Democratic Rep. Denny Heck said he felt hurt and upset last weekend, even though he got to lead the parade in Tacoma honoring the 50th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march.
There was somewhere else he wanted to be with his wife, Paula: Selma.
“Both of my sons are adopted --- one happens to be black,” Heck said. “And I wanted to go to Selma so badly you cannot believe it. … This is how we were going to spend Paula’s birthday weekend and it had great meaning for us.”
Heck, a second-term congressman from Olympia, said he and his wife had been planning to make the trip for the past year.
While President Barack Obama and dozens of members of Congress made the trip, Heck said he got stuck on a wait list with others who wanted to attend.
Democratic Rep. Derek Kilmer of Gig Harbor was among those able to go.
“I have to tell you it was really an extraordinary experience,” Kilmer said. “Watching the first African-American president have his motorcade cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge 50 years after people were beaten with nightsticks and teargassed for advocating for voting rights is a compelling moment in American history.”
Heck said he was eighth on the wait list.
His office said the bus trip was sponsored by the Faith & Politics Institute, which leads bipartisan delegations of congressional members on trips to learn about different periods of U.S. history. It was led by Democratic Rep. John Lewis of Georgia.
“They never told us space was limited,” Heck said. “ But I literally led the parade at Tacoma and had a chance to talk to that crowd of 500 to 600 people. It helped assuage the wound a great deal.”