Elijah Lewis: “I called a special order tonight with a bipartisan delegation, Members of Congress that traveled from Washington to…”

“I called a special order tonight with a bipartisan delegation, Members of Congress that traveled from Washington to Birmingham, Montgomery, and Selma during March 6 through the 8th. Along with Members of the Congress that included Amo Houghton, Earl Hilliard, Sherrod Brown, Tom Barrett, Karen Thurman, Fred Upton, Diana DeGette, Eliot Engel, Sheila Jackson-Lee, we also had the head of the National Democratic Committee, Roy Roman, and Jim Nicholson, the Republican National Committee chair. This trip was to be part of a dialogue on race, which was sponsored by Faith and Politics Institute under the leadership of Doug Tanner. These Members decided to travel to Birmingham to the site of the 16th Street Baptist Church and visit the church where four little girls were killed by a bomb on September 15, 1963, and from there to visit the Civil Rights Museum and to see some of the historic sites that changed America. From there we traveled to the City of Montgomery, where we had an opportunity to visit the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church that Martin Luther King, Jr., was called to pastor in 1954 and where he led the successful Montgomery bus boycott.”