Members of the Congressional Black Caucus want the families of Eric Garner and Michael Brown at next month’s State of the Union address.
The CBC members said Thursday that having the families of the slain black men at President Obama’s Jan. 20 speech would send a strong message that lawmakers on Capitol Hill are serious about fixing criminal justice reform.
“I think that would be appropriate and fitting. It would help educate and sensitize other members and humanize some of the issues that we’re going to confront,” said civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., according to The Hill.
Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., also echoed Lewis’ thoughts, calling the two families “symbols of an issue that needs to be urgently addressed in America.”
Reps. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., and Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, also expressed their hope Obama would invite the families, though no invitations have been extended.
“I think he must,” Lewis said about Obama making criminal justice reform a theme of his SOTU speech. “And not just speak to the question of criminal justice, but where we are as a nation and as a people.”
Lewis and Rep. G.K. Butterfield, D-N.C., both want and hope the invitations to Garner and Brown’s respective families to come directly from the president himself.
The cases of Garner, 43, from Staten Island, N.Y. and Brown, 18, from Ferguson, Mo., have both garnered national attention after their respective killers were not indicted by grand juries.
Both men were unarmed.
