Adams Calls for Voting Rights Legislation and Senate Reform in “State of the District” Speech

CHARLOTTE – On Thursday night, Congresswoman Alma Adams (NC-12) delivered her "State of the District" speech live from Halton Theater on the CPCC Central Campus in Midtown Charlotte. In the speech, she took time out to focus her remarks on voting rights, focusing on her personal experience in the Jim Crow South, and calling for the passage of voting rights bills and filibuster reform in the Senate.

Video of the voting rights portion of the speech is available for download here.

Adams' Remarks as Prepared for Delivery Are Below:

Now, this isn't a partisan event because I work for every person in our district regardless of their political beliefs. But it is an unfortunate fact that some folks want to make voting a partisan issue.

I don't believe that. I believe voting rights are fundamental to our democracy.

I was born in the Jim Crow South, and I attended North Carolina A&T in Greensboro during the Civil Rights Movement.

I went to school in the shadow of the Greensboro Four and the many other A&T students who led the sit-ins that integrated the Woolworth's lunch counter.

My contemporaries were beaten and bloodied and sometimes murdered for equal rights, including the right to vote. Because from 1877 until 1965 – the year I turned nineteen – almost every Black person in the South was denied the right to vote.

My mother didn't even vote until I was a sophomore in college.

So, it's hard to express how important voting rights are to me.

How fundamental they are to the American experience.

This isn't ancient history; this is my life. It's the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans who still live among us, who are still here to tell the story of what it was like to face poll taxes and literacy tests.

People like me effectively got the right to vote less than a lifetime ago. And one of the reasons it took so long was because white supremacists embraced the filibuster to effectively kill bills to advance civil rights.

According to the Washington Post, from 1917 to 1994, half of the bills that were successfully filibustered in the Senate were Civil Rights legislation. That includes voting rights legislation.

So, when I see a member of the Senate, Democrat or Republican, say preserving an instrument of segregation – the Filibuster – is more important than guaranteeing our fundamental right in a democracy … it breaks my heart, because they haven't once made the effort to stand in my shoes or wear my hat for a day.

And if you doubt that voting rights are important, we can respectfully disagree – but only if you make an effort to see the issue through the eyes of people who have fought and died for this right –

Because too many times, the price of the right to vote was paid in blood.

So, as I said, it's hard to express how important voting rights are to me.

And when Senators choose the filibuster over voting rights, it breaks my heart.

But what's more important is that it breaks our Democracy. And we as Americans deserve better. We deserve a Senate that works for the American people.

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