Feature: African Americans call for racial equality in U.S. city

African Americans in Selma City in the U.S. state of Alabama marched on Sunday to express their anger about racial inequality, once again putting racial problems under spotlight in the United States.

Tens of thousands of people, mainly African Americans, marched to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Selma civil rights march.

The event came a day after President Barack Obama visited Selma to pay tribute to those who marched on March 7, 1965, also known as "Bloody Sunday", as unarmed demonstrators were attacked by Alabama police.

Ruth Nelson, a green-economy company manager, shared her concern about the "bad situation" that African Americans face.

The problem is that in the United States laws are more stringently enforced when being broken by African Americans, she said.

The minority groups' situation is "constantly severe", Nelson added, mentioning that her mother was forced to drop out of school and work in cotton fields as the school she went to in Alabama was burned down twice for fear that African Americans would get educated and therefore empowered.

Nelson also urged equal employment and development opportunities.

She was echoed by a demonstrator who called himself Fredrick.

Stressing that human beings are equal, and all have the same right to vote, Fredrick, whose father was on the march 50 years ago, said that racial discrimination still exists in the United States, and that the American people are being classified.

"We have the class of rich, the middle class and the class of poor. It's not about skin and color as much as it was then, now it's about the class that you are living," he said.

In the past three decades, about 10,000 white residents of Selma have left, leaving many buildings vacant there.

Nowadays, Selma, the county seat of Alabama's poorest Dallas County in 2014, has an unemployment rate of 10.2 percent, 4.7 percentage points higher than the national average, according to official figures.

In Dallas County, more than 40 percent of the families and 67 percent of the children live below the poverty line. The violent crime rate is five times the state average. The region, known as the Black Belt because of its rich soil, is called "Alabama's Third World."

"They will never return once it was," said another demonstrator, Rose Davis, whose mother also joined the 1965's march in Selma. "If the people just become more united, keep pursuing their dreams, things will continue to improve, but you know there are a lot of work to be done." Endi