Raphael Warnock

That's what Martin Luther King Jr.

did.

That's what Fannie Lou Hamer did when she stood up to the Democratic Party some 20 years before Jesse Jackson and said, I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired.

That's what John Lewis and Hosea Williams did when they crossed that Edmund Pettus Bridge with brute force under the color of law on the other side of that bridge.

But they kept walking.

And more recently, in my estimation, Rene Good and Alex Preddy of Minneapolis lived out that same spirit, literally putting their bodies in the struggle.

They paid the ultimate sacrifice, but they too were trying to push the country towards its ideals.

Jesse Jackson is the bridge between civil rights activism of the 1960s

and the kind of multiracial coalition politics that we have seen in the modern era that culminated in the presidency of Barack Obama and the work that I try to do every single day in the United States Senate.

And there's a whole generation of folks and a couple of generations who are serving not just black politicians, but women.

Native Americans, Latinos, people come from immigrant communities, members of the LGBTQ community.

He was the one in my lifetime to give a clear expression of what he called the Rainbow Coalition.

Here is part of why I know it works is our adversaries certainly know it.

Right now in Congress, they're trying to pass something called the Save America Act.

It is a tragic misnomer.

What they're trying to save is an old vision and version of America, a dark past that Jesse Jackson and others pushed us beyond.

Yeah, look, and let me be really clear.

People should have to demonstrate that they are who they say they are when they vote.

And I want to be clear about that because there are those on the right who are trying to mischaracterize what we're saying.

They are using this idea of voter ID as a false pretext.