Building A Beloved Community

Floor Speech

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Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Virginia for hosting this event, and I also thank the Congressional Black Caucus for the focus on this issue tonight.

I was a child in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in the late 1960s. I lived across the street from the Booker T. Washington High School, so you know what side of town I lived on.

Rocky Mount was a city that was still segregated. In fact, it was literally divided by the railroad tracks that ran through the middle of the town. The Whites lived on one side; the Blacks lived on the other.

My parents were both graduates of that high school, and I had gone to work at that point. My mother worked in the school system. In the late 1960s, the schools were still segregated. I was able to see how that changed as my mother was working and then had the chance to work at other schools as the schools integrated.

I knew that the connection was the civil rights movement that was led by Dr. Martin Luther King, and Dr. Martin Luther King had preached at that gymnasium at the Booker T. Washington High School a few years earlier. I was probably too young to remember him even showing up, but we recognized the power of that movement and his leadership.

His leadership was a courage rooted in faith and total commitment to public service. He knew he was going to be killed, as you know from the ``I've Been to the Mountaintop'' speech he delivered the night before he was assassinated, but he still went on.

In 1956, after he had just graduated--or he was still working on his dissertation, actually working on graduating with his Ph.D.--he was called to Montgomery to preach at a church there and lead the church. When he got there, he was drafted to become the leader of the SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was put in that position because they had conflicting groups. They couldn't decide who the leader should be, but they knew it was a critical time, and they knew that this young man, whose father had been a preacher, had talent. They put him in the middle of that position.

This is a young man--I think he was around 26--who moves to a new town, doesn't know anybody there, with his wife and child. He becomes the pastor of a church. He is still writing his dissertation at night, and then he becomes the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott. Talk about gifted leadership.

Not too far into that--they were a few days in, actually--the White segregationists realized that this bus boycott was serious. They knew that it was real. They started with the threats. They tried to threaten people and threaten to take their jobs away, but they weren't able to get away with that. They weren't able to undermine the bus boycott with threats, so they actually started calling Dr. King's house. They threatened his wife, and they threatened him.

Eventually, the threats became real. In 1956, somebody put a bomb at his house and blew up the front part of it. His wife was there. His young baby was there. Thank God, neither of them was hurt. When Dr. King heard about it, he prayed and then ran to his house as quickly as he could.

When he got there, a crowd had gathered, hundreds of people, African Americans who lived in that community and knew about Dr. King and attended his church. They were angry. If they had guns, they brought those. If they had weapons, they brought those. If they didn't have that, they grabbed a shovel or whatever they could get their hands on and went to the house because they were ready to seek revenge, but Dr. King said: That is not our way.

The Christian leadership that he provided was deeply rooted in faith, deeply rooted in nonviolence, and was ultimately tested that night. He met the test that night and continued forward.

Part of that movement ended up resulting in the civil rights legislation that became the crown jewel of the American democracy, because America wasn't really a democracy in 1776 or when the Constitution was written in the 1787-1789 era. It certainly wasn't a democracy after the Civil War because right after that, when Reconstruction ended, the Ku Klux Klan rose up. They reasserted their right to white supremacy.

African Americans who had been freed from slavery were pushed back into an ugly version, an ugly, violent version that we called segregation. The Jim Crow laws were put in place. Many of them had achieved positions, including being elected to this body, and all of that was stripped away.

For the next 100 years or so, African Americans lived under the threat of violence. If you looked at a White woman the wrong way, you could end up dead. If she just thought you looked at her the wrong way, you could end up dead. That is what happened to Emmett Till.

Not only that, you had African Americans who came back from service after World War II, including my father-in-law, and what they found was an America that was still deeply violent, deeply racial.

In fact, one of the veterans who came back who had served in the military and fought in World War II had his eyes gouged out when he came back, an act of violence that shocked the country, but didn't shock it enough. We had other lynchings, and the like, that went through that era and continued until the 1960s. That is when Dr. King and the civil rights movement had their rendezvous with destiny.

I am here tonight to thank him for the work that he did. The Voting Rights Act, which is one of the key pieces of legislation that came out of that era, is now under attack. It is under threat. It is pending in front of the Supreme Court across the street. We won't know how it is going to turn out until the opinion is released, but I tell you what: We are not in the same place we were even then. When the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, yes, there was division. There were people who opposed it. There were segregationists--they called themselves Dixiecrats then--who opposed it, as well.

When it was reauthorized in 2006, the vote in the House was 390-33, and it passed the Senate unanimously. President Reagan had signed a previous reauthorization. President Bush signed this one, and that was just 20 years ago. What has happened to the country since then?

I will say this: We all know that the vote is the most powerful tool in a democracy. We all know that there are challenges to votes, voting ability, and voting rights across the country. We have disagreements, I suppose, with our Republican colleagues about some of that, but we need to make sure we remain vigilant and keep working hard to protect those rights.

I had a chance over the weekend to do a couple of things. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, I had a chance to visit churches and groups that were celebrating Dr. King, remembering Dr. King. I went to First Baptist Church of Highland Park, Faith Temple No. 2, and the AKAs had a day of service that I was happy to attend and have a chance to speak to them, worship with them, and work with them.

They are all concerned about where the country is going and the challenges to American democracy and the civil rights movement that gave us the rights that we have today.

I think it is critical for us to remember a couple of things. One is the work continues, no doubt. I have strong disagreements, to say the least, with the current administration, and I commit myself to fighting against the excesses and the wrongs that are going on there.

On Friday, I went with a group of Democrats to Minnesota to deal with the protests there, to see them firsthand. They reminded me in some ways of the civil rights protests from back in that era, the protests in Selma that led to the Voting Rights Act passage, the protests in Birmingham. The violence is shocking. People are dying. The shooting of Renee Good is just one example of those that has reached the media attention, but there are more of these going on all across the country. I saw clips of people and heard their testimony, people who were dragged out of cars, people who were citizens but were still arrested anyway and taken to the ICE detention center and not released for hours, people who were denied the right to call for an attorney, people who were denied the basic constitutional rights that my colleague from Virginia was talking about.

We have got to make sure we turn that around. We have got to make sure that we protect the rights that the civil rights movement was about defending and even beyond that the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, all of those things were put in place 250 years ago, which is the anniversary we are about to celebrate later this year, and rightly so.

We are not a perfect country. We are not a perfect nation, but we have been called to a perfect mission. We need to fulfill that mission.

I think it is important to wrap up with this. Dr. King's dream, kids learn about it in school now, and they see the replays, but in some ways the dream has become a memory for many. I think it is important for us to recall that the dream is not a memory, it is a mandate. It is a mission. It is a movement that we need to continue to make sure we get that work done that Dr. King died for and so many others died for, as well.

I thank my colleague again for putting on this event tonight, giving us a chance to remember Dr. King and think about the civil rights movement and where we are going as a nation. I want to continue to fight alongside her and all my colleagues with the Congressional Black Caucus and my colleagues here in the House of Representatives on both sides of the aisle as we work to get this done.

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