WaPo | President Biden promised Tuesday to "fight like heck" against Republican efforts to restrict voting, using the anniversary of a racist massacre here to respond to Democrats' growing anxiety that his low-key approach was threatening fair elections and their own electoral future.
Biden announced that he was tapping Vice President Harris to marshal an effort against the increasing array of Republican-led state laws that restrict voting in various ways, a campaign Biden condemned as “un-American.”
“This sacred right is under assault with incredible intensity like I’ve never seen,” Biden said, adding that June should be a “month of action” on Capitol Hill and taking what appeared to be a shot at Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), suggesting they often side with Republicans.
The president has been under pressure to show more urgency in the face of a GOP push that includes efforts to overturn the last presidential election, former president Donald Trump’s false assertion that he won, and Republican resistance to Democrats’ voting rights proposals in Congress. Democrats in Texas over the weekend blocked a restrictive voting measure, at least temporarily, by walking out of the statehouse.
Biden, the first president to visit Tulsa to commemorate the 1921 massacre, which included numerous atrocities and destroyed a prosperous Black community, delivered a searing speech that recounted the events in great detail and sought to “fill the silence” about the killing.
The massacre, which killed as many as 300 people and destroyed more than 1,250 homes, destroyed what was known as Black Wall Street, a thriving community of African Americans.
“For much too long, the history of what took place here was told in silence, cloaked in darkness,” he said. “But just because history is silent, it doesn’t mean that it did not take place.”
Biden portrayed the effort to come to grips with that spasm of racist killing, and what it revealed about the bigotry and hatred in American life, as critical to a process of healing and rebuilding that is still underway in the country more broadly.
“We can’t just choose what we want to know, and not what we should know,” Biden said. “We should know the good, the bad — everything. That’s what great nations do. They come to terms with their dark sides.”
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