hardships for African-American citizens continued; and
WHEREAS, With the Compromise of 1877, the last of the Federal
troops in the South withdrew, effectively allowing lynching,
disenfranchisement and segregationist laws to proliferate; and
WHEREAS, By the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement began to
form and was dedicated to activism for equal rights and
treatment of African Americans in the United States; and
WHEREAS, Among the prominent activists during this time was
the late Representative John R. Lewis, who participated in
freedom rides on interstate buses, was the youngest speaker at
the 1963 March on Washington and helped organize the peaceful
march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama in what is now
called "Bloody Sunday"; and
WHEREAS, John Lewis famously believed in getting in "good
trouble, necessary trouble" in an effort to bring about
transformative change in America; and
WHEREAS, John Lewis' leadership, among the help of countless
others, ultimately led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of
1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965; and
WHEREAS, The Voting Rights Act, signed by President Lyndon B.
Johnson on August 6, 1965, expanded the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendments by banning racial discrimination in voting practices
in response to barriers such as voter intimidation, literacy
tests and poll taxes that prevented African Americans from
voting for nearly a century; and
WHEREAS, Since 1965, the Voting Rights Act has been amended
in order to extend protections, however, on June 25, 2013, the
Supreme Court struck down a key provision; and
WHEREAS, The majority of the Supreme Court ruled that the
coverage formula in Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act was
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