18 January 2022 - 'No Celebration Without Legislation': MLK Family Leads Voting Rights March
Martin Luther King Jr. Day comes as voting rights legislation faces uphill battle
(CBS News, 17/01/2022)
Long known as a holiday dedicated to service, this Martin Luther King Jr. Day is taking on renewed significance as voting rights legislation faces seemingly insurmountable hurdles in Congress.
What Martin Luther King Jr. said about voting rights and why celebration without legislation dishonors his legacy
Brandon Tensley (CNN, 17/01/2022)
Martin Luther King Jr.'s family has a message for Democratic lawmakers who refuse to stop their Republican counterparts' voter suppression efforts yet intend to shower pious praise on the slain civil rights leader's legacy this holiday weekend: Save it.
King's son and the members of more than 80 grassroots organizations recently stressed that there ought to be "no celebration without legislation."Their statement arrives at a time when racial justice activists are intensifying their calls for President Joe Biden to demand that Senate Democrats alter the chamber's rules and pass voting rights legislation -- before the GOP makes it impossible to have fair elections.
Democrats came up short on MLK day promise. What's next for the push for a voting rights bill?
Mabinty Quarshie (USA Today, 17/01/2022)
Democratic lawmakers will mark the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday having come up short on a promise to vote on a Senate rule change aimed at ushering through a voting rights bill.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced Thursday the Senate will not take up House-passed voting rights legislation until Tuesday, breaking his deadline to vote on a rule change by the federal holiday honoring the late civil rights leader.
The New York Democrat cited a weekend winter storm and Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz's positive COVID-19 diagnosis for the delay in the vote. Without Schatz, Democrats don't have the 50 votes needed for a simple majority vote.
Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s History Lessons
Jelani Cobb (The New Yorker, 09/01/2022)
On March 25, 1965, at the conclusion of the brutally consequential march from Selma to Montgomery, Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered a speech titled “Our God Is Marching On!” He spoke to a crowd of twenty-five thousand people on the grounds of the Alabama state capitol, in view of the office window of the segregationist governor George Wallace. The address is not among King’s best-known, but it is among the most revelatory. King argued that, in the decade since the bus boycotts in that city, a new movement had emerged and an older order was starting to fall away. Referring to the historian C. Vann Woodward’s book “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” King said that racial segregation had begun not simply as an expression of white supremacy but as a “political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land.” The so-called split-labor-market theory held that, by creating a hyper-exploited class of Black people, white élites could hold down the wages of white workers. And so racism didn’t just injure Black people, its immediate object; it took a toll on white laborers, too.