The March Still Ahead
The House of Representatives met at noon on Tuesday, January 6, 1874, opening with a prayer by the chaplain, Reverend J. G. Butler. An ordinary day in the nation’s capital—except that one man, Robert Brown Elliot, was about to make it memorable.
The day before, Alexander Stephens—returning to Congress after a fourteen-year hiatus—had lectured the House against Charles Sumner’s civil rights bill that aimed to protect all citizens in their civil and legal rights. The former Confederate vice president argued that “the germinal and seminal principle of American constitutional liberty is the absolute unrestricted right of State self-government in all purely internal municipal affairs.”
The bill sought not only to protect freed Black Americans in the South, but to establish nondiscrimination in public places—a radical step toward true equality of treatment. Elliot had listened carefully. This was the same Stephens who, in 1861, declared that the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy was white supremacy and the rightness of enslaving an inferior race.
Born in Liverpool, England, of West Indian parents, Robert Elliot was widely acknowledged as exceptionally learned. As a delegate to the South Carolina constitutional convention in 1868, he helped defeat poll taxes and literacy tests designed to prevent Black Americans from voting. He became the first African American commanding general of the South Carolina National Guard, organized to combat Ku Klux Klan terrorism. And poetically, he held the seat once occupied by Preston Brooks—the man who had beaten abolitionist senator Charles Sumner nearly to death with a cane on the Senate floor in 1856.
Elliot respected Stephens’ years of service. But, he said, “It is not from him that the American House of Representatives should take lessons in matters touching human rights.”
After thunderous applause, Elliot continued: “It is scarcely twelve years since that gentleman shocked the civilized world by announcing the birth of a government which rested on human slavery as its corner-stone. The progress of events has swept away that pseudo-government which rested on greed, pride, and tyranny; and the race whom he then ruthlessly spurned and trampled on are here to meet him in debate.”
At the heart of the matter, Elliot declared, was Stephens’ refusal to accept progress—progress spoken for, fought for, and paid for in the blood of slaves and soldiers alike. Quoting Alexander Hamilton, he argued that the rights in the bill were among “the sacred rights of mankind, which are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records; they are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the Divinity itself.”
“The passage of this bill,” Elliot declared, “will determine the civil status, not only of the negro, but of any other class of citizens who may feel themselves discriminated against. It will form the cap-stone of that temple of liberty, begun on this continent under discouraging circumstances… a building the grandest which the world has ever seen.”
The speech was so significant it was memorialized in an 1874 lithograph now held in the Library of Congress and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. A banner in the image quotes Elliot directly: “What you give to one class you must give to all. What you deny to one class you deny to all.”
Eighty-three years later, on May 17, 1957—the third anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education—some twenty thousand people gathered in Washington for the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom. Speaking last, Martin Luther King, Jr., indicted both political parties for betraying justice and exhorted Congress to act.
“The denial of this sacred right is a tragic betrayal of the highest mandates of our democratic tradition,” King declared. “Give us the ballot, and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights.”
Though the 15th Amendment had guaranteed Black Americans the right to vote since 1870, Jim Crow laws—literacy tests, poll taxes, strict voter ID requirements—systematically prevented it. Poll taxes weren’t prohibited until 1964. The Voting Rights Act wasn’t signed until 1965.
Some politicians have fought ever since to return to the discrimination Stephens dressed up as constitutional principle.
By 2015, President Obama stood in Selma, Alabama, on the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday, and said: “Right now, in 2015, there are laws across this country designed to make it harder for people to vote. The Voting Rights Act stands weakened, its future subject to political rancor. How can that be?
“We were born of change,” he continued. “We broke the old aristocracies, declaring ourselves entitled not by bloodline, but endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. America is what we make of it.”
Now, in 2026, Louisiana v. Callais has made Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act all but a dead letter. States from Louisiana to Tennessee to Mississippi are redrawing maps before the midterms. The argument Stephens made on January 5, 1874—states’ rights, constitutional originalism, federal overreach—is the argument that won in April 2026.
Today, as in 1874, as in 1957, as in 2015, America is what we make of it.
Echoing Isaiah, Obama said in Selma: “We honor those who walked so we could run. We must run so our children soar. And we will not grow weary.”
The question today is not whether justice has been defeated, but whether we believe in America enough not to let injustice reign. That is the march still ahead.