Ayanna Pressley

speaker

333 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard Jun 2025

Ayanna Pressley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Don Lemon Show · LEMON DROP | Rep. Ayanna Pressley on Fighting the Trump Agenda · 28 Jun 2025 podcast

So you have to counter all of that.

I see it the same way.

You know, the ironic thing, Don, is that the Republican Party, which now is functioning more like

a cult of cowards, complicit in wholesale harm.

The Republican Party forever has tried to brand themselves as the party of freedom, but their agenda is very much an anti-freedom agenda.

When people mean to control the books you read, when they mean to control what you do with your very bodily autonomy,

When they want to control free speech, again, that's authoritarianism.

And I have legislation, Don, actually it's called Books Save Lives.

It's been getting great traction and we're keeping that momentum up that if you are denied representative literature in your school library, your public library, we see that as a violation of your civil rights.

It is so important that people see their stories and their lived experiences mirrored in literature.

And so when I say that books save lives, I know it to be true.

As a survivor of sexual violence, childhood sexual abuse, when I read Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, that's why I knew for the first time in my life that I was not alone.

And that book saved my life.

So books save lives.

We are, but I'm going to tell you what gives me comfort even in the midst of that.

The words of Coretta Scott King, someone who I think doesn't get enough credit.

Now, look, I've got my biases because Martin and Coretta met in the city of Boston in my district at 12th Baptist Church in Roxbury.

So I need people to know before there was Montgomery, before there was Atlanta, there was Boston.

And Coretta Scott King was a student at the New England Conservatory.

And people like to think of her as a widow who inherited a movement.

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