ATLANTA — Vice President Kamala Harris, Georgia’s first Black U.S. senator and the youngest daughter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. each made passionate calls on Monday for passage of new federal voting rights laws at the annual remembrance for the slain civil rights leader, warning democracy hangs in the balance.
In tributes to King, they also called upon Americans to follow in his footsteps, to push lawmakers through nonviolent organization to pass voting rights legislation currently stalled in the U.S. Senate.
The speeches at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church are part of a pressure campaign to force Senate Democrats to relax filibuster rules to allow for approval of federal voting rights law to get around unified Republican opposition in the evenly divided chamber. Republicans call the legislation a gross overreach of federal authority and a partisan power grab.
Two Democrats, Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have so far refused calls by President Joe Biden, other Democrats and activists to eliminate the Senate’s filibuster rule, which requires 60 votes to advance most bills, or to carve out an exception for voting rights.
In a video address, Harris said new laws in Georgia and other states create new burdens on voters in states representing 55 million people — or about one in six Americans.
“The proponents of these laws are not only putting in place obstacles to the ballot box, they are also working to interfere with our elections to get the outcomes they want and to discredit those they do not,” Harris said. “That is not how democracies work.”
The annual King Beloved Community Commemorative Service celebrates the life and legacy of the late King, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who was co-pastor of historic Ebenezer before his assassination in 1968.
It is always a political as well as spiritual event, with past years emphasizing poverty, health care, presidential politics and other issues. Health care and the rights of the poor played prominently again.
But voting rights at Monday’s 54th annual service carried greater urgency following the siege of the U.S. Capitol last January and acts by state legislatures that critics decry as voter suppression.
Last year, Republicans in Georgia passed new voting restrictions in the wake of Biden’s narrow victory in the state. The new Georgia law limits the number, locations and days of use of ballot drop boxes and cuts the time period to request an absentee ballot.
The law also outlaws mass mailing of absentee ballot applications and instituted new proof of ID requirements that critics say will disproportionately affect Black voters because they are more likely than whites to lack driver’s licenses or other state ID.
Sen. Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor at Ebenezer, who was elected as Georgia’s first Black senator in a runoff a year ago, said that on Martin Luther King Jr. Day each year, many quote King, but they “don’t always love what he represents.”
If you speak King’s name, the Georgia Democrat said, you must stand up for the poor and oppressed, for those who lack health care and for people disenfranchised.
“You cannot remember Dr. King and dismember his legacy at the same time,” Warnock said.
King’s landmark “I Have a Dream” Speech is often quoted, with platitudes toward his call for equal treatment for all, Warnock said. But he said some quoting King forget other speeches, including his 1957 address before the Lincoln Memorial, where he warned of the “conniving” efforts to stop people from voting.
Some of the arguments among Republicans today sound similar to state’s rights arguments against landmark voting legislation in the 1950s and 1960s, Warnock said.
“Surely states don’t have a right to block people from voting,” he said. “Ask yourself what side of the historical ledger you’ll stand on? As for me in my house we will serve the Lord.”
Republicans pushed new election laws asserting a need to restore integrity to state voting systems and procedures.
But many of the backers of those bills also support former President Donald Trump’s unfounded claims that the 2020 election was “rigged.” Recounts have upheld the results in Georgia and other states and courts have tossed dozens of legal challenges nationwide.
King Center CEO Rev. Bernice King, who was 5 when her father was assassinated, said nonviolence paved the way for the South to overcome segregation. It dismantled apartheid in South Africa and reunified East and West Germany.
“Nonviolence is the only way to save the soul of this nation and the world and the democracy of this nation,” she said.
Speakers at the service, which had a small invite-only crowd because of coronavirus, also included U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Marcia Fudge and Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and first lady Marty Kemp addressed the service via video.
Also on Monday, Martin Luther King III and his wife Arndrea Water King led a march in Washington, D.C., across the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge demanding action on voting rights.
The granddaughter of King Jr., Yolanda Renee King, said in Washington that at 13, she’s not yet old enough to vote, but the fight for voting rights is personal.
“At age 13, I have fewer voting rights than the day that I was born,” she said in a livestream of the march.
Last week, Biden and Harris traveled to Atlanta for a speech on voting rights, met with King family members and laid a wreath at the crypt of Martin Luther King Jr. and his widow and King Center founder, Coretta Scott King.
In a video address posted on social media Monday, Biden decried Republican efforts in state houses as “voter suppression and election subversion.”
The president said Martin Luther King Jr. committed his life to ensure a future in which the nation fulfills its promise that “we’re all created equal and deserve to be treated equally throughout our lives.”
Biden linked the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters to try to prevent certification of the 2020 election and efforts in state houses to change voting procedures.
“It’s no longer just about who gets to vote, it’s about who gets to count the vote and whether your vote counts at all,” he said.
Biden didn’t mention Manchin or Sinema by name but raised a challenge for Americans to pick a side.
“Will we stand up for an America where everyone is guaranteed the full protections and the full promise of this nation? Yes or no?” Biden said. “I know where I stand. And it is time for every elected official in America to make it clear where they stand.”
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(Staff writer Ernie Suggs contributed to this report.)
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