On the recordJune 13, 2024
I would just add, I don't know how long my friends on the other side of the aisle are going to keep mentioning the pandemic, COVID, but it is over with, and the shortage still exists. The fact that, again, we are funding this, devoting a day to discuss it, we ought to be having a day devoted to how to fight and arm our brave men and women who are serving in the military. Mr. Chair, I urge adoption of this amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time. Ms. McCLELLAN. Mr. Chair, the strength of our military is the people, and the people bring with them the sum of their life experiences and perspectives and what they know. In my family, I had several uncles born between 1918 and 1938 who served during World War II in the Navy in a segregated unit where they were not allowed to fight. They were only allowed to cook because of the color of their skin. The stories that they told their children about the indignity they suffered from their fellow servicemembers and superior officers, do you think any of their children wanted to serve in the military? There are countless stories like that. As we see people who lived under Jim Crow dying off and those stories are not being told, people don't understand that a legacy of 300 years of slavery and Jim Crow did not go away with the wave of a magic wand.…





