Thousands Remember Fight for Voting Rights

Civil rights-era figures and a bipartisan congressional delegation walked across an Alabama bridge with a throng to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Selma voting rights marches that opened ballot boxes to blacks across the South.

Police estimated the crowd at the Edmund Pettus Bridge at about 10,000.

Among those participating was Coretta Scott King, whose husband, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., led a 1965 march to the state Capitol. Others on hand included Harry Belafonte, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and Lynda Johnson Robb, whose father, President Lyndon Johnson, signed the Voting Rights Act into law in 1965.