Cory Booker's Appeal

Was Cory Booker's 25-hour speech a filibuster, a protest or a 25-hour performative stunt? Yes.

(Screenshot via YouTube/Senate.gov)

On March 12, 1867, Massachusetts’ first Black state representative (and only the second African-American legislator in American history) gave one of the most insignificant speeches in American history.

Edwin Garrison Walker wanted to reject the 14th Amendment.

Walker supported Section 1, which guaranteed citizenship and equal protection to the formerly enslaved (although he was criticized for his crazy idea that women should be allowed to vote). But, like many of his fellow Black “Radical” Republicans, Walker objected to the Amendment’s rarely discussed second section. In exchange for lower representation in Congress, the clause essentially gives states permission to exclude Black voters from politics. Basically, if a state disenfranchises its Black male citizenry, the state’s congressional apportionment “shall be reduced in the proportion.” Fortunately, Walker (and other “Radical” Black Republicans) had a solution. The Constitution’s 14th revision only needed one more addition:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

“The madness of slavery and the providence of God have given to our government the golden opportunity to eliminate the oligarchical features from our institution,” Walker told his colleagues. “When the rebel states have ratified, it will be time for Massachusetts to consider whether she needs to turn her back upon history by giving her consent to the disfranchisement of colored citizens.” Without this additional provision, Walker predicted that the former Confederate states would seize the opportunity to legally prevent Black people from voting.

The legislature rejected Walker’s proposal by a vote of 14 to 130. Walker’s Republican “allies” balked at the suggestion that white Southerners would institutionalize racism. Democrats laughed. While his Black “Radical” supporters knew he was right, his white allies called it a “performance.” Even the media newspaper said: “It seems what is sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander.”

Many of Walker’s fellow lawmakers agreed with his proposal, but they knew it would never pass. To be fair, Walker knew his actions were futile. He didn’t expect his colleagues to reject a constitutional amendment that had already been approved by Congress. According to Walker,  he was just trying to prevent “a system of serfdom” that left the formerly enslaved “at the mercy of their enemies.” But he also knew no one would say it out loud, so he did.

This story is about Cory Booker.

On March 31, 2025, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) stood on the Senate floor to deliver the longest speech in U.S. Senate history in protest of a president who wants to make democracy white again.

“The threats to the American people and American democracy are grave and urgent,” said Booker before quoting former congressman and legendary civil rights hero John Lewis. “All of us have to think of those 10 words — 10 two-letter words: ‘If it is to be, it is up to me.’ Because I believe generations from now will look back at this moment and have a single question: ‘Where were you? Where were you when our country was in crisis and when American people were asking for help? Help me. Help me.’ Did we speak up?”

Twenty-five hours and five minutes later, Booker had not offered a single proposal or filibustered a single piece of legislation. It was a stunt. A performance. A futile gesture that didn’t achieve any quantifiable result.

And it was glorious …

For some.

One of the biggest unsolved mysteries in American history is the apparent invisibility of good white people. Although the efforts of white abolitionists to end slavery should not be forgotten, the reason we know their names is that most white people did nothing. Even after emancipation, whites’ vocal support for anti-lynching laws was almost non-existent.

The Department of Justice estimates that “as many as 10,000” white people participated in the Tulsa Race Massacre. Apparently, there was not a single snitch. Because, according to the Tulsa Race Commission: “Not one of these criminal acts was then or ever has been prosecuted or punished by government at any level, municipal, county, state, or federal. Then again, white silence has led to zero prosecutions in America’s worst race massacres. Perhaps the white people in Alabama were busy every time racists bombed a home or a church in Birmingham. After all, it only happened 50 times. Why were there so few white people at the largest civil rights protest in American history? And if you think the backlash, fear and not wanting to talk about racism is why white people don’t like “good trouble,” consider this:

At its peak, more white people were members of the Ku Klux Klan (more than 4 million) than Black people who were enslaved at the peak of slavery (3.9 million).

Don’t tell me white people don’t like trouble.

They’ll attend lynchings by the thousands and march for segregation but think civil rights demonstrations are “not justified.” They will support insurrectionists’ attempts to overturn an election, but protests against police brutality that stop traffic are “dangerous” and “divisive.” Still, there is a good reason the New York Post characterized Booker’s “counterproductive” protest as a “stunt.” I know why The Hill said Booker’s marathon speech “demonstrated an outdated approach.”

He wasn’t talking to them.

When Edwin Walker was just a seed in his mother’s belly, his father David released one of the most revolutionary pieces of literature in American history. Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles was an excoriatingly beautiful denunciation of America’s race-based, constitutionally enforced human trafficking system. It was so revolutionary that the president of the United States tried to ban it from the U.S. mail system. Georgia issued a $1000 reward for anyone who killed Walker, $10,000 to capture him alive. A group of white men upped the ante, offering $3000 to anyone who decapitated the preacher.

Two months after it was published, Walker was found dead on his doorstep. His son was not yet born. ButWalker’s Appeal was not an entreaty to politicians, the public or to white people. The pamphlet’s full title was:

Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America

That’s who Cory Booker was talking to.

Booker and Edwin and David Walker’s efforts were not in vain. They were necessary. Still, they were not talking to Congress or Republicans or the media. They were talking to Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X and Sojourner Truth and Ella Baker and, yes, John Lewis. More than anything, they were speaking to us.

A protest is an appeal.

On March 12, 1869, exactly two years after Massachusetts lawmakers rejected Edwin Walker’s proposal, the state legislature voted to modify America’s document one more time. Not only was the 731 days between Massachusetts’ ratification sessions the shortest period between two Constitutional amendments, but it was also the shortest amendment since America first ratified its founding document.

The 15th Amendment was literally just the “extra clause” Walker had proposed two years earlier.

But when Walker proposed the 15th Amendment, the Ku Klux Klan had not yet formed chapters in other states and Louisiana’s “Grandfather Clause” did not exist. In 1867, Georgia’s first 33 Black lawmakers had not been expelled from office and the Black people who voted for them had not been slaughtered; by 1869, they had. When Walker tried “to earnestly request Congress to propose to the States an amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting the disfranchisement of any citizen on account of color,” 200-plus Black people in Opelousas, La., were still alive and 12 Black churches had not been burned because no one had organized the Knights of the White Camellia to “hunt down” Black voters.

When Massachusetts ratified the amendment that guaranteed the right to vote, the lawmakers who rejected it two years earlier did not apologize to Walker and admit they were wrong. Because of his “performance,” Edwin Garrison Walker was booted out of the Republican Party and blackballed from holding political office for the rest of his life.

But as his father said:

I am fully aware, in making this appeal to my much afflicted and suffering brethren, that I shall not only be assailed by those whose greatest earthly desires are, to keep us in abject ignorance and wretchedness,…

If you cannot or will not profit by them, I shall have done my duty to you, my country and my God.

Resistance is not futile.

Cory Booker's speech was a performance. Most demonstrations are. It was not meant to upend the world and change the law. This is why Martin Luther King Jr. repeatedly pointed out the difference between a demonstration and a “direct action.” While they are not mutually exclusive, one is an action that seeks to amplify a problem; the other “seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.” Confronting the tyranny that is currently slaughtering American democracy requires that we officially acknowledge its existence.

Years from now, people will remember Democrats’ fecklessness and how Republicans capitulated to a tyrannical leader. They will remember how liberal institutions of higher learning with billion-dollar endowments sold their students down the river like chattel. They will remember how the bastions of American journalism bent their knees. At best, Cory Booker’s appeal will be an asterisk in the Congressional record; a historical marker designating the end of democracy 1.0.

But the people who do nothing and remain silent are just as complicit in tyranny. They should not be lost to history. Someone has to point them out.

If it is up to me, it is up to me.