MONTGOMERY--Black leaders in the state said Tuesday an upcoming caravan in support of keeping the Voting Rights Act of 1965 intact will be historic.
They say it will unite black leaders, including Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam and those representing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference made prominent by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., for the first time in this generation.
“We have risen above our historical differences, and we are united,” said Tuskegee Mayor Johnny Ford.
The National Coalition of Leaders to Save Section 5 announced on Tuesday that Farrakhan would join them for a June 14 caravan and pilgrimage that will stop at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, at the Shelby County courthouse in Columbiana, at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, and conclude with a 4 p.m. event at the state Capitol in Montgomery.
Regardless of whether people like Farrakhan and his politics, Ford said he was the only black leader able to mobilize millions of black men.
Ford said that black leaders are uniting in support of Section 5, which requires some states including Alabama to apply to submit proposed changes to issues dealing with elections to the U.S. Department of Justice for approval, despite their differences.
The U.S. Supreme Court is currently considering a legal challenge by Shelby County to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, with the county and some states arguing the section is no longer needed because those regions have made progress since the civil rights era and because it only targets some regions. The court listened to oral arguments, but has not ruled.
Ford said removing Section 5 would gut the act, which Congress extended in 2006.
State Sen. Hank Sanders, D-Selma, said striking down that section would send the message that “the right to vote is no longer protected” and said it could lead to there not being black officials in the state.
Sanders, fellow Democratic Sen. Bobby Singleton of Greensboro, Selma attorney Faya Rose Toure and Ford announced the caravan on Tuesday.
Some of them bristled when asked about Farrakhan being a divisive figure.
Sanders, who said he personally knows Farrakhan, said he does not consider Farrakhan divisive and said “almost every time I have seen him he asks folks to stand together.”
While some consider Farrakhan a civil rights leader, some groups including the Southern Poverty Law Center consider him hateful, especially for his comments about Jews, and consider the Nation of Islam a hate group.
Farrakhan condemned the media and the SPLC during a March stop in the state and said they would have a lot of respect for his group if they “were riding like the Klan.”
Posted By: Siebra Muhammad
Thursday, June 6th 2013 at 12:27PM
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