Political Quotes

“This entire House has you, Mr. Chairman, to thank for a lifetime of work in civil rights and human rights for all people, I thank you here on the floor. I thank my good colleague who serves on the Judiciary Committee. And I especially thank my colleague, John Lewis, who was chair of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee when I first joined. And I think I can say for John and me that either of us expected to be on the floor of this House at that time. I thank you, John. I'm not surprised that you would come forward with this resolution. For me, it would be too poignant an occasion but for the progress that I think we can say assures that these brutal murders, the murders that we came to call the ``Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman murders,'' certainly have not been in vain. In 1963, Bob Moses, a legendary figure of the Mississippi movement, recruited me while I was in law school to go to Mississippi. SNCC had opened up virtually everyplace else, but not Mississippi because, frankly, it was terrorist country. And to show you the extent to which Mississippi was a different place, it took the NAACP and Medgar Evers to lead the sit-ins there, and they got beat unmercifully. And that was in Jackson. I came to the Mississippi Delta that year for an express purpose, to prepare for the 1964 Freedom Summer, by conducting the prototype ``freedom school'' to be used in 1964, when we knew we would be able to gather thousands of students to come down.…”