Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke Delivers Remarks at the National Urban League’s Annual Conference

Remarks as Prepared for Delivery

Good morning. Thank you, President Marc Morial, your board and the entire National Urban League movement for inviting me to take part in your annual conference. It is an honor to stand beside you, not only today, but every day in the fight for equal justice for Black Americans. The League’s activism has been an important complement to the Civil Rights Division’s relentless legal engagement. Together, we will defend democracy, demand diversity and defeat poverty.

The story of American democracy has not been linear. It contains both defeats and victories. But through the heroism, struggle, sacrifice and courage of those who came before us, the story ultimately is one of progress — and perseverance. Perseverance weaves through our history and abides in our present time.

Nearly a century after the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in 1865, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law. Dr. King referred to the Act as the “Second Emancipation”; it outlawed discrimination and codified equality in voter registration. Although the Act provided tools to protect Black enfranchisement, states continued to deny Black Americans access to voting. Brave Americans continued the fight for the promise of equality, including enduring state-sanctioned violence. That violence was on full display in 1965 on a day that we now all know as Bloody Sunday – when peaceful demonstrators were assaulted and brutalized while marching for the right to vote.

That violence horrified — but galvanized — the nation. Congress was spurred to action and on Aug. 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. For decades, the Voting Rights Act has been one of the primary tools that the Justice Department has used to address the voter discrimination and voter suppression efforts that we have seen across the country.

But then in 2013, a Supreme Court decision, Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, weakened the Act, flinging open the floodgates for jurisdictions to revert back to old tactics of the past. The law brought to suspension the heart of the Act – the Section 5 preclearance provision – that had blocked more than 1,200 instances of discriminatory voting changes in states like Louisiana that had a long history of voter suppression. In fact, the day the Court issued the Shelby County decision, Texas announced a discriminatory and burdensome photo identification law that had previously been blocked by Section 5. Shortly thereafter, North Carolina adopted an omnibus law imposing discriminatory restrictions burdening the rights of voters of color.

Voting rights continue to erode. In 2021, according to the Brennan Center, at least 19 states passed 34 laws designed to suppress votes. In 2022, eight states passed 11 such laws. In 2023, at least 14 states passed 17. In 2024, we’re still counting.

I am sharing this history because the threats to voting rights are serious. The damage is immeasurable. In Congress, I testified before both the House and the Senate Judiciary Committees in support of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The continued evidence of voting discrimination that we continue to see today underscores why we must continue to call on Congress to restore the Voting Rights Act. As your president, Marc Morial, pointed out, “The Supreme Court does not have the final word on our democracy. Congress must protect our access to the ballot box.”

While we wait, I want you to know that the Justice Department remains steadfast in our efforts to confront voting discrimination.

Right now, in the Civil Rights Division, we are we are litigating major cases to prevent discriminatory redistricting plans and working to block state legislation that restricts access to voter registration and more.

In district courts in Alabama, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Florida, Colorado and Texas we are defending the private right to challenge practices under the Voting Rights Act.

We are defending the constitutionality of several provisions of the Voting Rights Act, including its prohibitions against voter intimidation, threats and coercion. Just yesterday, we filed a friend-of-the-court brief to make clear that voter intimidation can violate the Voting Rights Act. Specifically, robocalls, disinformation campaigns and other tactics can be used unlawfully to intimidate voters. We will not stand for it.

As the National Urban League has known for over 114 years, voter suppression has significant negative downstream effects. For generations, your affiliate movement has brought energy to the fight for justice on so many fronts – everything from housing and healthcare, from employment to education and economic justice and more.

I want to highlight some of the Justice Department’s work on these battlefronts as well.

Let me start with a word about the current climate of hate we are witnessing today in our country. Hate crimes are a stain on our democracy. Yesterday would have been Emmett Till’s 83rd birthday. From Emmett Till, to the four little girls murdered in Birmingham, to the dragging death of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, racially-motivated, white-supremacist fueled violence has remain a threat for far too long. We will not stand for it.

We have prosecuted more than 120 defendants in more than 110 cases since January 2021. This includes prosecuting the men responsible for the tragic killing of Ahmaud Arbery in Glynn County, Georgia; a 27-count indictment against the man responsible for the tragic mass killings of 10 Black people in Buffalo, New York; prosecuting the defendant responsible for the murder of Dime Doe, a Black trans woman in South Carolina. It also includes the guilty plea we obtained in April from a Cornell student who threatened to kill or harm Jewish students, and prosecuting the man responsible for killing 23 and wounding 22 Latinos at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and much more.

We are working to ensure access to equal educational opportunity. This includes suing a school district where young Black children are subject to racial harassment and use of racial slurs. It includes our work to end the school to prison pipeline. And work that we are doing to end a school district’s use of corporal punishment. Our education justice work also includes — more than 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education — participating in more than 130 ongoing desegregation cases across the country.

We seek economic justice by fighting to end discrimination in employment and in housing, including modern-day redlining. This was, after all, the heart of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Under the leadership of Attorney General Garland, we launched the nationwide Combating Redlining Initiative in 2021. We are aggressively fighting this discriminatory practice, holding banks and lending institutions accountable so that underserved communities receive fair treatment and access to self-reliance and empowerment. To date, we have secured more than $122 million in relief for affected communities in places that stretch from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Philadelphia, Los Angeles to Rhode Island, from Florida to Tennessee.

We defend the rights of people with disabilities. This includes their right to access web and mobile content. We issued an historic final rule in April this year that requires state and local governments to make accessible any such content – information concerning application of benefits, registering to vote, filing taxes and more.

We work to end faith-based discrimination. This includes supporting the religious exercise rights of Christian groups to provide food to people experiencing homelessness or hunger by challenging restrictive zoning laws in places like Santa Ana, California, and Brookings, Oregon.

As part of our mission to ensure public safety and rule of law, we work hard to ensure constitutional policing across the country. This includes both holding individual officers accountable for their conduct and launching investigations into and seeking change within police departments for unconstitutional conduct. For example, we prosecuted four officers tied to the heinous and tragic murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota; five officers responsible for Tyre Nichols’s death in Memphis, Tennessee; and four officers tied to the death of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. In Rankin County, Mississippi, we prosecuted the six former officers who referred to themselves as the “Goon Squad” who tortured and viciously abused two Black men in their home. These men carried out one of the most sickening acts of brutality that we have seen this century. The lead defendant was sentenced to 40 years in prison.

We have investigated law enforcement agencies for “pattern or practice” of unconstitutional conduct in jurisdictions like New York City; Lexington, Mississippi; and Louisiana. In June, we announced the findings of our investigation into the City of Phoenix and the Phoenix Police Department. We found that they used excessive and deadly force; discriminated against Black, Hispanic and Native American people when enforcing the law; violated the rights of people engaged in protected speech; and discriminated against people with behavioral health disabilities when dispatched in response to people in crisis.

We protect the rights of incarcerated people. This includes investigating the Parchman Prison in Mississippi, which we found reasonable cause to conclude maintained conditions that violate the Eighth and 14th amendments. The jail permitted uncontrolled violence among prisoners and failed to provide mental health treatment or offer suicide-prevention measures, resulting in 10 murders and 12 suicides. We now are working to ensure the prison houses people in the least restrictive setting necessary for their safety, that it monitors people’s mental health, especially that of people in solitary confinement, and that it provides sufficient opportunities for daily physical movement and time outside their cells. We do this work because people do not surrender their rights at the jailhouse door in our country.

We also work to alleviate harm caused by environmental injustice, where lead-laced water, illegal dumping or exposure to raw sewage puts families, and Black families in particular, at risk. In Lowndes County, Alabama, we are actively working to ensure that residents in this low-income community in the Black Belt can have long-overdue access to safe septic and wastewater management systems. Our environmental justice work is motivated by a simple principle – ensuring that one’s ability to live a healthy life is not dictated by race or ZIP code.

As I close, this much is clear: all the concerns I have discussed today are concerns that motivate people to participate in our democracy — but only if their right to vote is protected.

I said at the outset that the story of American democracy is ultimately one of progress. But it is not a linear story. It is no fairy tale. And we are certainly not at the last chapter. Every day, in the Civil Rights Division, we continue to write it. We do the work to prevent the United States from backsliding, to stop the resurgence of discrimination and to oppose obstacles that make it more difficult for millions of citizens, especially citizens of color, to register, to cast their ballots and to elect candidates of their choice.

You are heroes in this story, and shepherds in your communities, guiding us toward the still-elusive goal of equal access to the ballot. I see it on the horizon. Today, I issue a call to you: continue the path forward. Continue to call out voting discrimination and voter suppression. Use your voice to oppose restrictive legislation. Seize the power of your own vote. Help others exercise their right to vote. As Whitney M. Young said, “stretch your mind and fly.”

Ours is a story of perseverance. Together, we will write a just end to the story of voting rights. We will move toward a democracy where we truly hear every voice, and we will absolutely count every legitimate vote. This is how we defend democracy, demand diversity and defeat poverty.

Thank you.

Department of Justice
Office of Public Affairs

Source: Justice.gov