ATLANTA — Nearly 54 years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the U.S. is in the middle of another debate on voting rights.
Martin Luther King III joined other activists in Washington D.C. on his father’s holiday to push senators and President Biden for action.
“Last week, the president said he’s tired of being quiet about voting rights, well we’re tired about being patient,” King said.
Activists are looking to change Senate rules to allow two voting rights bills to pass with only 50 votes and avoid a filibuster.
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Conservative Democrats Kriysten Sinema and Joe Manchin have been skeptical, alongside Senate Republicans, which has put the passage of the bills in doubt.
Jay Williams with the Stoneridge Group, which works alongside candidates, says the number of voters in Georgia has increased each of the last few election cycles, making him skeptical that Republicans would be trying to stop voting rights.
“It’s really hard for me to believe that there’s some type of, you know, Republican effort to hurt voting rights when voting specifically in Georgia has increased every election cycle for the last three or four cycles,” Williams told Channel 2′s Matt Johnson.
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In 1964, a filibuster held up a civil rights bill Dr. King fought for, but it was eventually passed.
UGA political science professor Charles Bullock told Johnson that politics today are even more divided than they were then.
“It was also then broken up by getting a bipartisan coalition to come together. Bipartisanship is not a word you hear in Washington anymore, it simply does not exist,” Bullock said.
Both the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act could be up for a vote on Tuesday. Together, the bills aim to expand voter registration, make Election Day a federal holiday, limit gerrymandering and restore voting rights to formerly incarcerated Americans.
Pastor Jamal Bryant at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church told Johnson that he was going on a hunger strike to push for the passage of the bills.
“Even for voting rights to be on the agenda is an affront to the King legacy and the holiday,” he said. “Everything that he died for, we are now reliving.”
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As politics become very much a part of this MLK Day, some are celebrating the man and not the politics.
“We sometimes wax overly poetic about what King would do if he were living. And the fact is, none of us really know because he was a man who was independent in his own thought,” Leo Smith said.
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