Republicans are all over the place using Martin Luther King’s “content of their character” line and insisting that he wouldn’t have wanted schools to teach about America’s racist past. Get a load of this one from the new Great Whitebread Hope, Glenn Youngkin:
And that message is selling like hotcakes in the MAGA Death Cult.
Martin Luther King knew the score:
“So long as I do not firmly and irrevocably possess the right to vote, I do not possess myself,” King Jr. said in his “Give Us the Ballot” speech in May 1957. “I cannot make up my mind — it is made up for me. I cannot live as a democratic citizen, observing the laws I have helped to enact — I can only submit to the edict of others.”
Organizers had gathered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, for the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom — which drew nearly 25,000 supporters — to push lawmakers to uphold the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.King Jr. was the last to speak. But his words to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Congress were powerful.
“The denial of this sacred right is a tragic betrayal of the highest mandates of our democratic tradition. And so our most urgent request to the President of the United States and every member of Congress is to give us the right to vote,” King Jr. said.
The crowd responded, “Yes.”
King Jr. went on to say, “Give us the ballot, and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights. Give us the ballot, and we will no longer plead to the federal government for passage of an anti-lynching law. We will by the power of our vote write the law on the statute books of the South and bring an end to the dastardly acts of the hooded perpetrators of violence.”
The Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first federal civil rights legislation passed since Reconstruction, authorized the government to take legal measures to prevent citizens from being denied voting rights. But it wouldn’t be until 1965 that Congress would pass the Voting Rights Act.
In March of that year, during a voting rights march in Selma, Alabama, that came to be known as “Bloody Sunday,” White state troopers brutally assaulted 600-some protesters. President Lyndon B. Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act that same month, when the outrage over what happened to protesters in Selma was “still fresh“; Congress passed the bill in August.
In 2013, the Supreme Court decided there was no further need for most of the Voting Rights Act.
And now here we are with a bare majority of the US Senate, including two showboating Democrats, once more blocking access to the polls as Republican state governments work overtime to ensure that they will never lose elections in the future.
It’s always, always, two steps forward and one step back in this country. And sometimes it’s two steps back. Or three.