Terri Sewell: “I applaud the CBC for this Special Order hour, and I commend my colleague from New Jersey (Mr. Payne) and my colleague…”

“I applaud the CBC for this Special Order hour, and I commend my colleague from New Jersey (Mr. Payne) and my colleague from Illinois (Ms. Kelly) for choosing such a great topic for tonight's Special Order hour. Selma, Lord, Selma. I have the great pleasure of standing before you not only as a Representative who represents the great city of Selma but as a native of Selma, Alabama, and a lifelong member of the historic Brown Chapel AME Church. I know that the journey I now take, the journey that many others who are here today take, was only made possible because of the courage, fortitude, and determination of those brave men and women on that bridge, Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965. We who have the privilege and honor of taking this journey must ask ourselves: What will we do to extend the legacy? What will we do to protect the legacy? Selma is the soul of America. It is the place where the struggle for civil rights and voting rights began, the epicenter, if you will, of the voting rights movement. It deserves to be more than just a footnote in the history books. It deserves to take up chapters in the history books, the tactical and strategic voices of Martin Luther King and those brave men and women of SCLC and SNCC that had the fortitude and had the intellect to see this as a strategy, to know that they were speaking not only for themselves and their children, but for future generations.…”