SiriusXM Host Joe Madison Talks About Why He’s Not Eating Until Congress Passes Voting Rights Bill

Joe Madison is a popular talk show host on a morning SiriusXM radio show and a civil rights and human rights activist that has advocated for voting rights.

Madison is taking things up a notch to see that the John Lewis Voting Rights Act gets by pushed through the Senate.

Last week the 72-year-old radio legend known as “Black Eagle” went on a hunger strike to send a strong message about the acts that need to be passed. He feels so strongly about it that he’s willing to continue to go without solid food for as long as it takes, BET reported.

If passed, the Lewis bill will restore vital provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that protect citizens’ ability to cast ballots.

Republican lawmakers in the Senate prevented the bill using the filibuster, which is simply an extended debate over legislation that would take 60 votes to overcome. Sixty votes Democrats did not even though they are the majority.

Madison understands the risks that come with his decision. He’s not the first person to go this route. Human rights icon Dick Gregory was a mentor of Madison, and he had joined him in hunger strikes decades ago.

When asked why he chose the hunger strike as his method, Madison told BET, “Because what the United States Senate is doing is extreme—this is what it’s going to take. I think that abstaining from eating solid food sends a signal that somebody out here cares.”

“I always try to relate historically. At the end of the first Reconstruction in 1877, with the Hayes- Tilden compromise, white southerners were very upset with how their political power had changed, and they agreed to strike a deal with [President Rutherford B.] Hayes. That resulted in assassinations, intimidation of Black politicians and citizens and their white allies. For the next 70 plus years, it literally changed the culture of the South. And it ended, in essence, the first Reconstruction. We are on the verge of what I would refer to as the end of the second Reconstruction. There have been some parallels. The first thing the Republicans went after in the Senate was our voting rights. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a decision in Shelby County v. Holder that stripped one of the key provisions from the Voting Rights Act, and immediately the next day, states started introducing voter suppression laws.”

At the time of the interview, he was on day 9, and when asked how he felt, he said, “My spirits are high, but I’ve done this before. This is not my first rodeo. I’ve been on hunger strikes with Dick Gregory over the years. That experience taught me a lot. Your body goes through changes but all the changes I had anticipated. So nothing is going on, physically, spiritually, mentally, that I hadn’t expected because I knew that there was the possibility that I would be in this for the long haul.

“One of the things that I did before taking this form of protest was to get a physical and get a baseline of where I am physically. The only challenge that I thought I might have was a PSA that had spiked a few weeks ago, unrelated to the hunger strike. But the oncologist told me that the hunger strike would not impact any prostate cancer problems that I had experienced. So it’s something that everything that I anticipated is pretty much what I’m going through.”