SELMA -- It may have lacked the political star power of last year, but prominent officials and two nationally known preachers picked up the slack at an event marking the 43rd anniversary of "Bloody Sunday."

U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Atlanta, and the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton led an estimated 3,500 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge following church services Sunday.

At last year's crossing, Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama were joined by former President Clinton.

Sen. Clinton had been announced as Sunday's main speaker at Brown Chapel AME Church, but Bridge Crossing Jubilee sponsors were told by Clinton campaign officials last week that she apparently had other "commitments."

Obama also had an invitation, but Clinton was the only one who agreed to speak, sponsors said. She had a full-page biography in the Sunday church program.

"I don't think it really matters who shows up to speak because this thing is bigger than any of us," said bridge crossing spokesman Sam Walker. "It just keeps getting bigger each year."

Capacity crowds listened to Lewis, Jackson, Sharpton and other leaders at Brown Chapel as well as Southern Christian Leadership Conference President Charles Steele at Selma's black First Baptist Church at the other end of Martin Luther King Jr. Street.

Brown Chapel was so packed that hundreds had to stand outside as the church rocked to gospel music in a service that extended through the morning and into the early afternoon.

The three main speakers each addressed the importance of Selma and the Voting Rights Act and pointed to the historic aspect of this year's Democratic presidential primaries -- a woman and a black man running for the nation's highest office.

"Without Selma, there would be no Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama running for president," said Lewis, who was badly beaten by Alabama troopers when he and other black leaders attempted to march to Montgomery on March 7, 1965. "Those hands that picked cotton in Alabama are about to pick a pres ident of the United States."

Selma's significance four decades ago has not been lost on those who benefited from the Civil Rights Act, which was signed by President Lyndon Johnson five months after the beatings on the bridge.

"That's why we're here 43 years later and that's why we need to cross that bridge one more time," said Lewis.

Sunday also marked the 43rd anniversary of the fatal beating of white Unitarian minister James Reeb after he and two other pastors left a black restaurant in downtown Selma.

A group of white men clubbed Reeb after yelling racial epithets at the group of clergymen. Reeb died two days later at a Birmingham hospital.

"We call this place sacred land," said U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, who was joined by U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-California, and other well known Democratic leaders at the Brown Chapel program.

Jackson pointed out that the Voting Rights Act, which stripped away barriers to voter registration, "was not for blacks only."

He cited federal laws that assist disabled Americans and other legislation that came about after the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts.

"Selma is the re-birthplace of America," he said, using a term that won smiling approval throughout the historic church. "Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are the conduit vehicles for laws that benefit all Americans."

Jackson, who had two unsuccessful bids for the Democratic presidential nomination in the 1980s, said a "changing South" is prospering because the "cotton curtain" that kept big business out of the region no longer exists.

The famous bridge, named for Confederate general and U.S. Sen. Edmund Pettus, was built in 1940 and continues to be visited each year by thousands seeking to relive one of the most historic structures of the civil rights era.

http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080310/NEWS/803100302/1001