Sheila Jackson Lee: “Yesterday was the Federal holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, and I accepted the challenge of the Martin Luther…”

“Yesterday was the Federal holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, and I accepted the challenge of the Martin Luther King family, under the name of Martin Luther King III, his oldest child: No celebration without legislation. So I rise in the middle of the debate and debacle that is going on over an ill-fated and wrong policy of the filibuster and cloture to read the words of Dr. Martin Luther King that he issued on April 3, 1968, speaking about having been stabbed by a demented woman and saying that if he had only sneezed, he might not have been there even in 1968. And so he says: ``And I want to say tonight, I want to say that I am happy that I didn't sneeze. Because if I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around here in 1960 when students all over the South started sitting in at lunch counters. And I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American Dream and taking the whole Nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around in 1962 when Negroes in Albany, Georgia, decided to straighten their backs up. And whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent.…”