7/19/2020
Democrats Demand Expansion of Voting Rights in Memory of John Lewis
Breaking Newstags: civil rights, voting rights, John Lewis
Democratic lawmakers said Sunday that they don’t want tweets or condolences to honor civil rights icon John Lewis. They want policymakers to get to work to honor the Georgia congressman’s legacy.
Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), the House majority whip, urged President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to pass legislation that would expand voting rights in Lewis’s name.
“It should be the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act of 2020,” Clyburn said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “That’s the way to do it. Words may be powerful, but deeds are lasting.”
Reps. Karen Bass (D-Calif.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) also echoed this sentiment in interviews on Sunday morning and called for swift passage of the legislation, called the Voting Rights Advancement Act. The House in 2019 passed the legislation, which would restore key protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court struck down in 2013.
Lewis died on Friday night, months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, at a pivotal moment for race relations in the United States. Protesters in cities from coast to coast are demanding widespread reforms in the wake of the May 25 police killing of George Floyd, a black man. Meanwhile, coronavirus cases are surging in states nationwide, shedding fresh light on the inequities black Americans encounter in health care.
Clyburn also called for the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., to be renamed in honor of Lewis, a lifelong friend.
The bridge, named after a former Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader, became a critical site during the civil rights movement. On Bloody Sunday in 1965, Alabama state troopers beat peaceful demonstrators there, including Lewis, who suffered a fractured skull.
“Edmund Pettus was a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan,” Clyburn said during an interview on NBC News’s “Meet the Press.” “Take his name off that bridge and replace it with a good man, John Lewis, the personification of the goodness of America, rather than to honor someone who disrespected individual freedoms.”
comments powered by Disqus
News
- Josh Hawley Earns F in Early American History
- Does Germany's Holocaust Education Give Cover to Nativism?
- "Car Brain" Has Long Normalized Carnage on the Roads
- Hawley's Use of Fake Patrick Henry Quote a Revealing Error
- Health Researchers Show Segregation 100 Years Ago Harmed Black Health, and Effects Continue Today
- Nelson Lichtenstein on a Half Century of Labor History
- Can America Handle a 250th Anniversary?
- New Research Shows British Industrialization Drew Ironworking Methods from Colonized and Enslaved Jamaicans
- The American Revolution Remains a Hotly Contested Symbolic Field
- Untangling Fact and Fiction in the Story of a Nazi-Era Brothel