Washington: For President Barack Obama, it will be a week to invoke America's civil rights struggles from past to present.
The nation's first black president plans a speech Saturday from the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, the site of one of the civil rights movement's most stirring moments, and will refocus on last year's fatal shooting by a white police officer of an unarmed black 18-year-old in Ferguson, Missouri.
Recommendations were expected Monday from the president's Task Force on 21st Century Policing, appointed after Michael Brown's death in August. Attorney General Eric Holder has said he expects to announce results of his department's investigation of the case before he leaves office, and that word could come within days.
Obama's actions are an important gesture toward the black community, which strongly backed him in his two White House races and will be critical for Democrats in the 2016 presidential campaign and their efforts to retake control of Congress.
The week also highlights the personal racial politics of Obama's past and future as he plans Friday to make his first return to South Carolina since the 2008 primary campaign in which he and Hillary Rodham Clinton fiercely fought for the state's black voters.
Obama's South Carolina event is tied to his 1-year-old My Brother's Keeper initiative aimed at improving the lives of young minority men, expected to be a continuing focus for the president after he leaves office.
From the Pettus bridge on March 7, 1965, white police officers beat civil rights protesters in 1965. Obama last visited the bridge in 2007 when he was a presidential candidate; this time he is bringing his entire family.
"When I take Malia and Sasha down with Michelle next week, down to Selma, part of what I'm hoping to do is to remind them of their own obligations. Because there are going to be marches for them to march, and struggles for them to fight," Obama said at a White House event Thursday celebrating Black History Month.
The Rev. Raphael Warnock, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where the Martin Luther King, Jr., once preached, said voting rights and criminal justice reform were the main topics of a private meeting Obama held with civil rights leaders shortly before his public remarks.
Warnock said Obama's presidency has been a living tribute to the sacrifices of the generation that protested in Selma and elsewhere to promote civil rights. But he argued that a recent discussion among possible 2016 Republican presidential candidates over whether Obama loves his country is one example of how Obama's election has highlighted continuing racism in America.
Obama's Monday meeting with the police task force follows the three-month deadline he set for recommendations about how police can build trust, accountability and transparency with the communities they serve.
