Honor Lewis legacy
Progress does not go backward. Restore the voting rights the congressman fought for.
“The vote is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have to make change in a democratic society,” U.S. Rep. John Lewis wrote in his 2017 book, “Across That Bridge: A Vision for Change and the Future of America.”
That is why, across our history, the powerful have tried so hard to limit its access. That is why, as we mourn the loss of the late Georgia congressman and civil rights icon, we must honor his legacy by protecting it.
To understand the significance of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that Lewis and thousands of other dedicated activists helped pass with their peaceful demonstrations, one must understand the intimidating, humiliating and highly effective voter suppression tactics that compelled it into being.
As Lewis recounts in his book, Black people trying to register to vote in 1960s Alabama weren’t just required to fill out a four-page application and pass a nearly impossible literacy test that frequently stumped professors and lawyers. They sometimes faced a bonus question: count the number of jellybeans in the jar. For Black people, the mere act of attempting to register could be punished by eviction or loss of a job, their names published in the newspaper and reported to the Ku Klux Klan, which stood ready to attack offending citizens.
In the face of that unyielding hate, the movement Lewis helped lead answered with unyielding patience and persistence. It paid off, helping pass perhaps the most effective piece of legislation in 50 years. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed literacy tests and “grandfather” clauses and also, as Lewis wrote, “provided for periodic reauthorizaton to curtail present day efforts to limit free and fair access to the ballot box.”
Those present-day efforts include unfair gerrymandering and voting restrictions meant to, if more subtly, impose echos of the jellybean jar.
The best way to honor Lewis, who died Friday night of cancer after a lifetime of courage and service, is for the United States Senate to approve the voting rights bill that bears his name.
Already passed 228-187 in the Democratled U.S. House of Representatives, it now lies moribund in the Senate judiciary committee, but all of America ought to cry out for each of our 100 senators to take it up and send it to the president with resounding support.
“What I remember most about John,” said his longtime colleague and friend Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, “was his commitment to the fierceness of now. When things were bad he did not get angry or hurtful. He came with hope and a plan of action.”
Urgency is sorely needed now. All over America, agony stemming from the still unrealized dream of equality before the law, regardless of race, is on vivid display. The death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which has led to protests in dozens of cities, including our own, has flushed out truths about our society that too often festered in the shadows.
Lewis’ life was a long series of counterexamples to that tendency to turn away or to accept. In 1963, on the same stage from which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would deliver his famed “I Have a Dream” speech that same day, Lewis spoke on behalf of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, focusing the crowd’s attention on those who weren’t able to attend.
“While we stand here, there are sharecroppers in the Delta of Mississippi who are out in the fields working for less than three dollars a day, twelve hours a day,” he said, “Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary to March on Washington?”
Two years later, Lewis helped organize a march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama, where state troopers savagely beat the peaceful demonstrators, leaving Lewis himself with a cracked skull.
In the days since his death, many have called for renaming the bridge for Lewis, which is appropriate. More urgently, we must advance his work by passing the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2020.
It would restore what Lewis called “the most powerful section” of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which was gutted by a U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 decision. In that decision, Chief Justice John Roberts naively reasoned that racism had so diminished in America that requirements for states such as Texas to get advance approval for voting changes were no longer necessary.
The court was tragically mistaken, as countless examples of moves by states that were once subject to the pre-clearance requirement have shown.
The responsibility to restore the act’s power lies especially with judiciary committee members, including Texas Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz. They must help get this bill to the floor — even if it means challenging the iron will of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
In his 2017 book, Lewis spoke of the virtues and power of patience and strategic waiting, which over the long run worked as a “ramrod” breaking down the doors of resistance. But his words decades earlier at the March on Washington are prescient in this moment.
“We do not want our freedom gradually, but we want to be free now,” he said. “We are tired. We are tired of being beaten by policemen. We are tired of seeing our people locked up in jail over and over again. And then you holler, ‘Be patient.’ How long can we be patient?”
More than 57 years later, America has a tough enough row to hoe without going backward. We must restore the Voting Rights Act immediately to its 1965 power, as the first of many more steps required for all Americans to realize their power in this democracy.