Douglas Alexander: “I am here this afternoon to salute the Senator from Missouri for his tireless work on this piece of legislation and to…”

“I am here this afternoon to salute the Senator from Missouri for his tireless work on this piece of legislation and to applaud also the Senator from Connecticut who has been a leader for civil rights legislation in this country for a long time. I thank them both not only for their initiative, for thinking of this, but also for pushing it and being persistent about it. I can remember when the Senator from Missouri came to me on the floor months ago talking about it. I thank them both for giving me a chance to be an original cosponsor and for their hard work on shepherding it through the Senate in this way. The Senator from Connecticut pointed out that it has not been that long since these crimes have happened. In my lifetime, it has not been that long. I was a student in the South in the 1950s. I was a college student at Vanderbilt University in Nashville when it was still segregated. I helped to try to desegregate it--successfully. In that same year, in the early 1960s, Congressman John Lewis was trying to sit in. He could not get a seat for lunch. In that same year, the judge on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans for whom I worked a few years later, Judge John Minor Wisdom, had ordered Ole Miss to admit James Meredith.…”