 In 1967, a president's commission recommended that a single phone number should be established nationwide for reporting emergencies. And in 1968, it was announced that the digits 911 would serve as the emergency code throughout the United States. 911 is a call for the most dire situations, a last-ditch effort to save a life in peril. Whoever answers the call must respond with an urgency and force equal to the severity of the problem. Today, we are calling 911 on American democracy. Civil Rights hero and congressman John Lewis recently made headlines when he said he's less hopeful today than he was during the height of the civil rights movement when he was beaten and bloodied, marching in Selma, Alabama. Who can blame him? The Voting Rights Act, the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement, an act that Lewis and so many others bled and sacrificed their lives for, was gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013, throwing open the floodgates of voter suppression. In hours, Texas announced a strict new voter ID law. Mississippi, Alabama, and 14 states followed suit, cutting Americans out of their own democracy. 15,000 polling places have been closed nationwide since 2008. And unprecedented 16 million voters have been purged from the rolls. Yet this election-rigging breach of democracy wasn't once mentioned in the first presidential debates last month. Just days before we recently celebrated the 243rd birthday of our democracy, a narrow majority of the Supreme Court officially legalized partisan gerrymandering. They gave their official blessing for partisans to cut voters out and re-elections. This decision, the fourth lethal blow from the court to our fragile democracy following their 2010 Citizens United 2013 Shelby and 2018 Husted Decisions, made it strikingly clear that we the people are the last defense and best hope to protect and advance the democracy we deserve. The two-party duopoly range supreme and foreign powers are attacking what's left of our elections. In 2018, over 200 officials in 33 states reported that they need to replace their voting machines by 2020 but lack the funding to do so, leaving these old machines vulnerable to even more breakdowns, malfunctions, and hacking. All the while, members of Congress are spending up to 70% of their time fundraising from a handful of billionaires and special interests just to pay for the next election. It is a crisis. And it affects everything from our wasted taxes to unaffordable health care, unjust criminal justice and the humanitarian crisis at our border, failing education and the existential threats of gun violence and global warming. It is why Amazon, owned by the richest person on earth, pays no federal income taxes. The promise of America is a better life for the next generation. History shows us that this promise will be broken unless we answer this 911 call. From the American Revolution to abolition, woman's suffrage to the civil rights movement, no major American struggle has been won without the weapon that Dr. King called the sword that heals nonviolent direct action. And once again, it's time to answer the true patriot's call. We're asking you to respond to the 911 call by joining me, Ronaldo Pearson, as I walk from Atlanta, Georgia to Washington, DC. I will walk for just under two months, more than 600 miles, an action commensurate with the unprecedented scale of this crisis. I will begin in just a few weeks on Tuesday, August 6, the 54th anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, in Georgia's capital city, the final resting place of Dr. King, and where the infamous 2018 election purges and voter suppression made the state ground zero in our fight. I invite you to join me on this walk. If you do, our numbers will grow, and so will the pressure on Washington, DC. And when we arrive, we will sit on the steps of the Capitol until our demand is met. We will demand that Washington passed these three reforms to save American democracy. Number one, protect our right to vote. End voter purges. Make election day a holiday. Pass automatic voter registration, early voting, same day registration. Get it home and restore the vote for returning citizens with past felony convictions. Number two, make elections secure and competitive. Stop foreign meddling in our elections. End gerrymandering. Pass ranked choice voting to enable independent and third party candidates to run and win. Number three, end political corruption. End secret donations, close the revolving door between governments and the lobbying industry, and create democracy vouchers or small donor matching that make politicians dependent on voters instead of big money interest. We will remain on the steps of the Capitol until the Senate Republican majority introduces a bipartisan alternative to HR1 before the People Act, or until a plurality of presidential candidates pledge to act on these reforms to fix democracy first. If they arrest us, we will pay our bail and we will return. Not just because it's the people's Capitol building, but also because the people have spoken in 2018 in so-called red and blue states with a wave of the most city and state anti-corruption and pro-democracy victories in American history. Over 80% of American voters want to see these anti-corruption and pro-democracy reforms enacted at the federal level, with multiple polls showing corruption as the top issue of concern with the federal government. The verdict couldn't be any clearer. We want our government to represent us. To the presidential candidates and congressmen, we say, it's simple. Show us where you stand, either you're against corruption or you're for it. Whether you stand with we, the people, or you don't. So drawing our inspiration, not just from the most iconic sentence of our Declaration of Independence, we hold these truths to be self-evident, but also from the sentence that follows, that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the government. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. We've had a march for our lives, a woman's march, a poor people's campaign, and even a people's climate march. Not to mention the fact that we've had to say black lives matter for far too long. It's time we all come together to walk for this issue that underpins them all. Our democracy is in a state of emergency. We must respond to the 911 call together. Join me. Acknowledge the fierce urgency of this collaboration so that we can all win. The Marian Wright element reminds us that a lot of people are waiting for Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi to come back, but they are gone. We are it. It is up to us. It is up to you. Dr. King, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Medgar Evers, John Lewis, Cheney, Goodman, Schwerner, Granny D, and so many others face the certain terror of dogs, billy clubs, water hoses, and even death to march and organize in order to win a real democracy for us. What will our excuse be for the next generation? With this country over party call to conscience in mind, I leave you with these words from Rabbi Mamanides. The world is equally balanced between good and evil. Your next act will tip the scales. We're calling 911 on our democracy. Will you answer the call? Go to democracy911.us and join me.