On Tuesday, social media woke up to Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) still plowing through an historic Senate floor speech launched the night before.
By 6 PM, Booker had nabbed the record for second longest filibuster in history and had accumulated more than 280 million likes on TikTok. Thirty minutes after that, he surpassed the record of ardent segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), who protested the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
Observers quickly noted the historical significance of a Black U.S. senator smashing the previous record held by a stalwart racist.
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“Democratic Senator Cory Booker makes history!!!!! At 24 hours and 19 minutes, Cory just broke Strom Thurmond’s record for the longest speech on the Senate floor! Bravo for taking that racist’s name off the record books!” tweeted liberal pundit Art Candee.
"This is the energy I'm here for," Journal of Mormon History editor Christopher Jones wrote on Bluesky.
Booker confessed he may have gotten “caught up" with the idea of breaking Thurmond’s record, but he added he was not doing it strictly to spite Thurmond.
“I'm not here because of his speech. I'm here despite his speech,” Booker said. “I'm here because as powerful as [Thurmond] was, the people are more powerful."
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Sen. Tina Smith, (D-Minn.)pointed out that “Sen. Strom Thurmond voted against the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, AND supported Jim Crow laws,” and that his record “was just broken by a Black man, my good friend Cory Booker. That’s America.”
Booker spent his time slamming the Trump administration for what he described as “putting profits over people,” and for trying to “gut Medicaid and Medicare.” He also dedicated long hours to attacking the administration for what he considered “threatening changes" to Social Security and dismantling the Department of Education. He reserved particular ire for the administrationdeporting a Maryland resident using a controversial rule designed for wartime.
In another stark contrast to Thurmond, the senator criticized the administration’s efforts to strike the contributions of Black people from U.S. history as well as bury the nation’s 200-year program of oppression and murder against many minorities.
Watch the video of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) announcing that Booker broke Thurmond's record below, or by clicking this link.
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