Taylor Branch – Sandy Rosenberg

Like many of you, I watched Sunday as Congressman John Lewis, ill with cancer, joined in the commemoration of the 55th anniversary of the voting rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, when a 25 year-old Lewis almost lost his life after his skull was fractured by Alabama state troopers.

I remember seeing the frightful video of that march later that day on tv. I also recall watching President Johnson give his speech to the joint session of Congress a few days later when he introduced the Voting Rights Act. He ended his speech by declaring, in his Texas twang, “We shall overcome.”

I thought about reading more about those events the old fashioned way – in my copy of Taylor Branch’s Pillar of Fire, but I didn’t.

A few hours later, I went to the Meadowbrook Swim Club.

Whom did I run into? Taylor Branch.

He added these details.

The only network to air film of the assault on the marchers was ABC. That night, it cut into a movie, Judgment at Nuremberg.

Spencer Taylor, as one of the judges at the Nazi war crimes trial, had just speculated about how the little guy could stand up to the Nazi government.

That day in Alabama, hundreds of African-Americans had done just that.

Both of us knew that President Johnson, while walking up the aisle of the House of Representatives chamber after giving his speech, had spoken to Congressman Emanuel Celler, chair of the committee that would consider the bill LBJ had just introduced. “Hold hearings on my bill at night and pass it sooner,” LBJ urged Celler.

Taylor told me that four months later, at the signing of the Voting Rights Act, Johnson told Celler, “Now you need to pass my immigration bill.”

I told Taylor that one of my proudest accomplishments as a legislator is that I have introduced and enacted legislation protecting the right to vote.

No doubt many of you read Taylor Branch’s expose of the NCAA, The Shame of College Sports.

Since I know Taylor, I asked him if there was anything that he and I could do in Annapolis to reform how the NCAA rules over intercollegiate athletics.

Provide procedural protections for student-athletes who are under investigation, he advised.

So I drafted a bill that would give those in the cross hairs of the NCAA the same due process protections they would have if accused of violating the Code of Student Conduct for the University of Maryland System.

Today I met with U of M officials. My assigned reading was NCAA v. Miller, where a federal court struck down a Nevada law requiring that certain procedural protections be provided for a state university student or employee subject to an NCAA hearing.

The court held that the law imposed an excessive burden on the NCAA’s enforcement procedures, which violated the Commerce Clause in the Constitution.

Since my bill would meet the same fate, I will not introduce it.

However, the court did note that member institutions of the NCAA can seek “desired changes in the NCAA bylaws which regulate the investigative and enforcement procedures.”

When I was a student at Amherst College, the football coach, Jim Ostendarp, rejected televising one of our games on NBC during a NFL players strike.

“We’re in the education business, not the entertainment business,” he declared.

Coach Ostendarp could not say that today about Division I athletics.