The right for all to vote was the "crown jewel" of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's legacy, his onetime aide and fellow civil rights advocate the Rev. Jesse Jackson said Monday.
Until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed, Jackson told Fox News' "America's Newsroom," African Americans were hindered from voting, even almost 100 years after the passage of the 15th Amendment.
"Women could not serve on juries in the south," Jackson, who founded the Rainbow-PUSH Coalition, recalled. "Eighteen-year-olds were serving in Vietnam and could not vote. You couldn't vote on a college campus, and you couldn't vote bilingually."
King's actions allowed for a new kind of majority that had been locked out for too long, Jackson said, and even had an effect on the most recent election.
"You look at the massive turnout on Nov. 6, when the Democrats are gaining the Congress, they did so because they had the right to vote," Jackson said.
For those reasons, Jackson said, "I think that even though he did public accommodations and King's assassination changed America, said Jackson, as it "took away their hope. It became my job to tell people to keep hope alive."
Moving forward, he called on America to keep bringing down walls and building bridges, making a comment about the border controversy and the current shutdown.
"I hope that sometime we will decide to take those border babies out of the cages on the border and choose to open up our government," said Jackson, a frequent critic of President Donald Trump. "We can negotiate in good faith."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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