Might we just, for a moment, meditate on an
old Jewish text? “The stone that the builders
rejected will now become the chief cornerstone.”
Amen. It is good to be here, to Chancellor
Folt, the first woman to lead this nation’s
oldest public institution of higher learning,
to Dr. Katz and all of the staff team of The
Institute for the Arts and Humanities, and
to all the true blue Tar Heels.
Who was were gracious enough to break bread
today with a proud North Carolina Central
University Eagle, and a Duke Blue Devil.
Barber: And to the Weil Family, where are
you? The Weil Family, let’s give it up for
them. Would you just raise your –?
They established this lecture over a century
ago. It’s a great honor to be with you here
this evening. I’ve been on the road for
about six weeks straight, from Albuquerque,
New Mexico, to Alaska, to California, to Kansas.
But it’s good to be here with you this evening.
I have to leave early in the morning going
to Chicago, Indiana. It’s good to be here
to remember together the legacy of this Jewish
family that found its way in the 19th century
to Goldsboro, North Carolina, where I live,
where I’ve pastored for the past quarter
of a century. Goldsboro, North Carolina, the
place where, just outside of that city, in
Eureka, Charles B. Aycock gave one of the
most racist speeches in history, two years
prior to the Wilmington Riots. Goldsboro,
a place that once was known if you were black,
for the only place where African-Americans
were placed in mental institutions in the
State of North Carolina. In some ways, Goldsboro
was considered by many like Nazareth was considered
in the Bible, a place where nothing good could
come out of. And yet, the Weils. And, like
them, I have read the great prophets of Judaism
as I’ve travelled the roads of Wayne County
in North Carolina, and like the daughter and
matriarch Gertrude, who founded the North
Caroline League of Women Voters, I have felt
the weight of attacks on voting rights as
an assault on the image of God that is stamped
on every one of them. My own Jewish teachers,
my Rabbis, as they’ve taught me as they
have taught her, that in Hebrew, the word
for, “Voice,” and the word for, “Vote,”
are terribly similar. And so, I thank you,
this evening, for the invitation to lift my
voice, and thereby cast my vote in this turbulent
moment for the American democracy.I want,
today, in this lecture, to talk about reviving
the heart and soul of our democracy, and why
America needs a Poor People’s Campaign,
and a National Moral Revival. It was in the
spring, [inaudible 00:12:22] of 1915, after
in-party fights with Theodore Roosevelt. Theodore
Roosevelt was demanding in that day. In 1912,
he called for a moral agenda in which public
education would be seen as a moral issue,
protecting the environment would be seen as
a moral issue, not Democrat or Republican,
that healthcare for everyone, and a minimum
wage, and labor rights, and getting money
out of politics, would all – and public
education, would all be seen as moral issues.
That caused a lot of in-fighting, and former
President William Howard Taft, he lost the
White House in 1912, and it was Taft who gave
the fir1st Weil lecture on American citizenship,
here at the University of North Carolina.
And though he was no longer in the Oval Office,
President Taft did not hesitate to speak publicly
about the office he had once held. The title
of his lecture was, “The Presidency: Powers,
Duties, Obligation, and Responsibilities.”
It would be an interesting academic exercise
–
To hold that century-old vision of the presidency
from American’s progressive area, up against
the state of the presidency today.
But if we leap too quickly across time, between
now and then, we miss the main lesson that
history offers us in our present moral crisis,
which is this: white nationalism and fear
mongering is not new. White nationalism and
white supremacy were alive and well in the
progressive era, when Woodrow Wilson, a Southerner,
who had been the Governor of New Jersey, and
the President of Princeton – because being
educated doesn’t necessarily keep someone
from being a white supremacist – Woodrow
Wilson ascended to the White House. White
populists had gotten behind the White Supremacy
Campaign of the extremist Democratic Party,
right here in North Carolina, a generation
earlier. They ushered in Jim Crow’s segregation,
and the chief architect of their campaign,
right here in North Carolina, was Furnifold
Simmons. He had built a political machine
to maintain white-only rule for the Democratic
who paved the way for the Dixiecrats that
would come in the 1950s and 1960s.Gone was
the public memory of The Red Strings, those
who wore red strings to say they were like
Rahab in the City of Jericho, waiting for
the redemption of the land, who they remained
– the Red Strings remained true through
the union, through the Civil War. Gone was
the Reconstruction Government by the mid-1900s,
gone was the African-American representation,
George White being the last African-American
kicked out of the United States Congress in
1900, 1901. Gone was the Fusion Party that
brought black and poor whites to get North
Carolinians together to be of a Tar Heel state
for all. Gone were those who rewrote The Constitution
in North Caroline that said that everybody
has a right to life, liberty, the enjoyment
of the fruit of their own labor, and the pursuit
of happiness, and that education should be
a public right, and that equal protection
under the law was a right for all. Gone was
all of that. Gone was all of that when a former
Republican President came here to deliver
the first Weil lecture in 1915. North Carolina,
then, was a one party state, and it wasn’t
Taft’s party, and they saw it their business
to roll back every accomplishment of the Reconstruction.Well,
the white-only Democrats of the south – who
were the precursors of the Dixiecrats – were
delighted to have their man in the White House,
Woodrow Wilson. He’d already kicked black
leadership out of his office when some of
them came, because they had actually voted
for him, some of them, and he kicked them
out of his office. He had already begun to
re-segregate federal offices in DC, to finish
the final deconstruction of Reconstruction.
And in March of 1915, President Wilson invited
his old college buddy from North Carolina,
the Reverend Thomas Dixon, from Shelby, North
Carolina, to screen the film adaptation of
his popular novel at the White House. The
name of Reverend Thomas Dixon’s best-selling
novel was, “The Clansman.” The film was
a celebration of white supremacy rising again,
birth of a nation. Now, this is 100 years
before Banon was ever in the White House.
Woodrow Wilson had all of his staff watch
The Clansman. It has been the most effective
tool in recruiting modern Ku Klux Klan, and
it debuted with a presidential blessing. It
was a lie. It was a distortion about reconstruction
and black and white fusion politics, and yet,
it got an okay from the highest office in
the land from 1915 to 1916. And in 1919, six
years after Silent Sam was raised here, the
Lee Statue was erected in Charlottesville,
commissioned in 1917, but raised in 1919,
and it was not to pay homage to the Civil
War. It was to pay homage to white supremacy,
and the resurrection and reinstitution of
white supremacy between 1898 and that time.
And it was raised to celebrate a friend and
an embodiment of white nationalism in the
Oval Office. Could that be the reason why
Alt Right, and Unite the Right, and Richard
Spencer chose that statue to have their recent
hate-fueled march that has happened in Charlottesville?My
brothers and sisters, what we are seeing in
America today is not new, and one of the worst
things you can do is to suggest or think that
it is. Donald Trump’s attack on NFL players
isn’t about whether they respect the flags
or respect our veterans. How can you call
someone you disagree with an SOB, and then
say they are disrespectful? There’s something
deeper going on here. How can you disagree
with kneeling? The Pope kneels. Presbyterians
kneel.
Jews kneel, Muslims kneel. Kneeling is one
of the most scared postures. What is it that
you would disagree with kneeling? There’s
something deeper going on here, so don’t
get it twisted, even as we have our debates
about Silent Sam and the Lee Statue, the question
about the statues is not whether we respect
the dead. The statues didn’t go up out of
respect for the 1000 alumni of this university
who fought on both sides of the Civil War.
No, these monuments were erected nearly – they
were erected between 1898 and 1922 to whitewash
history and to celebrate the legalization
of white supremacy. In fact, Dr. Tim Tyson
tells me, as we often have conversation, that
80% of them went up between the Wilmington
Riots in 1922, before we even had the first
vote on an anti-lynching law in American.
Those of us who came up in the southern freedom
struggle know that. We know that at the beginning
of 1954, citizenship in this society was redefined
by thousands of courageous men, women, and
children, Jews, Gentiles, and Christians,
black and white and brown, who were willing
to risk life and limb to challenge white supremacy.
What we usually call the Civil Rights Movement,
I call – and many others – American’s
Second Reconstruction, the first being in
America between 1868 and the 1890s, and the
second one between 1954 and 1968. It lasted
about 13 years, until its institution and
leaderships were assassinated and fractured
because of co-intel and other ways of breaking
the movement. The movement did not achieve
all that it desired, but the backlash against
it has deconstructed much of the good it was
able to achieve.And I want to pause here to
measure the time between the ascension of
white supremacy to the White House 1915 and
the emergence of a resistance that affected
political and legislative change in this nation.
Between The Birth of a Nation and the Brown
Decision, we suffered 40 years, 40 long years
in the wilderness. The fundamental questions
that American democracy faced in 1915 are
the same questions we face now, when these
lectures were first found, “Do we have a
government that represents all Americans?
Can we reconstruct a system founded on white
supremacy and plantation capitalism and genocide?
Is it possible to live up to our promise of
liberty and justice for all? Is it possible
to be indivisible?” We cannot watch a football
game without facing these questions today.
You can’t read about a US Attorney General
refusing to defend voting rights, attacking
immigrants, and attacking affirmative action,
at the behest of the President, without seriously
asking yourself, “Is America possible?”
In 2017, we faced the same fundamental questions
we faced in 1915, but we cannot in our present
crisis afford to wander another 40 years in
the wilderness. The fierce urgency of now
is not so much about Donald Trump. Trump is
a symptom. Even if he had not gotten elected,
we would still have to face these questions.
But he certainly is exacerbating the need
to face them. The world has endured narcissistic
fear mongers before. More to the point, however,
we can’t afford to wait, because the forces
that brought Trump to power threaten to upend
the very notion of democracy, and destroy
the Earth itself, for as late as today, the
conversation is being raised, “How can we
have more nuclear weapons?”But what is also
an issue for us, is that some of our public
leadership has demonstrated that they have
no capacity to fully name and resist these
disastrous forces. Case in point: Senator
Bob Corker can tell The New York Times that
he and every senator knows Trump needs a babysitter.
That’s what he said. He said that he is
dangerous in the way in which he moves and
breathes and acts as President. But those
same senators cannot muster any real resistance
to the white nationalist agenda, the attack
on immigrants, the sabotage of healthcare,
the suppressing of voting rights, the bloating
of defense spending, and unchecked fossil
fuel extraction. If Trump is so much a problem
now, wasn’t he a problem when he lifted
up the lie about Birther-ism? Where was Crocker
and the critics when Trumped signed the Muslim
ban? How quick Lindsay Graham goes from a
critic to a golf partner. Where were they?
Where are these voices when the healthcare
for 30 million Americans was on the chopping
block, and we were about to take 140 times
more money from the backs of poor people than
were taken during slavery? You know, in 1960,
the price tags on slaves was $5 billion. We
were about to take $600 billion and turn it
over to the wealthy. That’s 140 more times,
in terms of money, than the price tags of
slaves in 1860. Where were they? Where were
they? Where was he when Congress wants to
cut taxes and recommend, at the same time,
and $85 billion increase in military spending?
Where are these voices?Could it be that they
are not really in disagreement with the narcissist,
they simply are in disagreement with the style,
and not the substance? What we face, therefore,
is not simply a political problem. It’s
not a left problem, it’s not a right problem,
it’s a heart problem, it’s a moral malady.
The very heart and soul of our democracy is
at stake, and if we are to understand this
current crisis of citizenship in America,
we must pay attention to find diseases that
threaten the heart of our common life. Why
do I say, “Diseases”? Because the issue
is so much bigger than Democrat versus Republican.
In fact, that language, “Left versus right,”
is too puny! “Conservative versus Liberal.”
I’m left-handed, and I’m right-handed!
“Left and right,” comes from the French
Revolution, when those on the left didn’t
want the monarchy, and those on the right
did, that’s not where we are. I’m Conservative
and I’m Liberal. I want to conserve justice,
I want to liberally spread it to everybody.
So, that language is too puny!
Some issues are not about leaning, “Left
and right,” they do not have equal moral
standing. Some issues are about, “Right
versus wrong,” period!
It is about whether we will be human beings,
or whether we will prey on one another! What
we face today, just as in the period between
1898 and 1922 is whether we can be a government
of, by, and for the people. That’s the question.
It is about whether we are serious about our
Constitution’s moral vision of, “We, the
people.” Our Constitution’s moral vision
that we have to repent and recognize that
we’ve not yet become a perfect nation, so
we still have work to do. It is about our
Constitution’s moral vision that says, “Before
you wave the flag, and before you pass this
freedom onto other people, you must establish
justice. You must provide for the common defense.
You most promote the general welfare. You
must ensure domestic tranquility, and then,
you have a liberty worthy of being passed
on to the generations that come behind you
and your posterity.” Will our policies and
citizenships strive towards this goal? Is
the question. Or will we settle for a political
and social life based on who hates who? That
is the question. Will we uphold the great
and universal moral principles and religion
for every nation since – every politician
likes to brag about how they put their hand
on the Bible, and swear into office. Well,
the great principle, universal moral principle,
is that every religion teaches for a nation
to be successful is that that nation must
be rooted in love, and justice, and mercy,
and grace, and care for the poor, and care
for the immigrants, and the sick, and the
broken, and the battered. Or will we simply
see the survival of the fittest, greed, isolation,
and xenophobia, and racism be our guide?Our
answer, I believe, is rooted in how we address,
how we diagnose, and how we face five deep
threats to our democracy. Now, the first deep
threat and disease we must face is systemic
racism. You cannot understand American history
without understanding the original sin of
racism and genocide. Since the rejection election
of 2016, when white rage – as Carol Anderson
says – propelled the candidate who was endorsed
by the KKK to the Republican National Convention,
and who stood there and committed the sin
of idolatry, when he said, “I, and I alone,
can fix this.” My Jewish friends would know
that sounds like Nebuchadnezzar or somebody.
You know? Pharaoh. “I, and I alone.” Race,
since that election – and even before – has
been ever before us. But our national conversation
about racism has become confused, and you
see it best in the post-Charlottesville debates
about whether there were good people on both
sides. Every politician in America that had
some sense condemned hate after Charlottesville.
Only the President, for the most part, stuttered.
But racism – you can condemn hate and still
be for white supremacy and white nationalism.
Racism is not just about hate, interpersonal
hate. Did you hear Richard Spencer when he
went back to Charlottesville last week? “We
come peacefully, and we’ll come again,”
he said. Racism also isn’t about whether
you have a black friend or a black student
in class.
Or a black Assistant Vice President. Racism
also isn’t just about whether or not you
use the N word. Institutional racism is written
into policy. It is about power. After the
Civil Rights Movement, white people who were
afraid of losing power learned how to perpetuate
the culture of racism without appearing to
be racist, and also learn how to get some
black folk to join them, because every ventriloquist
can find a dummy.
And they learn how to do it, though, through
code words and dog whistles, the southern
strategy, that Kevin Phillips – who lecture
here – would later repent of, was a strategy
deliberately designed to play the race card
in a way to drive southern whites to vote
for extremist white politicians, but it also
would work in some of the northern enclaves
of the north, where you could pit Italians
and Jews and blacks against one another, and
in the Midwest and in the Rust Belt. And in
a startling, starkly revealing interview,
former GOP Strategist Lee Atwater boldly described
how the southern strategy worked to undermined
fusion type political movements, because Kevin
Phillips said, “If you find out who hates
who, you can win in American politics.”
Remember what he said? He said, and these
are tough words, you start out in 1954 by
saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger,” and
that’ll get you elected. But by 1968, you
can’t say that, because it’ll hurt you.
So, you start talking about things like forced
bussing, and states’ rights, and entitlements
being bad. Now you’re getting abstract.
And then, you really get abstract and talk
about cutting taxes.And all these things you
talk about, they don’t sound racist, because
you don’t use the N word, or you don’t
say you’re hating, and they sound almost
totally economic. But the byproduct of them
is blacks get hurt, percentage-wise, worse
than whites, and whites are taught to believe
that their problem of black people and brown
people getting things, they’re undeserved.
Dr. King said it in ’65 at the end of the
Selma to Montgomery March, he said he felt
so sorry for southern whites, many of them,
because he said a rich oligarchy – when
their stomachs were growling from hunger and
poverty – a rich oligarchy fed them Jim
Crow and turned them against the very people,
black people, that they should have been in
alliance with, in order to fight for economic
justice. Now, the target of this southern
strategy was initially the old Confederates,
because if you can control the 13 former Confederate
States, from Virginia, all the way over to
Texas, you can control 191 electoral votes,
which means you only need 99 from the other
37 states. You can control 26 members of the
United States Senate, which means you only
need 25 more from the other 37 states to have
a majority. You can control 31% of the United
States House of Representatives. So, the goal
was to create a Silent Sam, and then work
the other – and then find the other states
to add to that, but the south would be solid,
and southern whites, they wanted to ensure
that a majority of southern whites would resist
and repeal and repel any fusion alliances
with AfricanAmericans, because they had seen
out that works in the First Reconstruction
of the 1800s and the Second Reconstruction
of the 1900s.But it turned out that race bating
worked in other parts of the country too.
Sound familiar? In Wisconsin’s Democratic
Primary in 1964, more than a third of the
state’s Democrats voted for George Wallace.
In Wisconsin! Hmm? Later, three weeks later,
Wallace landed 30% of the votes in Indiana,
and two Ku Klux Klansmen ran a shoestring
campaign out of a service station and phone
booth. In Maryland’s Democratic Primary
– a northern place, really southern, but
some claim it north – Wallace won 16 of
the state’s 23 counties. When Wallace stood
in the door of the University of Alabama,
he received over 100 000 congratulatory cards
from the north! And he said, “Hmm, this
race fear mongering thing is bigger than just
a southern issue.” Now, Wallace, when he
ran, George Wallace, the one who stood up
and said, “Segregation yesterday, today
and tomorrow,” February of 1963, that’s
the George Wallace I’m talking about, the
loud Governor that would say anything and
do anything, when he ran and got all those
votes, it surprised George H. W. Bush. He
saw the volcanic white opposition to the Democratic
Party’s embrace of civil rights opened the
door for Republicans in the Silent Sam. So,
Bush, then, who had never run for an office,
decided to run for the United States Senate.
And you know what he did? In 1964, he said,
“I am emphatically opposed to the Civil
Rights Act of 1964.” He didn’t say because
he hated black people, he said, “Because
it tramples upon the Constitution, by mandating
equal access to restaurants, hotels, restrooms,
and other public accommodation.” And he
said, to a crowd, “The new Civil Rights
Act was passed to protect 14% of people. I’m
worried about the 86%.” This is the kind
of gentler white supremacy, that brought Strom
Thurmond and the Dixiecrats into the Republican
Party.Strom Thurmond really liked George Wallace,
but they knew he couldn’t win, so they needed
to find a kinder, gentler white supremacy.
It paved the way for the campaign of Richard
Nixon, Ronald Regan, and the Bushes, all of
whom employed the same political operatives,
and the same divide and conquer tactics. So,
here’s what I’m trying to say, first of
all: don’t let anybody tell you that the
problem is just Trump. That kind of analysis
is too weak, it does not deal with the disease
of systemic racism. What we are seeing now
has been 50 years in the working. Yes, Trump
embraced and emboldened white nationalists
who rallied in Charlottesville and elsewhere,
yes, they feel like they can take of their
hoods and stand tall with Trump in the White
House, but long before Trump mastered the
con of the southern strategy, he had an audience
that had been cultivated for 50 years, and
what should cause of fear or cause us concern,
is not that he used these tactics, but the
ease of which he used these tactics, the way
in which the media didn’t know how to critique
it, and the way in which progressives didn’t
know how to address it.We are seeing what
Nell Painter calls, “The iconography of
an American call and response.” The call
is racial progress, and simultaneously, or
shortly thereafter, the response is, as Carol
Anderson has aptly named it, “White rage
and regression.” Only with this history
in mind can we comprehend what Brother Coates
has said so well, amplifying the analysis
of our Sister Nell Painter. Coates said this
recently: “For Trump, it almost seems that
the fact of Obama, the fact of a black President,
insulted him personally.” Replacing Obama
is not enough! Trump has made the negation
of Obama’s legacy the foundation of its
own, to wipe out a history that should not
be, ever in America, according to the white
nationalist mindset. Trump truly is something
new. He is the first President whose entire
political existence hinges on the fact of
a black President. No Obama, no Trump. And
so, it will not suffice to say that Trump
is a white man like all others who rose to
become President. He must be called by his
rightful honorific, “America’s first white
President.” He is the perfect example of
white privilege. Everything he did, people
looked past it, those who voted, not just
poor whites, but all the way up the line,
because of this call and response that is
as American as apple pie. And that is why
we misunderstand the challenge of racism,
if we think it’s just about a dislike for
black people. No systemic racism is a dislike
of democracy. In fact, you can be black and
be a white nationalist.
You can be black and embrace or encourage
white nationalism and systemic racism. 11%
of people, black men, voted for Trump. You
can be black and be silent and be an accessory
to the crime of white nationalism, because
systemic racism is simple the perpetuation
of a system where the ideal of whiteness and
white power are the norm in our common life.
It is to accept the heresy that says some
people were not made in the image and likeness
of God. Now, to see this up close, you could
look at it through every lens, education,
criminal justice system, the attack on immigrants
– in fact, there’s where Richard Spencer
said he first decided that Trump was his man,
was when he talked about Mexicans as rapists,
he said, “That’s my man,” because is
the white nationalist mindset, the first war,
if you will, is the attack on immigrants.
“Get them out. Get them away.”But I want
to look at white supremacy, white nationalism,
systemic racism, through the lens of voter
suppression. Since the US Supreme Court gutted
the Voting Rights Act, June 25th, 2013, there
has been an assault on voting rights in this
country like we haven’t seen since the 19th
century. Let me give you some numbers. There
were 868 fewer voting sites in the black and
brown and poor white community in 2016. 868
fewer sites. There are 22, that’s the number
of states that had passed voter suppression
law since 2010. This is six years before Trump
was ever running. Now, you take 22 states
that represents 44 Senators and nearly 50%
of the United States House of Representatives,
and over 54% of AfricanAmerican voters. Four
years, four years, that’s how long it’s
been since the Supreme Court gutted Section
5 of the Voting Rights Act. Now, let me help
us understand that: Strom Thurmond only filibustered
the Civil Rights Act of ’57 for 24 hours.
This Congress, before Trump, under McConnell
and Ryan, have filibustered fixing the Voting
Rights Act for four years. That is over 1000
days, 1000-day filibuster, which means, sitting
here right now, we have less voting rights
than we had August 6th, 1965, when the Voting
Rights Act was first passed.And we talk about
Trump winning Wisconsin by 20 000 or 30 000
votes, there were 250 000 votes suppressed
in Wisconsin! In North Carolina, we won! We
beat the voter suppression! We beat them on
gerrymandering! And still, they were able
to find a way to take away 150 fewer voting
sites doing early voting. This election hacking
– this is the election hacking that no one
really wants to talk about, because it would
force us to deal with systemic racism. And
America wants to always kind of deal with
racism as, “Those folk. The David Dukes,
or the people with the torches. And we don’t
want to really deal with systemic racism.”
I don’t know how much help Trump got from
Russia – he did, but I don’t know how
much – but it’s manifestly clear that
he could not have stolen the election without
the help of systemic racism and voter suppression.
And whether their tactics are partisan gerrymandering,
or discriminatory, extreme voter ID requirement,
or rolling back early voting and same-day
registration, or not allowing 16 and 17-year-olds
to vote, the places where we see an attack
on voting rights in America are the same places
where we see the highest poverty levels.As
I’m traveling around the country, we’re
making that point, because some people thinking
voting rights is a black issue. Voting rights
is an American issue. Voting rights is a poverty
issue. Voting rights is a union issue. Because
the same states, if you put them up on a map,
that suppressed the vote, also have a lack
of living wage, and the highest levels of
poverty, and the greatest attacks on the immigrant
community, and the greatest attacks on the
LGBT community, and the greatest lack of funding
of public education. Wherever you find racist
voter suppression, all of these things follow.
And politicians who use surgical and targeted
racist voter suppression, they use that racialized
methodology to get elected, and then, once
they get elected, they use their power to
promote and codify policies that hurt all
Americans, especially poor and working class
white people, and poor and working class brown
people and black people, and the policies
only benefit a greedy oligarchy. White nationalists
don’t care about white people, because they
don’t care about democracy.And so, we have
to make the connection between these maladies
that threaten the very heart of our democracy.
And when somebody says, “Well, I don’t
agree with the white nationalists, I’m not
a white supremacist,” you say, “Okay,
but let’s do this. Let’s go on the website
of the white nationalists and look at their
policies. White nationalists vote against
the Voting Rights Act and refuse to deal with
voter suppression. Where do you vote, Mr.
Politician? I’m not saying you’re white
supremacist, I’m just saying, white nationalists
are anti-immigrant. Where are you, Mr. Politician,
huh? Where are you? How do you vote on immigration?
White nationalists don’t believe in a living
wage for everybody. Trump said the living
wage is too high. People in his party will
not vote for a living wage. Just saying”!
White nationalists are against healthcare
for everybody. Mr. Politician, where are you
for universal healthcare? White nationalism
loves to – are against Native people have
a right to their land. Mr. Politician, where
are you? White nationalists believe in war,
and war mongering, particularly a lot about
a mindset rooted in past genocide, and especially
when that war is going to be targeted primarily
at black and brown people. Mr. Politician,
where are you? I’m not saying you’re a
white supremacist. I’m just saying, that
if you vote with the white supremacists, and
you support the policies that’s on their
Google pages, my grandmother used to say,
‘If you walk like a duck, and you quack
like a duck, you must be a duck!’”
And that is the way we separate the conversation
from talking about white people to talking
about white supremacists. And that’s why
I can even say that same thing to a black
politician, because if that black politician
votes the same policies as white supremacy,
then that black person is, at best, an enabler
of white supremacy. Hmm. The second disease
we have to deal with also though is unjust
and immoral attacks on the poor. In the richest
nation in the history of the world, we do
not like to talk about the fact that a third
of our population is crippled by poverty.
Republicans blame the poor often for their
plight, while Democrats insist on talking
about those who strive to enter into the middle
class, as though they can’t ever say the
word, “Poor.” But some people are just
poor – in fact, they’re, “Po’,”
as my grandmamma used to say.
Over 110 million people – yeah, actually,
Dr. King one time talked about two Americas.
There are four Americas. There’s the wealthy.
There’s the struggling middle class. There’s
the working poor – there’s five. There’s
the poor. And then, there’s just the extreme
poor and homeless. Hmm? Former Secretary of
Labor, Robert Reich, says, “The ranks of
the working poor are growing, because wages
at the bottom have dropped and adjusted for
inflation with increasing numbers of Americans
taking low-paying jobs in retail, sales, restaurants,
hotels, hospitals, childcare, eldercare, and
other personnel services. The pay of the bottom
fifth is falling close to the minimum wage.
At the same time, the real value of the federal
minimum wage is lower than it was 25 years
ago. In fact, if the minimum wage had kept
up with the pace of inflation, it would be
nearly $20 an hour.” We have 14 million
children in poverty, 150 years after the Emancipation
Proclamation, and, and Marian Wright Edelman
tells us, “If you took 2% of the federal
government and spent it on programs that worked,
we could alleviate 60% of that poverty tomorrow.
The question is not, “Do we have the resources?”
It is, “Do we have the will?”In the US,
we claim to be the leader of the free world,
but we pay half of AfricanAmerican workers
and 60% of Latino workers less than $15 an
hour. There are 64 million people making less
than $15 an hour. Down here in the south,
where politicians still pit white workers
against workers of color, 50% of all workers
make less than $15 on the hour – all workers!
All workers! And over the past five years,
cities where Fight for $15 has won living
wage campaigns, then the state legislators
intervene to override the municipalities!
The very people that claimed they want local
control, they want it on everything but living
wages. [laughter] Hmm. The state legislature
in Missouri – do you remember Fergusson?
Just voted this year to take their minimum
wage backwards! Meanwhile, the economic growth
America has seen in the great recession has
benefitted the wealthiest members. And it’s
not wealthy, but just, there are some folks
that are wealthy and kind, there are others
that are greedy. Greedy corporate criminals
on Wall Street got bailouts, while working
Americans, working jobs were shipped overseas
or outsourced to contractors, and in the 21st
century, the divide between the rich and the
poor in this country has grown exponentially.
In some ways, it’s worse than The Great
Depression.The top 0.1% of income-earners
in America today make 198 times more than
the bottom 90%. According to Joseph Stiglitz,
who is the Nobel Peace Prize Economist, I
had a chance to sit with him for a couple
of ours and working on the Poor People’s
Campaign, and he reminded me that 400 families
in this country are making an average of $97
000 an hour while we are arresting people
and locking them up who simply want $15 and
a union. Since last year’s rejection election,
pundits have returned again to the plight
of the so called white working class, tired
of watching their neighbors die of opioid
overdoses, white people who voted for Obama
in 2012 flipped to Trump in 2016, some suggested.
With growing income inequality, the theory
was that white people felt desperate. But
other people have felt desperate throughout
history and did not vote for a narcissistic
egomaniac.
But if you look at closer examination, this
theory doesn’t pan out, because white people
voted overwhelmingly for Trump across every
income level! It’s not just about white
working class. And, as happens so often in
our history, race was used in 2016 to pit
poor white people against poor black people
and brown people. Do you remember when Trump
went to an all-white audience to talk about
black poverty? Yeah. And that’s something
he was doing that goes as far back as W. E.
B. Du Bois, when W. E. B. Du Bois said, “There
are some people that see certain people as
not just people who have problems, but are
problem-people.” So, he went before an all-white
audience to talk about black problems, they
basically say, “They are a problem-people.”
Look again at the maps of the United States,
9 out of 10 of America’s poorest counties
are so called red – excuse me, 9 out of
10 of America’s poorest states, are so-called
red states. So called working class whites
in raw numbers hurt the most from the economic
injustice that is perpetrated by tax cuts,
deregulation, and denial of federal assistance.
In fact, North Carolina couldn’t even run
if you took away federal assistance. And yet,
people rail against it. Somebody has to tell
poor white people and poor black people and
poor brown people, regardless of your color,
if you can’t pay your light bill and your
lights go out, we are all terribly black in
the dark.“Is it race, or is it class?”
People ask. Yes! It’s race and class! We’ve
seen it right here in North Carolina, with
a vote from none other than Clarence Thomas,
the Roberts Court, found that our legislature
targets African-Americans with nearly surgical
precision when it passed the monster voter
suppression law in 2013. That was systemic
racism. But their systemic racism that allowed
them hold onto a supermajority has hurt more
poor white people than any group in this state!
When this legislature denies Medicaid expansion,
346 000 of the people that were getting Medicaid
expansion are white! 1000 people in Mitchell
County, North Carolina, that’s 99% white,
89% Republican. This legislature has voted
against increased wages, voted against the
extension of federal unemployment benefits,
and even against the earned income tax credit.
And when you vote against the earned income
tax credit, that even Ronald Reagan say is
good, when you make Ronald Reagan look like
a Liberal, my goodness!
But racism and classism mix to make a poisonous
concoction, and with our political leadership
drunk on this tonic, the whole world suffers,
and our democracy suffers. The third disease
we have to face is ecological devastation.
It threatens the heart and soul of our democracy.
We do not have to look far these days to see
that the Earth is sick. Harvey hit Houston,
Irma hit Florida, Maria hit Puerto Rico, so
fast that most of us could hardly follow the
floods, in Asia, that killed thousands, the
earthquakes in Mexico and Central America,
and the forest fires that continued to rage
on the west coast. All of this in the past
two months alone. Sometimes we call these
natural disasters, but maybe there’s nothing
natural about the rate at which we are experiencing
the upheaval in our world. Between 1970 and
1979, meteorologists recorded 660 disasters
around the world. Between 2000 to 2009, the
last decade on record, there were 3322. In
between, in the 1990s, climate scientists
testified before Congress and explained to
the publics that two centuries of fossil fuel
extraction had not only built a global economy,
but had released enough carbon into the atmosphere
that the planet Earth had a fever. Now, then,
it was a slight fever, about a half of a degree
Celsius. You know, the kind of fever mama
used to give you some chicken soup and send
you on off to school or off to bed. But no
one knew exactly how our planet would respond.
And now, we’ve passed one degree Celsius,
and it’s clear that we don’t just have
a fever, we have a sickness. And greed, greed,
greed, greed. Greed is causing even more of
this. In addition to this, people like those
in Flint, Michigan, think about it: you can
buy unleaded gas, but you can’t get unleaded
water.
And less than a few miles from the road, Nestlé’s
is allowed to bottle 100 000 bottles of water
for something like $2, and the people in Flint
can’t get clean water. Water has been weaponized
in far too many communities. Multinational
corporations are drilling for gas, penetrating
the aquifers on the Apache land. I was just
in Arizona with the Apache Nation, cold ashes
being spilt in our rivers and poured in our
wells, pipelines are being constructed not
only through standing rock but also being
planned right through eastern North Carolina.
Deregulations, reopening coal mines in Alaska.
I was just there with the Native people of
Alaska. They were devastating environments
in Native lands. And meanwhile, the robber
barons, who have taken control of the federal
government, have pulled out of the Paris Climate
Accord, done everything in their power to
bring back coal and make way for new and dangerous
fossil fuel pipelines.And then, there’s
a fourth sickness we must face, and that is
the war economy. President Eisenhower, the
Generalturned-Commander-in-Chief warned of
a military industrial complex, remember? When
he was leaving office after General Motors
and American Steel had seen boosts in profits
that came from both destroying and rebuilding
Europe in World War II, Eisenhower said, “We
better be careful to keep American investors
out of the business of war.” In Vietnam,
taught Americans to be cautious. The Founding
Father, James Maddison, said, “No nation
could reserve its freedom in the midst of
continual war.” The quagmire of Southeast
Asia’s jungles brought his word of caution
to full fore. Congress passed the War Powers
Act of 1973 as a permanent check on America’s
warmaking, but this restraint could not endure
the Reagan years, The Gipper, who had played
a soldier on America’s TV screen, knew how
nothing unites a nation like a common enemy.
His star wars ballooned the defense budget,
even as Congress passed tax cuts that were
supposed to grow the economy. During the Reagan,
Bush years, the federal debt quadrupled, but
our addiction to war-making is non-partisan.
It continued during the Clinton years, as
the Department of Defense honed its capacity
to make perpetual war on multiple fronts by
outsourcing non-combatant operations – we
used to call the mercenaries [laughter] – to
private companies. There were more contacts
just on the ground in Bosnia than US troops.
Bush, too, seized upon 9/11 as an opportunity
to declare war without end on one of the war’s
chief products, namely terror.In the name
of national security, the Obama administration
transformed the CIA into a cover offensive
arm of military operations, carrying out hundreds
of unarmed drone attacks around the world,
and without any public accountability as to
who was targeted, who was written off as collateral
damage, and at what cost. Yes, it is disturbing
to consider. Now, with all this war machinery,
thumbs which Tweet spitefully against partisan
allies, have the capacity to type nuclear
codes for an arsenal that could destroy the
world several times over, and he’s asking
for more. But the madness of the current escalation
between the US and North Korea is simply the
latest chapter – it’s not new, it’s
the latest chapter – in a long story of
war economy hell-bent on a limitless growth,
and you have to face it. The 2017 military
budget is almost $600 billion, which doesn’t
include veterans’ care, $182 billion, the
nuclear arsenal, $20 billion, and so for 54
cents of every discretionary dollar paid into
federal taxes goes to the military. Not to
health care. Not to education. Not to jobs.
Not to infrastructure. Not to a war on poverty.After
dropping the mother of all bombs in Afghanistan
and threatening war with North Korea, Trump
now wants an additional $54 billion for the
military in 2018. But the so-called war mongers,
the so-called Conservatives, war mongers in
Congress, said, “No, that’s not enough.
We want $85 billion!” If we were just to
cut $1 billion from our bloated military budget,
we could pay for 12 000 elementary school
teachers, 17 000 infrastructure jobs, 112 000
headstock slots for children, and 96 000 veterans
could receive comprehensive medical care.
We’ve spent $3 trillion and growing on the
war in Iraq. $3 trillion. We argue that we
do not have the resources, that the resources
are scarce. No, that’s not what’s scarce.
What’s scarce is our moral capacity to face
what ails this democracy.And then, finally,
the fifth disease, and it pains me to say
this, is why we’re faced with the fourfold
attack on racism, poverty, ecological devastation,
and militarism. I would love to be able to
stand here, the preacher in me, and hope that
America – not only the NFL – would fall
on its knees, cry out to God for help, get
up from our knees, and work for justice. But
much of the religion in our public life has
contributed to the moral crisis we now face.
And we must add to our list of maladies, the
fifth disease that threatens the heart and
soul of our democracy: namely, Christian nationalism,
or what my former professor, [inaudible 01:01:25]
Lincoln, called, “Americanity.” Earlier
this year, when I saw a picture of preachers
laying hand on Donald Trump in the Oval Office,
I was so troubled, I wrote an open letter
to my fellow clergy – and not because I’m
against praying for a President, but because
I know that, in the scriptures, the prophets
did not go to just pray for the kings, they
went to challenge them. Those who followed
Jesus challenged Caesar. They did not merely
accommodate Caesar. And I said that as I watched
them praising Trump, praising the prophetic
legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, of which
he knows nothing about, and I watched them,
and it showed them laying hands. First of
all, the scripture says, “Be careful who
you lay hands on suddenly, lest ye become
a party to their sins.” That’s 1 Timothy
5:22. And then, I thought, “We cannot simply
pray – P-R-A-Y – over politicians or anyone,
while they prey – P-R-E-Y – on the poor
and the vulnerable and the sick.”The teachings
of Jesus are clear, the teachings of the prophets
are clear, the teachings in even Islam were
clear that a nation must care for the poor
and the sick and the vulnerable and the hurting.
And if we pray over persons engaging in injustice
and do not challenge them, then we actually
engage in a form of heresy, and so many [laughter]
of the so-called, “Religious right” – I
don’t call them, “Religious right” – so
many of these extremists who have tried to
hijack – they wrote articles saying that
I was wrong, and others were wrong. We’re
not wrong. I’m not wrong. You ought to read
what Kevin Kruse, who was at Princeton University
has said, and you’ll understand why there’s
this core of religionists who fawn, who just
fall out and fall down and bow down to somebody
just because they have money and power. It
was Kevin Kruse that did an examination of
what some have called so-called, “White
evangelism,” which is not a theological
term, there’s no such thing as white evangelism,
that’s a term that Jim Wallace and people
come up with as a euphemism that really means,
“Mostly angry white men,” but that’s
another story.
He says, “This whole public religiosity
that wraps itself in the flag, while doing
the bidding of big business, was purchased.”
He tells the story of how in 1935, the corporations
like the US Chamber of Commerce, Sun Oil,
and General Motors, and US manufacturers hated
the new deal under Roosevelt. They hated any
restrictions on labor. They hated minimum
wage, they hated social security, but they
didn’t have the moral credibility to challenge
it because they had run the country into a
depression. So, they did a poll, and they
found – they asked, “Who had the biggest
and the strongest moral capacity and credibility?”
And the poll came back and said, “Preachers.”
But the problem was, during that period of
time, the social gospel was so powerful, preachers
were preaching the social gospel, and that
social gospel, like Walter Rauschenbusch,
and others, that raised the question, “What
would Jesus do in the face of so much injustice?”And
so, the poll said, “You got to find out
a way, if you want to do anything, to take
over these pulpits,” so they hired a guy
by the name of James Fifield, from California,
Los Angeles, and he created something called
the Spiritual Mobilization, and all these
corporations got together and paid him to
go out and buy pulpits – hmm, it’s in
the book – buy pulpits. But in order for
them to receive this money, they had to preach
a twisted form of Calvinism, which goes like
this: “If you’re good, you go to Heaven,
if you’re bad, you go to Hell. If you’re
a good American, you’ll prosper, if you’re
a bad American, you’ll be poor.” And then,
they prescribed was good was, being for the
flag, being against homosexuality, before
for [inaudible 01:05:26], being against abortion,
you know, being for states’ rights, that
was good according to them. They basically
tried to say that Jesus was against the gay
people, against poor people, against those
who commit abortion, he was for property rights,
and Jesus was an original founder of the NRA,
that’s basically what they were trying too.
And, inside of 10 years, he had 19 000 pulpits
that had committed to this! And if you follow
that line, it traces all the way before to
the magicians of Pharaoh versus the prophet
Moses. It goes all the way back to the false
prophets that challenged Jeremiah and Isaiah.
It goes all the way back to the hypocrisy
of others that challenged Jesus. It goes all
the way back the slave masters’ preachers
who preached slavery.
And it doesn’t fit the scriptures, for the
scriptures are clear; our moral principles
are clear, what we’re supposed to do in
the face of economic challenges and racial
challenges in the nation. Ezekiel 22 said
“Your political leaders are like wolves,
who tear apart their victims. They destroy
people’s lives for money. But here is the
worst thing: your preachers cover up for them
and tell false visions that God has said when
God has not said a thing.” Or Jeremiah 22,
where it says to preachers, to prophets, to
moral agents: “Go to the royal palace, deliver
this message: tell the king, ‘If you want
to be known as a great king in God’s sight,
then attend to justice. Set things right between
people. Rescue victims from their exploiters.
Don’t take advantage of the immigrant. Protect
the (??), protect the widows, and stop murdering
people.’” And then Jesus, that Palestinian,
brown-skinned Palestinian Jew that I follow,
that rabbi I follow, he said, “The Gospel,
true evangelicalism, is first good news to
the poor” - in Greek the “potokos,”
those who have been made poor because of economic
exploitation. Then he said you’ve got to
care for the broken-hearted and the sick,
and the blind, and the imprisoned. And then
he said everybody who’s been made to feel
unacceptable… So evangelicalism, Biblical
evangelism, starts with a critique of systems
of injustice. And if it does not start there,
if it’s just about personal faith and private
religion, it is not the deep moral religion
of the faith that so many hold dear; it is
a form of heresy. And it is a heretical attempt
to hijack the faith and use it in the service
of domination and oppression. A faith that
says nothing and let alone does nothing when
people are treated like things and corporations
are treated like people is hypocritical and
heretical. It is a theological malpractice
to say that the only issues to be a moral
person is to be against gays, against Muslims,
against abortion, against Jews, for prayer
in the school, for property rights. Only the
faith that descended from the slaveholder
religion could be so loud on those things,
and yet so quiet about racism, so quiet about
their tax-owned immigrants, so quiet about
healthcare, so quiet about our living wages.
And we can’t diagnose this sickness that
is affecting the soul and heart of our American
democracy - without admitting that we have
a moral problem that goes all the way down
to the heart of our public religion. Well,
now, any good doctor once you’re diagnosed
has to give a prescription. Is there a prescription?
I believe because of this, all is not lost.
In fact, this means that America, for the
reviving of the soul and heart of America,
America needs a poor people’s campaign and
a national call for a moral revival. Why?
Because first of all, we need moral analysis
that does not simply follow the talking points
and the talking heads of our time, but digs
deep into our national psyche. It’s why
we need spaces like this to tell the truth
about our history. We need a moral movement
to revive the heart of our democracy, that
reminds us that our nation has always struggled,
and there have always been those who would
struggle to fight to make it better. And then
many of them faced greater struggles than
we face now. And we must know, in this moral
analysis, that these forces are not new. But
then, number two, we must also have moral
dissent, because our deepest faith, and our
deepest constitutional traditions have been
hijacked too often to serve greed, racism
and lies. We must raise our voices like the
prophets! Silence now is not an option. We
must cry out. We must cry loud! None of us
can be silent. And we cannot, for instance,
certify elections where the loser has three
million more votes than the victor - no, we
must maintain our right to dissent. Moral
dissent is a necessity in this moment. We
can never say it’s alright, we can never
normalize it, we can never say it’s alright
for senators and congresspeople, who get healthcare
paid for by the people and then block not
just the Affordable Care Act, but block universal
healthcare for all Americans. Some things
are just wrong! And our moral dissent must
be raised. And we cannot allow any human being
to be denied equal protection under the law.
The Second Amendment, the right to bear arms,
is not the greatest amendment; the First Amendment,
the right to free speech, and then the amendments
that saved our Constitution: the Thirteenth
Amendment that ended slavery, the Fourteenth
Amendment that provided equal protection under
the law, the Fifteenth Amendment that said
you cannot deny and abridge the right to vote,
the Nineteenth Amendment that gave women the
right to vote, and the Twenty-Sixth Amendment
that said if you’re old enough to go to
war, you ought to be old enough to vote on
those who send you to war. We cannot - we
cannot allow any human being to be denied
equal protection under the law because of
their race, their creed, their color, or their
sexuality. We must declare some things are
simply non-negotiable. And we will never say
that a supermajority or even a simple majority
of any party has the right to run roughshod
over the Constitution or the higher moral
laws of the universe. We must never allow
hate to have the stage without lifting up
the demands of love as a direct challenge
to every hateful effort we see - no matter
who’s in power. No matter who’s in power.
Touch your neighbor, say, “no matter who’s
in power.” It is our time to pick up the
tradition of moral dissent, like Henry David
Thoreau when he was asked would he repent
of civil disobedience; he said “no, the
only thing I will repent of is for not asking
sooner what demon possessed me to be quiet
so long.” We must pick up moral dissent
and have what Dr. King said: “an eternal
dissatisfaction with hate and militarism and
poverty.” We must declare like Coretta Scott
King when she said, “Violence is not just
killing my husband; violence is not making
sure children have public education. Violence
is denying a living wage. Violence is not
giving people healthcare. Violence is taking
away people’s cultures. Violence is attacking
immigrants.” And then she said, “There’s
another form of violence, and that is an apathetic
attitude that refuses to stand up and make
a difference.” [Applause] We must accept
the mantle now of being the kind - somebody
asked me the other day, “Are you tired?”
I said, “Yeah, like Fannie Lou Hamer: ‘I’m
sick and tired of being sick and tired.’”
Fannie Lou Hamer’s one hundredth birthday
was just this past Friday, and she said, “if
I die and if I fall, I’m fallin’ five
foot three inch forward, but I’m never going
backwards.” It is our day. Henry Thoreau
is dead, Martin Luther King is dead, Coretta
is dead, Dorothy Day is dead, Rabbi Heschel
is dead, Fannie Lou Hamer is dead, Dorothy
Day is dead, but we are alive and we are their
children, and it is time for us to raise our
moral dissent. [Applause] And not only must
we have moral analysis, and not only must
we have moral dissent, we must have moral
- moral articulation, I call it, and moral
dissent - we must have moral activism. Not
just analysis, not just articulation, but
we must also disrupt what is disruptive. But
not with hate - with revolutionary love. We
must love this nation enough to take a knee...maybe
in the halls of Congress, the streets in front
of the White House, state legislatures. We
must love it enough to stand between the ICE
agent, who has been ordered to do wrong, and
the immigrant neighbor who wants to do right.
We must love our democracy enough to go to
jail for it, in nonviolent disobedience, to
sue for it in the court, and to register everybody
you know to vote for it at the ballot box.
No, we don’t have to be in despair. We know
what works. How did people turn back the white
nationalism and white supremacy of the early
twentieth century? In the middle of that century,
building on years of planning and pushing,
they came together. And they forged a modern-day
civil rights movement, and a justice movement.
That’s how they beat it back. To take on
racism, poverty and war, they came together,
black and white and brown and young and old
and gay and straight and Christian and Catholic
and Gentile and civil rights and labor - and
we must do that now. That is why as the National
President and Senior Lecturer of Repairers
of the Breach, I have accepted an invitation
to join and help lead the Poor People’s
Campaign, a national call for a moral revival.
It’s time for a moral movement across this
nation, in multiple states and in the District
of Columbia, that engages in indigenously-led
grassroots organizing, that uses moral language
to frame and critique policy regardless of
who’s in power, that will demonstrate a
commitment to civil disobedience, that follows
the steps of nonviolent action, that will
build a stage from which to lift the voices
of everyday people impacted by immoral policies,
that will recognize the centrality of race,
America’s original sin, and how it connects
to classism and all the other “isms,”
that will build a broad, diverse coalition,
including moral and religious leaders of all
faiths, a movement that will intentionally
diversify the movement with the love goal
of winning unlikely allies and even redeeming
some of our adversaries, a movement that will
build transformative long-term coalition race
relationships - not just a rally, but a campaign,
a movement that doesn’t judge its success
only by electoral outcomes at first, a movement
that will make a serious commitment to academic
and empirical analysis of policy, a movement
that will use every form of social media:
video, text, Twitter, Facebook, because if
Harriet Tubman got five hundred slaves out
of slavery and she didn’t have email, she
didn’t have Twitter, she didn’t have Google
- all she had was moss on the North side of
a tree, a North Star in the sky, and a pistol
in her pocket just in case anybody wanted
to go back. We need a movement that will pursue
a strong legal strategy, and will pick up
our Constitution and dust it off and say,
“no matter who’s in office, they don’t
have a right to run roughshod over the Constitution.”
We need a movement that will engage resistance
cultural arts everywhere in every state. And
we need a movement that will resist the one-moment
mentality and will build a campaign. We must
use our moral activism to fight for a moral
agenda. We cannot say, “this is the era
of Trump.” I’m a person of faith - I don’t
give anybody eras but God - every era belongs
to God, we are God’s creation, and we must
stand up in this time. We must lift up, we
must defend the most sacred principles of
faith and Constitutional values. What are
those? We must fight for a pro-labor, anti-poverty,
anti-racist policy that builds up economic
democracy through full employment. We must
fight for living wages. We must fight for
the alleviation of despair and unemployment.
We must fight for a transition away from fossil
fuels. We must fight for labor rights and
affordable housing and social safety nets
for the poor. We must fight for fair policies
for immigrants in a country of immigrants.
And we must critique the policies around warmongering
that undermine our moral standing in the world.
We must fight for equality in education by
ensuring that every child receives a high-quality,
well-funded, constitutionally diverse public
education, as well as access to community
college and universities. We must fight for
healthcare, insure Medicare, insure Social
Security, insure Medicaid. And we must fight
not just to save the Affordable Care Act - we
must fight for universal healthcare for everybody
as a human - as a fundamental right for every
human being. We must fight for fairness in
the criminal justice system by addressing
the inequalities in that system for black,
brown, and poor white people. We must fight
the proliferation of guns. We must fight for
it. And we must fight for, and fight to expand
voting rights. We must save the rules we have,
but then we must say, “it is wrong not to
have automatic registration at 18; if I’m
automatically registered for the war, I ought
to be automatically registered to vote.”
We must fight for women’s rights. We must
fight for LGBTQ rights. We must fight for
labor rights. We must fight for immigration
rights. And we must declare that we will never
give up on the principle of equal protection
under the law. So what are we doing right
now? We are preparing to launch the fight.
In 2018, with 40 days of action in 25 states
and the District of Columbia - from Mother’s
Day to the summer solstice. I can’t tell
you all about just yet, because we’re going
to announce it later, but let me just give
you a little bit. Auditing America 50 Years
After the Poor People’s Campaign,” focusing
on racism, poverty, ecological devastation,
the war economy, and focusing on our national
morality, which are all inextricably tied
together as an assault on the heart of our
democracy. Who’s sitting in that room? Economists,
poor people, people who work on behalf of
the poor, theologians, history - they’re
all in the room right now working on this
major audit - because as you know, the worst
thing you want to be is loud and wrong, so
the first thing, we got to get our audit,
we got to prepare for the campaign. And we
must come together - think about it - 40 days
of simultaneous actions has never happened
in American history. 40 days of civil disobedience
in 25 state capitals, and in the office of
Ryan and McConnell, in the congressman’s
office - led by the poor, led with the poor,
not just one - not a commemoration - we don’t
need another commemoration of what Dr. King
did then, another commemoration of the march
from Selma, no, we need a re-inauguration,
we need a consecration, we need a commitment.
And we’re asking all of those that have
been rejected - if you’ve felt rejected
because of poverty, rejected because of the
lack of healthcare, rejected because of your
sexuality, rejected because of race, we’re
calling all of you, all of you. And what would
happen if for 40 days, 40 days out of 365
days, progressives could come together - you
know, if we can’t come together for 40 days,
then the extremists really don’t have the
problem. And what if we could come together,
and what if simultaneously, it would sound
like this - let’s just say the Tuesday after
Mother's Day: “Breaking news, CNN, 150 - 200
people have just gone into the Mississippi
State Legislature and they’ve taken a knee,
they’ve sat down, and they’re fighting
for policies that would － wait a minute,
the same thing is happening in Alabama － hold
on, we’re just getting another message that
it’s happening in Virginia － wait a minute,
it’s also happening in Wisconsin － uh-oh,
Ohio! Wait a minute, there are 250 in McConnell’s
office, there are 250 in Ryan’s office!
You know what they’re singing? ‘Somebody’s
hurting my brother, and it’s gone on far
too long, and we won’t be silent anymore!’”
[Applause] What if we were to do that together?
Not just for 40 days, but to launch a movement
－ Mother’s Day, birth. June 21st, the
summer solstice. What if we would birth light?
And what if we could organize 1,000 people
in 25 states that would do civil disobedience?
That’s 25,000… plus 2,500 in the District
of Columbia. There has never in the history
of this country been 30,000 people that engaged
in simultaneous civil disobedience. And I
think we could break through the tweets if
we do that. I think we could change the news
cycle if we do that. I think we might be able
to inspire the 100 and 120 poor and working
poor people to say, “Wait a minute…”
You know, there’s a scripture in Isaiah
where God asked － Isaiah asked God, “If
I go out and do this, how many people will
listen to me?” God said, “Ten percent.”
And he said, “That’s all?” He said,
“That’s all you need because ten percent,
a remnant, can change the whole world.”
I believe my Jewish friend, just maybe, that
valley of dry bones － those people over
in Ezekiel, that valley of dry bones － maybe
we can get them together. And if we get them
together, we can begin a movement － not
just for another election, not just to save
a party, not just until 2020 － but we need
to look 10, 15, 20 years － a movement that
will save the heart and soul of this democracy.
And so I go back where I began: the stone
that the builders rejected has become the
chief cornerstone. I believe that if the stones
in this nation come together, we can shift
the moral narrative, and we can bring up a
Third Reconstruction, and we can revive the
heart and the soul of this nation. We have
to try, my friends. We cannot be so tired,
we quit! We cannot just give up because of
six months of craziness. In fact of the matter,
I would rather die trying than live, and it
be written on my epitaph that we gave in to
oppression, we gave in to racism, we gave
in to hate. If I was at my church I’d ask,
“do I have a witness?” When the stones
that have been rejected come together, something
powerful can happen. I know the power of coming
together. I know it biblically. Can I just
be a southern preacher for ten minutes and
I’m through? I know the power of getting
together － because when Moses, and his people,
and his rod came together, Pharaoh came down,
and the Red Sea had to open up. When Esther
and her uncle Mordecai came together, they
were able to stop the plots of destruction
against the Jewish people. When David, and
his rock, and his slingshot, and his faith
came together on the battlefield, Goliath
failed. And they tell me that the next day
in the Jerusalem News & Observer, it read,
“The bigger they come, the harder they fall.”
When Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego got together,
way down in the fiery furnace, God cooled
the fire in the furnace, and somebody said
they saw a fourth person standing with them,
and when they came out the evil, narcissistic
king was bowing to their God rather than them
bowing to his god because they told him bowing
down is not an option. When the disciples
of Jesus came together on Pentecost and got
on one accord, God’s spirit filled them,
and together they became a power that stood
against the idolatry of Caesar and the oppression
of Rome. I know what coming together biblically
does, but I also know what coming together
has done historically. The truth is, when
you hold on to truth and hold on to justice,
justice has never lost. Truth has never lost.
You’re looking at me funny. I didn’t say
justice hadn’t been fought. I didn’t say
truth hadn’t been beat up － but it’s
never lost. During slavery it looked like
justice had lost, but when Harriet Tubman
and Frederick Douglass and Quakers and white
evangelicals of that day got together, they
formed a fusion movement that brought about
abolition and slavery came down. Women didn’t
have the right to vote － but when Sojourner
Truth and a Quaker named Lucretia Mott and
others got together, women won the right to
vote. Plessy vs. Ferguson － remember that?
－ looked like it had a victory, but when
Thurgood Marshall got white lawyers and black
lawyers and Jewish lawyers all together, in
the end an all-white Supreme Court with one
member who had been a member of the KKK, voted
unanimously to tear down “separate but equal.”
It looked like Jim Crow had beaten down injustice
and it couldn’t rise again, but when Rosa
Parks and Martin King and Bayard Rustin and
Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer and Jonathan
Daniels and Viola Liuzzo and Rabbi Heschel
and Cesar Chavez and James Reeb － when they
all got together, they tore Jim Crow down.
Apartheid looked like it was winning, but
over in South Africa they used to have a saying:
“A dying mule kicks the hardest.” And
when Nelson Mandela and Bishop Tutu and the
women of South Africa all got together, apartheid
came tumbling down. So there’s plenty of
record in history, that if you engage in moral
analysis, if you engage in moral articulation,
and if you engage in moral activism, you may
have some bruises when it’s all over but
when the dust clears, justice wins, love wins,
truth wins. Now, you know, not only do I know
it biblically, and do I know it historically,
I also know that no matter how hard it gets,
you have to fight. So let me tell you, personally,
why I’m willing to fight. Not only do I
know about theology, not only do I know about
history, but I’m talking about what happened
in my own life. Several years ago, some said
I’d never walk again. They said I was crippled
forever. They said I’d never get out of
a wheelchair. I was 30 years old. I had always
depended on my legs. But I woke up one morning,
I couldn’t move. I spent three months in
a bed right here at UNC Hospital, not knowing
if I’d ever get up again. For twelve years,
I went into depression, I got really hurt.
For twelve years, I was in a wheelchair and
I was on a walker. But over those twelve years,
somehow, my mind got together, and then my
doctors got together, and then my nurses got
together, and then my pharmacists got together,
and then my swim coach got together, and my
therapists got together, and the prayer warriors
got together, and the mothers in the church
got together, and my family got together,
and good God Almighty, I can hop now! I can
walk out on stage right now! Because when
they all got together, things began to work
out. I’m telling you, this is no time for
despair － this is time for a poor people’s
campaign. This is time for a national call
for a moral revolution. Because when we all
get together, what a day! What a day! What
a day! What a day of rejoicing it will be!
When we all
Get together
It's time to fight back
come on, come on, let's do it together
poor people's campaign
National [inaudible] for a Moral Revival
now say it with me
when we all
get together
Black and white
Brown and red
Gay and straight
Young and old
Jewish
 Muslim
Christian
Those who don’t believe in anything
But they believe
In the moral law of the universe
“When we all
“Get together
“What a day!”
