One of my few heroes who happens to be the congressman from my birth state of Georgia, Rep. John Lewis, a Freedom Rider in 1961, gave a brief and eloquent speech about voter suppression at the Democratic National Convention this week. Too bad it got so little attention in the convention hall, the media or the blogosphere.

Lewis was, in 1964, one of the organizers of the voting registration project called Freedom Summer in which I participated 48 years ago. This man put his life on the line for liberty not in a foreign land but right in America, fighting non-violently for an end to Jim Crow and for the right of black Americans to exercise the vote they supposedly had won after the Civil War.

In the first part of the video below, he briefly describes his experience half a century ago. In the second half, which I have transcribed, he talks about what is happening these days. Seven very worthwhile minutes:





Today it is unbelievable that there are Republican officials still trying to stop some people from voting. They are changing the rules, cutting polling hours and imposing requirements intended to suppress the vote. The Republican leader in the Pennsylvania House even bragged that his state’s new voter ID law is “gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state.” That’s not right. That’s not fair. That is not just. And similar efforts have been made in Texas, Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia and South Carolina. I’ve seen this before. I’ve lived this before. Too many people struggled, suffered and died to make it possible for every American to exercise their right to vote. And we have come too far together to ever turn back. So we must not be silent. We must stand up, speak up and speak out. We must march to the polls like never before. We must come together and exercise our sacred right. And together, on November 6, we will re-elect the man who will lead America forward: President Barack Obama.

The country's dead-level, frustrated and angry, but not necessarily motivated, and a substantial number of people think the whole thing is a waste and an equally substantial number believe that it's not on the square. If I were running the president's campaign, I'd shut the hell up about Simpsonp-fking-Bowles and put John Lewis on an airplane and let him tell his story in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and everywhere else this atavistic authoritarian nonsense is going down. There's more at risk here than anyone knows.

Charles Pierce at Esquire had quite a lot to say about Lewis's talk, which he summed up rather well with:(Continue reading below the fold.)