"I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream, and taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution."
"It was Memphis that, one year before President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, elected civil rights lawyer Archie Walter Willis Jr. as the first African American Tennessee state representative since Reconstruction. And it was in Memphis that many of the great electoral campaigns that followed the enactment of the VRA took place."
Memphis holds significant civil rights history, from hosting Martin Luther King Jr.'s final speech to electing the first African American Tennessee state representative since Reconstruction one year before the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The city witnessed numerous electoral victories for Black candidates following the VRA, including Harold Ford Sr. and Jr. as US Representatives from Tennessee's Ninth Congressional District. Currently, a Democratic primary battle unfolds in the ninth district between US Representative Steve Cohen, a white former state legislator with substantial Black support, and state Representative Justin Jamal Pearson, who gained national prominence in 2023 when he was expelled from the legislature.
#voting-rights #congressional-redistricting #black-political-representation #civil-rights-legacy #southern-politics
Read at The Nation
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]