Georgia State Sen. Nikema Williams On Moving The Needle Forward On John Lewis's Legacy

[babylonsister]

Last edited Sun Aug 16, 2020, 08:39 AM - Edit history (1)

I've been friends with Nikema since I lived in GA. What a kind soul she is, and smart as a whip! Good luck, Nikema!

https://www.essence.com/feature/nikema-williams-us-congress-john-lewis/

Georgia State Sen. Nikema Williams On Moving The Needle Forward On John Lewis’s Legacy
By Breanna Edwards · August 14, 2020
Williams, who was selected to take Lewis’s place on the ballot in the November elections, spoke to ESSENCE about her run for U.S. Congress.


Last month, Georgia Democrats selected State Senator Nikema Williams to take the late Rep. John Lewis’s place on the ballot after the beloved civil rights icon passed away. It might be a daunting prospect for some, but Williams knows she’s not Lewis, and she knows that she can’t step into his shoes…no matter how many other people have asked her to. However, she does plan to move ahead and live up to the ideals and values that she learned from him, while still being herself, and while “moving the needle forward” for the betterment of the next generation.

“There are absolutely things that Mr. Lewis fought for that I want to pick up the mantle and continue, but each generation has an obligation to take it one step further,” Williams told ESSENCE. “So just picking up where he left off and continuing isn’t, simply, enough; and I know that Mr. Lewis would feel this way as well.”

Take, for example, voting rights, something that the civil rights icon literally shed blood for during the march from Selma to Montgomery when he was brutally beaten by White officers in 1965. If elected, one of the first things Williams plans to do is work on the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, if it has not already been dealt with by the time she arrives on Capitol Hill.

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn moved to rename H.R.4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2019, which passed in the House, after his departed colleague. The bill, if passed and signed into law, restores the full protections of the Voting Rights Act, which the Supreme Court gutted in 2013. A perfect representation of Lewis’s legacy.

However, Williams says beyond that, more has to be done to protect voting rights, an issue that she is equally passionate about, and one that she herself was arrested for back in 2018 while demonstrating with constituents to have every single vote be counted in the contentious Georgia elections.

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“When I go to Congress, I’m bringing you with me. I want to be your voice. We can only do this if we do this together,” she said. “We’re all going to make sure that we’re living up to the promise of America when I get there.