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SPRINGFIELD — State Rep. Bud L. Williams led the city’s Black community and politicians Thursday in rally honoring the legacy of the late civil rights leader John Lewis and marking the 55th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The hourlong program was on the City Hall steps where Williams recalled protesting for Civil Rights himself in his earlier years and across Court Square from the MassMutual Center and from Old First Church, venues where Lewis — one of the “Big Six” leaders of the Civil Rights era and later a congressman from Georgia — spoke on his trips through Springfield.

Lewis was beaten very badly by Alabama state troopers after marching across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma in March 1965. The event, and images of the violence on television, helped get the Voting Rights Act passed months later.

Lewis died in July at the age of 80.

Williams explained that the right to vote guarantees all the other rights: assembly, free press, the right to petition the government, assembly. And he called on Congress — the Senate specifically — to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act.

“The Black vote matters,” Williams said.

He also wanted to remind the crowd that the struggles of the Civil Rights era are in the past, but not the distant past.

"It's only been 55 years," Williams said. "Fifty-five years. Not very long."

U.S. Rep. Richard E. Neal, D-Springfield, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and longtime Lewis friend, called the Voting Rights Act — along with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Medicare and Medicaid Act of 1965 — as some of the greatest legislative achievements in the nation’s history.

Bishop Talbert Swan, president of the Springfield chapter of the NAACP, said the Voting Rights Act itself doesn’t mean much following a 2012 Supreme Court decision that made it unenforceable.

What followed was a series of state laws that make it harder for people to vote: closed polling places, restricted hours, requirements for voter ID despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud that ID laws might be able to prevent.

“Let’s not get too wrapped up in things that are symbols,” Swan said. “The Voting Rights Act is not worth anything unless it has teeth in it.”

Neal said the re-authorization is in the hands of the Republican-controlled Senate, the same place as the latest coronavirus relief package he is negotiating now.

In December, the House passed re-authorization, 228 to 187, with one Republican voting with the Democrats.

In the past, reauthorization votes were bipartisan and Republican presidents signed the bills into law.

“There is just been this trend to make voting rights a partisan issue,” said Neal, lamenting the lack of bipartisan work by what he called “skilled legislators.”

Swan and Williams put the blame more squarely on Republicans. They said its largely white people who were so put off by having a Black president in Barack Obama that they will do anything to regain power.

“Every time there is a Black progress, there is white backlash,” Swan said.

While it wasn't billed as a partisan event, Williams exhorted the crowd to vote Donald Trump out of office, keep Democrats in control of the U.S. House.

"And let's flip the Senate," Williams said.

Speaker after speaker praised Neal, especially his successful lobbying to keep the TD Bank branch open in Springfield’s primarily Black Mason Square neighborhood.

No mention was made of Neal’s primary opponent, Holyoke Mayor Alex B. Morse.

In a separate interview, Morse expressed his support for getting the Voting Rights Act renewed.

“We need a voting rights act now more than ever,” Morse said.

At the ceremony outside City Hall, some carried signs from the city Democratic Committee exhorting people to vote on Primary Day, Sept. 1 ‚and in the November General Election. No candidates’ names were listed.

City Councilor Jesse Lederman, who serves as chairman of the Springfield Democrats, said there are three ways to vote: vote early and for the primary that means during the last week of August. Vote by ail or vote in person on the day of the election.

Speakers also said Black lives need to be counted in the Census, an ongoing process happening right now.

Neal shared his personal memories of Lewis — they served together in Congress and on the Ways and Means Committee.

Lewis invited Neal to a luncheon with South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Tutu relayed how that when Nelson Mandela got out of prison, Mandela asked that his first meeting be with the prosecutor who pushed for the death penalty. Mandela wanted to forgive the prosecutor.

Neal said he later told Lewis that he wasn't sure he could have been so wiling to forgive.

“That just means,” Lewis told Neal, “I need to spend more time working with you.”