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It failed in the Senate in January, part of a broader bill halted by a Republican filibuster and two Democrats unwilling to change the rules for passage.įor Sewell, it was a reminder of how the battle of the earlier civil rights generation has swiftly, intractably become her own. Since the court’s decision, every session of Congress she has introduced legislation, now called the John R. Two years after Sewell took office, the Supreme Court’s stunning decision to reject the Voting Rights Act’s “preclearance” formula governing state election changes thrust the congresswoman to the forefront alongside Lewis to try to salvage the law, which had been seen as among the most enduring achievements of the Civil Rights era. “It’s a city that is dying on the vine, a city that needs economic revitalization.” “We can’t just come to Selma and walk across that bridge and keep on walking,” she said ahead of next month’s anniversary of the marches. Residential yard sewage remains a stubborn problem because of lagging public investment in wastewater systems.

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The region has been so underserved that when “Selma” the movie opened in 2014, her mom pointed out there was no movie theater open in town for a screening. One bill she steered into law awarded the Congressional Gold Medal to the four Black girls killed in the 1963 bombing at the city’s 16th Street Baptist Church. In Congress, Sewell put her public finance law background to work trying to preserve the historic civil rights sites in her district, which stretches across the state’s Black Belt to her current home in Birmingham.

Many of them were “ordinary Alabamians,” she said, and once the marches were over and the voting rights bill became law, “They went on with their lives, and many of them were my neighbors and my church members.”

“For me, growing up in Selma, Alabama, I didn’t have to read in the history books about these amazing foot soldiers,” said Sewell, who is 57. Her family’s church in Selma was the historic Brown Chapel AME Church, the starting point for the historic voting rights marches and the place that Lewis - the future congressman, who died in 2020 - and others would return years later to commemorate “Bloody Sunday.” Her mother was the city’s first Black city councilwoman. That was a tough start for the first Black valedictorian at Selma High School and someone who can boast of attending college with both Obamas, Michelle at Princeton and the future president at Harvard Law.Ĭoming from a long line of “preachers and teachers,” she confides she really wanted to be an actor, but recalled her late father’s admonitions: “We’re not eating cornflakes for dinner for you to be majoring in theater at Princeton University.” Wade Henderson, interim president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said of Sewell: “She’s emerged as someone who is uniquely qualified to play the role that history seems to have given her.”Įlected in 2010 as the first Black congresswoman from Alabama, Sewell arrived at the Capitol about as backbench as it gets, among a new handful of Democrats in a Republican tea party wave.

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Since the Supreme Court in 2013 struck down part of the law, many states free from federal oversight have been imposing new rules, changing polling times and even installing limits on handing out water for those waiting in line - changes that voter advocates say could make it more difficult to cast ballots in this year’s elections.

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Her work trying to restore the Voting Rights Act is testing the resolve of a nation that celebrates its civil rights heroes of the past, but cannot muster support in Congress to update what has historically been a popular, bipartisan law.