MONTGOMERY, Ala.—Thousands rallied in Montgomery, Alabama, Saturday, May 16, to build support for voting rights as Republicans work overtime to diminish those rights across the South and elsewhere.
The demonstration happened under the banner of “All Roads Lead to the South, National Day of Action.” Civil rights leaders, activists, and politicians gathered to protest recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings and subsequent efforts by GOP-run states to redraw congressional districts that threaten Black political representation.
The loss of that Black representation sets back all the pro-labor and progressive battles for economic and political justice across the nation because it is Black and other minority lawmakers who have been in the forefront of all battles important to the labor movement and its allies.
The day of demonstrations, Saturday, included specific, localized events mirroring the historic 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches:
The morning began with a prayer service at the historic Tabernacle Baptist Church and a silent walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the site of the infamous “Bloody Sunday” violence.
Demonstrators traveled by bus to Montgomery, converging on the Alabama State Capitol for an afternoon mass rally that drew over 5,000 attendees.
The National Voting Rights Day of Action occurred on May 16 against a background of a race in Republican “red” states to redraw congressional district lines, as white nationalist and anti-labor GOP President Donald Trump demanded.
“It is time for New York to go up to Alabama,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., declared at a rally in front of the state capital building in Montgomery, following a morning march across the Edmund Pettis bridge in Selma, site of the white nationalist assault on peaceful civil rights marchers in 1965. Montgomery was the capital of the Confederacy.
“It is time for all of us to go to Georgia, to Louisiana, to Tennessee, to Mississippi and let them know what they have uncorked with this injustice. They think they can draw us out of power,” she stated about the redistricting. “They do not know the sleeping giant they just awakened.”
“This is one of those moments where we understand that our blessings come with obligation,” said Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J. “There is no liberation without obligation. Because if we in our generation do not now do our duties, we will lose the rights and the liberties that our ancestors think they afforded us.”
Ocasio-Cortez may have to add South Carolina, the first state to secede from the U.S. in December 1860, and where the South fired the first shots of the Civil War in 1861, to her list.
Gov. Henry McMaster, R-S.C., called the GOP-run state legislature back into session the week of May 18 to force the GOP-run State Senate to approve a remap to obliterate the district of influential Democratic Rep. James Clyburn, an African-American who has used his clout as a House party leader to steer millions of dollars in federal aid statewide.
The state Senate had rejected that House-passed map. Majority Leader Shane Massey, R-Edgefield, broke with Trump and led five Republicans to join all the Democrats and defeat it. Massey said remapping the state to eliminate Clyburn’s district could weaken the party’s hold on the other six Carolina districts.
Before that, Tennessee’s GOP-gerrymandered legislature split the majority-Black city of Memphis into thirds, forcing veteran Rep. Steven Cohen, the sole Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation, to retire. Cohen, a Jewish white progressive, now represents Memphis.
Two Black Democrats from Memphis, State Rep. Justin J. Pearson and State Sen. Justin Lamar, will run in the new 9th District. It’s heavily Republican, and State Sen. Brent Taylor, R-Memphis, and State Rep. Todd Warner, R-Lewisburg, are running for the GOP nod. Memphis urban voters in the new 9th will be drowned in a sea of rural and suburban GOP whites in a district that stretches halfway across the state to the Nashville suburbs
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