PRIORITY: Senator Warnock's Address to the Senate 3-17-21 (23 minutes)

Yesterday newly-elected Senator from Georgia, the Reverend Raphael Warnock, gives his first speech on the Senate floor, in which he addresses concerns about voter suppression.  Reverend Warnock has been the senior pastor of Atlanta's Ebeneezer Baptist Church, which was the same church MLK Jr. pastored.

Please watch the entire speech.

Here are a few choice quotes from it: 

The right to vote is preservative of all other rights, it is not just another issue alongside other issues, it is foundational.

My mother grew up in Waycross, Georgia. You know where that is? It’s way ‘cross Georgia. Like a lot of Black teenagers in the 1950’s she spent her summers picking somebody else’s tobacco and somebody else’s cotton. But because this is America, the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else’s cotton went to the polls in January and picked her youngest son to be a United States Senator. Ours is a land where possibility is born of democracy. A vote, a voice, a chance to help determine the direction of the country and one’s own destiny within it. Possibility born of democracy.

 

“That’s why this past November and January, my mom and other citizens of Georgia grabbed hold of that possibility and turned out in record numbers, 5 million in November, 4.4 million in January. Far more than ever in our state’s history. Turnout for a typical runoff doubled. And the people of Georgia sent the state’s first African American senator and first Jewish senator, my brother Jon Ossoff, to these hallowed halls.

 

“But then, what happened? Some politicians did not approve of the choice made by the majority of voters in a hard-fought election in which each side got the chance to make its case to the voters. And, rather than adjusting their agenda, rather than changing their message, they are busy trying to change the rules. We are witnessing right now a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights unlike anything we have seen since the Jim Crow era. This is Jim Crow in new clothes.