This is an opinion column.

Sen. Cory Booker had been standing for almost 20 hours before I knew he was standing at all. Standing at the podium in the U.S. Senate chambers. Standing and pontificating, as Senators and members of Congress often do.

As they usually do before a near-empty chamber, articulating and gesturing really for C-SPAN political nerds and the Congressional Record.

It wasn’t too long before I realized, though, that the 55-year-old Democrat from New Jersey wasn’t standing and speaking to an echo chamber for an audience of none. He was standing and speaking to us all.

Standing and speaking for us all.

Even for those who will no doubt throw verbal rocks at him. Even for those who disagree with everything he eloquently and passionately said — with every fact he cited — or covered their ears, refusing to hear.

Even for those who are breathing fire that threatens to torch our Constitution and transform our democracy into a heap of smoldering embers. Fire that will leave the foundation upon which this nation was built as a pile of ash.

As you surely know by now, as your children and their children and beyond will one day surely know (and be taught, hopefully), Booker stood and spoke on the Senate floor longer than anyone in history, including one of the most racist humans ever to stand at that podium. Poetic.

Booker stood and spoke for 25 hours and 5 minutes, from Monday at 6 p.m. Central time until 7:05 p.m. Tuesday. He stood and spoke 47 minutes longer than the late South Carolina segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond, who spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes in a failed effort to derail the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first significant civil rights legislation of that era.

A failed effort to stop progress. A failed effort to sustain immoral inequities.

A failed effort to stifle me.

Such is the irony of Booker’s eloquent declaration that this, now — 71 days, as of Tuesday, into Donald Trump’s second presidential administration — was our “moral moment.”

It was a savory delineation of the immorality of Trump’s actions.

Of intentionally and blithely hurting Americans. Hurting their ability to feed their families due to rising grocery prices. Hurting children who will go hungry without funding for school meals that may be their only one of the day. Hurting veterans by stripping away the medical and mental care they risked their lives to earn. Hurting our elders and families who depend on affordable health care to live.

“There’s a threat to the bedrock commitments we’ve made to this country,” Booker said.

Hurting our brightest and those who aspire to be so. Hurting those who seek medical advances that save lives now and will save the lives of our children, their children and beyond.

Hurting men, women and children who risked their lives to seek a better life here, a productive life, a life as law-abiding as those of us born on this soil. Hurting them with depraved indifference. Immoral indifference.

Hurting (no, let me be real: killing) men, women and children in other nations whose lives we — as moral global leaders — committed to save.

Hurting relations with global allies who’ve stood with us for generations, trading them for global oligarchs who smile at our bullying, threats and naïve folly.

Hurting our economy in ways that will choke the financial plans many faithfully pursued.

Hurting far more than we yet know.

He evoked the Constitution many times, saying it “saved my life” as a Black man whose ancestors were elevated by amendments that guaranteed them citizenship, the vote and other rights afforded Americans.

“It is not about right or left,” Booker said many times of Trump’s actions. “It’s about right and wrong.”

I watched Booker proudly in those final hours on the floor. We share an alma mater, Stanford University. African American alums call ourselves #chocolatecardinal and many among the tribe shared our pride via text and social media during his speech.

I interviewed him for a column six years ago when he was an aspiring hopeful for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Our conversation focused on Alabama, where he had traveled on numerous occasions.

In 2018, he toured two Black Belt cities, Tallahassee and Uniontown, and listened to residents share the effects of decades of environmental racism on their lives — environmental racism that will now go unchecked with the Trump/Elon Musk DOGE-mantling of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Justice and DEI arms.

During that same trip, Booker also visited Africatown, the cluster of mostly African American neighborhoods in Mobile encircled by toxic industrial blight.

“I’ve fallen in love with the state,” he told me then. “I was really moved by the sacrifice and the will — although their circumstances are tough — of some communities, which won’t stop fighting. I was inspired by that.”

Booker learned, too, of his blood ties to the state, dating as far back as slavery. While participating in Harvard professor Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s PBS Series “Finding Your Roots,” he discovered his grandmother’s grandparents fled Alabama and settled in rural Buxton, Iowa. His Native American ancestors fought in the Alabama Creek War of 1814-15; at least one white ancestor was a Confederate soldier.

“I was surprised how much Alabama kept popping up,” he said.

Two months before we spoke, Booker gave the keynote speech at historic Brown Chapel AME Church on the morning of that year’s annual commemoration of “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965 — 60 years ago now.

“It’s time for us to defend the dream,” he said that day.

So, I wasn’t surprised that Alabama was woven through as Booker stood and spoke Monday and Tuesday. He shared many tales of his close relationship with Alabama native Congressman John Lewis, evoking the late civil rights icon’s challenge to create “good trouble” when necessary.

Like now.

I’d heard many of Booker’s stories about Lewis before, but not this one:

The “Bloody Sunday” attack on the then-student and 600 other marchers inspired a white attorney in New Jersey to offer pro bono work for local charitable organizations. He reached out to a nonprofit that was trying to address housing discrimination. Together, they created a plan to expose it. They sent a black couple to homes that were listed for sale but were told the home was no longer on the market.

A white couple was sent that same listing. “Make an offer,” they were told.

Ultimately, the realtor was sued. In court, he attacked the white lawyer and sicced a dog on the African American woman who led the nonprofit.

The white owners of the home were apparently so taken aback by the realtor’s attack they reached out to the nonprofit and sold the home directly to the Black couple trying to buy it.

That couple was Cary and Carolyn Booker, whose son, Cory, was born in 1969.

Booker also recalled Lewis standing in for his just deceased father on the day he was sworn into the Senate in 2013.

He talked about calling Lewis to see if he would help Booker attend the Sunday School service taught by former President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalyn. In what he called his “greatest road trip ever,” Booker flew to Atlanta, rode in a car with Lewis to Plains, Georgia and sat in the front row before being summoned to meet the former president and First Lady before the class.

President Carter said he had heard Booker was thinking of running for president, the senator recalled.

“Well, if you do,” Carter said as he poked Booker in the chest, near his heart, “do so from here.”

One of the final stories Booker shared about Lewis occurred shortly before the congressman’s death. “It won’t be long,” Booker was told. Lewis could not speak but a phone was held to his ear. Booker couldn’t remember “anything profound,” he said. “I just told him, ‘Thank you.‘”

As Booker filled the final minutes, he called upon Lewis and Alabama again as examples of how we must be in these tenuous times (and this is edited a bit, for a man who had been standing and speaking for more than 24 hours):

I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know what he would say now. But John Lewis would say something. He would do something. He wouldn’t treat this moral moment like it was normal. John Lewis knew what Dr. Martin Luther King said — that all of us here will have to repent for not just the vitriolic words and violent actions of so-called bad people. What we will have to repent for in our day and age is the appalling silence and the inaction of good people.

This is our moral moment. This is when the most precious ideas of our country are being tested, where the Constitution and the question is being called: Where does the Constitution live? On paper or in our hearts? …. We’re on a crossroads here, folks…. Health care is in the balance. Veterans are on the balance. Priorities are on the balance. Where’s our priorities, America? More tax cuts disproportionately going to the wealthy, greater budget deficits into trillions and trillions of dollars. Or are we going to do something different?

Like John Lewis would call us to do, he would call us to get into good trouble, necessary trouble to save the soul of America. But you all know, John: Don’t hate each other. … Don’t hate anybody.

The folks in Birmingham: Martin Luther King, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Dorothy Cotton, James Bevel. Did they bring bigger dogs and bigger fire hoses to match … (Booker struggled to recall the name here until someone shared it from the chambers, which was now filled with Senate colleagues and others seeking to witness this historic feat) … Bull Connor, thank you. I’ve been standing here a long time. They didn’t do that. They were creative artists of activism. They called to the conscience of a country. They challenged our moral imagination, to not focus on hate but on what is possible in America if we redeem the dream, if we dream America anew. That generation in their 20s and 30s, that’s what they demanded.

Martin Luther King didn’t go to the March on Washington with a list of grievances against the racists in our country. He went there and called to the conscious of a country. He said he had a dream. That’s what we need in our generation — a vision to redeem the dream to call our country together.

As he teetered toward closing, his voice expectedly cracked but his energy did not falter:

Where I started was John Lewis. I don’t know how to solve this. I don’t know how to stop us from going down this road. … But I know who does have the power: the people of the United States of America. The power of the people is greater than the people in power.

It is time to heed the words of the man I began this whole thing with, John Lewis. I beg folks to take his example of his early days when he made himself determined to show his love for his country at a time the country didn’t love him… to be such a patriot that he endured beatings savagely on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, at lunch counters, on freedom rides. He said he had to do something.

He would not normalize a moment like this. He would not just go along with business as usual. He wouldn’t know how to solve it. But there’s one thing that he would do that I hope we all can do: He said for us to go out and cause some good trouble, necessary trouble to redeem the soul of our nation. I want you to redeem the dream. Let’s be bold in America … not divide us against each other.

Let’s be bolder in America with a vision that inspires with hope … Let’s get back to the ideals that others are being threatened. …Those imperfect geniuses added some very special words at the end of the Declaration of Independence, one of the greatest in all humanity declarations of interdependence. Our founders said we must mutually pledge, pledge to each other, our Lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

We need that now. For all Americans, this is a moral moment. It’s not left or right, it’s right or wrong. Let’s get in good trouble. My friend, Madame President, I yield the floor.”

Booker’s historic, eloquent and passionate display of endurance finished at 7:05 p.m. Central time.

For the rest of us, it was time to start. To stand.

Let’s be better tomorrow than we are today. My column appears on AL.com, and digital editions of The Birmingham News, Huntsville Times, and Mobile Press-Register. Tell me what you think at [email protected], and follow me at twitter.com/roysj, Instagram @roysj and BlueSky.