Steve Cohen: “Mr. Speaker, just this past Sunday, on March 7, we commemorated the 45th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, one of the most…”

“Mr. Speaker, just this past Sunday, on March 7, we commemorated the 45th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, one of the most significant moments in the civil rights movement. It was a day in which I was in Selma, Alabama, with John Lewis, one of the heroes of this United States of America, one of the great saints and heroes of this United States Congress. Other Congress people were there from both sides of the aisle. We first went to Brown Chapel in Selma for a prayer service, where Rev. C.T. Vivian led us with a wonderful sermon. It was a civil rights pilgrimage that the Faith and Politics Institute put on. The culmination of that, after going to Birmingham, where we went to the 16th Street Church and the Civil Rights Institute, and to Montgomery, where we saw the Rosa Parks Museum and went to Rev. Ralph Abernathy's church at the First Baptist Church and the Dexter Avenue Church, the church of Dr. Martin Luther King, as well as the Center for Poverty Law headed up by Morris Dees, culminated in Selma, and it was significant. John Lewis marched there 45 years earlier. Alabama State troopers and Alabama police, the government, stopped them with horses and sticks and gas and all other means of oppression to stop people who were marching simply to have the right to vote and participate in this country's great democracy. Voting is essential, and African Americans were denied voting.”