In the News

To the Editor:

Few printed words have evoked the brutality of Jim Crow more concisely than Roy Reed’s March 8, 1965, report on the front page of The New York Times: “Alabama state troopers and volunteer officers of the Dallas County sheriff’s office tore through a column of Negro demonstrators with tear gas, nightsticks, and whips here today to enforce Gov. George Wallace’s order against a protest march from Selma to Montgomery.”

Mr. Reed’s language bore witness to the violence of 1960s life for Black Americans. The Times editors’ decision to print Mr. Reed’s report on the front page displayed deliberate moral clarity. I was disappointed, then, that The Times failed to acknowledge the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday earlier this month.

In commemoration and homage to our late colleague Representative John Lewis of Georgia, I traveled to Selma earlier this month on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday alongside more than 30 House colleagues. We remembered marchers who paid for the Voting Rights Act with blood, recognizing, too, the need for full and fair representation. Their work is unfinished.

Over the years, conservative, anti-voter hostility has eroded voting rights in the United States. For millions, this remains urgent; it is discouraging that The Times’s attention to this issue has diminished so markedly.


Yvette D. Clarke
Washington
The writer is a Democratic U.S. representative from New York and the chairperson of the Congressional Black Caucus.