-You know, when you are up and down with a guy for 60 years,
you started in this business at 20-year-olds,
and you know what it was like back then,
every time I think of voting, I think of John.
Well, we first met in 1960, when we were forming what became
known as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
We thought that we could be much more effective
if we started coordinating our activities,
and so we met in Atlanta.
It was also the weekend that I met Martin
Luther King Jr for the first time.
And I tell people that it was that night with King,
when I spent four or five hours with him,
I came out of the room a changed person.
So I had my Saul-to-Paul transformation that weekend.
I've often said about John,
he became a real disciple of Martin Luther King Jr.
A lot of us adopted nonviolence as a tactic.
John internalized nonviolence.
It became his life.
-I said on many occasions that the vote
is the most powerful nonviolent instrument of transformation
we have in our democracy, we have in a democratic society.
-And so, of course, it was 1965
when they marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
And that led to the '65 Voting Rights Act.
So, what John was doing,
and many of us throughout the South,
was using that new Voting Rights Act
to get African-Americans registered to vote.
John kept faith.
He, more than anybody I knew,
really believed that we were going to succeed.
And that's why I want to do
whatever I can to carry out his work,
because he spent the last seven years of his life
working on getting the Voting Rights Act reinstated.
The Supreme Court gutted it seven years ago
in the Shelby case.
-People have to pass a so-called literacy test,
interpret some section of the Constitution.
One man was asked to count the number of bubbles
in a bar of soap.
Another man was asked to count the number of jellybeans
in a jar.
It's shameful that you would come here tonight
and say to the Department of Justice
that you must not use one penny, one cent, one dime, one dollar,
to carry out the mandate of Section Five
of the Voting Rights Act.
We should be opened up to political process
and letting all of our citizens come in and participate.
People died for the right to vote --
friends of mine, colleagues of mine.
-John wanted to get that bill passed real bad.
We passed it in the House.
It is sitting over in the Senate.
Hopefully, the Senate will do more than give lip service
to John Lewis and,
by their deeds, pass the bill and send it to the President.
He'd ask me, well, now, do I think we're going to
get a majority of the Senate to agree to it.
I'm not optimistic about that.
But what I am optimistic about is that we can explain
to the American people why we need a new Senate.
If that law were passed now, and we could operate
under that law, going into this election,
a couple of things they could not do that they're doing now.
In my home state of South Carolina, they started a policy,
if you want an absentee ballot, you got to submit an application
with your Social Security number.
We ask people to protect their Social Security numbers.
Why are going to require that?
And that's what the state of South Carolina
finally settled our lawsuit, photo ID laws.
These things, you outlaw with the Voting Rights Act.
And most egregious is that you have states now
that are sending out applications for absentee votes
or early votes,
and you got to buy a stamp to mail it back in.
That's a poll tax.
That's been outlawed.
So, these are the kinds of shenanigans
that they would not be able to do
if we had the safety of that Voting Rights Act.
No matter what the movement is, there will be somebody
that stands head and shoulders above all others.
There were 600 people on that bridge that day.
Some of them, I knew very well.
Pretty popular people -- some more popular than John.
But John stood head and shoulders above all the others.
And, no, I will never forget John Lewis.
I will never get him out of my system.