Another speaker advocating the revival of the VRA, gutted by the infamous SCOTUS decision in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013.
Rev. Yearwood objected to the police actions, saying that in all his years of activism he'd never been pushed back as we were, that it violated our civil rights. He identified the police weapons as AK47s. My stomach turned over.
"Let me take you down my voter-suppression memory lane," he said. Back in the sixties, Medgar Evers was turned away from the polls, told he couldn't vote, and was later shot standing in his own driveway.
Yearwood told the protesters to form a line filling H Street from corner to corner, holding hands. "Fight back" was the next chant. The police this time didn't react. Mic check didn't work too well, so the group resumed its clump formation to hear what was being said as well as possible.
He said whatever the police may do next, that we should obey them and stay calm and do what they tell us to do, despite the barriers and yellow tape blocking not just us but the entire public from the shade of the park on this brutally hot day
Meanwhile, a good samaritan came over to me and sheltered both of us from the sun with her poster. I was dripping sweat, which kept smearing the ink on my reporter's pad.
Evocative words followed from the next speaker: "We shall overcome this fight! We will not be moved!" What they did today was un-American.
Members of the Hip Hop Caucus promised to be there every day. "This is what America looks like. We stand together."
Another speaker said that the hand-picked members of the commission were about as logically placed as Putin would be if he were in charge of investigating his country's intervention into our Election 2016.
Yet another said that 70 years ago people stood in the hot sun to be told that the polls would be closed on Sunday, because that was when less- educated people tended to vote. Another suggested that we should build another civil rights commission instead of the sham group being anointed in the air-conditioned Eisenhower Executive Office Building across the street while we sweated.
Representing Generation Progress, another speaker said that the millennials were the largest and most diverse generation in history. She then reported on a session held at the Center for American Progress discussing automatic registration, which is so far done in only six states but must spread throughout the country. "We must wrest the resins of power from these toxic people," she said.
Close to the end of the protest, as we dared exceed the 11:30 boundary of our interrupted schedule, former Connecticut secretary of state Miles Rapoport, now a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, told us that the CEI was a "shameful assault on democracy." There are so many better things "they" could be doing. He said that the Kansas City Star calls Kobach "Inspector Javier," alluding to a villain in the Broadway musical Les Miserables.
Katherine Harris is the only "super-star" villain not on the commission--notorious for polluting Election 2000 by working to subtract 94,000 Democratic-leaning voters from the rolls in Florida. Rapoport called the commission "put together with arrogance and sloppiness"--that what we really had to fear was cooperation with the Department of Justice, whose authority is clear and unambiguous.
What can we do? Continue to resist as we did today and, at the state level, fight to restore the VRA and to prevent the Trump administration from defunding the Election Assistance Commission, which Congress is planning to do. They are the ones who are the witch hunters, not we the people.
A singer closed the protest with the lyrics "One thing we did right / was the day we started to fight / keep your eyes on the prize / hold on." He then recommended Greg Palast's masterful investigation of interstate crosscheck "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," which few among us were familiar with. He said to buy it on Amazon on Palast's website immediately.
"Fight like the future depends on it, because it does!" he concluded.
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