BARACK OBAMA: There are places and moments in America
where this nation's destiny has been decided.
Many are sites of war.
Concord and Lexington, Appomattox, Gettysburg.
Others are sites that symbolize the daring
of America's character.
Independence Hall and Seneca Falls,
Kitty Hawk and Cape Canaveral.
Selma is such a place.
And one afternoon, 50 years ago, so much
of our turbulent history, the stain of slavery and anguish
of civil war, the yoke of segregation,
and tyranny of Jim Crow, the death
of four little girls in Birmingham,
and the dream of a Baptist preacher, all that history
met on this bridge.
It was not a clash of armies but a clash of wills.
A contest to determine the true meaning of America.
What they did here will reverberate through the ages,
not because the change they wanted
was preordained, not because their victory was complete.
But because they proved that nonviolent change is possible.
We know America is what we make of it.
Look at our history.
We are Lewis and Clark, and Sacagawea,
pioneers who braved the unfamiliar,
followed by a stampede of farmers and miners,
and entrepreneurs and hucksters.
That's our spirit.
That's who we are.
We're Sojourner Truth and Fannie Lou Hamer,
women who could do as much as any man and then some.
We're the fresh-faced GIs who fought to liberate a continent.
And we're the Tuskegee Airmen and the Navajo code talkers,
and the Japanese Americans who fought for this country
even as their own liberty had been denied.
We are Jackie Robinson, enduring scorn
in spiked cleats and pitches coming straight to his head,
and stealing home in the World Series anyway.
JOHN LEWIS: I think we all are called to do something.
We all are called to play a role.
BARACK OBAMA: If you think nothing's
changed in the past 50 years, ask
somebody who lived through the Selma or Chicago
or Los Angeles of the 1950s.
JOHN LEWIS: Our country is a different country.
And we are different people.
We're better people.
BARACK OBAMA: And that's what the young people here today
and listening all across the country
must take away from this day.
You are America, unconstrained by habit and convention,
unencumbered by what is, because you're
ready to seize what ought to be.
Because Selma shows us that America
is not the project of any one person.
Because the single most powerful word in our democracy
is the word "we."
We the people.
We shall overcome.
Yes we can.
That word is owned by no one.
It belongs to everyone.
Oh, what a glorious task we are given,
to continually try to improve this great nation of ours.
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