SELMA, Ala. -- Two of the Democratic Party's leading presidential candidates came to an emotionally evocative touchstone of the civil rights movement yesterday seeking to strengthen their bonds with black voters and tie their campaigns to the cause's unfinished work.
It was the first side-by-side appearance of Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton in their 2008 presidential campaign, and the political theater of the two campaigns overlapped repeatedly, but with a polite tone that contrasted with their political skirmishing of recent weeks.
Obama and Clinton spoke at services on the same street, three blocks apart, and the lines of worshipers were so long that they nearly intermingled. The two candidates presented their campaigns as legacies of the struggle for political equality.
With African-American votes crucial to winning Democratic primaries in the South, Clinton and Obama have been making a determined effort to win them over. They came to Selma for events leading up to the 42nd commemoration of Bloody Sunday, when civil rights marchers were beaten by state troopers as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.
The day marked the first entrance into the presidential campaign by former President Bill Clinton, a popular figure with African-Americans whom writer Toni Morrison once called "our first black president." He avoided upstaging his wife at her speech by staying away from the church, but people cheered and rushed to be near him when he joined his wife and Obama for a re-enactment of the 1965 march.
In a keynote address for the commemoration, Obama declared himself part of a new wave of black political leaders that he called "the Joshua Generation." It was Joshua, the Biblical successor to Moses, who led the Jewish people to the Promised Land after Moses delivered them from slavery in Egypt.
"We are in the presence today of a lot of Moseses ... of giants whose shoulders we stand on," said Obama, surrounded by civil rights veterans. But, he added, "We've got to remember now that Joshua still has a job to do."
While Obama did not explicitly claim for himself the role of Joshua, that was clearly the implication, coming during a campaign to be elected the nation's highest leader.
Speaking at the First Baptist Church, Clinton drew upon her Southern roots in Little Rock, Ark., saying that three Democratic contenders for the presidency - Obama, an African-American; New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a Latino; and she, a woman - benefited from the civil rights movement.
