Voting rights activists raise web page from civil rights motion, launch march in Central Texas

GEORGETOWN – Defiant, even bold, the leaders of a national push for new federal voting laws gathered late Tuesday at a Lutheran church off Interstate 35 in Georgetown to launch a re-enactment of one of the civil rights movement’s most famous achievements: Three Marches from Selma to Montgomery , Alabama, March 1965.

Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, founder of the Moral Mondays protests in North Carolina, and former El Paso Congressman Beto O’Rourke, said on the eve of a four-day “March for Democracy” that the recent sprints of the legislature in red States like Texas tightening electoral procedures are barely disguised efforts to stem economic injustice.

While Republican leaders of Texas and other southern states insist on only curbing electoral fraud, Barber said limiting participation in elections is the goal – and maintaining income inequality, corporate power, and a shadowy life for 11 million undocumented immigrants in the USA the country.

“We will be the moral resurrection,” Barber said at a combined pep rally, outdoor religious revival and press conference next to Christ Lutheran Church in Georgetown. About 150 people braved a 99-degree afternoon in central Texas to hear more than a dozen speakers.

Barber, a co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, said he did not promise the same results as the Selma-Montgomery marches that led to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

However, the organizers imitate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. followed up by “connecting the dots” between lack of access to voting and economic injustice, he said. They also take a page from the actions in Alabama 56 years ago by saying that advocates for greater participation cannot fight the fight state by state. You need federal laws, said Barber.

O’Rourke credited Selma with the inspiring passage of the 1965 federal law that “ensured we in America had multiracial democracy for the future”.

Governor Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Texas House spokesman Dade Phelan are pushing for tighter restrictions on postal ballots, greater mobility for partisan election observers, and prevention of district policies like drive-through and 24-hour voting, but have been foiled by more than 55 Democrats in the House of Representatives who fled to Washington, DC on July 12th.

O’Rourke contrasted their efforts with what he called the brave efforts of Texans like Dr. Lawrence Nixon and Lonnie Smith, who fought the all-white Democratic primary, and former President Lyndon B. Johnson to expand.

Starting in Georgetown on Wednesday morning, the protesters will walk parts of the 27-mile route between that city and Austin. The last stage on Saturday ends in the Texas Capitol.

The organizers hope to put pressure on Congress to pass federal voting rights that appear blocked in the US Senate. The poor people’s campaign calls for an end to Senate filibuster, a federal minimum wage of $ 15 an hour, and protection of undocumented immigrants.

While the target is federal legislation, Barber said all eyes are on Texas.

“Texas is like a canary in a mine,” a signal of poisons in the air killing democracy, he said. “Just like Alabama was the canary in the mine in 1965. … In 2021 we have to nationalize Texas to change the whole country. “

March organizers said they chose Georgetown as a starting point to commemorate a lawsuit against the Ku Klux Klan nearly a century ago.

In 1923, then District Attorney Dan Moody, who later became Attorney General and Governor, obtained an assault conviction against four Klan members for brutally beating and tarring a white salesman whom they suspected of having sex with an also white widow to have.

During the Klan’s resurgence after World War I, when its membership grew to millions of members, some Klansmen attacked not only blacks, but also Jews, Catholics (including Mexican Americans), Asian Americans and all Klansmen suspected of immoral behavior, violently.

The clan attack on salesman Ralph Waldo Burleson took place on a country road a few miles east of Georgetown. Williamson County residents donated money to help Moody, then 29, hire a high-profile legal team and win a series of jury trials that landed Burleson’s attackers in jail.

Moody received national recognition for putting the assailants behind bars and winning a perjury conviction against the preacher Alton Davis. Without evidence, Davis accused Burleson and Fannie Campbell of sexual inappropriateness, said Houston independent historian Patricia Bernstein. Her 2017 book Ten Dollars to Hate tells of lawsuits against Murray Jackson and other Klansmen.

“What Moody did was remarkable because, as far as I could tell, at the time he was the first prosecutor in the country to succeed in not only convicting Klansmen of a brutal crime, but also giving them serious prison sentences.” said Bernstein on Tuesday.