(applause)
- Wow.
I wonder if they say like,
"Don't follow or work
with kids or animals."
(laughter)
Wish they had told me that
was gonna be the video
before we got things warmed up.
Good morning everybody.
- [Voiceover] Good morning.
- My name is Sekou Biddle.
I am a 1993 New York City
core member alumni.
Happy to welcome you here and also proud
district residents are
welcome to my hometown.
Hope you all have a good time
and learn a lot and are inspired to do
what you're doing better, faster,
higher or harder and
stronger as we go forward.
Really looking forward to the time we have
this morning and the
opportunity for all of us
to learn more in how we can
forge forward on our journey
to educational equity
for all children.
So, this morning, I have the pleasure
of setting up and giving time to a
group of important leaders in the history
of civil rights change and
activism in this country
and I think that we
couldn't have a better start
to our day to hear from
people who've been doing important work,
leading, sacrificing, blazing,
literally blazing the trail
for so many Americans over
the last several decades.
So, for those of you like me who feel like
we've been doing something
'cause we've been
to 25 years to Teach For America
and it's 23 years since I joined the core
and like, that's like only like
incremental baby steps to what people
have been doing on these
issues in this country.
So, our panelists today are gonna share
lots of wisdom, some challenge,
and lots of perspective
for all of us.
So, with that said,
we're here to talk about and reflect on
Doctor King's Letter from Birmingham Jail,
one of the more important pieces of
modern literature for us to consider about
the challenges faced, the reflections on
our humanity and the
challenges, quite frankly,
of dealing with those that sometimes
we might regard as enemies that in fact,
simply are people who we haven't yet
figured out how to make
our allies in our cause
to make the world better for everyone.
So, with that said,
I'm gonna do as much as I
can to get out of the way
'cause I want to sit actually at the end
and listen to and learn more from our
esteemed panelists today.
I'm going to quickly hand
over the mic and the podium
to Doctor Joyce Ladner,
who in addition to being an important
thought leader, civil
rights icon activist,
family friend,
is someone who I have always
learned something new from
every time I've heard her speak.
I'm sure that all of you will
and with that said, I'd like to
welcome Doctor Ladner to the microphone
and all of you join me in welcoming her
to our summit.
Thank you.
(applause)
- Good morning.
Was it hard for you to get up and out here
this early?
(laughter)
Sekou Biddle's mother and
I were in SNCC together
in Mississippi
in the early 60's.
I grew up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
- [Voiceover] Woo!
- Hey, who was that?
Raise your hand.
Oh, a couple of Mississippians.
Three, alright.
I joined,
I was always conscious
of the racial differences
and how
they impacted our lives.
I remember asking my mother
when I was four or five years old
why don't we have a brick school too?
Because the white kids had a brick school.
Imagine growing up where, a place where
you live in your own community,
you have your own institutions.
If you go to a store, you cannot try on
a dress or pair of shoes.
You have to take them home and keep them.
If they don't fit, that was it.
My generation was profoundly impacted by
the murder of Emmett Till
in 1955
and I call our generation,
especially those of us southerners
who joined the Civil Rights movement,
the Emmett Till generation.
And that is the perspective from which
I will speak today.
I want to thank Teach For America
for inviting me to speak to you about
Doctor Martin Luther King's
Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
And to correlate it with the work you do
in this black history month.
Congratulate you on your 25th anniversary.
Doctor King's letter is a radical call
to arms, originally written
in the margins of newspapers
while he was jailed, obviously.
It has become a timeless
universal treaties
on the moral and ethical justification
for protesting the wrongs of the society.
Social activists around the world
have used some of the memorable phrases
in his letter as a guide for their work.
First, in responding to his critics
who advocated moderation
and told him to go slow,
Doctor King wrote,
"Justice too long delayed
"is justice denied."
Secondly, to those who challenged him
to obey current laws, King wrote,
that "a just law is a man-made code
"that squares with the
borrowed law of God,"
or the law of God, "and unjust code law
"is a code that is out of
harmony with the moral law.
"Any law that uplifts
human personality is just
"and any law that degrades
human personality is unjust."
Just as an aside,
when I attempted to register to vote
three times while I was in college in
Hattiesburg, Mississippi,
I failed the test.
I finally, on the third try,
knowing that I was going to fail anyway,
on the question of what is a good citizen,
I wrote that a good citizen is one
who obeys just laws and
disobeys unjust laws.
Of course, I failed again.
But I left the registrar there
looking at what in the world.
He kept looking up at me and that smile.
I was 19-years-old but
could not, I was a senior in college
and I could not pass the test.
Third, Doctor King addressed those critics
who said, "Now is not the right time
"to protest."
And what he said was that
actually time itself,
and I think this is critical,
is neutral.
It could be used either destructively
or constructively.
Human progress never rolls on the wheels
of inevitability.
It comes through the
tireless efforts of men,
and I insert and women,
and now is the time to
lift our national policy
from the quicksand of racial injustices
to the solid rock of human dignity.
Although Doctor King
has been immortalized,
for those of us who were in SNCC,
he was a living, breathing human being.
He was roughly 10 to 15
years older than most of us.
We were in Doctor King's company
much like you young people today
are in the company of
leaders of your movement.
I met him when he spoke at my college,
Tupelo College in Mississippi,
in 1962 and I
took a photo with him that I have now
and he gave me his autograph.
He came to the march on Washington office
where I was working helping
to organize the march
in the Summer of '63 several times
and he always came back
to our desk to say,
give us some encouraging words.
And there, I worked under Bayard Rustin.
I was on the podium when Doctor King
gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech
and three weeks later, I saw him
when he eulogized three
of the four little girls
murdered in Birmingham.
I also saw him during the Meredith March
for about a week during the march,
Mississippi and finally, I
joined the thousands of others
who went to his funeral.
Doctor King was a leader
with extraordinary courage
and fortitude or morality and ethics
and a tremendous clarity of vision.
Much of what he wrote in his letter
is relevant to you today.
Things such as seizing the moment.
Things such as fighting
against unjust laws.
And on the importance of individual action
as well as group action.
And critically important, the creation
of the society you want
because fate and chance are not going to
deliver it to you.
All of these are exceedingly important.
We in the civil rights movement understand
that people of ill will used time
and lethargy and immobility against us
and they use it against you.
We challenge those who
stood on the sidelines
to join us because if they didn't
support what we were doing,
racial discrimination and racial violence
were going to continue.
Such are the challenges
you also face today
in your work.
Many of you are or were
idealistic young teachers
who wanted to increase
educational opportunities
and outcomes for the
children who need the most.
At the same time, the negative forces
about which Doctor King wrote
are still present.
The civil rights movement
did not eliminate
the misuse and abuse of power
or the use of illegal and extra-legal
methods to thwart the progress
being made in public education
or of simply waiting you out.
In Doctor King's language, your opponents
can use time against you
so that you must always
rise to the occasion
and use time on your side.
Empowering teachers and
parents and communities
to help kids get a good education
is possible in some
areas, but not in others,
not as much in others.
It is up to you to
mobilize and to organize
to ensure that educational opportunities
for these children are increased.
Three weeks after the march on Washington,
where Doctor King sent
us off with an idealistic
expectation or dream for his children
and by extension, the children of America
who needed to be lifted
out of segregation,
he went to Birmingham for the funeral
of three of the four little girls
who were murdered in 16th
Street Baptist Church.
As the police stood on top of the church
and other buildings
nearby with shotguns drawn
at the hundreds of us standing outside,
Doctor King eulogized the girls by saying,
and I quote, "Today, as
I stand over the remains
"of these beautiful little girls,
"beautiful darling girls,
"I paraphrase the words of Shakespeare.
"Goodnight, sweet princesses.
"Goodnight.
"Those who symbolize a new day.
"And may the flight of angels take thee
"to thy eternal rest.
"God bless you."
What this tells us is that the movement
saw the occasional uplifting moments,
such as the march on Washington.
That nationalized the
civil rights movement
and took it out of the
isolation of the south.
But also, we saw a lot of dark days
and turmoil
and the victories often
came at a heavy price
in the form of the
murders of Medgar Evers,
who was one of my mentors.
of Vernon Dahmer, another mentor,
from the time I was
about 10, 12 years old,
and the three civil rights workers,
James Chaney, Matthew Goodman,
and Mickey Schwerner.
Chaney and Schwerner were my friends.
Can you imagine how you would feel if
people who were very, very close to you
were murdered,
cut down.
Think of the strength that we had to,
within ourselves as a group,
to pull ourselves back
together and keep going on.
It was not until the passage
of the Civil Rights Act
of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965
that there was some
kind of a breakthrough,
but I must tell you that in Mississippi
in those years before the breakthrough,
Bob Moses often says that
we were playing gorilla warfare.
There were never more than 31 of us
trying to make these major changes
on staff.
It was a small number who
were playing gorilla warfare.
It was out of this turmoil
the civil rights movement
was a springboard for the creation
of movements for women,
for students, for
chicanas and the elderly,
for the physically or
emotionally impaired,
for the environment, children advocates,
homosexuals and for educational equity
and others.
The civil rights movement created
a social activist model for the ages
that has been exported around the world.
When We Shall Overcome is sung in China
or in Cairo, we know
that they were exported
from the civil rights movement.
The key elements that have been adopted
for other movements
were the following.
Number one: the ability to
articulate the unmet needs.
You will never be successful
unless you can tell
people what it is that
you're trying to do.
Number two: protests.
Number three: to mobilize people
and number four, to organize.
And I say organize, organize, organize
because using Facebook and other forms
of social media to get
an audience or people
to come to your protest
ends in not, for the most part,
unless you take those people and begin
to organize them for concrete goals.
Some of the young people from
Black Lives Matter came to those of us
on the board to the SNCC legacy project
and asked us our advice
and we told them to organize,
organize, and organize.
Another contribution of the movement
is that there's been a
proliferation of individual
and group rights.
Rights have been codified
to protect individuals
and groups from being
discriminated against
in the areas of an employment.
In accordance to gender, race,
sexual preference, age,
and physical and emotional impairments,
and as I said earlier, for children.
Individual and class actions,
lawsuits can be brought
if discrimination occurs in any of these
protected categories.
All of those changes are a result
of what the civil rights
movement set forth.
Simultaneously, the
intersection of race and class
produced much of the discrimination
that threatens the life
chances of children
and adults alike today.
Inadequate education,
substandard housing,
homelessness.
My son works with homeless people
and I tell him each day
that he's doing God's work
or the Lord's work.
Crime, unemployment,
and under-employment,
police balance and police murders,
are certainly not the kinds of problems
Doctor King's letter envisioned.
We in the movement dealt with
fairly straightforward issues,
principally the right to vote
and the right to use
public accommodations.
We had not yet gotten
to the critical problems
of economic power that
were facing the society.
However, I must say that Doctor King
came out against the Vietnam War
and he paid a heavy price for it
and he was about to launch
a poor people's campaign
in Washington when he was assassinated.
By the way, that campaign did go forth.
The concentration of economic power
in the hands of fewer
and fewer corporations
and individuals has the
most corrosive effects
on those that you worked with.
Poor neighborhoods do not have
a strong tax base
needed to support their schools.
Martin Luther King did not envision
homeless families or the
hundreds of thousands
of children in long-term foster care
and certainly not the murder of children,
as well as men and women
on the streets of towns
alike of this nation.
Nor did he envision that the world,
I'm sorry, nor did he envision
that the prisons would
be filled to capacity
with the fathers and a
smaller number of mothers
of black and brown children,
leaving them
behind and their welfare left to chance.
This is not true for the middle class
whose children are more
likely to grow up in
neighborhoods that are safer
with stronger tax bases
to fund their schools
and where parents can
augment the curriculum
with fundraisers to pay for teachers
for art, physical education, and music.
Even though the civil rights movement
issues today, the civil
rights issues today
are infinitely more complex to solve,
Doctor King's words can be a guide
and as I close, he wrote,
that any law that uplifts humanity is just
and any law that degrades
human personality
is unjust.
The caring public cannot stand by
and watch the systemic
degradation of young people
and their schools and communities.
Those who are not supportive
must be persuaded to do so.
Like Doctor King, you must neutralize
your opponents and turn the bystanders
of all races and income groups
into your supporters.
Frantz Fanon, the Algerian psychiatrist
wrote in his book, The
Wretched of the Earth,
that each generation
must find it's mission,
fulfill it or betray it.
Thank you.
(applause)
- Yeah, so I get to follow
cute kids and then wedged in between
civil rights icons.
I need to talk to my
Teach For America people
about what I sign up for next.
(laughter)
So, next we're gonna hear from Bob Zellnar
and I think I had this conversation
with my folks over dinner one night.
Ya know, by intro, the simplest thing
that can be said
to give you a window is,
Bob has an interesting story.
For those of you who find yourselves
in this movement and in this work
conflicted or concerned about
people like me have
some different interests
or how do I fit or what's my role,
don't worry.
People like Bob have shown
that when you know what
the right thing to do is,
you simply have to go ahead and do it
and the people like you,
the people in your family,
friends, community,
who just don't see, just don't get it,
they eventually will
or they won't
but you will still do
what needs to be right.
So, Bob is also
native out Alabama, so has a unique
perspective on both
Doctor King's letter and
what it was like to really work hard
to transform the conditions for
African Americans and others in the south.
So, with that, Bob Zellner.
(applause)
- Thank you Doctor Sekou.
Thank you very much.
I am Bob Zellner and I grew up in LA,
Lower Alabama.
(laughter)
And Doctor Joyce Ladner and I have known
and worked with each
other for over 55 years.
(applause)
That's a great unity between
Alabama and Mississippi
because in Alabama, when I grew up there,
we always thanked God for Mississippi
'cause it was worse.
(laughter)
Growing up in Alabama,
it was very unlikely
that I would ever get involved
in the civil rights movement.
My Dad was in the Ku Klux Klan
from Birmingham, Alabama.
One of the worst and most dangerous clans
in the United States.
The same klavern that
killed the four little girls
in 1963, which was the answer of the Klan
to the march on Washington
and the I Have A Dream speech.
When my father and it's another story,
quit the Ku Klux Klan, his father,
my grandfather, disowned him
and his brothers never spoke
to him again in his life.
That's how personal
racism was when I grew up
in LA, in Lower Alabama.
I was very lucky because
my father not only quit
the Ku Klux Klan, but when he did,
he began to work with Doctor King
and Joe Lowry in the SCLC
to try to integrate the southern church.
Having been in the Ku Klux Klan and having
a conversion to Christianity,
he was, after all, a Methodist minister.
My mother was a school
teacher of special education.
So, coming through that
crucible that he came through,
it was natural, of course,
that I would go to our
church school in Montgomery, Alabama,
and while there, in a sociology course
on race relations, I met Doctor King
and I met Mrs. Rosa Parks
and I want to tell you
briefly about that meeting.
We told our professor that
we were writing a paper
about segregation and we wanted to go
and talk to Doctor King
and Mrs. Rosa Parks
and E.D. Nixon, who made
the Montgomery bus boycott,
the beginning of the modern
civil rights movement.
And he said, "You can't do
that, you'll be arrested."
So, we talked to Doctor King about it.
We met him at federal court.
If you wanted to find
Doctor King in those days,
he was in federal court
or some other court in Montgomery.
And he said, "Yes, you can come,
"but you better be ready to be arrested."
And we said, "That's
what our Professor said."
And he said, "That's
why he's the Professor."
(laughter)
He knows about that.
You don't know much about race
and I said, "That's what
we're trying to learn about."
Anyway, I went to the meeting.
John Lewis was there,
other people from SNCC,
the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee.
At the end of the meeting,
Doctor King came over
to the five of us students
from the sociology class
and said, "The church is
surrounded by the police
"and the news and they've sent word
"that you're going to be arrested."
And he smiled.
The very idea that anyone
would smile at that
prospect of being
arrested was strange to us
sociology students, but I said,
"Doctor King, we need to escape."
And he said, "Well, remember that workshop
"that we said you might be arrested."
We said, "Well, what we need
to do is try to escape."
So, he said, "I'll go out the front.
"If they come out there,
Reverend Abernathy
"and Mrs. Parks can
take you to the basement
"and you can run for it."
So, while we were in the basement
waiting for Doctor King
to go out the front door,
Mrs. Parks, Mrs. Rosa
Parks, that quiet saint
made of granite touched me on the elbow
and she said, and I haven't
washed that elbow since then,
(laughter)
and she said, "Bob, when
you see something wrong,
"you have to do something about it.
"You can't study it forever."
So, if I have any message for teachers,
we can not only teach about making change,
we have to make that change
and that's what you're
about here today, I believe.
So, when I grew up in Alabama,
I was very close to Doctor King.
We were in jail together.
Also when my mother
quit the, when my father
quit the Ku Klux Klan, my
mother was so relieved,
she took his Klan robes and cut up shirts
for the five of us boys
to go to Sunday school in.
So, growing up in Alabama that way,
I was very interested and excited about
The Letter From the Birmingham Jail
because when Doctor
King penned that letter,
he was talking to my
white people in Alabama.
And I've been doing that
for about over 55 years now.
And the challenge was that the church
has to live up to the
gospel of Jesus Christ
and he was a preacher
of the social gospel.
So, we're still in that struggle.
I'm working today in North Carolina
and do people know that we've had
over 80 to 100,000 people
demonstrating at one time
in Raleigh, North Carolina?
How many people have heard that recently,
over 1,000 people have been arrested in
Raleigh, North Carolina in
what Doctor Barber calls,
Doctor William Barber, calls
the third reconstruction.
So, that's what we're involved in today.
You are an example, by
the way, of a youth,
another rise up of youth in this country.
The very idea that we have to fight
once again for what we won
in the first reconstruction,
which was overturned by violence.
The second reconstruction,
the civil rights movement
that we all participated in,
was the second reconstruction and it was
overturned by violence.
Doctor King was murdered.
Medgar Evins was murdered.
Malcom X was murdered.
The two Kennedy brothers,
Bobby and Jack, were murdered.
So, that reconstruction was
also overturned by violence.
We're now in a period of
the third reconstruction
and it's up to young people,
it's up to Teach For America,
to bring that message back that what
Mrs. Rosa Parks said to me that long ago,
"When you see something wrong,
"you have to do something about it."
And you have done that.
(applause)
When I joined the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
on September the 11th, 1961,
exactly 40 years before those
buildings were knocked down
in New York, I understood
what that dynamic was about
because when I joined SNCC
that many years ago,
in the first 36 months
of my work with SNCC, we
lost six of our comrades
to murder.
They were lynched, they were killed
because they wanted to do what?
Register black people to vote
in Alabama and Mississippi
and once again, that
vote is under challenge.
After the civil rights
movement, we thought that
women's rights would
never be challenged again.
We thought that the all white ballot box
would never be brought back
and they're bringing
it back today in spades
and people think we're hurdling
in a right wing direction
and I think because of Teach For America
and the work that's going on
and the new uprising of youth
lead by Black Lives Matter and others,
we're on the brink of
a new progressive era.
You wouldn't know it from the current
political campaign,
but it's all about race
and if you don't understand that race
has always been at the
center of our struggle
in the United States and all the other
struggles around that,
you simply can't do the job.
The very idea that young people
are totally different now
is exemplified in the
success of the LGBTQ struggle
and that has preceded at warp speed,
but we still have pockets of poison
in the deep south and now in the midwest
where people want to go backwards
and we won't go backwards.
That's what this meeting today is about.
Looking at The Letter
From the Birmingham Jail.
We have to once and for all get serious
about making a huge
change in this country.
Now, the way that we can do that is
that we can make our contribution.
I tell young people now
and I've been speaking to
sold out groups all
over the United States.
Just most recently, two days ago
in Maryville, Missouri,
just near Ferguson,
up above Ferguson, just below Iowa,
where that battle took place.
Now, youth are on the
rise, but they don't know
exactly what to do with this new medium,
this new social medium
because there's more
tools of communication
and fewer and less
communication going on now
for some reason.
How many people have heard of the
Forward Together Moral Mondays movement
in North Carolina before today?
Have you heard of that?
Now, this is a crowd.
This is a whole, maybe, I
don't know, 1,500 people or so
and there's maybe a dozen people in here
who've heard about that.
How can we have a press in this country
where you can have the
largest civil rights
demonstration in the
history of the southern
civil rights movement occurring
in Raleigh, North Carolina,
over 1,000 people arrested,
60% of them white southerners,
and you don't know about it?
When that 80 to 100,000 people
marched in Raleigh, North Carolina,
one newspaper in the
United States, USA Today
of all newspapers, not
the Washington Post,
not the New York Times,
they did not cover it.
It's been very difficult
to get coverage for
the Moral Mondays movement
in North Carolina,
but it's gonna break out anyway.
When we were working
in SNCC, we had to call
York Gazette and Daily in Pennsylvania
to get the word out
about what was happening
in Mississippi.
My first demonstration was in
McComb, Mississippi,
and I wanted to tell
you about that because
we couldn't get coverage
on what was happening
in Mississippi even though Herbert Lee,
a black farmer, had gone
down to register to vote
in Pipe County or Amite County.
Amite County, a Klan infested
place in southern Mississippi.
He was murdered by his nextdoor neighbor
when he went to the gin
in Liberty, Mississippi.
Shot in the head one time and killed
because he, a black man, had gone down
to register to vote.
E.H. Hurst, the murderer, was a member
of the Mississippi state legistlature.
They held a inquest over the body.
They forced the black witnesses to testify
that Herbert Lee, the black farmer,
had attacked the member of
the Mississippi legislature
with a tire tool.
It was a total lie.
Lewis Allen witnessed the murder.
He told the justice department, John Doar.
And because he told the
justice department the truth,
Lewis Allen was then murdered.
This is in the freest
country in the world.
This is at a time when we were in a war,
a battle with God-less communism,
the slave states of
communism, and in the bashing
of democracy, just that few years ago,
it was a capital crime for
a black person to register
to vote in southern Mississippi
and they want to go back that way.
Look at the political campaign right now.
Don't you know candidates who would love
to make the N word a
common parlance again?
Wouldn't they like to shock you with that
because they've shocked you
with just about everything
they can shock you with?
And the more they shock you,
the more support they get.
So, it looks like we're
dividing as a country,
but I think we're gonna choose
the progressive direction.
I think we're gonna go
forward, not backwards.
We can not go backwards
in a global economy
and have religious tests in this country
of who's gonna have protection
and who is not gonna have protection.
So, if I ever learned one thing
from Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King,
in the Letter From the Birmingham Jail,
he challenged us in the white community,
in the white church,
to live up to what we said we believed in.
So, are we gonna do it in this country?
Both Martin Luther King
and Mrs. Rosa Parks,
one thing I learned from
them and learn this saying,
if you will,
"Brotherhood and sisterhood
"is not so wild a dream
"as those who profit by
postponing it pretend."
So, you see, they're still profiting
by using that original moral compromise
that the mothers and
fathers of our country made
and we have never settled that question.
So, all of these right-wingers,
I don't call 'em Republicans,
I call 'em right-wingers
and extremists, around this country,
they always go back to that mother load
of hate in this country, race.
And they tie nationality, religion,
sexual preference and all of those things
to that central thing of race.
We've never dealt with it yet.
We talk about having a conversation.
We don't need a conversation.
We need action and we need it now.
Thank you.
(applause)
- As many of us are teachers,
I'm going to give you
the heads up that we are momentarily,
we're gonna hear from
Doctor Terrence Roberts,
but then we're gonna
start taking questions,
so start getting ready with your questions
and they'll be collecting cards,
taking questions for the panelists.
Bob talked a lot about challenge
and many of us got into this to go
directly into classrooms and work
for and with students to help them
fight through the challenges that our
community and societies
deliver to them in schools.
We're gonna hear from
Doctor Terrence Roberts
who, as a member of the Little Rock nine,
was a student walking into a school,
into the teeth of those challenges,
like on the actual frontlines
blazing the trail for educational equity
and access.
So, with that said and with a nod to
my Mom and Dad, who are now
with me in the front row.
So like, if you guys got anything else
to make this more challenging.
(laughter)
Anything else that can
make this more challenging
for me, like shout it out.
(laughter)
Ya know?
But just, point of personal privilege
and you may have heard earlier,
Joyce and my mother and
Bob known each other
for many, many years through SNCC,
which is my personal
connection to our work
and the civil rights issues of our day.
So with that said, I'm
gonna hand it over to
Doctor Terrence Roberts.
(applause)
- Before I start on my prepared remarks,
I'd like to have you
make a mental adjustment.
We, the panelists, represent
three states of origin.
Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas.
That may confuse some
of you in thinking that
you have to situate civil rights
and all those activities in
that region of the country,
but I want you to
recalibrate your mental maps
so that from now on, your maps will read
that the south is any
place south of Canada.
- [Voiceover] Absolutely.
(laughter)
So, you're not confused.
I don't want you to be confused.
(applause)
Because in your confusion, you might
make conclusions that are unjustified
and unjustifiable.
Few days ago, I was invited by the
Kentucky State Board of Education
to come to that state and
review some textbooks,
which had not yet been approved
for use in the schools.
I agreed.
I went to Kentucky.
I opened the social studies textbook
to the chapter on Martin
Luther King Junior
and the chapter started off, sentence one,
"Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior
"was a great leader for black people."
At which point I closed the book.
(laughter)
I didn't have to read any more because
I figured if the authors
were that confused,
what could I gain from
reading any other words
that they might have penned
on the pages to come?
My feeling at that time was that
something is very much amiss here.
I thought as I reread
Letter From Birmingham Jail,
that Doctor King must
have felt that same way
in response to the op ed piece
written by his fellow clergyman,
Darren Alabama.
They accused him of being a disrupter
of the public peace.
He was an outside agitator,
an impatient petitioner for rights.
They agreed they were yet to be bestowed,
but why continue to push, when in fact,
it was coming sooner or later.
Doctor King's response
in that very eloquent
and mind-piercing Letter
from Birmingham Jail
speaks a truth that even today,
many find
an unwillingness to receive
without qualification.
Black people in American have been urged
to work harder to earn
the rights they seek,
to spend more time in
the halls of learning
to qualify for freedom,
to gain the experience necessary
to be promoted to work,
to fit in better so that neighbors will be
more accepting, to be less
threatening to white people
so that we can be invited to sit at table.
In the face of Black Lives Matter,
we hear strident voices countering with
"All Lives Matter."
What better way to ignore a salient plea?
What better way to add fog to an already
murky environment?
What better way to stand in support
of maintaining the status quo?
The same truth we heard from Doctor King
in 1963 has been echoed more recently
in Ta-Nehisi Coates'
Between the World and Me.
In this letter to his son,
Coates reminds all readers
that while not all white people
would see you thrown into the streets,
most of them would certainly work hard
to maintain and preserve
the present status quo.
And so, in response to the question,
what are the challenges
and hopes for the future
that arise when re-reading
Doctor King's letter?
I can say with clarity,
until all of us who
happen to be arrayed along
this so-called racial continuum,
awaken to the fact that
there are challenges,
hopes will be delayed, postponed or
perhaps never realized.
At the end of a course I taught
when I was in University,
I taught a course on white privilege,
at the end of that course,
a young white student
came up to me and she said,
"You know, prior to taking your course,
"I knew nothing about white privilege.
"But now that I know about it,
"I am not giving it up."
(laughter)
Now, when you think about that,
when you think about that,
you must face the question,
what inducement must there be
for white people to voluntarily
give up that privilege?
I don't know the answer to that question.
But absent this change,
all other attempts to make progress
will be exercises in futility.
Now, when we think about the way
in which conditions for equity
have evolved in this country
over the past 50 years,
we have to reach further
back in time and space
to discover the foundational elements
upon which our present is built.
Ya know, it's not
unreasonable at this juncture
to realize and review
the national narrative.
What is the national narrative?
That's the origin story
that we tell ourselves.
Ya know, all countries have one.
All countries have an origin story.
Now our story has been
cemented into something
that I have begun to call
the national narrative.
It's the approved text
that is cemented into the mental lockbox
of every student who's ever gone to school
in this country.
Our story, if I may be so regal,
is often subsumed under the rubric
of manifest destiny.
Oh yes, (laughter)
that will resound in the minds and hearts
of most of you because
if you are like I am,
by the time you got to fourth grade
or even before, you heard the story
of manifest destiny.
Now, that story
is a rather dubious tale
of God sanctioned genocide, enslavement,
rape, plunder,
thievery and armed conquests.
Now of course, in our schools,
that story is sanitized,
so as not to excite and
dismay the learners.
And this is the greatest challenge to us,
to somehow move beyond
that sanitized version
to confront the truth,
to confront the truth
about who we have been
so that we can find a way today
to do more realistic assessment
about what is now necessary
to change the fact of our existence.
But when you get lost in all of that
patriotic babble, it's very
difficult to convince others
to even join the conversation.
Now, this pull-up-yourself
by your bootstraps
narrative does little to help black people
in this country make sense out of
the ongoing poverty,
the limited opportunity
for employment and education,
inadequate housing, lack
of civic involvement
and limited decision making,
in terms of authority.
I invite you to consider one of the more
salient conditions for equity in these
United States of America.
Since it's inception, America has been
an affirmative action country.
Now that may come as a
surprise to some of you
who see this whole concept
of affirmative action
as being something new.
But in the beginning,
as the founding fathers,
if you will, set around a table
wondering what to do with this country,
somebody suggested that perhaps
we should institute
some affirmative action.
There was some concern about
whether or not we had the resources
to affirm everybody
and so the discussion languished for a bit
until somebody, waking
up from a long slumber
at the end of the table,
suggested we affirm white men.
There was agreement at the outset
and so, it was.
Affirmative action for white males
became the order of the day
and what that meant was that
all competitors, with the
exception of white males,
were barred from the arena of competition.
I like that concept.
Somebody asked me once, "Terry Roberts,
"do you support affirmative action?"
I yelled out, "Yes!"
But what I want is for it to be enlarged
so that more people benefit.
If then we have a history
of favoring white males
to that degree, what can be said
about conditions of equity today?
My daughter, my youngest daughter and I
were on one of those obligatory
father/daughter trips seeking
colleges and Universities
to which she might apply.
We happened to drop in at Yale University.
The President at that time, Bart Giamatti,
he's since died, said
to all of us prospective
parents and students,
"You parents especially might think
"that we here at Yale
will accept your children
"on the basis of their SAT score."
He said, "Not true.
"You may very well line them
up according to SAT score,
"highest to lowest, but we will start
"at the head of that line and
ask one essential question
"to each student in line
and that question is
"do you possess
"outstanding athletic ability?
"After that group of students had been
"called from the line,
placed on air conditioned
"buses to go directly to the dorm
"to begin training, we will then
"start at the head of the line again
"and we will ask another question.
"Did your parents and/or grandparents
"graduate from this University?
"The third question, did your parents
"and/or grandparents
contribute large sums of money
"to this University?"
And he said, "As I look
out at the audience,
"I see some of you parents
with expectant faces,
"but hold on, not yet.
"This year, the senior
oboe player is graduating.
"Do any of your students, your children,
"possess outstanding
ability in playing the oboe?
"Now, if there are slots left,
"we might consider your child."
And my daughter and I
looked around and there were
slack jaws and gaping eyes.
We were very sanguine
because we knew in advance
what the story was.
We were not surprised.
It's unfortunate that that reality exists,
but there it is.
My generation got it's start under
the aegis of the Plessy decision,
which had been rendered in 1896.
I am one of those
separate but equal babies.
And that actually lead to a
lot of confusion on my part.
When I exited the womb
on December 3rd in 1941,
I expected to find a population of people
who loved me.
I was mistaken.
What I found, in fact, was a system
of law and custom that deemed me
unacceptable.
That was a kind of thing that
convinced me to join
later, this group of nine.
You know, as I think about that,
I was speaking to a middle
school group recently
and I was introduced as Terry Roberts,
and this one little kid
raised his hand right away.
He says, "Okay, so that's
something you did then.
"What have you done lately?"
(laughter)
I accepted that question
as an honest inquiry
and it forced me to
come up with a response
and I said to him, "Young man,
"I consider myself to
have been conscripted
"into the civil rights army
"on December 3rd, 1941
"and I've been an active soldier since."
There was a bit of
misunderstanding between the two of us,
but later I sought him
out and we cleaned it up
a little bit.
All having to do with the fact that
I do not ever want to leave anybody
with the feeling that they have,
quote, "said the wrong thing."
Martin Luther King, Junior, in his letter,
does in fact, call up on all of us
to hope that the dark
clouds of racial prejudice
will soon pass away and the deep fog
of misunderstanding will be lifted
from our fear drenched communities
and in some not too distant tomorrow,
the radiant stars of love and brotherhood
will shine over our great nation
with all their scintillating beauty.
Now those are great words
and it presumes a future
that we can look forward to
with some great expectation
and in thinking about that kind of future,
I see schools as a place where
such an idea can take root.
You, in Teach For America,
can be instrumental
in helping to make that reality
come faster than it seems to have been.
However, there are problems.
Not too many months ago,
I was selected to sit on
a panel in Los Angeles.
We were looking at the Los Angeles unified
school district and the question was,
what can we do to repair this system?
My fellow panelists were becoming
increasingly dissatisfied with some of my
responses and comments.
Finally, as a unit, they confronted me
and they said, "Okay
smarty, what would you do?"
And I said, "Well, actually, I think
"repair should be taken off the table.
"The system is at a
point now where I think
"the only way out of
this is to destroy it.
"We need to blow it up.
"We need to send all
of school-aged children
"out of the country, stamp their VISA's
"cannot return for two years
"and in that two year absence,
"those of us who really gave a rip
"about educating children would
build a system from scratch
"and at it's base would
be critical thinking.
"We would teach kids how to learn.
"We would teach them how to analyze
"each and every mythological
concept in their world,
"including such things as race
"and meritocracy and
equality of opportunity."
Now, several things have to happen
before schools can be trusted to do
the kinds of things that
I think are necessary
and that is, you have to
learn to love yourself
because until you're able to do that,
you cannot love the children
and that will also be fundamental
and foundational and it can't be fake.
Kids know the truth of the matter.
If you love them, they will know it.
In my early years of school,
each time I stepped onto the campus
of Gibbs Elementary there in Little Rock,
each time I stepped onto
campus of Dunbar Middle School,
Horace Man High, I could feel the love
emanating from the people who were there.
You can't buy that kind of thing.
I often say that kids
all over this country,
regardless of their so-called
racial classification,
should have what we had
in the segregated schools
in Little Rock
because I was able to stockpile love
in that surround and take it with me
when I went to the
battleground at Central High.
It's one of the things that saved me.
In closing, I would like to suggest to
all of you assembled here today
that you do several things,
not the least of which
is to consider very carefully when
was the last time you did something
for the first time?
Thank you.
(applause)
- Alright.
Well, that's a good start.
And because we know there's so much more
that our guests have to offer
and so much more you all want to know,
we will seek to find the
solutions enlightenment
to meet everybody's needs
in the next 10 minutes
with their questions.
Yeah, so,
question for the group.
We'll do a few questions
before we move to wrap up.
What's the most misunderstood part of
King's letter and the
civil rights movement
in general?
- [Dr. Ladner] Good question.
- Yeah, you have to pick
one misunderstood thing.
- You want us to answer that?
- Yeah.
- The most misunderstood part of it.
Wow, that is a good question
and there's so many candidates
for the answer, but I think,
if I had to pick any one thing,
it would be that his message was for
a limited audience.
I think we have to expand our thinking
to understand that Doctor King
was concerned about
the soul of his country
so much so that he gave his life
for it and he's speaking to all of us
all the time.
- You got that.
- As I try to write
my talk to you today,
by the way, it was not easy,
you know, to extract some basic principles
from his very lengthy letter
and then give them to you
and you use them as you wish.
I think, you know, that people thought
he was talking to
black people.
Bob talked about the white people
who were the target audience.
Power brokers, ministers, and others.
But he was also speaking to,
people probably don't know
that he was speaking also
to his black critics,
that there were those black
ministers, for example,
other conservative black leaders,
like Condoleezza Rice's father,
who was a minister
or who told him that you must go slow.
But his messages did
have a universal appeal.
I said earlier that it
was a timeless quality
and the universal themes
that could be extracted from this letter
that could be used internationally
and not just to those specific people.
A lot of people don't think about
it in those terms.
- Okay, thank you.
I think the most misunderstood part
of the Letter from Birmingham Jail
is Doctor King was,
he was much more radical
and he was much more revolutionary
than even when that letter was written,
was it 1963?
- Right.
- He had another five years to live
and by the time he reached
the end of his life,
he made it very clear to the whole
nation and the world that maybe
there was a liberal consensus nationwide
to do away with the worst aspects
of segregation and de jure racism.
The worst aspects, that
was a liberal consensus
around the country because
we had a lot of support,
actually, from the government and others,
for the voter registration work
and things that we were doing,
but the people had no idea what his
belief about economics was
or Ella Baker's economics
and by the time he got ready in 1967
to launch the Poor People's campaign,
it became very clear that he was going
well past the liberal consensus to do away
with the worst aspects of race
and segregation to a thorough going
revolution, an economic
and political revolution
in this country and that's what we are
trying to do now because we've had a
downturn in the last 25 or 30 years
where we have hollowed
out the middle class
and we have decimated all of the people
who have gained from 1960
and we have a lot to make up for.
- Wow.
What work do you all feel like
still needs to be done to de-segregate
our public schools and how can
teachers and future leaders expedite,
motivate and organize to that end?
- It would help
if there were a general commitment
to this whole concept of de-segregation.
I haven't seen that.
People often say to me today
that schools seem to be
more segregated today
than they were in your day.
I said, "No, that's not true.
"It's been the same, nothing's changed."
Nothing's changed.
And it's a very confusing element,
but I don't think there's any real support
with this notion of de-segregation.
I mean, you think about it, most Americans
choose to live mono-racial,
mono-cultural lives.
- I think that's one of the most difficult
challenges and I think that
what has to be done is
that the base of support
has to be expanded.
I challenged you to seek out
stakeholders.
Convince those who are not convinced.
Go to the young tech.com people
in Silicon Valley
and make the case that
they don't have to continue
importing talent from India,
but they could begin to
make these schools into the kinds of
laboratories that they want them to.
I recall that when
Mississippi schools desegregated,
the principal in one case in Alabama,
a principal of a school became a janitor
in the larger school.
Principal in my school became
one of the assistant principals.
Most of the, simultaneously
with desegregation,
also came the rise of the
white private schools
and that, therein lies the case.
Only those who could not
afford to go to those schools
are in the desegregated schools.
I think that as we see the
resegregation of America
and of Donald Trump, who has made
enemies of the brown
children in our society
and I think he'll begin to
call us "niggers" pretty soon
and say that we too are
rapists and murderers,
that we have to vote these people out.
You have to develop a consensus of people
in elective office.
You have to make more
demands on those people.
The clarity of vision that Doctor King had
was that he was able to tell people
exactly what it was that,
what would happen to them
if they didn't get involved
and that's what you have to do.
As long as we have balkanized communities,
they lose too.
Bob Moses, I mean not Bob Moses but,
as Bob Zellner was saying,
that he's always worked
with the white community.
They lose as well.
I don't have any better
answers to give you
than that, but,
it's a tough one.
- I'll try a little bit on that one.
The legacy of Doctor King and SNCC
and NAACP and CORE and SCLC
was the '64 public accommodations act,
the '65 voting rights act,
and the housing act of '68.
That was passed after he was assassinated.
It probably never would have been passed
if he hadn't just been assassinated.
But we still live in the most segregated
countries in the world, probably.
I've taught University in Long Island,
in the Hamptons, and
that is one of the most
segregated sections of
the whole United States.
So, housing, discrimination was outlawed
all those years ago, 1968,
and we still have it,
and it's increasing.
Gentrification in Washington, D.C.,
and a lot of other places are displacing
black people, poor people, Latinos,
immigrants and so forth.
We still have the same game going on
because we still have
the same establishment
and we have to challenge them.
- You need to ask if
integration is the goal
or do you
produce the most competitive,
competent students in the country?
That's the question.
Does it come, I mean integration
is not going to make your kids smarter.
It will expose children
on both sides of the
racial divide or all sides to each other.
- And that'll be a help.
- And that will help.
But I don't think that integration
is the objective,
but rather increasing the
support for your schools
from as many people as possible
and producing highly
competitive children, students.
- Great.
And this came up earlier,
some of the comments that Bob was making,
how do we as educators embolden our
LGBTQ, black and brown students
to participate in a movement
that quite frankly has
historically deprioritized that portion
of their identity?
- Could you break that last phrase down?
- Yeah.
- Rephrase the question.
- Sure thing, yeah.
Just, so since we're
keepin' it super real here.
In our movement for education equity
and in, ya know, frankly in
the civil rights movement
around equality and
justice in this country,
we have often engaged many of our
lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual
friends, colleagues, supporters,
but when pushes come to shove,
we almost always invariably ask them
to deprioritize that part of themself
for some larger goal we're working on.
How do we help support our students
so they no longer have to do that
in their life?
- Who is this we you're speaking of?
(laughter)
- So, I get to ask the questions here.
(laughter)
- I can give you one example of a we.
- Go for it, thank you Bob.
- When I say we, I mean a huge movement
going on in North Carolina
and around the country
generally called the Forward Together
Moral Movement,
but in North Carolina,
what we do, we have 150 organizations
that go across all of the interests
of all progressives and
generally human beings
and what we do is that, each one
doesn't work in the silo.
We don't have a silo of LGBTQ interests
and one in voter rights and one
in environment and so forth.
All the environmental people
work on all the issues
and Reverend Barber was one that,
in North Carolina, when
they tried to put it in our
constitution and in fact, they did,
outlawing equal marriage,
as the NAACP state president
and a black minister,
evangelical minister, he lead the fight
against putting that in the constitution.
He changed the policy of
the NAACP in North Carolina,
then the national changed it's policy
and then President Obama
came out soon after
and it helped speed up that whole thing.
So, we use the LGBTQ struggle
along with all the rest
of 'em and sometimes,
somebody working on voter rights
will talk about LGBTQ rights
and vice versa.
So, we support all those issues together
so it doesn't subliminate
any one cause to any other.
They are all upheld together in a
Forward Together progressive movement.
- Let's assume that the we is your school.
Let's assume that the
we is your classroom.
The question is, do you integrate
those students into the body
of your classroom?
Do you pull them from the margins?
Do you help to make it possible
for them to not be bullied?
Do you, as teachers,
set the example
by treating them equally?
I think that, on the microlevel,
is what I would be concerned about.
The acceptance comes from,
we used the word love back in the 60's.
- That was a good word.
- The love and the respect
that you give them.
It's a matter of affirming their dignity.
Affirming their dignity
is the critical part
so that they don't feel the isolation.
I live here in D.C. and ya know,
where gay rights is not
a side show, but it's,
ya know, we have the most
affirming city for gay people.
But if I go home to Mississippi,
I know that gay people
are still called fags
and sissies and all kinds of other names.
So that wherever you are,
it is your job to bring them in.
- Wow, so we've got just
a few more minutes here.
So I'd love to actually
get a final thought
from each of you and
since I know you all have
so many thoughts, I'll ask
you for one specific one
as we begin to wind down and we'll start
with Doctor Roberts since
I'm still asking questions
and hopefully, he's answering them.
(laughter)
This is for you.
What were your initial thoughts
when you walked into Central High School
and what made you not turn around
and go immediately?
- You know,
one of the first things I can remember is,
I felt a great deal of fear.
I'd never been that afraid in my life.
I thought that my name was gonna
probably wind up on some coroner's list
before the day was over.
But, I was there in spite
of that fear because
the law was now on my side.
You know, schools have a
way of instilling stuff
within you and from the brief schooling
that I've had prior to that time,
I had learned that quote,
"we are a nation of law-abiding people."
And whether we were or not, I believed it.
So, the 54 decision that said
I could go to that school
was enforced and I was going to model
law-abiding behavior.
- Wow, thank you.
Bob, you talked about
belief that in this reconstruction period
is gonna yield real progress.
What do you see in the current crop
of presidential candidates,
some of which have been eluded to directly
and indirectly in our conversation today
that's gonna help us fight
for justice in progress?
- Very good question.
Well, first of all, in both sides
of the political spectrum,
the establishment
is under tremendous pressure
and under tremendous
attack and rightly so.
There's no reason in the world that
we should be surprised
or shun the word liberal,
the word socialist or communist
or any of those things.
We've been crippled in this country
because we have skewed so far to the right
that Americans think of Hilary,
excuse me for using her first name,
Mrs. Clinton, and they
think of Mrs. Clinton
and President Obama as extreme leftists.
And Europeans laugh (laughter)
because they're in the center.
So, if you're in the center now,
you're considered to be.
So, we need a new paradigm in this country
and some of those candidates are doing it.
I'm a Burney-ite right now
and I know I'll probably
wind up a Hilary-ite.
I was a Hilary-ite before
and I wound up an Obama-ite.
So, we have to be flexible in this,
but we have to challenge the establishment
and be willing to have different economic
paradigm's and anything is on the table.
- Very good, very good.
- Wow.
Anything is on the table
and be flexible,
things that everybody in this room--
- What we need is a peaceful,
non-violent, democratic revolution.
(applause)
- Think we have heard people
talk about that before.
We're onto something.
And so, while we're on the subject of
peace and frankly, instances
where we don't really
see peace,
Joyce, in thinking about the current
juvenile justice system and
the disproportionate number
of black and Latino
young men in the system,
what recommendations
or thoughts do you have
on what do educators and
education policy makers
need to do to reverse this dangerous path
and course that we're on?
- Very, very good question.
Here in the district,
one of the city council members
just introduced a bill
that would allow the district,
adopted as a model program from,
I think Connecticut,
that would pay high-risk young people,
put them in a program, diversion programs
as a way to incentivize,
a way to give them incentives
to not go in the wrong direction.
I know that one of the charter schools
that was started here in D.C.,
started by James Foreman, Junior,
whose father was our
executive secretary of SNCC,
Jim Foreman, James Lumumba,
and whose mother is Dinky Romilly,
who believe it or not, his mother was
Jessica Mitford, one of the famous
British Mitford sisters.
- And a niece that went
with Winston Churchill.
- Right, a niece of Winston Churchill.
Anyway, James has great pedigree.
(laughter)
But he works in this field.
But he and
oh my, you start gettin' old,
your memory just goes.
David Dimenichi, son of Debee Dimenichi,
republican of Arizona.
They started, they were,
defense lawyers
and the youth division here at D.C.
and what they saw was the children who
were committing petty crimes,
often were doing so because
they didn't have money
and what they asked them is,
what would you want most?
They said education
and a way to make money
to sustain myself.
So, they started
step wise,
they started with a
pizza delivery business
so that the kids made an income.
They made their own
pizzas and they sold them.
They also started an elementary kind of
basic tutoring program and that grew
into the Maya Angelou charter schools.
I think there are three locations,
but that's how it's began
and that's how you began.
Many of you are in communities
and not just in the school.
Your schools need to find ways,
a diversion for those kids in your classes
that you think are high-risk
for going to prison.
We have to stop them
in the paint line before they get there
and there are all kinds of other ways
to do it as well.
But the other thing is,
we've got to lobby to change the laws
so that kids are not picked up for it
and sent to prison for petty things.
A change in the laws is
absolutely necessary.
- Wow.
So, here I am again left with,
we need to rethink the agenda next time
following up on all that.
In our final couple minutes, I think
all I'm really left here to do is to
summarize a few things we heard today,
encourage you all to take
what you got here today
and use it.
So, as a reminder, Joyce pointed out to us
that you know, there are things that
good citizens do
and they're not always nice things
that good citizens do and
they're not always easy things
good citizens do.
But you gotta ask yourself that question,
am I prepared to be a good citizen
and do the hard things a good citizen
needs to do?
This has to be about not just
each and every one of us in our
individual action, but about
how we collectively, how we together rise,
mobilize and organize.
We have to, as Bob pointed out,
do something.
There's a time to talk.
There's a time to plan.
There's a time to reflect.
But there's got to be lots more time
to do something.
We're here because Teach
For America brought us
together over the last 25 years
into this network and into this family.
So, if there's anything that we
individually and collectively
can and ought to be
able to do, it's to teach.
It's to teach our friends,
our colleagues, our family
the things we need them to know
so they can and will act better
and harder and faster in the interest of
all of our children.
We have to perservere.
Some of us look back and reflect,
we've been at this thing for 25 years.
Mom and Joyce and Bob can reflect on
things they've been doing for 50 years.
So, we're just getting warmed up.
There's a lot more that
we can and need to do
together.
Sometimes, the privilege
that has some of us
afraid and uncomfortable
about being in this space
is the exact thing we need to leverage
and lean on to help us push through
and do those things that need to be done.
And we need to remember
that Doctor King was in fact
a real, radical,
and revolutionary thinker and leader.
This isn't about us nickel and diming
and bunting for a base hit here and there.
This is absolutely about real,
hardcore, radical, revolutionary change.
So, there are gonna be lots of moments
when it's hard
and it's uncomfortable
and you don't want to do the next thing
and then you remember
the several hundred people
in this room here today
and the 15,000 here with us this weekend
and the tens of thousands of
us who started this journey
called Teach For America
and the hundreds of thousands and millions
of friends, allies, students
who we've touched and engaged
and we've pulled them in to help us
continue to do the important work
because they're right.
The path to success and
prosperity for this country
is not in importing all the talent to do
the complicated, difficult
things and hard thinking work
that needs to be done.
The way all of this changes is,
when we recognize
we've got everything we need
and we need to invest in all,
not some, not most, not
all the ones we like,
but all the children, all the families,
all the communities
so that all of them have
opportunity.
So that we can't look
around and honestly say,
"Well you know, because you're
this or because you're that,
"you're just not gonna
have an equal or a fair
"or a decent chance."
And so, in closing,
I ask you to think about
25 years from now,
how many of us in this room
or in this building today
are gonna be able to look back and say,
"I've been with Carrie and Melinda
"and Marco for 50 years
"bangin' away at the hard, hard work.
"We'll have some scars.
"We'll have some horror stories.
"But we'll also have
some really good stories
"about all the things we've done,
"the lives we've changed
"and the country that
we've transformed into
"not the one that we thought
we were supposed to have,
"but the one we allegedly
claim we wanted to have
"when it was created, one that is actually
"designed for all the people
"to go forth and do anything
and everything they can do
"to be their very best?"
So with that, all I ask you to do is
look, look deep within.
Find the fuel that's
gonna take you forward.
Find the friends you
need to support the work.
Put one foot in front of the other
and go forth because ladies and gentlemen,
those of you who are my friends
and those of you who
will become my friends
over the next 25 years,
together we rise.
Thank you all very much
and please congratulate our panelists.
(applause)
