Donald M. Payne: “I thank the gentlewoman from Florida for the opportunity to speak here tonight. As I knew before, I have just learned…”

“I thank the gentlewoman from Florida for the opportunity to speak here tonight. As I knew before, I have just learned again, you should not follow any speaker with the last name Jackson. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to commemorate the 58th anniversary of the march from Selma to Montgomery, and support the need to pass critical legislation to protect the right to vote for all Americans. In 1964, our Nation passed the Civil Rights Act. It established clearly that the rights described in the U.S. Constitution applied to all Americans, regardless of color. The question I have, though, and I will raise in the future is: Why do we have to continually ask for that right every 25 years? That right should have been given in 1964 and been a permanent right. So as we get through this piece of legislation, I will start to raise that question: Why is it we have to come every 25 years and ask for a right that we deserve? But there were still political structures in place that denied African Americans the right to vote. So African Americans mobilized and promoted voter registration throughout the country, especially in the southern U.S. States. Few places in the country were as segregated as the State of Alabama. In some Alabama counties, African Americans represented half of the population, but they only represented 2 percent of registered voters. At the time, activists engaged in peaceful protests to attack the Jim Crow laws that kept African Americans off the voter rolls.…”