WASHINGTON — As Democrats’ hopes to pass landmark voting rights legislation once again died in the Senate this week, Massachusetts Representative Katherine Clark, one of the party’s leaders in the House, has been thinking a lot about the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
That’s the landmark bridge in Selma, Ala., where in 1965, civil rights activists, including the late Representative John Lewis, were beaten by state troopers for marching for the right to vote. The bridge rises steeply, obscuring the view of the other side until one reaches the middle. A person has to commit to climb up, as Lewis did at age 25, and keep going, Clark said, even as they see obstacles that lie ahead.
Lewis and the other activists “didn’t turn back in the middle when they were met with incredible violence,” Clark said in an interview on Wednesday, hours before the voting rights legislation stalled in the Senate. “They regrouped and restrengthened and came back across the bridge.”
Clark and her Democratic colleagues are trying to regroup and regain momentum following an emotional debate in the Senate that touched on racism and past civil rights struggles. In the end, Republicans filibustered the voting rights legislation and Democrats failed to convince their more moderate members to change the body’s rules to overcome that blockade, putting the passage of future Democratic-backed legislation in doubt.
Read here.