Photo credit: David Hume Kennerly
John Lewis, US Representative from Georgia and civil rights leader, introduces President Barack Obama at the Civil Rights Summit at the LBJ Presidential Library on April 10, 2014.
It was the perfect time to be reminded not long ago we had a president who cared about all Americans and not just himself. Less than four years have passed between the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, but Trump’s America is completely unrecognizable from the one Obama inspired.
Americans are dying from an uncontrolled contagion that’s the equivalent of 9/11 every three days and the seven straight years of economic growth Obama handed to Trump now lie in ruins with jobs being destroyed at the fastest rate in American history. Those public health and economic crises are also racial crises with African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans suffering disproportionate death tolls and unemployment.
It was a sad occasion that brought Obama to Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached—the passing of 80-year-old civil rights icon Congressman John Lewis. But Obama’s call to action wasn’t about the past. It was in support of the growing multiracial modern-day civil rights movement calling for racial equality in American policing and ending race-based suppression of voting rights.
Without naming them, Obama made it clear Trump and Republicans who create racial barriers to voting and oppose banning police practices that brutalize and kill African Americans are direct descendants of the racist Southern sheriffs and politicians who terrorized and cracked the skulls of civil rights protesters like Lewis in the ‘60s.
“(Birmingham Police Commissioner) Bull Connor may be gone, but today we witness with our own eyes police officers kneeling on the necks of Black Americans,” Obama said. “George Wallace may be gone, but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators. We may no longer have to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar in order to cast a ballot, but even as we sit here, there are those in power doing their darndest to discourage people from voting — by closing polling locations and targeting minorities and students with restrictive ID laws and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision, even undermining the Postal Service in a run-up to an election that is going to be dependent on mailed-in ballots.”
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New Voting Rights Act?
John Lewis was 25 when his skull was fractured on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, in Selma, Ala., when peaceful civil rights marchers were trampled by state police on horseback wielding clubs and bullwhips. Horrific film of that violent attack on TV had the same national impact as the recent video of Minneapolis police murdering George Floyd. President Lyndon Johnson, who’d opposed civil rights laws as a Texas Senator, introduced the Voting Rights Act a week later, promising a joint session of Congress: “We shall overcome.”
Obama said Lewis wasn’t just instrumental in passing laws protecting civil rights, voting rights and fair housing, but continued fighting for those rights his entire life as Republicans, originally the party of Abraham Lincoln and abolition, betrayed that legacy to become a white backlash party. Dismantling those rights predated Trump in 2013 when the John Roberts Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act by eliminating federal oversight of discriminatory state voting laws. That decision, Obama said, “unleashed a flood of laws designed specifically to make voting harder, especially. . . where there is a lot of minority turnout and population growth.”
Obama proposed a new John Lewis Voting Rights Act restoring protections against voter suppression and expanding them to stop the brazenly dishonest gerrymandering of voting districts that results in Wisconsin Republicans winning a nearly two-thirds majority in the Assembly even when Democratic Assembly candidates receive more votes than Republicans statewide. Other measures could include increasing early voting, adding polling places, making Election Day a national holiday and finally allowing residents of the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico to elect their own U.S. Senators and House members like all other Americans.
None of those are radical American ideas. What’s radical and totally unAmerican is any modern-day politician trying to return to the days before John Lewis and the civil rights movement changed forever what is acceptable in our democracy. Obama described the horrors Lewis faced and other marchers faced that Sunday in Selma: “Their bones were cracked by billy clubs, their eyes and lungs choked with tear gas. . . (John) thought he was going to die surrounded by the sight of young Americans gagging and bleeding and trampled, victims in their own country of state-sponsored violence.”
Right on time, Obama has given us our marching orders: “We have to be vigilant against the darker currents of this country’s history, of our own history with their whirlpools of violence and hatred and despair that can always rise again.”
The first job of every decent American in November is to replace the current White House occupant whose entire presidency depends upon continuing to stir those dark whirlpools of violence and hatred.
To read more past "Taking Liberties" columns by Joel McNally, click here.
