Laura Murphy keeps a surprising memento in her Washington home: a framed copy of former President Ronald Reagan’s signature.
It’s a reminder of something many said would be impossible.
Murphy, now 70 and semi-retired, remembers how hard she pushed for the 1982 extension of the Voting Rights Act. Back then, she was a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union, working to win support from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
Earlier, Reagan had mentioned he wouldn’t signal it. Murphy requested for the president’s autograph at a White House reception the day he did.
Now, she says, the framed signature seems like a relic from a bygone period of bipartisan cooperation.
“It’s so tragic to me that we could convince Republicans then, but we can’t convince them now,” she says. “You think progress is like a line moving up, when progress is like a roller coaster.”
The May Supreme Court resolution gutting the measure devastated her. To Murphy, it seems like America is regressing.
“This whole period has been like a stake in my heart,” Murphy says.
Murphy was properly into her profession at the ACLU when she discovered she descended from a signer of the Declaration of Independence by a grandson who had a daughter with an enslaved girl. She went on to be taught that Philip Livingston, the signer who’s her fifth great-grandfather, had shut ties to the slave commerce, too.
“He was my family’s founding father and their enslaver,” she says. It’s a painful fact that Murphy says is necessary to acknowledge.
“My ancestors didn’t envision women, indigenous people and enslaved people as part of the American Dream. … Maybe we’re living up to their dream, but we’re not living up to a collective dream that advances all Americans,” she says.
But Murphy says a current journey to Philadelphia helped rekindle her hopes for the future.
Just a few weeks in the past, she helped marketing campaign for her nephew in a Democratic main there, simply miles away from the website the place their ancestor as soon as signed the declaration.
Meeting voters who supported Chris Rabb’s marketing campaign was energizing, she says.
“You had women in hijabs and you had men in yarmulkes. There were members of the LGBTQ community. It just was so joyous and exciting to see young people feeling a responsibility to influence our democratic system … They’re not angry, they’re determined, which makes a really big difference.”
“My ancestors didn’t envision women, indigenous people and enslaved people as part of the American Dream. … Maybe we’re living up to their dream, but we’re not living up to a collective dream that advances all Americans.”
Laura Murphy
Rabb gained the main, and with no Republican challenger on this closely Democratic House district, he’s poised to become Pennsylvania’s newest representative in Congress. Murphy sees his victory as a reminder to preserve preventing.
“Even when my government abandons me,” she says, “I never abandon my nation.”