Defending Voting Rights

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. HORSFORD. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus and Representative Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick and Representative Jonathan Jackson for organizing this Special Hour order and leading as coanchors this evening.

As chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, I rise today to join my colleagues in this hour focused on the push for voting rights.

Today, March 7, is the 58th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, which occurred in Selma, Alabama, at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. That day, people gathered to march to the capital of Alabama, but they only made it a few miles before State troopers beat the protesters and shed blood on the bridge and streets of Selma.

Among the marchers was a 25-year-old young man named John Lewis. Years before he would come to join us here in the Halls of Congress, he was a civil rights leader and activist.

Some today might call him woke by their standards, and he was, in fact, woke: woke to disenfranchisement of Black men and women in the South, and woke to the fact that in Dallas County, Alabama, where he marched and where the police beat him, Black folks made up more than half of the population but somehow only made up 2 percent of the registered voters.

When the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was arrested in Selma a few months earlier, he wrote in The New York Times: ``This is Selma, Alabama. There are more Negroes in jail with me than there are on the voting rolls.''

In the nearby town of Marion, tensions hit a fever pitch when, on February 18, 1965, State troopers clubbed protesters and fatally shot 26-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson, an African-American demonstrator trying to protect his mother, who was being struck by police.

Civil rights leaders planned to take their cause directly to Alabama Governor George Wallace on a 54-mile march from Selma to the State capital of Montgomery.

Although Wallace ordered state troopers ``to use whatever means are necessary to prevent a march,'' approximately 600 voting rights advocates set out from the Brown Chapel AME Church on Sunday, March 7.

I was honored to join my colleague, Representative Terri Sewell, and other Members, at Brown Chapel AME Church just this Sunday.

The demonstrators marched peacefully through downtown Selma. As they began to cross the bridge spanning the Alabama River, the marchers who gazed up could see the name of a Confederate general and grand dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, Edmund Pettus, staring right back at them in big block letters emblazoned across that bridge.

Soon after, the melee began and the police took out their batons and tear gas to attack the peaceful marchers. John Lewis later testified in court that he was knocked to the ground and was hit in the head with a nightstick by a state trooper.

What was different from this march, and this fight, was the many television cameras that captured the brutal moments on film and aired them across the country. It was a turning point in the fight for civil rights and for voting rights, just months after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been signed into law.

I had the opportunity, as I said, to join some of my colleagues in Selma, in Birmingham, and in Montgomery this weekend which, I may add, is now represented by our colleague in the Congressional Black Caucus, Congresswoman Terri Sewell. I was pleased that President Biden was there with us recognizing the need for our renewed action on voting rights for all.

The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would ensure every American can exercise their vote. As the conscience of the Congress, the Congressional Black Caucus has always held voting rights at the forefront of our efforts in Congress.

Let me just say this: This is the first time in nearly 40 years that reauthorization of sections of the Voting Rights Act have not been passed in a bipartisan way, in nearly 40 years.

There have been previous Congresses where this was never controversial; the idea of reauthorizing one of our most fundamental rights as American citizens, the right to vote.

So my question to my colleagues on the other side is: Why won't you join with us, as your colleagues in previous Congresses have done, to reauthorize the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act?

We are calling on you today to join with us to protect and restore the sacred right to vote. We understand that this legislation must be passed. This is not a Republican, a Democrat, or an Independent issue. This is not a Black, Brown or White issue. This is a fundamental issue around voting rights.

Mr. Speaker, I thank you for the time for the Congressional Black Caucus today and, again, thank all of my colleagues who have joined us on the floor this evening, and to our great co-chairs, Representative Cherfilus-McCormick and Representative Jackson for leading this Special Order hour.

Let's pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act this Congress.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source