Summer Lee: “I thank our convenors for the opportunity today to talk about this important issue of protecting our voting rights. I am…”

“I thank our convenors for the opportunity today to talk about this important issue of protecting our voting rights. I am one of the new wave of younger Black legislators who never had the opportunity to meet or serve with Representative John Lewis but who are now tasked with finishing what he started. It is disappointing that we still have a need to explain the urgency of voting rights. But during a time when Black history is under attack, I will still give a brief course, as some of my colleagues here have done. Today, on March 7, but in 1965, 58 years ago and over two decades before I was born, John Lewis and his comrades risked their lives to demand more of our democracy on what is now known as Bloody Sunday. You see, months before Bloody Sunday, civil rights organizers celebrated the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, but they demanded more: the right to vote. So 58 years ago, John Lewis joined over 600 others, marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where they were brutalized by police simply for demanding access to the right to vote, the right to be a full citizen in our democracy just like everyone else, a right that is under attack once again today. Just saying the right to vote is incomplete. There are still multiple impediments today toward what is really at risk: access to our democracy.…”