Martin Luther King, Jr. at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

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In 1963 Martin Luther King, Jr. called the filibuster “the legislative incinerator in which every smoldering hope for racial justice has been converted into ashes.” The Workers Circle has called for the elimination of the filibuster since 1957.

President Obama called the filibuster “a Jim Crow relic” during his eulogy for the late Congressman and civil rights champion John Lewis. The filibuster was not part of our nation’s founding documents. In fact, it was innovated in 1841 by John C. Calhoun the white South Carolina senator who notoriously defended slavery as “a positive good”—after a clean-up of the senate rule book inadvertently eliminated the mechanism to end debate and move to an actual vote. It has been used to delay and block civil rights, indeed the longest record for a speech goes to South Carolina's J. Strom Thurmond who filibustered for 24 hours and 18 minutes against the Civil Rights Act of 1957. In recent years the filibuster has become a procedural tool that allows the minority to stop legislation in its tracks and become a tool of obstruction that has ground the Senate to a halt on so many issues. Learn more about the filibuster and why it needs to go.

Sources

Martin Luther King, Jr. quote from: Nussbaum, Jeff. Undelivered: The Never-Heard Speeches that Would Have Rewritten History. New York: Flatiron Books, 2022.