After winning the Academy Award for Best Original Song as the co-writer of “Glory” from the film Selma, the Grammy-winning rapper Common—whose birth name is Lonnie Rashid Lynn, Jr.—gave an impassioned speech on the struggle for freedom throughout the world.
“The spirit of this bridge connects the kid from the South Side of Chicago, dreaming of a better life, to those in France standing up for their freedom of expression, to the people in Hong Kong, protesting for democracy,” said Common during Sunday’s Oscars ceremony. The bridge he mentions is the iconic Edmund Pettus Bridge that civil rights marchers crossed on the way to Montgomery, Ala. in 1965.
The Selma to Montgomery marches in Alabama brought national attention to the barriers to voting black Americans in the Jim Crow South faced. “Glory” was the theme song to Selma, the 2014 Martin Luther King Jr. biopic depicting the events leading up to the marches, which spurred then-president Lyndon Johnson to pass the Voting Rights Act.
