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      Washington voting rights march marks Martin Luther King anniversary

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      US voting rightsWashington voting rights march marks Martin Luther King anniversaryNearly 60 years after the I Have a Dream speech, crowds came to the capital again to protest attacks on minority rights Ankita Rao in WashingtonSat 28 Aug 2021 16.25 EDTLast modified on Sat 28 Aug 2021 16.31 EDTTheodore Dean marched in Washington DC in 1963, somewhere in the crowd behind Martin Luther King Jr. Exactly 58 years later, he decided to drive 16 hours from Alabama to do it again.Will America’s latest redistricting cycle be even worse than the last? Read more“I’m here because I’ve got grandchildren and children,” the 84-year-old told the Guardian as he and his son made their way past the White House.Dean joined thousands for March On for Voting Rights, an event organized by a coalition of civil rights groups and nonprofits. Speakers included Rev Al Sharpton and Cori Bush, a Democratic congresswoman from Missouri.The US Senate will soon vote on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, a measure passed by the House which would restore protections from the Voting Rights Act of 1965 at a time when minority voters are the target of concerted Republican efforts to restrict access and participation. Furthermore, lawmakers across the US are set to redraw electoral districts, a process open to partisan abuse.In Washington on Saturday, however, it was clear that voting rights was not the only issue on people’s minds. While some marchers carried posters supporting the end of the filibuster and gerrymandering, weapons wielded to great effect by Republicans in state and federal government, others chanted about police violence toward Black people, worker’s rights, the Afghanistan withdrawal and minimum wage.In many ways, the spectrum of issues reflected Dr King’s agenda 58 years ago, when on 28 August 1963 he told a crowd at the Lincoln Memorial: “I have a dream.”“The original march on Washington was not just about Black people and voting rights – it was for jobs and justice,” said Rev William Barber II, a prominent activist and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, after his own speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday, at a “Make Good Trouble Rally”.“It was about brutality, poverty, voting rights. There was unfinished business.”Barber said the US was facing issues that had little to do with Donald Trump, the Republican president beaten by Joe Biden but still an active force in national politics from the far right.“In some ways Trump not being president is forcing the movement to have to understand this was never about a person,” Barber said. “All Americans should be worried, concerned, mad and dissatisfied. We may be a civil oligarchy and not a democracy, and the next step is autocracy.”Barber and the Poor People’s Campaign have held marches and rallies across the US, particularly in states like Texas, where lawmakers passed a sweeping elections bill this week that would curb access to voting, and West Virginia, where both cities and rural areas are seeing high rates of poverty and joblessness.West Virginia is home to Senator Joe Manchin, a centrist Democrat who along with Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona has refused to end the filibuster, a procedural rule Republicans have used to block key voting rights legislation.“It doesn’t have to be this way,” said Rev Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, adding that a summer of action had given her hope. While the coronavirus pandemic further exposed deep economic disparities, she said, it also gave rise to temporary legislative solutions, such as an eviction moratorium and stimulus checks.“We can take our experience here and make it work for everybody,” she said.On Saturday, thousands braving 93F (34C) heat were holding on to optimism too.“Our ancestors did these walks and talk so this is something I’m supposed to do,” said Najee Farwell, a student at Bowie State University in Maryland who rode a bus to the march with fellow students.“I feel as though if I don’t stand up, who else is going to?”TopicsUS voting rightsUS politicsCivil rights movementMartin Luther KingRaceUS CongressProtestnewsReuse this content More

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      Death penalty kills belief that people can change | Letters

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      Austin Sarat writes powerfully about the Trump administration’s rush to execute federal prisoners (Trump is spending the last days of his presidency on a literal killing spree, 15 December). In the past weeks, it was Brandon Bernard and Alfred Bourgeois. Next in line are Lisa Montgomery, Corey Johnson and Dustin Higgs.
      Joe Biden proposes to introduce legislation to abolish the federal death penalty. This will take time and its success is not guaranteed. But there is something he could do as soon as he takes office. This is to use his clemency power to spare the lives of the 50 or so individuals who will remain on federal death row. I estimate that it would take him four minutes to sign the required notices of commutation. This would ensure that the trail of bodies Sarat describes could not grow any longer.
      Is it too much to hope that Biden will set aside the time to do this during his first 100 days? It would be a magnificent gesture. Prof Ian O’Donnell School of Law, University College Dublin
      • When my friend, Brandon Bernard, was executed this month, he was a different man from the 18-year-old accessory to a double-murder (Trump administration puts Brandon Bernard to death amid rushed series of executions, 11 December). Spending two decades in solitary confinement changed him. Brandon never had a single infraction on death row. He did church youth outreach to help teens make better choices in life.
      He taught me many life lessons. To be open-hearted yet level-headed. To remain calm and patient. To be respectful and thoughtful and an attentive listener. To be kind. To live with a sense of optimism like one I’ve never witnessed. I want to hate the sin, but forgive the sinner after a horrible mistake and two decades of regret and reform. Martin Luther King Jr said “violence begets violence” and that holds true when the violence is committed by the government. Brandon became a beautiful person. When we killed Brandon, we killed the belief that one can change. Jen Wasserstein Washington DC, US
      • It has long been my view that any country that condones judicial murder in the name of justice cannot be deemed civilised. Suellen Pedley Stanford in the Vale, Oxfordshire More

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      To John Lewis, with love | Kevin Powell

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      Opinion

      Civil rights movement

      To John Lewis, with love

      Kevin Powell

      From the March on Washington to Selma, from the halls of Congress to Black Lives Matter Plaza, you gave yourself to us

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      John Lewis remembers ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Selma – video report

      Dear Mr Lewis,
      I gasped when I learned of your death, after your courageous battle against cancer. I think of your December statement, when you said: “I have been in some kind of fight – for freedom, equality, basic human rights – for nearly my entire life. I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now.”
      I shed tears then and I shed tears now, at what your passing represents to America and to the world. You do not know this, but the very first time I heard of you, in 1986, I was a Rutgers University student, asked by the Commission for Racial Justice to be part of a group of young people recreating the Freedom Rides you led during the civil rights movement.
      We stopped in Atlanta, where you were running for Congress. You encouraged us, you gave us an on-the-spot civil rights history, you told us not to be afraid. You seemed to know that some of us, including me, were absolutely terrified.
      Our bus went on to Alabama, to help African Americans protect their voting rights, just as you had done a generation before. When we heard troubling rumors of white supremacists “coming to get us” for repeating and continuing your work, I held tightly to your words in Atlanta, urging us to never give up – never.
      That was 34 long years ago. I watched you become a congressman, an elder statesman, the humble and unassuming moral voice of America. I sat on panels with you at the Congressional Black Caucus Annual Legislative Conference. I saw you publicly saddened by attacks on the civil rights for which leaders like you were savagely beaten. That is why you were forever committed to making “Good Trouble” on behalf of democracy.
      I myself have walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, many times. But my memories there are of you: of the bloodthirsty hatred of the police cracking your skull, how you could have died there on that ground, in your white trench coat, in 1965, just because you believed that Black people, all people, had the right to vote. I vote, Mr Lewis, because of you, because of people like you. I exist because of you, because of people like you.
      And I have wondered, as you witnessed president after president, one racial murder after another, from your childhood until your death, how you could still possess such a massive capacity to love people, every kind of people, in spite of what you experienced in your 80 years on this planet, in this country. You did not merely preach love, you embodied it, and were clear that love was forever the answer.
      Is that who you were, Mr Lewis, when you were a boy practicing your sermons to your chickens in your hometown of Troy, Alabama?
      Is that who you were in 2017, when you led 1,000 people through Comic-Con, a march to celebrate the trilogy of comic books you had written, based on your life?
      What a life it was, Mr Lewis. To be able to say you spoke at the same majestic March On Washington in 1963, where Dr King gave his “I Have A Dream” address, and to be the last living speaker from that sweltering August day. To be able to say you were there in Indianapolis, Indiana, on the day Bobby Kennedy announced to a mostly Black crowd that Martin Luther King Jr had been killed, Kennedy’s words rivaling King’s as one of the greatest speeches ever. To also say you were there, just two months later in Los Angeles, when Bobby himself was assassinated.
      To be able to say that your cracked skull and many arrests in the 1960s led to Barack Obama becoming our first Black president, and to also be able to say you lived long enough to witness #MeToo and Black Lives Matter and protests unlike anything we have had since you yourself led nonviolent demonstrations those many years ago.
      You never stopped protesting, Mr Lewis. In the final months of your life, there you were in Selma, honoring the 55th anniversary of that march. There you were in a virtual town hall meeting with Barack Obama. And there you were, in June, a mere month before your death, admiring the Black Lives Matter mural on the street leading to the White House.
      You never gave up, Mr Lewis, and neither will I, and neither will we who believe in freedom, justice and equality for everyone. You, sir, were a living, breathing history book of America, a living, breathing example of the best of the human race.
      The greatest thing you gave us, besides your entire life, was your entire love. The greatest salute to you we can give, is to love ourselves and each other as fiercely as you did us, to the very end.
      Kevin Powell is a poet, journalist, civil and human rights activist, public speaker, and the author of 14 books, including his newest title, When We Free The World, a collection of essays about the present and future of America available exclusively on Apple Books.

      Topics

      Civil rights movement

      Opinion

      Race

      Protest

      Activism

      Barack Obama

      Martin Luther King

      US politics

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      Barack Obama pays tribute to Joseph Lowery, civil rights leader dead at 98

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      Reverend helped start the influential Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King Jr Civil rights leader the Rev Joseph E Lowery speaks at an event in Atlanta in 2013. Photograph: David Goldman/AP Barack Obama has paid tribute to the civil rights leader Joseph Lowery, calling the charismatic preacher “a giant who changed the face […] More