Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the subject of my Special Order. Madam Speaker, I first got interested in…
Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the subject of my Special Order.
Madam Speaker, I first got interested in and started studying history as an 8-year-old. I grew up in a parsonage where my brothers and I were required, every morning before breakfast, to recite a Bible verse and, every evening before retiring to bed, we had to share with our parents a current event.
We didn't have television. Therefore, in order to carry out that rule, we had to read the newspapers. It was delivered to our home every afternoon. Today, those who are living down in my hometown of Sumter, you get the Sumter Daily Item in the morning. Back then it was an afternoon paper.
It was my interest in the Presidential campaign of Harry Truman that attracted me to politics. Harry Truman ascended to the Presidency from the Vice Presidency. Of course, no one gave him a chance to get elected on his own. He did not have, according to conventional wisdom, what it took, and he was going to be up against this scion, this big-time prosecutor from New York, Thomas Dewey.
In fact, one Chicago newspaper was so assured of the outcome, they didn't bother to wait on the results to write the headlines for their newspapers the day after the election. All of us remember that headline: ``Dewey Wins.'' When the votes were counted, all the votes were counted, Truman had been elected President.
That always intrigued me, this man of limited educational background, a disability, without any of all of the trappings of what would make one a big-time leader. Of course, when Truman left office, he was not very popular with a lot of people. In fact, his popularity was pretty low.
But as we look back on history, and people continue to write about history, they keep upgrading Truman. Most places I see now, he is in the top ten. In my opinion, he is in the top five. I consider myself, to this day, a Truman Democrat.
After studying history, I went on to teach it. I became a firm believer in George Santayana's admonition that those who cannot remember history--of course, he said ``the past''--are condemned to repeat it. That is what brings me to this floor today.
It has been a long, long time since I have stayed here on what we call getaway day to address this body during what we call Special Orders.
I listened intently today as we debated the legislation that was a vehicle by which we would send two pieces of legislation: The Freedom to Vote Act, a bill that was proposed by Senator Joe Manchin, and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, a bill that this body approved and sent over to the Senate as H.R. 4. Upon John Lewis' death, I came to this floor and asked and received unanimous consent to change the name of H.R. 4, to rename it in honor of John Lewis, and this body granted unanimous consent for that to happen.
Now, John Lewis and I first met as 19-year-old college students. I was in Orangeburg, South Carolina. He was down in Nashville, Tennessee. We met on the campus of Morehouse College, where the Vice President was on the day before yesterday, I think it was. It was also the weekend when I first met Martin Luther King, Jr.
Now, as is often the case--and we saw quite a bit of it today--a disagreement cropped up between us so-called Young Turks, those of us who were in SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee--in fact, this was the second organizational meeting of SNCC--and SCLC, which was being run by Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, and others.
We asked Dr. King to come and meet with us so we could try to reconcile our differences. Dr. King came and agreed to a 1-hour meeting. That meeting convened at 10 p.m. in the evening. It was not over until 4 a.m. the next morning. I always refer to that evening and that meeting as my Saul-to-Paul transformation. I came out of that meeting a changed man--well, I guess, boy. I have never been the same.
I started reading everything I could about Dr. King. I went back to my campus, and I got his book, his first book, ``Stride Toward Freedom,'' and, of course, all the way down through his last book, ``Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community.''
I interacted with him several times over the years. After the 1965 Voting Rights Act, one of Dr. King's first trips was to the little town of Kingstree, South Carolina, a rural town in Williamsburg County that is currently in my district. When he came that day, he came to talk to us about all the marches we were having. I was living in Charleston at the time. My late wife and I got in our little Falcon and drove to Kingstree to be a part of that meeting.
Dr. King talked that day about marching. We had marched to integrate lunch counters. We had marched to get off the back of the bus. We had marched for a lot of social things. But he said to us on that day: It is time to march to the ballot boxes. He put a new definition on what marching was all about. I remember that day as if it were yesterday.
In fact, not long ago, the local community decided to have a 50th anniversary celebration of that event and called me and asked would I attend. I told them I would be glad to attend.
Of course, I later got a phone call from a reporter who asked me what I was going to say at this 50th anniversary. I told the reporter, I said: Well, I think I will reminisce a little bit about that day and the speech he gave.
And he says: Well, did you see it on television? How do you know about the speech?
I said: I was there.
The reporter didn't quite believe that I was there, and of course, he questioned me, wanting to know what I remembered most about that day.
I said to him: The thing I remember most about that day was that there was a very big storm. In fact, the storm was so bad that, on our way there, we had to stop and wait it out. When I got there, I was sure that we were not going to have a celebration, but the sun came out, and Dr. King came. But there was so much rain in that cow pasture, I told him, that we were in, it was not very conducive for the convention.
The reporter was kind of quiet, and he hung up. A few days later, the reporter called me back. The reporter had gone to the Weather Bureau to check out my story about that day and sheepishly reported to me that he had checked it out and that my description of that day was pretty accurate.
I said: Well, I lived through it. The things you live through are the kinds of things you remember most, and you remember them best.
I have lived through a lot, growing up in South Carolina. I remember the conversations I had with my parents. My mother was a beautician. As you can imagine, a lot of conversations go on in the beauty shop.
So when my mother would sit down with me, we would often have discussions about information that flowed throughout the beauty shop. In fact, I wrote about one day, coming home from school. One of the rules we had was that we had to stop by the beauty shop to report in after school every day to make sure that things had gone okay.
On this particular day, when I went into the beauty shop to make my report, there was a lady there that had grown up with my mother in the cotton field adjacent to the one that she grew up in over in Lee County, South Carolina.
When I walked in, I spoke, and this lady turned to me and says: My, my, how much you have grown since I last saw you. My goodness, she said, your voice is beginning to change.
Then she asked me a question, what it is that you want to be when you grow up. That question was asked of us very often back then. I began to tell her how proud I was of that background that I had developed since 1948 studying Harry Truman and how I had developed this interest in politics and government. I told her I wanted to grow up to be a Member of the United States Congress.
That lady looked at me and very sternly said: Son, don't you let anybody else hear you say that again.
That lady was not throwing cold water on my dreams. She just felt that a little Black boy in Sumter, South Carolina, should not have those kinds of dreams and aspirations. It was not safe for a little Black boy to have those kinds of dreams.
My mother never said anything that day, but that night, when she closed the beauty shop, she came into the house and called me to the kitchen table, and she sat me down.
She said: Now, James, don't you let what that lady said to you today ruin your dreams. You stay in school, you study hard, you stay out of trouble, and you will be able to live out your dreams and your aspirations.
My mom did not live to see me get elected to Congress. She died in 1971. I didn't get here until 1992. But I think about her almost every time I come into this Chamber, how right she was.
So, today, looking back on that history, I recall from my studies that the first civil rights bill passed by this Congress was passed in 1866, giving the former slaves the right of citizenship. Of course, following that 1866 law, South Carolina held a constitutional convention in 1868. That was a very interesting constitutional convention.
I would like to share with you some of what took place in that convention. There are two things kind of interesting about the convention to me.
Number one is the majority of the attendees at that convention were Black. It is kind of interesting.
The second one is there was an attendee at that convention, Robert Smalls, who was there in 1868. Robert Smalls had been a slave until 1862. Just think about that. He was a delegate to the South Carolina Constitutional Convention and would go on to serve 10 years in the South Carolina legislature and another 10 years here in the United States Congress--a former slave.
Now, I don't know how Robert Smalls felt about slavery. He didn't like it. If he did, he would not have engineered the escape. He would not have stolen the Planter and taken his whole family and friends and delivered the Planter to the Union Army and got his freedom and $1,500 for having done so. And he turned that $1,500 into great wealth and had become a great soldier in the Union Army.
Now, back then, Robert Smalls, a former slave, had not gone to school. He didn't have a high school education, and therefore, though he wanted to be, they would not have taken him into the Navy. He was actually inducted into the Army and assigned to a Navy ship. That is why you see some ships now named for Robert Smalls.
It was my great honor to be in Baltimore, Maryland, at the Baltimore harbor to speak for the christening of the USS Robert Smalls.
Now, however Robert Smalls may have felt, after Robert Smalls gained wealth, he went back to Beaufort, South Carolina, where he was born and raised and where he had been a slave. He bought the house that he had been a slave in. The McKee family that owned him legally, when they got back, Mr. McKee, John McKee--I think John was his first name--had passed away, and his wife was living in poor health and no wealth.
Robert Smalls went and got her and brought her to that house that she had been the head of and he had been a slave in, and he nursed her, kept her there until her death. He forgave, but Robert Smalls never forgot.
He died in 1915, basically of a broken heart. Why? Because Robert Smalls, who had been in that 1868 convention as a delegate, was also a delegate in the 1895 South Carolina Constitutional Convention.
Now, in 1868, January 14, 1868, is when he got his State rights as a full-fledged American citizen, and then in 1895, Robert Smalls was in that convention. It was in that convention, September 10, 1895, that Robert Smalls got all of his rights taken away.
As I said earlier today on this floor, any rights given by the State, in this instance the United States, can be taken away by the States, in this instance the United States. That is why I am fearful of what is taking place, most especially in the other body.
What we did here today, sending those two bills to protect the voting rights of people of color, is being threatened by the other body with a filibuster. I have been saying for some time now that I believe very strongly that constitutional rights ought not be subjected to the filibustering whims of any one person.
We don't allow that for our budget matters. We call it reconciliation when it comes to doing the budget so that you can pass it. If everything in this bill applies to the budget, we can have a simple majority to pass it. When the full faith and credit of the United States was put at risk a couple of weeks ago, we worked around the filibuster in order to raise the debt limit so as not to ruin the full faith and credit of the United States of America. And you are telling me that the same should not apply to basic constitutional rights?
As I said here on the floor today, as a result of that 1895 convention that took all of those rights away, in 1897, George Washington Murray left the United States House of Representatives, being the last Black person. At one point, of the four Black Representatives in this House, three were from South Carolina.
The very first Black person ever elected to the United States Congress--I want to clean that up because a lot of times I say that and people start sending me pictures of Hiram Revels, and what's his name down there in Louisiana. Look, they were Senators, and they were sent to this Congress by their legislative bodies.
It was not until, what, 1913 when we changed the Constitution in 1913 to allow for the popular election of Senators. So the first person of color, the first Black person to be elected to the United States Congress was Joseph Rainey. We just named a room on the first floor of this Capitol in his honor. It just so happens it was on the 150th anniversary of his election, which I
think was December 12, I believe, in a special election, December 12, 1870. And it just so happened that on that day, none of us knew it, but when we got to the room that we named in his honor and we looked, guess what number was on the room? Room 150. It is now named for Joseph Rainey from Georgetown, South Carolina. He was the first one in 1870.
In 1897 George Washington Murray left this Congress. And because of the Constitutional Convention, what they did in 1895, taking all the rights of Black people away, not another Black person got elected to this Congress from South Carolina until yours truly was elected in 1992: 95 years.
And for most of that time, well, I hadn't really counted all the days and the years, but let me say this: For a major portion of that time, if not most of it, Black people were in the majority in the State of South Carolina. They were in the majority but had zero representation here in this Congress, zero representation in the legislature, and zero representation in governing bodies all over the State.
I remember the first Black in South Carolina that got elected to the county council down in Beaufort, South Carolina. All of these things happened in my lifetime.
And so what I am saying to this body today and what I am saying to this great country of ours is that what we are doing here today in allowing States to pass laws that take away voting rights and privileges, just think about this, a State, one of my neighboring States, Georgia, just passed a law that says not only are we going to suppress, throw up all these barriers to voting, we aren't just going to do that, but now if this line gets long and you are standing out here in the hot weather trying to cast a vote and someone decides to give you a bottle of water to quench your thirst, they just committed a criminal act. You can give a bottle of water to anybody walking out on the streets if they are thirsty, but if you give a bottle of water while someone is standing to vote in line, you have just committed a criminal act. I want the people of this country to think about that. I want my friends in the other body to think about that.
And then it went even further. They have put into the law a mechanism and a little entity, about I think three people, and sent them up to be referees over whether or not the voting was to their liking, the results. And if they do not like the results of the vote, they can nullify the vote. That is what they just did.
You got 19 States--and I want to hasten to add here all of them are not southern States--19 States, two of them up in the Northeast have passed 34 laws and have introduced over 400 to make it difficult for people to vote and to nullify the efforts of voters. That is Third World stuff. That is banana republic stuff. That is not the stuff of which America is made. And we are going to sit idly by and just watch this happen?
Earlier today, one of my colleagues on the other side was upset because someone has compared--I think maybe upset with the President. In fact, one of my colleagues said as a southerner he was insulted by President Biden's speech. And the basis I understand of the insult is the fact that he called what these States are doing with these new laws Jim Crow 2.0. I am not into all of this IT stuff, so I don't know what that really means, but I know this: It sounds like I agree with him. I am not insulted by that. Because Jim Crow was not Jim Crow until it became Jim Crow.
Reconstruction--one of the reasons I sort of correct some of my friends sometimes when they say it is because I don't want them to get things muddled. I hear people talk all the time about me being the first Black Congressman from South Carolina since Reconstruction. That is not true. All nine of us, the eight before me and me, we are all since Reconstruction.
Reconstruction didn't last but about 12 to 13 years based upon which date you want to use, it didn't last. Reconstruction was over in 1876, so Robert Smalls did not get elected until the 1880s. Robert Smalls got elected since Reconstruction. No.
Reconstruction ended in 1876, and at the end of Reconstruction is when all these so-called Jim Crow laws went into place. The Black Codes went into place. Those things, those laws starting with the Supreme Court decision in 1872, the Crescent decision coming out of Louisiana, which is kind of interesting.
But Plessy v. Ferguson came out of Louisiana. And I want to thank the Governor of Louisiana for having--after all these years--issued a pardon to Homer Plessy, who is a man who was arrested and fined $25 for riding in a forbidden car on the train that he had paid a first-class ticket for and he was arrested putting in place separate but equal, which was never equal.
And so I want to read to you something that was said in the 1895 convention by Robert Smalls. It is real interesting. These are the words of a former slave: ``Since Reconstruction times'' and I am quoting Robert Smalls, ``53,000 Negroes have been killed in the South.'' Since Reconstruction. Remember now, Reconstruction ended in 1876. So somewhere between 1876 and 1895 when Robert Smalls made this speech he says: `` . . . 53,000 Negroes have been killed in the South, and not more than three White men have been convicted and''--he said ``hung'' here, though I want everybody to know that I am educated enough to know that should have been hanged--``for these crimes. I want you to be mindful of the fact that the good people of the north are watching this convention upon this subject. I hope you will make a Constitution that will stand the test. I hope that we may be able to say when our work is done that we have made as good a Constitution as the one we are doing away with.''
Just think about that. They were doing away with the Constitution of 1868 that gave Robert Smalls and other Blacks the right to vote, gave citizens those rights, and in 1895 he is saying, I'm hoping that when we finish here today we will have made a new Constitution that is as good as the one that we are getting rid of. I think Robert Smalls knew very well what was in the making.
There is another gentleman in that Constitutional Convention with him who also served in the Congress, Thomas E. Miller, he had served in the Congress. And in order to get him to serve him in Congress, they made it attractive for him to be the first president of South Carolina State University where Joe Biden was a couple weeks ago and from which I graduated. Thomas Miller spoke on this issue, as well.
But here is what I want you to understand. One of the things they were putting in this Constitution was in order to get the right to vote you had to be able to interpret sections of the Constitution of the United States. You can't get the right to vote until you interpret the Constitution. And now some of the sections are a little worse than that.
In Alabama--we have all seen the stories--in order to get the right to vote you had to be able to tell whoever was standing there--somebody who probably couldn't even count, let alone understand the Constitution--how many jelly beans were in a jar. These were laws passed by States. And anybody who may think that that is silly to have to be able to count or guess how many jelly beans are in a jar in order to get the right to vote, that is no more silly than arresting somebody for giving a bottle of water to somebody standing in line in the hot sun.
That is how stupid some of these laws they are passing are. And we in this body and my friends across the other side of this building are condoning that, saying that we can't change this process to get rid of that kind of silliness. But this is serious stuff.
``How can you expect an ordinary man to understand and explain any section of the Constitution, to correspond to the interpretation put upon it by the manager of an election.''
And I guarantee you, some of these people--I knew some of them--who were running these elections could not read the Constitution, much less interpret it.
I want everybody to listen to this:
When by a recent decision of the Supreme Court, composed of the most learned men in the State, two of them put one construction upon a section of the Constitution and the other justice put an entirely different construction upon it.
How did we get 5-4 decisions in the United States Supreme Court? Because five people think one way; four people think the other. Which one of them would get the right to vote, interpreting the Constitution? This is the kind of silliness here.
To embody such a provision in the election law would be, to me, that every White man would interpret it all right and every Negro would interpret it wrong.
And then Robert Smalls said, I appeal to the gentleman from Edgefield to realize that he is not making the law for one set of men.
Robert Smalls said, ``Some morning, you may wake up to find that the bone and sinew of your country is gone . . . I tell you that the Negro is the bone and sinew of your country and you cannot do without him. I do not believe you want to get rid of the Negro, else why did you impose a high tax on immigration agents who might come here to get him to leave?'' That is very insightful, very insightful.
Now, Thomas Miller, who had also served in Congress, and as I just said, became the first President of South Carolina State, Thomas Miller was a free-born attorney. He was a college graduate. And as I said, he, too, had served in the Congress. As I told you earlier, in 1868, the majority of the delegates were Black. In the 1895 convention, six Blacks, only six. Thomas Miller was one of the six.
Tillman, Miller told the convention, condemned Reconstruction-era political corruption but had ``not found voice eloquent enough, nor pen exact enough to mention those imperishable gifts bestowed upon South Carolina . . . by Negro legislators.'' That is what he said.
He said that ``We were 8 years in power. We had built schoolhouses, established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary system, provided for the education of the deaf and''--that is a colloquial term that is no longer used--to the deaf and mute--you can imagine what the other word is--and ``rebuilt the jails and courthouses . . . In short,'' he says, ``we had reconstructed the State.''
Now, the reason I point this out to you is because he was a majority Black legislator in South Carolina that passed a law that provided for free public education for everybody. Little old State of South Carolina was the first State in the Union to provide for free public education for everybody. Until that time throughout the South, only the elite were provided education.
And as I said here, the school, the penitentiary system, the most modern penal system had been created in South Carolina by a majority of Black legislators; the school to educate the deaf and mute done by a majority of the Black legislators. And that is what Thomas Miller was talking about.
Now, I want to say something about what Robert Smalls had to say about waking up and finding that the law you passed that was meant for me may one day apply to you. We just saw that last year in January when Georgia elected Senator Ossoff. Senator Ossoff ended up defeating an incumbent Senator. Now, that incumbent Senator was David Perdue.
Now, let me tell you something interesting about that, and I think that people better start thinking. Georgia decided several years ago--I remember when it happened--that because there were so many Black people voting, they decided to set up--and you can go back, I won't go through it today, and read the debate that took place in the legislature.
When Georgia decided in order to win a general election in Georgia, you had to have 50 percent plus 1. And man who proposed it argued on the floor that he was doing that in order to dilute, to nullify the effect of the Black vote, to make sure that you get to a 1-on-1 Black versus White runoff requirement. He felt that if there were three or four people in the general election and then the Black people voted in unison, they could get a Black person elected to the Senate. And that is not what he wanted to happen.
So he wanted to make sure that if there were more than two people running and nobody gets 50 percent, then you have to have a runoff in the general election between those two. And if one was Black and the other was White, the White person was sure to win.
Well, that tells you how shortsighted he was, because that is exactly what happened in that other election between Warnock and the incumbent Senator. Now, Warnock got a smaller vote than the person he was in the runoff with, but he didn't get 50 percent so they had to have a runoff. David Perdue got 49.8 percent of the vote, but it was not 50 percent.
If they had not changed that law, David Perdue would have been reelected to the United States Senate on that day back in November. He never would have been in the runoff because he had 49.8 percent, but they put in the law that you got to get 50 percent. So now he has got to runoff. And he runs off against Ossoff and gets beat. He would have been elected if Georgia had not changed.
Just like Robert Smalls told the people of South Carolina: You are not making this law just for me. You are going to wake up one day and this law is going to apply to you. Just ask David Perdue.
Madam Speaker, may I inquire how much time I have remaining?
On the other side, the gentleman was shortsighted in his debate in the legislature simply because Warnock was in this runoff. It was Black against White. But the people of Georgia decided they would elect a Black guy. So the Georgia legislature was wrong on both fronts when they put that law in place. The law that would have reelected Perdue was taken away and they put in place a law that was supposed to ensure his election, and he lost. And they lost on both fronts.
So I say to my friends in the Senate, and I have been talking to them, and I am, quite frankly, very disappointed in my conversations and that is why I decided to come to this floor today. I want to say to them, they should be careful. They should be very, very careful because what may look like a good thing to do today, may not be such a good thing after it is operated for some time.
Madam Speaker, I will give you back a few of these minutes. I could go on for some more. I have got some other things I probably should have said and I may have already said some things that I should not have said. But I did say I would say something interesting about that first Constitutional Convention in 1895.
I just told you about free public schools, when in that Constitutional Convention, the guy that put up the resolution calling for free public schools was Robert Smalls. The penal system that they put in place, that was the envy of the world, done by the majority of Black legislators. I have talked about all that.
But there was something else that they proposed that they couldn't get done. They had proposed in 1868 at that convention, the majority of Black people tried to give the vote to women--in 1868. Something that did not happen until the 19th amendment in the 1900s--whenever that was--1920-something. Just to let you know that skin color has nothing to do with the extent of progressive ideas or, what we might call, enlightened thought.
Madam Speaker, I want to close with--I call it a poem. I used to quote it pretty often. A German theologian, Lutheran theologian named Martin--and I think I am pronouncing his last name right--Niemoller. It isn't quite spelled that way, but I am not that equipped in the German language but I think that is the way it is pronounced. And I close with his words:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out
because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak
out because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak
for me.
Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.