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Senator James Lankford, an Oklahoma Republican who spent weeks attempting to reverse the outcomes of the presidential election earlier than altering his thoughts on the final second, apologized on Thursday to Black constituents who felt he had attacked their proper to vote.
In a letter addressed to his “friends” in North Tulsa, which has many Black residents, Mr. Lankford wrote on Thursday that his efforts to problem the election consequence had “caused a firestorm of suspicion among many of my friends, particularly in Black communities around the state.”
“After decades of fighting for voting rights, many Black friends in Oklahoma saw this as a direct attack on their right to vote, for their vote to matter, and even a belief that their votes made an election in our country illegitimate,” he wrote, in response to the information web site Tulsa World.
Mr. Lankford stated within the letter that he had by no means supposed to “diminish the voice of any Black American.” Still, he added, “I should have recognized how what I said and what I did could be interpreted by many of you.”
Mr. Lankford, who sits on a key Senate oversight committee, was initially one of many Republicans who tried to upend Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory, at the same time as courts threw out baseless questions raised by President Trump and his allies about election malfeasance.
Democrats in Congress have considered Mr. Lankford as a uncommon, cooperative associate on voting rights, and his determination to affix these Republicans looking for to disenfranchise tens of tens of millions of voters — lots of them Black residents dwelling in Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee and Atlanta — got here as a shock.
The first indication he would possibly accomplish that got here throughout his look in December at a Senate listening to about alleged voting “irregularities,” when he repeated unsupported Trump marketing campaign allegations about voting in Nevada that had been debunked in courtroom practically two weeks earlier.
Mr. Lankford and different Republicans had claimed that by difficult the election outcomes, they have been exercising their independence and performing within the pursuits of constituents who have been demanding solutions.
“There are lots of folks in my state that still want those answers to come out,” Mr. Lankford stated a couple of days earlier than the Electoral College vote was licensed.
After the riot on the Capitol, Mr. Lankford was one in every of a number of Republican senators who deserted their earlier problem, saying the lawlessness and chaos had triggered them to modified their minds.
In a joint assertion that night time with Senator Steve Daines, Republican of Montana, Mr. Lankford referred to as on “the entire Congress to come together and vote to certify the election results.”
Mr. Lankford has confronted calls from Black leaders to resign from the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, which is designed to commemorate the racist bloodbath within the metropolis’s Greenwood district, an prosperous Black neighborhood often called Black Wall Street. The bloodbath, which befell 100 years in the past this spring, was one of many worst situations of racist violence in American historical past. A white mob destroyed the neighborhood and its Black-owned companies, and as much as 300 residents have been killed.
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