Across the bridge: Alabama Dem carries torch for voting bill

WASHINGTON — Growing up in the civil rights epicenter of Selma, Alabama, Terri Sewell heard all the stories. Coming 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.” 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. 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.” 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. “It’s a city that is dying on the vine, a city that needs economic revitalization.” 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. The state, where one in four voters is Black, is asking the high court to reject the creation of a second, mostly Black congressional seat, despite a lower court’s finding that having just one Black-majority district out of seven “violates federal law.” Sewell said the country’s history is filled with “progress and regression,” and just as it took an earlier generation years to pass the Voting Rights Act, she is determined to press on as long as it takes to preserve it.