Political Quotes

“Mr. President, 54 years ago, 600 nonviolent protesters set off to march from Selma to Montgomery, AL, to protest the disenfranchisement of Black voters in the South. They got as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge when they saw police officers lined up on the other end, waiting with tear gas, clubs, and dogs. The iconic bridge stood between the police and protesters like a physical barrier between hope and violence, democracy and second-class citizenship. Although the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments--which cemented into law the freedom, citizenship, and voting rights of Black Americans--passed nearly 100 years earlier across the country, literacy tests, poll taxes, violence, and intimidation stood in the way of this constitutional promise. This was especially true in Alabama. According to the 1961 Civil Rights Commission report, at the time of the famous protests, fewer than 10 percent of the voting-age Black population was registered in Alabama's Montgomery County. This infamous march from Selma was intended to right the wrong and to shine light on the injustice of all the many laws that kept voting from being accessible to Black Americans. For months leading up to it, a community of activists--led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and of course our esteemed colleague Representative John Lewis--carried out voting registration drives and nonviolent demonstrations, all against the resistance of the local government and members of the Ku Klux Klan.…”