President Obama spoke beautifully in his speech marking the 50th anniversary of Selma. The march that the Reverend Martin Luther King led there in 1965 is one of the most inspiring moments in American history, not only for the physical and moral courage of the marchers in the face of the batons and truncheons of the police defending the dying regime of Jim Crow. It is also for the fact that African Americans were in effect redeeming the very American republic that had once enslaved them. All of us and all of our children will be forever in their debt.

This was but one of the points so-well marked by the President. He began by speaking of the “young folks with bedrolls and backpacks” who were “milling about” as the day began 50 years ago. “Veterans of the movement trained newcomers in the tactics of non-violence; the right way to protect yourself when attacked. A doctor described what tear gas does to the body, while marchers scribbled down instructions for contacting their loved ones. The air was thick with doubt, anticipation and fear.” He spoke of Congressman John Lewis, who had been there 50 years ago and was present Saturday.

One can imagine that the President drew part of his passion from Selma’s reminder that in community organizing — the early careers of both Messrs. Lewis and Obama — one can also find greatness, just as in, say, the military, legislatures, and the courts. We found ourselves thinking of the breadth of the assemblage marking the event. President George W. Bush was there, as were 100 members of Congress, the governor of Alabama, the mayor of Selma. They all knew that Selma was, as the President put it, one of the “places and moments” in which “this nation’s destiny has been decided.”

The president spoke of the impact Selma, whose marchers inspired young people behind the Iron Curtain, in Soweto and Burma, Tunis and Ukraine. It would not be too much to say that those who marched at Selma 50 years ago helped our country to victory in a world teetering between communism and freedom. The president decried cynicism and rejected the notion that nothing has changed. Racism may stain our society, he suggested, but — contrary to what obtained before the Civil Rights Movement — it’s no longer sanctioned by either law or custom.

This acknowledgment of progress was precisely at the heart the most recent major civil rights case, Shelby County v. Holder, in which the Supreme Court found that the Constitution will no longer support the kind of interference with federalism involved in certain pre-clearance requirements of the Voting Rights Act that was won at Selma. Mr. Obama, in our view, marred the moment yesterday by railing, yet again, at the Court’s conclusion. Voting rights remain protected; it is only the pre-clearance system that has been constrained. It would have been wiser to mark this as yet another victory of Selma.

Our own favorite comment on that much-maligned case came from H. Brandt Ayers, publisher of the Anniston Star, one of the Alabama newspapers that crusaded for civil rights. Mr. Ayers has spent his entire career — and risked his family fortune — standing with the civil rights movement. His only break from the newspaper crusade was when he went to work for Attorney General Robert Kennedy, his great hero. Yet he wrote of how “finely the voting rights bureaucracy grinds in the nine Southern states it covers” and suggested that the time has come to “let local mayors and district attorneys and newspaper editors see if they can’t keep justice alive all by themselves.” That is when the victories for which Americans marched 50 years ago will truly be secure.