Is this justice? | Senator Cory Booker on Juneteenth

[00:00:00]This week, not many hours from now, we're going to celebrate Juneteenth.

[00:00:07]We all know the story of Juneteenth, that there were slaves in Texas that had not gotten the word that they were free.

[00:00:14]A Civil War that cost so much blood and treasure to this country. No other war has seen so many Americans dead.

[00:00:22]And yet, at the end of that war, many many people had not heard the Emancipation Proclamation, did not know they were free. It wasn't until that fateful day on Juneteenth that that that slaves, now free people in in Texas, heard about their freedom. There was jubilation, there was celebration, and the tradition of Juneteenth started.

[00:00:47]Now, I'm very familiar. It's hard for me to walk on this Senate floor, these sacred sacred civic space. It's hard for me to walk here and not recognize the history.

[00:00:59]Right after Reconstruction, we saw the first black person ever to walk on this floor. We saw black senator in a black senator elected to this body.

[00:01:11]Not popularly elected, but back then we put our legislators in the Senate by a votes of state legislatures.

[00:01:20]We saw house members come from southern states as well.

[00:01:25]Being elected in free, fair elections in that post-reconstruction period.

[00:01:31]Because freedom in America is not just defined by not having chains. Freedom in America means being able to participate in this democracy.

[00:01:40]And in that brief period of of the post-reconstruction era, that brief period, excuse me, of the Reconstruction era, we saw free and open elections.

[00:01:49]African-Americans rushed to the polls and voted at 70, 80%, and began to elect people in fair elections. We saw multicultural legislators. We saw blacks and whites in states sharing power. It was extraordinary, this brief window of time.

[00:02:09]But then the Reconstruction period ended.

[00:02:13]And a reign of terror fell throughout the South.

[00:02:18]We saw black elected officials, black judges, black mayors being dragged out of their offices, beat, and some of them lynched. We saw laws being passed by state legislatures to bar black people from voting, to put on poll taxes and other extraordinary hurdles to stop African-American participation and African-American voting. That very idea of being free was now undermined and undercut by a set of unfair laws. And what happened to blacks in the Senate?

[00:02:48]What happened to blacks in the House of Representatives? Well, they disappeared.

[00:02:56]Uh I know the last speech, I've read it before, by George Henry White, the last black person in 1901 gave the final speech, and he predicted that one day African-Americans would return to our federal legislature, would return to the House of Representatives, would return to the state. It's called the Phoenix speech because he predicted that one day blacks would return to these bodies. One day elections would be free. One day we would reclaim our democracy of one person and one vote.

[00:03:26]1901, and he was from North Carolina, and it wouldn't be till the 1990s that another black person would come to be elected from North Carolina.

[00:03:38]From those days in the 1870s and 1880s when that reign of terror and the denial of vote, it wasn't until the 1960s that laws were secured, passed through the United States Senate and United States House that gave the right to vote a more fair and equal chance. It was called the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

[00:04:02]This extraordinary piece of legislation that secured the right to vote for African Americans and finally African Americans started returning to our legislature. We saw Edmund Brook get elected to the United States Senate.

[00:04:17]We saw Carol Moseley Braun be elected to the United States Senate. The third person was Barack Obama elected to the United States Senate and I was the number four.

[00:04:26]Fourth black person in history to be elected to this body.

[00:04:31]After this history of horror and struggle and pain, after girls were killed in a bombing, Edmund the Edmund Pettus Bridge marchers beaten on Bloody Sunday, Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner being killed in Mississippi.

[00:04:46]The stories of horror of those folks who tried to stand up for the right to vote, tried to fight to advance the cause of equal voting. Finally, in 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed.

[00:05:02]Equality at the polling place, justice returned in this body and the chamber across the Capitol began to see, as was predicted by George Henry White, blacks come back to Congress.

[00:05:20]Justice, fairness, equality secured by this chamber, secured by Congress, signed by a president.

[00:05:31]The Voting Rights Act of 1965 held strong and allowed that fairness to be seen and allowed voters to have a fair say, but here as we get ready to celebrate Juneteenth and those ideals of freedom, I have to stand here on this Senate floor, recount this history, and say that we are at another crisis point in our democracy because the Supreme Court now has gutted the Voting Rights Act.

[00:05:58]It disintegrated Section 2.

[00:06:01]And what's happened as a result?

[00:06:04]Before the ink was dry, we saw Southern states, those same states that a century before used the legislative power at the state level to eviscerate black voting fairness, they raced really quickly to draw congressional lines on their maps with the express purpose of diluting African-American voting power.

[00:06:30]Literally eliminating districts where African-Americans had fair representation in order to stop them from having a voice in Congress.

[00:06:43]Here we're celebrating Juneteenth, but there's an irony, a painful, bittersweet truth that's being told that right now we are seeing legislature after legislature in the very states that made up the former Confederacy moving with all deliberate speed to try to stop African-Americans from having a fair say, a fair voice, equal rights in voting.

[00:07:10]And the consequence of that is already being seen.

[00:07:16]Just like George Henry White, who knew he would not last one more election cycle, I see colleagues now who know that their districts have been diced up with intentionality in order to stop their voters from having a representative in Congress.

[00:07:37]What did our ancestors struggle for?

[00:07:41]What did generations who swore an oath to this flag that this would be a nation of liberty and justice for all? What are those people who died in the movement?

[00:07:50]What are those folks who struggled and sacrificed? What are those folks who literally watched finally fairness and equality coming to maps in the south? What do they say to say now?

[00:08:03]I can't stand on this floor as one of the few still only handful of African Americans ever to serve in this body without knowing upon whose shoulders I stand.

[00:08:14]The debt that I owe.

[00:08:17]The price that they paid so that we should have a federal government that is truly of the people, for the people, and by the people.

[00:08:28]We know our history is full of dirty tricks and unfair games that were played to stop some people from voting.

[00:08:38]So that even though those folks made up majorities in their communities, they would have no say in Congress.

[00:08:44]It is a bitter, ugly, wretched history that we have overcame. It speaks to the greatness of our nation that we have overcome. It speaks to the mightiness of a rainbow coalition of Americans, black folks and white folks, people from all backgrounds who joined arms and sang songs and marched towards freedom that helped this country to evolve and to grow into a more perfect union. And here we are on the eve of Juneteenth and we see not a stride forward, but a stride back, but a setback, but our democracy being knocked down again by people who do not believe in the ideals of a democracy, of fair voting, fair maps, fair representation.

[00:09:32]But I'm here to tell you right now that progress is not always linear.

[00:09:38]That we are not in a nation that always always marches forward.

[00:09:45]We've seen setbacks before.

[00:09:49]We've seen challenges, pains and sorrows.

[00:09:54]What I'm here to tell you is that this most recent dark chapter that is ongoing right now will come to an end. I'm here to tell you that weeping may endure through the night, but joy cometh in the morning. I'm here to tell you that we may have a setback, we may have a falling down, but this is not a failure.

[00:10:15]This is not final. We will fight.

[00:10:18]I'm not talking about physical contest.

[00:10:21]I'm talking about what makes democracy thrive. What is we stand up and organize. We stand up and mobilize. We stand up and make sure that our voices are heard. On this Juneteenth, we need to recommit ourselves like our ancestors did to the highest ideals of our democracy, which is freedom and liberty.

[00:10:41]AND HOW ARE THESE RIGHTS secured upon our nation? It's by people in this country standing up and securing those rights through action. We are not a nation whose story is powerful people preying upon the powerless. We are a nation that has shown that the people hold the power and that the power of the people is greater than the people in power. Six people in black robes, they were wrong in Plessy versus Ferguson.

[00:11:09]They were wrong in Korematsu. We overcame them then and we can overcome them now. The people united for the cause of freedom is the great story of America, and it's time that our generation benefiting from the fruits of liberty, from the toiling hands of those in the past, it's time for our generation to earn the right of democracy by sweating for it and struggling for it now. This Juneteenth, let us cry freedom again, but not with our mouths. Let's do it with our sleeves rolled up rolled up ready to organize and mobilize in the days to come because this next election is not right or left, it's right or wrong.

[00:11:51]So that we can elect people to this body and the other that will restore voting rights, that will restore voting freedom, that will restore the ideals of fairness.

[00:12:02]That is the end, that is the aim, and that's how we overcome again. That is how we as a people secure liberty and justice for all.