File photo of Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton celebrated a civil rights milestone with black leaders Tuesday but warned that the United States was still falling woefully short of providing equality and justice for African-Americans.
The former secretary of state, who leads in the race for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, traveled to Alabama 60 years to the day after black seamstress Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger, an event which changed the course of American history.
Despite the civil rights victories of the following decades, Clinton said that "there are still too many Americans, especially African-Americans, whose experience of the justice system is not what it should be."
Clinton cited the need to conduct broad criminal justice reform and to improve voting rights, where she said there was "mischief afoot" in some states where steps have been understood as efforts to make it tougher to register to vote.
"We can't go on like this. We've got to change," Clinton told members of the historically black National Bar Association as the group commemorated the start of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
The events of December 1, 1955 made Parks an international icon, and brought notoriety to Martin Luther King, Jr, a little-known reverend of a church in Montgomery who grew into one of the nation's great civil rights leaders.
"Sixty years ago today, Rosa Parks changed America," President Barack Obama said in a statement.
"Refusing to give up a seat on a segregated bus was the simplest of gestures, but her grace, dignity, and refusal to tolerate injustice helped spark a civil rights movement that spread across America."
Joined by Parks's lawyer Fred Gray and King's daughter, the reverend Bernice King, Clinton lamented that such change has been slow in coming for some.
"There is something profoundly wrong when African-American men are still far more likely to be stopped and searched by police, charged with crimes and sentenced to longer prison terms for doing the same thing as a white man."
She also mentioned the estimated 1.5 million black men "missing from their families and communities" due to imprisonment or premature death.
"It's time to change our approach, and end the era of mass incarceration in America," she said.
Clinton also stressed the need to do more to address the "epidemic" of gun violence plaguing our country. "I consider this a national emergency," she said.
The Democrat met in recent months with members of the "Black Lives Matter" protest movement, which has highlighted several incidents of unjustified use of deadly force by police against mainly unarmed African-Americans.
On Tuesday, Clinton called on a restoration of trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve, particularly among African-Americans.