Political Quotes

“Madam President, in 1619, Africans were first brought to Virginia, against their will, to be enslaved. From that moment on, White Americans systematically and violently denied the rights of citizenship to Black Americans. The adoption of the 15th Amendment, ratified in February 1870, was a historic effort to correct course. It recognized the right of all male citizens, including Black men, to vote. This amendment was the first time that we promised to protect the right of African Americans to full and equal participation in our democracy. In the 150 years since then, we have tried to expand on that promise many times, like when women of all races and ethnicities finally won the right to vote in 1920. Yet our promise remains elusively unfulfilled. Today, in honor of Black History Month, I would like to take a moment to discuss the trajectory of that broken promise, as well as its impact on our character as a nation. We began to break our promise shortly after we made it. During the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras, White men and women across the country developed a number of techniques--some obvious and brutal, some subtle and pernicious--to keep African Americans away from the polls and out of government. The broader goal of these tactics was to hamper the Black population's ability to recover from slavery by blocking their access to education and the economic means of building wealth.…”