Democratic Rep. John Lewis, a veteran of the civil rights movement, pushed back Wednesday against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz’s claim that NFL players protesting police brutality during the national anthem are going against what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for.
Cruz, a Texas senator, was responding to a question about whether NFL players should be protesting during the national anthem and comments made by his Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke during their first debate in Houston last week. O’Rourke supports the NFL players, and said there is nothing more American than a citizen standing up or taking a knee for their rights. Cruz countered that his party, the “party of [Abraham] Lincoln” is the one who fought the “Dixiecrats who were beating [civil rights] protesters.”
“Everyone has a right to protest but you could speak in a way that doesn’t disrespect the flag, that doesn’t disrespect the national anthem and I tell you those civil rights protesters would be astonished if the protests were manifesting in burning the flag,” Cruz said. “That’s not something Dr. King stood for, he stood for justice without disrespecting the men and women who fight for this country.”
Lewis, who was with Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1961 March on Washington, and was beaten by a state trooper during the Bloody Sunday march across Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to protest the lack of voting rights for black people, disagreed.
“I knew Martin Luther King Jr. very well, worked with him, marched with him, and he would say ‘people have a right to protest for what is right,'” Lewis said. “When we marched from Selma to Montgomery in March 1965, we carried the flag but we knelt, we knelt. The flag protects the right of people to protest for what is right.”
Asked again if he thinks the act of NFL players kneeling during the anthem is disrespectful, Lewis said “No, I do not. I do not agree with that.”
Cruz and O’Rourke are scheduled to debate a second time on Sunday in San Antonio. The closely watched Senate race is considered a toss-up by nonpartisan election forecasters and could determine control of the Senate.
