Editorial: Honor a technology of civil rights giants with a brand new voting rights law | Editorial

DALLAS MORNING NEWS

Last year our nation lost civil rights activists John Lewis, CT Vivian, Bruce Boynton, Joseph Lowery, and most recently Bob Moses. These are just a few of the legion of courageous personalities who advocated the right and the risk decades ago and whose ranks are now getting smaller every year. While we honor these personalities for their high-profile leadership, they are among the thousands of men and women who marched and sometimes died in search of civil rights and legal equality, including the right to vote.

Lowery, Vivian, and Lewis were close confidants of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and Lewis is best known for leading 600 protesters in the 1965 Bloody Sunday March over Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, a landmark event which led to the passing of the Voting Rights Act later that year. Boynton was a civil rights attorney who inspired the Freedom Rides, and Moses registered black voters in Mississippi at great personal risk during the 1964 Freedom Summer, the Rights Act 1964 and the Voting Rights Act 1965 – the two most momentous measures to redress racial discrimination since the reconstruction.

It is not enough to acknowledge these sacrifices and achievements without also acknowledging that Congress has an obligation to pass a new suffrage law. Among other things, the measure would restore a viable enforcement measure that has not existed since 2013, when the US Supreme Court overturned the enforcement order in a 5-4 ruling in Shelby County v Holder.