Presidential candidate Sen. Warren visits Selma

Published 8:36 pm Tuesday, March 19, 2019

On her three-state tour throughout the south, presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, visited Selma on Tuesday.

The tour was led by multiple people including Rep. Terri Sewell, D-AL, who showed some of the top spots of her hometown including local businesses.

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Warren’s tour began at the historic Brown Chapel where she was able to learn about the historic importance the church played in the Civil Rights Movement.

From there she was shown the George Washington Carver (GWC) Homes and was told about the recent crime and poverty that has afflicted the area.

From there, the legislators traveled to the Coffee Shoppe where Warren said her new housing plan would help neighborhoods like GWC.

Warren said her plan aims at helping communities address their needs as opposed to telling them what those needs are.

“This is not a one-size-fits-all bill,” Warren said. “The idea is to push money down to the community level so that the individual housing needs of a community are met. This isn’t about Washington dictating from far off that everyone needs a certain kind of housing or every community needs a certain kind of approach.”

Warren’s housing plan includes spending $500 billion over 10 years to build and rehabilitate affordable house units by lowering thresholds on federal estate tax dropping from $22 million to $7 million.

She talked about the racial imbalance in the housing world.

“It’s no surprise the federal government has subsidized the purchase of housing for decades for white people, but it has actively discriminated against black families that try to buy housing,” she said. “Redlining was the principal tool and it was the law of the land into the 1960s. The impact has been felt for generations since then. This bill is a step toward trying to reverse the impact of that discrimination.”

At the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Warren talked about her visit to the Queen City.

“I‘m delighted to be here with the congresswoman,” said Warren. “I plan on talking with her [Sewell] about the housing bill and getting about 3 million new housing units built in this country and about all the way we contribute and invest in this country.”

Warren talked about her wishes to eliminate the Electoral College.

“I believe we need a constitutional amendment to guarantee a right to vote for every single citizen,” she said. “We need to put some federal muscle behind that I believe we ought to repeal every one of the voter suppression laws because we need to be an America where voting matters for everyone. Part of that is making sure that candidates for the highest federal office come to all of America and make the case of why they should be President of the United States. Nobody comes to Alabama in the General Presidential Election or Massachusetts because they think we are not in the game because of the Electoral College. My view on this is that we ought to get rid of the Electoral College and every vote should count. Every vote in America should count.”

Warren said she learned a lot in her visit to Selma.

“I got to see firsthand how much need there is for investment in small town and rural America,” she said. “In particular, how much housing matters for communities like Selma. People live in sub-standard living and are on waiting lists that are years long for affordable housing. This is the richest country in the history of the world, we can make sure that every person in this country has a safe and decent place to live and the way we do that is we make investments in each other.”

Warren also talked about reparations.

“America was built on principals of liberty and freedom and on the backs of slaves,” she said. “It has been one hard fought battle after another to try to ensure equal rights for all American citizens. We are not there. I believe we won’t be there until we confront head-on America’s stain on our history and that is the stain of having built this country on the backs of slaves. A national conversation about reparations … let us as a country think about what is fair now. We live in an America where a wealthy, average white family has $100 and the average black family has about $5. That is the consequence of a history that starts in slavery and that is perpetuated by generation after generation. We have a chance to change that and it comes to us.”