Echoing a speech given by President Obama a day earlier, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said Sunday that access to the polls was “under siege” by a flurry of recent state laws, and by a 2013 United States Supreme Court decision that weakened the Voting Rights Act, the landmark legislation that was the great prize for the civil rights activists who marched here a half-century ago.
Mr. Holder spoke at ceremonies before veterans of the civil rights era and ordinary citizens who gathered here for a commemorative march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge to mark the 50th anniversary of a violent confrontation between the police and protesters that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.