Ali Velshi
speaker
554 appearances
10 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 16 Sep
Ali Velshi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
The promise that has to be made again and again and again.
America was 189 years into the experiment, and black Americans could still not reliably vote.
On paper, the Constitution now prohibited racial and sex-based denial of the vote, but in the South, the paper meant nothing.
Black voters faced illiteracy tests that were designed to be failed.
They had poll taxes, grandfather clauses, registration offices that were open only on days that nobody could get there.
And underneath it all, perhaps most important, the quiet but ever-present threat of violence.
In Selma, Alabama, there was a woman named Amelia Boynton Robinson.
For 30 years, she'd been trying to register black voters.
The year before, she had become the first black woman to run for Congress in Alabama.
She lost, but she kept going.
On March 7th, 1965, she walked onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge with 600 marchers.
State troopers, as expected, met them on the other side, on horseback, with clubs and tear gas.
Amelia Boynton Robinson was beaten unconscious.
She was left lying on the bridge.
A photographer took her picture.
This photograph moved Lyndon Johnson to go to Congress and demand the Voting Rights Act.
One photograph, one woman, beaten but undefeated.
Fifty years later, Amelia Boynton Robinson, then 104 years old...
50 years later, she went across that bridge again, pushed across the bridge by Barack Hussein Obama.
She just wanted to be able to walk across the bridge.
Showing 221–240 of 554 · page 12 of 28
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