movement to make juneteenth a federal holiday. known as the grandmother of juneteenth, the 95-year-old campaigned on the issue for decades. she even held a two and a half mile march each year to commemorate the two and a half years it took for slaves in texas to learn they were free. please, please continue the kinds of things you know we need to become one people. it s not a white thing. it s not a black thing. it s an american thing. reporter: in 198 texas became the first state to make juneteenth a state holiday. 47 states and the district of columbia followed suit. a dream come true for low and
certainly the president is pushing in every way he can and so no question about that, and i think we re at a point where we see some things happening in the senate around the edges that don t go to the fundamental essence of dnl conditional trying to get back power. he ll work with us on making juneteenth a federal holiday, which was great, but why aren t reprotecting people s freedom to vote? they ll work with us on an innovation bill. great but that doesn t tackle what we ve got to do on the climate crisis, and clean energy manufacturing to move forward, and when they stand up and say oh, no, no, january 6th, no, nothing really happened here, or we know everything that happened here, which of course we don t, and the public has a right to know and we ought to be focusing on making sure we are doing everything possible to make sure it doesn t happen again. when it goes to standing up to donald trump, when it goes to their fundamental power, you
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that you have these senators, republican senators, who voted for the holiday and yet are burying their heads in the sand or being in intentional denial around the fact that we are still trying to make the promise of juneteenth a reality, particularly as with regards to voting rights. you would think that if you voted to commemorate the end of slavery, you would think it would go hand in hand with voting to protect the right to vote. some of our viewers may not know, but 94-year-old opal lee, she s quite an inspiration. if we can show video of president biden signing that bill, making juneteenth a federal holiday into law, you see her right next to president biden, and a lot of people say juneteenth may never have been possible in terms of it becoming a federal holiday if she did not help this fight to make that so. i want to play some sound, she was on cnn the other night, and she talked about that moment. here she is.
and if they will not disavow the filibuster then i think that the democrats will have to ask themselves where do they go from here? i just can t understand, brian, why voting rights is such an issue right now. they passed a law granting juneteenth making juneteenth a federal holiday. it was low hanging fruit. that was an easy one to do. but in many ways i think it was subterfuge for the bigger fight republicans want to engage in, and that s the issue of voting rights and that s the issue of police reform. these are two things they don t want to do, and they would rather engage in the symbolic, brian, than the real and that s voting rights. well, professor, to your very point these are some of the same republicans in the senate raising this crisis over