Fifty-nine years ago on Thursday, white state troopers brutalized voting rights protesters as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.
Footage of the carnage — one officer cracked 25-year-old John Lewis’ skull with a billy club — enraged the country, and galvanized widespread support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which President Lyndon B. Johnson enacted on Aug. 6 of that year.
Nearly six decades on, the fundamental right to vote is still under assault, as Republican lawmakers and Republican-nominated judges across the South chip away at the landmark law with renewed intensity.
The ongoing attack on this basic freedom is just one of many issues Black voters want President Joe Biden to address in his third State of the Union speech — which, perhaps coincidentally, falls on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday. Other concerns include policing, student debt relief, and health care.
“Our hope is that in his speech on Thursday he’ll mention two pending voting rights bills: the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act,” Cliff Albright, the co-founder of the community empowerment organization Black Voters Matter, told Capital B. “We’d love to hear a commitment from him that, on day one if he’s reelected, he’ll call on Congress to make it possible for him to sign those bills.”
Read more: How the Legacy of a Reconstruction-Era Massacre Shapes Voting Rights Today
Other groups also have emphasized the importance of protecting the power of the franchise through federal legislation.
“We have employed litigation and legislative strategies to safeguard voting rights at the state level,” Elsie Cooke-Holmes, the international president of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc., a co-plaintiff in the legal challenges to restrictive voting legislation in Texas and Georgia, told Capital B. “Yet the true remedy lies in federal intervention.”
She added, “We firmly advocate for the passage of the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act — it honors the efforts of our predecessors. It enshrines a future that values every voice and vote, fostering a multicultural and inclusive democracy.”
Cooke-Holmes and Albright are fully aware that passing federal voting rights legislation is difficult, given the current composition of Congress: Democrats hold the thinnest of majorities in the Senate. But the margins are changing, as redrawn voting maps in states such as Louisiana shrink Republicans’ slim House advantage.
In the absence of robust federal legislation, some advocates are increasingly pushing for state Voting Rights Acts, which allow states to fill in the gaps left by congressional gridlock. Six states — Connecticut, California, New York, Oregon, Virginia, and Washington — have passed such legislation.
Beyond the ballot box
Black voters want more from Biden than just a promise to protect access to the ballot box. They also want the president to rededicate his energy to a variety of other racial justice causes, including police accountability.
Biden must speak “clearly, unequivocally, and forcefully” on the issue if he wants to appeal to Black voters, Marc Morial, the president of the National Urban League, told Capital B.
“Some of these things were tried in the first term, but they weren’t accomplished mainly because of congressional blockades,” he said.
In the thick of the 2020 uprisings, Biden championed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. The legislation would rein in racial bias in policing and police misconduct, among other things. It passed the House, but then it stalled in the Senate and never made it to the president’s desk.
Biden has delivered on his pledge to diversify the federal judiciary. Most of the judges he’s appointed are women or racial or ethnic minorities, making the bench more diverse than it’s ever been. Notably, he nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022. She was confirmed by the Senate and sworn into office that same year, becoming the first Black woman (and the first former federal public defender) to join the high court.
Former President Donald Trump, on the other hand, packed the Supreme Court with conservative justices who have undermined reproductive rights and “eroded voting rights, eroded affirmative action, and undercut civil rights,” Morial said.
Read more: How Biden Can Reclaim Black Voters’ Support in 2024
One of the bright spots of the current administration, Albright argued, comes from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, which just released a damning report about three Mississippi prisons that found that the facilities violate inmates’ constitutional rights.
“The people in that department have really been doing some good work,” he said. “We’d love to hear that they’re going to get more resources. Give [Assistant Attorney General] Kristen Clarke more funding and more staff so that they can go deeper.”
Shauna Sias, a resident of Opelousas, Louisiana, also is concerned about funding.
“I’d like Biden to talk about investing in children’s education — more funding for schools and social services, and preparing children for 21st century jobs,” she told Capital B.
Part of Biden’s task on Thursday, per advocates, is to make plain all that he’s accomplished over the past several years. He must set the record straight.
“We’ve already seen historic levels of student loan debt cancellation [under the current administration]. And Biden just went even bigger. We want to hear about that,” Albright said, referring to the president’s announcement in February that he’s expanding student debt relief to 153,000 more borrowers. “And Biden’s moves to cap the price of insulin. That means something. That’s more than a notion. Everybody in our community knows somebody with ‘the sugars’ — with diabetes.”
Put another way: We know that Biden can claim many achievements, Albright said. We want to hear about them — and what the president’s plans are to do more.
Capital B staff writer Christina Carrega contributed to this report.
