Unlike most of you, I remember Dr. King Jr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood for civil rights, including voting rights. He taught non-violence civil disobedience. Along the side of great civil rights leaders like Late C.T. Viven, Dr. James Lawsen, and Andrew Young, these men taught The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Dr. King Jr. was the pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, the same church where Sen. Rev. Raphel Warnack is the current Senior Pastor. Dr. King preached the need for civil rights and voting rights; he called on the Black community to protest non-violently against what he called tyranny.
During the August 1963 March on Washington D.C., Dr. King delivered his most famous and infamous speech. Many politicians today take lines out of his “I Have a Dream” speech out of context for their benefit. The one passage that you never hear the quote is the following one:
“Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.
But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.”
We just celebrated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the year 2022, and I ask you what has changed from 1963 to now? We have members of the Wisconsin Legislature and the Federal Legislature in Washington D.C. wanting to take this country back to this time by curtailing the voting rights of people of color. Was that the dream of Dr. King Jr.?
I heard an interview with Martin Luther King III and his wife; they were talking about the voting right of MLK’s only granddaughter. She has fewer voting rights today than she did when she was born 11 years ago.
In November, I ask you to vote. To this day, we live in a democracy, an experiment in self-governance that was a success but has been failing. We need to rid forces from our democracy that want to destroy it from within, and yes, we have those in Wisconsin. We have a U.S. Senator running for re-election, who is as dangerous as Sen. Joseph McCarthy was, if not worse. The same goes for members of the state assembly and senate.
I agree with the family of MLK: no celebrations until new voting rights laws are passed and signed into law. These rights are part of the inalienable rights of U.S. citizens and shall never be abridged by any level government.