50th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act - Aug. 6, 2015

CLINTON: Fifty years ago the Voting Rights Act was signed into law. I came of age as the Civil Rights Movement was beginning to not only change laws, but change hearts.

JOHN LEWIS: For we cannot stop and we will not and cannot be patient.

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: Let us march on ballot boxes until brotherhood is more than a meaningless word at the end of a prayer.

CLINTON: Generations of Americans fought and marched and organized and prayed to expand the circle of freedom and opportunity. They never gave up and they never backed down.

NEWS REPORTER: The 600 marchers that crossed that bridge -- what they fought for, for the Voting Rights Act -- that's under attack right now.

NEWS REPORTER: The court seems like it has decided to kill this pillar of the Voting Rights Act today.

CLINTON: What is happening is a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people and young people from one end of our country to the other. We should do everything we can to make it easier for every citizen to vote. Congress should move quickly to restore the full protections that American voters need and deserve. Every young man or young woman should be automatically registered to vote when they turn 18. We should set a standard across our country of at least 20 days of early, in-person voting everywhere. Now yes, this is about democracy, but it's also about dignity. We owe it to our children and our grandchildren to fight just as hard as those who came before us, to march just as far, to organize just as well, to speak out just as loudly and to vote every chance we get for the kind of future we want.