House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., remembered longtime civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., on “Your World” Monday, after the House approved Clyburn’s proposal to rename legislation aimed at restoring a provision of the Voting Rights Act after the late congressman.
“John was one-of-a-kind,” Clyburn told host Charles Payne. “We first met almost 60 years ago, October 1960, and many of us back then had adopted Martin Luther King Jr.’s approach of nonviolence, but most of us adopted it as a tactic, something to do to get in order to get our issues addressed.
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But not John,” Clyburn went on. “John internalized it. For John, it became his life, and he lived a life of nonviolence. And he was what I would call just a good man, a man that personified the goodness of the American people.”
Lawmakers memorialized Lewis on Monday afternoon after his casket arrived at the U.S. Capitol building to lie in state on the third of six days of events honoring the civil rights icon.
Earlier Monday, the House unanimously passed Clyburn’s proposal to rename H.R. 4 the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act, an ode to Lewis’ instrumental role in the 1965 law’s original passage.
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Clyburn explained that when Lewis attempted to lead civil rights demonstrators across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on March 7, 1965, only two percent of African-Americans in Alabama were registered to vote.
Many “were not registered to vote because of all kinds of creative devices that … had been put up to keep them from voting,” Clyburn said. Voters were asked to answer bizarre questions along the lines of “How many jelly beans are in that jar?” or “How many bubbles are in a bottle of soap?” and were turned away from the polls if they gave incorrect answers.
“That’s what John was fighting against,” the third-ranking House Democrat said. “Now, we updated that.”
If signed into law, the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act would amend the 1965 law to impose new obligations on states and local jurisdictions, essentially reversing a 2013 Supreme Court decision that tossed out a “pre-clearance” provision that determined which jurisdictions needed federal oversight of elections.
“Now we are using voter ID,” Clyburn said. “You can’t vote absentee unless you put your Social Security number down … that is what we are fighting against. The fight is still here.
“We are trying to correct that,” Clyburn went on, “and so what we need now is for everybody to join in … so that we will not go back to those days where you had to guess how many bubbles were in a bottle of soap.”
