together In Selma

SELMA, Ala. (AP) - Eric Holder, the nation's first black
attorney general, and Gov. George C. Wallace's daughter celebrated
the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march Sunday - 44 years after
state troopers from her father's administration beat marchers
starting the landmark journey.
Peggy Wallace Kennedy introduced Holder at a historic Selma
church filled to overflowing, calling the meeting, "reconciliation
and redemption."
Selma's annual Bridge Crossing Jubilee, commemorating the 1965
voting rights march, brought together civil rights leaders Jesse
Jackson, Al Sharpton and Joseph Lowery in addition to the attorney
general and several members of Congress, including Georgia Rep.
John Lewis, who was beaten in the original Selma march.
Holder and Kennedy embraced at Brown Chapel AME Church, where
marchers organized on March 7, 1965, to begin their 50-mile march
to Montgomery.
A few blocks into the march, they were beaten by state troopers
on Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge-an event that became known as
"Bloody Sunday."
Wallace's daughter endorsed Barack Obama for president last
fall, but she and Holder had never met until Sunday.
U.S. Rep. Artur Davis of Birmingham, a Democrat who is
campaigning to try to become Alabama's first black governor, asked
her to introduce Holder.
But their ties go way back in Alabama history.
Her father stood in the schoolhouse door at the University of
Alabama in 1963 in an unsuccessful attempt to keep Holder's future
sister-in-law, Vivian Malone Jones, from integrating the
university.
Holder hugged Kennedy, saying: "I so wish Vivian had lived to
see this moment."
Kennedy said that as a child watching the Selma-to-Montgomery
march, "I knew their cause was just." But she said she never
spoke out politically until she endorsed Obama, who appointed
Holder.