Political Quotes

“I thank my colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus and Representative Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick and Representative Jonathan Jackson for organizing this Special Hour order and leading as coanchors this evening. As chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, I rise today to join my colleagues in this hour focused on the push for voting rights. Today, March 7, is the 58th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, which occurred in Selma, Alabama, at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. That day, people gathered to march to the capital of Alabama, but they only made it a few miles before State troopers beat the protesters and shed blood on the bridge and streets of Selma. Among the marchers was a 25-year-old young man named John Lewis. Years before he would come to join us here in the Halls of Congress, he was a civil rights leader and activist. Some today might call him woke by their standards, and he was, in fact, woke: woke to disenfranchisement of Black men and women in the South, and woke to the fact that in Dallas County, Alabama, where he marched and where the police beat him, Black folks made up more than half of the population but somehow only made up 2 percent of the registered voters. When the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was arrested in Selma a few months earlier, he wrote in The New York Times: ``This is Selma, Alabama.…”