Message from Southern Poverty Law Center

Berkeley CA

Description

This Sunday will be the 56th anniversary of the day in 1965 when voting rights marchers led by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader John Lewis and Southern Christian Leadership Conference activist Hosea Williams were beaten by white lawmen wielding clubs and tear gas on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, as they attempted to march to the state capitol in Montgomery. We all know what happened after “Bloody Sunday.” Thousands of activists poured into Selma, ultimately reaching the capitol steps on March 25 and hearing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his “How Long? Not Long?” speech in defiance of the Confederate flag that flew overhead from the capitol dome. In the months that followed, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, changing the course of history and effectively ending the period of legalized racial discrimination known as Jim Crow. And, of course, even though Lewis almost lost his life that day on the bridge – his skull fractured by a blow to the head – he would never waver in his commitment to making our country live up to its promise of equality. As a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia for the last 33 years of his life, he became known as the “conscience of the Congress.” Now, in his honor, members of Congress are expected to reintroduce the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to reform an election system scarred by renewed efforts to suppress the vote. We lost Lewis last July at the age of 80. But we have not lost his spirit. His passion for justice continues to inspire us. Right now, we need Lewis’ spirit as much as we have since March 7, 1965, when he and other heroes put their lives on the line as they marched toward a phalanx of hostile state troopers and sheriff’s deputies on the Selma bridge. Assault on democracy It’s been nearly eight years since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and opened the floodgates to a tide of new state laws intended to roll back the rights for which Lewis and so many others risked everything. And, unless we now mobilize to fight back, it could get worse. The lies about “voter fraud” in the 2020 election – led by Donald Trump – have spawned a slew of new proposals in many states to make voting even more difficult than it already is for communities that have long faced efforts to block their vote. Read more here. In solidarity, Nancy Abudu Deputy Legal Director, Voting Rights