>> Good evening,
Grand Rapids.
Good evening,
Grand Rapids.
How's everybody doing?
Let's give a
round of applause
for the Grand Rapids
Community College
Diversity Learning
Center again
for such an incredible
lecture series...
(applause)
And to the Board
of Trustees
and the leadership at
this great institution.
Good evening.
On behalf of Blue Cross
and Blue Shield
of West Michigan,
one of the sponsors
of this annual diversity
lecture series
and as the current president
of the Grand Rapids branch
of the NAACP, I am
honored to introduce
my brother,
Mr. Benjamin Jealous.
Benjamin Jealous--
and I have to add this--
you know, it's almost
like this script
is probably gonna be longer
than his presentation.
(laughing)
So Benjamin Jealous
is a partner
at Kapor Capital,
where he invests
in high growth companies that
have a positive social impact.
He formerly served as the
youngest ever president
and CEO of the
national NAACP.
Jealous has been a leader
of successful state
and local movements to
ban the death penalty,
outlaw racial profiling,
defend voting rights,
secure marriage equality,
and free multiple wrongfully
incarcerated people.
Under his leadership,
the NAACP grew
to be the largest civil
rights organization
online and on mobile,
experienced its first multiyear
membership growth in 20 years,
and became the largest
community-based
non-partisan voter registration
operation in the country.
A builder of
robust coalitions,
Jealous's leadership
at the NAACP
including-- included
bringing environmentalists,
organizations into the fight
to protect voting rights,
and convincing
well-known conservatives
to join the NAACP, and
challenging mass incarceration.
Prior to leading
the NAACP,
he spent 15 years
serving as a journalist
and community
organizer.
While at Mississippi's
"Jackson Advocate" newspaper,
his investigations
were credited
with exposing corruption
at a state penitentiary
and proving the innocence
of a black farmer
who was being
framed for arson.
While at Amnesty
International,
he led successfully efforts
to outlaw prison rape,
expose the increasing trend of
children being sentenced to life
without the possibility
of parole,
and drawing attention to
expanded racial profiling
in the wake of the September 11,
2001 terrorist attacks.
Jealous has been
named to the 40--
"Under 40" lists of both
"Fortune" and "Time" magazines.
He is the number one
on the root.com 2013 list
of black leaders
under 45.
Please join me, and let's
receive our brother,
my brother, with the well and
welcome round of applause.
If you could stand
to your feet
and let's receive
Mr. Benjamin Jealous.
(applause)
>> Well, good evening!
(applause)
It's great to be here in
Grand Rapids-- thank you.
Thank you, Cle Jackson--
let's give a round of applause
to our local president
of the NAACP.
(applause)
Thank you,
Chris Arnold.
You know, I won't
forget Chris's name--
you know, when you have
a last name like Jealous,
you kind of take
note of names.
Earlier today, I forgot
Chris's last name,
and somebody said to me,
"Don't forget--
"she has two
men's names."
I was like, "Oh right,
perfect, Chris Arnold."
(chuckling)
And thank you to the student at
Grand Rapids when I was making--
excuse me, Grand Valley--
I was making notes--
the treasurer of the local
NAACP gave me her notebook,
so please don't forget
to get this back.
You know, look, I'm here to talk
about mass incarceration,
and I'm here to talk
about it with hope,
and tonight, I'm gonna
tell some stories
and some moments,
you are gonna feel
like you are on
a journey with me.
Just roll with me
on this journey.
I wanna talk
about how we win.
It's a big problem.
It's a problem much bigger,
much bigger than we realize
and sometimes it
sneaks up on you.
I remember one moment
it snuck up on me.
I was on a flight
on Delta airlines
from Atlanta
to Memphis,
and I was flying so much
as President of the NAACP
that I was always getting
bumped up to first class.
It was like 11 o'clock
in the morning.
But you know
it's first class,
so they feel obligated to
ask you if you want a drink,
even though it's
11 o'clock in the morning.
And so, I said, "No, it's
11 o'clock in the morning."
And then, this guy
sat down next to me
in a University of Mississippi,
an old Miss booster shirt,
and I still resisted
the urge to drink.
(audience laughing)
And then, he said to me,
"Hi, I'm Bill."
I said,
"Hi, I'm Ben."
He said, you know,
whatever-- "I sell--"
he was working for
a big corporation,
maybe FedEx-- one of the
big ones in Memphis--
and he said,
"(stuttering indistinctly).
"What do you do?"
I said, "Oh, I'm the
President of the NAACP."
He's sitting there in his
University of Mississippi shirt.
School has the
confederate flag as their mascot
until like
two years ago.
That's their mascot-- okay.
(laughing)
And only school in America that
has a flag as a mascot, okay.
And, um...
(chuckling)
and he-- I mean, even
West Point doesn't have a flag
as a mascot, but okay,
and so...
(coughs)
And so, he kind of looks at me.
He says, "So tell me
about affirmative action."
I was like, "I'll
take that drink."
(audience laughing)
Sitting there
talking to this...
older white man in a
University of Mississippi shirt
about affirmative action,
and I said-- big guy-- I said,
"Well, affirmative action, sir,
"is supposed to be the hammer
that destroys nepotism
"as the operating
system of our country."
He said, "I could
sign up for that,
"but tell me about, what
does that do for my family?"
I said, "Well,
I suspect the women
"in your family
are pretty pleased
"how things have turned
out over the last 50 years
"as far as opportunity,
college, employment,
"leadership ranks
of corporations."
He said, "Yeah,
that's great, man,
"but we've never been concerned
about the women in my family.
"I'm talking about
the boys in my family."
He said, "My family--
how can I put this--
"we came over here--
"see, the reason I'm flying
from Atlanta to Memphis
"is, you know, I work in Memphis
'cause I went to Old Miss,
"and I wear this shirt 'cause
I'm a bit of an exception
"in my family-- I come
from a very poor family
"and I got a football
scholarship,
"and well, the coach got
me a job in Memphis
"and that's why my life
has been so good.
"But the boys
in my family,
"well, we came over
here originally
"as prisoners in the
Georgia penal colony.
"And well, the boys in my
family, the men in my family,
"most of us-- we've been in
and out of prison ever since.
"What will it
do for them?"
And we talked--
we talked about geographic-based
affirmative action
and how if you're in Appalachia
or poor parts of Georgia,
you know, Harvard will give
you special consideration
and so forth, but then,
we just ended up talking
about our shared passion
to end mass incarceration.
Now, I wanna define the
problem for a second
because I think we think
of it as sort of something
that affects black people,
and we miss the point.
America doesn't just have
the most incarcerated black
or brown people
on the planet.
We have the most incarcerated
white people on the planet, too.
There are roughly a
million blacks in prison
and roughly a million
whites in prison.
And you might say, "Well,
the black population
"is much smaller"-- it's true--
the rate is much higher,
but understand it
in these terms.
A black man in America today
is more than three times
as likely to be
incarcerated
as a black man was,
statistically, in South Africa
at the height of apartheid
when South Africa
was the world's
leading incarcerator.
A white man in America
today is almost as likely
as the average black man
in South Africa
at the height of apartheid
when South Africa
was the world's
leading incarcerator...
to be behind bars
in our country.
So as I said to my father,
who is white,
who, like Bernie Sanders, was in
the Congress of Racial Equality
and goes way back as a fighter
for racial justice.
I said to my Dad,
"Dad-- look, man."
Now mind you,
my family's been like--
my father's family has
been white in America
since 1624...
(chuckling)
so they're like really white.
And...
(laughing)
and I said--
I said to my Dad--
I said, "Dad, you know,
if what white privilege
"in America gets you
in the 21st century
"is like a 20% to 25% discount
on the incarceration rate
"of black men in South Africa
at the height of apartheid,
"like, we're all in
the flying pan, Dad."
The only question is,
like, are you on the
edge of the flying pan
or in the middle
of the frying pan?
But we're all in
the frying pan.
The consequence of us--
and what's happened to
white men, in particular,
and white people,
more generally,
over the last
10 years--
well, the 10 years
specifically of 2000 to 2010
because we get a lot of
these stats with censuses,
so what we learned
with the census
was it went from
about half as likely
as the black man
in South Africa
to three-quarters
as likely,
and was trending up, and that's
why I'd say it's 20% to 25%--
it might even
be closer.
We won't know till
the next census.
Is because we took the tactics
of the war on crack...
and we applied it
to the war on meth,
and we left the incentives
in place that were the same.
You see, in order for a
local police department
to get federal subsidy
for the war on drugs,
you have to prove two
things by one action.
The two things are--
an existing problem
and ongoing progress
towards solving
that problem.
And you measure
that in arrests.
It's like as misguided
as using body counts
to measure whether we were
winning the war in Vietnam.
And so, what happens
with a drug like crack
where most crack users--
the biggest cohort
has always been middle-aged,
middle class white men
typically in
the suburbs.
The problem is, if
you want to find them,
they are in their
living room
and you can drive down
their street all day
and you'll never see
them smoking crack.
So if you want to find
a lot of crackheads quickly,
then you go into a
poor neighborhood,
typically a poor
black neighborhood
where there are tenements, and
people in small apartments,
and crack has
an acidic smell,
and they smoke with
the windows open,
or they smoke on the stoop,
and you round them up.
And the law we were dealing
with most of the time,
which still exists in
most of the states,
has gone to 18 to 1 in
the federal government
and yet gone down
to 1 to 1.
It's been eliminated
in South Carolina,
so it shows somewhat
what we are dealing with.
I'll get to that
in a second.
Literally said, if
you had this much crack--
like this much, my thumb,
two rocks of crack,
five milligrams-- you would
get as much punishment
as if you had half
a kilo of powder.
So we took that approach and we
applied it to the war on meth,
and we started literally
going to trailer parks
and poor white neighborhoods
to round people up,
like we had done
in tenements
with black folks
in the war on crack.
And so, black arrests
started to come down
as our communities
protested and shifted,
and the white arrests
have gone like this.
The problem with
that, of course,
is when you take a strategy
for mass incarceration
of 12% of your population--
black people--
and you apply it to
60% of your population--
white people-- the ability
for exponential growth
as far as number of
people behind bars
and expense is
significant.
Now, why
should we care?
If anybody doesn't
live in a tenement
anybody doesn't live
in a trailer park...
maybe you don't know anybody
who's ever been caught up
in these dragnets.
Because we all pay,
and we pay explicitly.
When I was President
of the NAACP,
and admittedly before the
famous Joe Paterno scandal,
the famous football
team at Penn State,
I sat down with the then
President of Penn State,
and I said-- Pennsylvania
State University--
and I said, "Mr. President--"
we're backstage,
University of Pittsburgh
having a conversation--
I said, "Mr. President,
just curious,
"what's your biggest
leadership challenge?"
He said, "Man, it's
the same every year.
"It's like
Groundhog Day.
"I go up to the state capital
and I try to keep them
"from sending so much more
money to the state pen,
"so much more money
to the state pen,
"so they will just send a
little more to Penn State."
Coming out of
that conversation
and a parallel experience
with protesting
at the University
of California
over tuition hikes in
response to state budget cuts,
driven by mass
incarceration,
and the whole "Books
Not Bars" campaign
that Van Jones'
old organization,
the Ella Baker Center,
was behind.
We, at the NAACP,
commissioned a study.
It was called
"Misplaced Priorities."
We looked at states
across the country
over the last 40 years
and what you saw
was that what happened in
California and Pennsylvania,
the bookends
of a nation,
had happened everywhere
in between.
California-- the state budget,
in approximately 1973,
the year I was born--
when you're the CEO
of an organization, you
can be vain like that.
About 11%-- but
there was a reason,
which I knew as a child--
California's public universities
were considered to be
among the best in the world,
so I wanted to go,
back then.
Back then, 11% of
the state budget
went to public
universities.
They were almost free.
3% went to prisons.
Fast forward by five
or six years ago,
say roughly
2010, 2011...
11% of the state budget
was now going to prisons.
6.5%, 7% were going to
public universities.
The following year, Governor
Jerry Brown of California--
I'll get back to him
later, as well--
had proposed 6% for
public universities
and 15% for
prisons.
What do we learn
from that?
We learn two things, but then
we come to a big conclusion
I'll get to
in a second.
One is that we love
our kids a lot
because our kids--
our kids are always the ones
who are headed
to college, right?
Our kids-- the ones you disown
are headed to prison,
but the ones you claim, man,
they are heading to college.
And our kids, we have
never let the percentage
of the state budget
to send our kids
to public universities
get as low--
and that includes community
colleges, the whole range--
get as low as we had allowed
our prison budgets to get.
So it never
got to 3%.
On the other hand,
the prison budget
had switched places with
the old college budget.
It was now up at 11% which
shows that there is something
that will trump our
love of our children.
It's our fear of
somebody else's kids.
And we'll spend two--
if Jerry Brown had
his way that year,
two and half times
as much.
Paying for our fear of
somebody else's children
as we will to fund our own
children to go to school.
And if you look at
the failure of empires--
and ours is one
of those--
if you look at the
failure of empires,
there are two things
that can destabilize
an empire financially,
historically.
Russia, for instance,
got tangled in both.
Rome got tangled
in both.
The over-investment in
endless wars overseas
and over-investment in
over-incarceration at home.
The two previous countries
to hold our place now
in the world as
leading incarcerator
no longer exist.
One is the former
Republic of South Africa,
which had an
internal revolution,
and the other is the
former Union of Soviet
Socialist Republic,
which imploded.
It is unsustainable
what we are doing
and that's why this
issue is so urgent.
But let me take
you back for a bit
to how this all
began for me
and how I've learned
over the years
the strategies I believe
are gonna fuel us to win.
I was a
college student.
It was a friend's
21st birthday.
We were drinking.
I will neither admit nor deny
whether I was 21 at the time...
(audience chuckling)
And...
a round of toasts went up
to my boy for turning 21.
And then, another toast went up
and, before that toast reached
my friend's shoulder, he
was overcome with grief
and he began pouring
libations of memory...
for all of our friends
who had been shot
and killed in the
wars on our streets
or sent to prison
for the war on drugs.
Trying to turn
the mood around,
another friend
threw his glass up
and toasted the fact
that one more brother
had survived to 21,
that one more young man
of color in America,
one more young black man
had survived to 21.
The notion cut like
me like a knife.
The notion that
somebody thought
it was an accomplishment
for a member of any group
in this, the world's wealthiest
and greatest democracy,
let alone for
their own group,
let alone for my group,
to merely breathe
past their
21st birthday.
Cut me like a knife,
sent me reeling,
made me sleepless.
And I ultimately did what I'm
still blessed to be able to do.
You see, my Grandma today?
She's 99 years old.
She's the granddaughter
of slaves.
She carries with her-- she's
the griot of our family,
she carries with her
200 years of American history
experienced firsthand.
The 100 handed down to
her by her grandparents
and great-grandparents
who had been slaves,
and the 100 or so
she has witnessed.
Much of it
triumphant,
but honestly, she could
do without the sad turn
of the last 5 to 40 years,
whether you are talking
about the attacks on voting
rights or mass incarceration.
And I said, "Grandma,
what happened?
"Grandma, you said
that we were supposed
"to be the children
of the dream,
"the ones born after
Dr. King's March on Washington
"and his 'I Have
A Dream' speech
"and the passage of
the Civil Rights Acts...
"and the slaying
of Jim Crow,
"that you had slayed,
"that you and your generation
and my mom's generation
"had slain Jim Crow,
the great dragon,
"holding our people
in the ghettos
"and away from opportunity the
way that your grandparents
"and great grandparents had
conspired to end slavery...
"and that all we had to do was
reap what you all had sow.
"You said, all we had
to do was, Grandma,
"was to just keep
our nose clean
"and walk a straight line
and study hard
"and everything
would be okay.
"And Grandma--
I dare say, Grandma,
"that worked
for many of us.
"I'm grateful to you,
Grandma, but I don't think
"it worked for most of us
because my generation--
"these so-called
'children of the dream,'
"well, we've come of age just
in time to find ourselves
"the most murdered
in the country...
"and the most incarcerated
on the planet.
"What happened,
Grandma?"
And my Grandmother
looked down,
and then, she looked up
and she said,
"Grandson, it's sad
but it's simple.
We got what we fought for,
but we lost what we had.
We got the right to send
our kids to any school...
we wanted to.
We lost the right to
assume they would be loved
and welcomed
the way that I--"
this is my
Grandmother talking--
"that I had been welcomed
at that one-room schoolhouse
"my dad had built
at the end of slavery
"for his children and the
other children of free slaves
"in our community...
"or the way that
your Mom was welcomed
"at that little Jim Crow
public elementary school
"down the street from
the housing project
"she was raised in.
"We got the right
to be police officers
"or, in law enforcement,
like your Grandfather
"but we lost the right to
live in safe communities.
"We got the right to buy a
house in any part of town.
"Our people, at the same time,
lost land down south
"at the rate of 500
to 1,000 acres per day,
"every day, every year,
every decade
"from the start
of World War II
"until the end
of the Cold War.
"We got the right
to be free,
"and yet, the one loophole
in the Constitution
"that allows them to send
you back into slavery
"is being duly convicted
under the law,
"and man, have we been
mass incarcerated."
And...
in my Grandmother's
short telling
of sort of 200 years of
the American struggle--
and I would offer it is
an American struggle,
it isn't a black struggle, it's
not a civil rights struggle.
Read the preamble to our
Declaration of Independence.
This is our
struggle.
All of ours.
And understand what's going
on with mass incarceration
right now-- nobody
gets a free pass.
The only question is-- are you
the canary or the miner?
Do you die
sooner or later?
In that short telling, her
admonition was pretty clear.
It's not enough, at
any point, to know
simply what you
are fighting for.
You must also know what has
already been gained for you--
or you know, you
might find yourself,
as many of us did in 2012,
in many states,
fighting to reelect the
nation's first black President
while they were stealing our
neighbor's voting rights.
But in the pauses,
in the glances,
and in that regal arc
to her back,
a true Virginia lady
despite all she had endured,
my Grandmother made a
more damning indictment.
By the way, I heard y'all's
pastor say "damn" downstairs
tonight so apparently you
can say that at this pulpit.
(audience laughing)
He's a good man.
(laughing)
A more damning indictment,
which was that she didn't
believe that my generation
had figured
out either.
That we'd either
had adequate stock
of what had been
gained for us
and we didn't understand
the price of anything
that been
gained for us,
nor did she think
we had figured out
what we were
fighting for.
And so, I left that day
and I got on a bus.
She was living at exit zero
on the Garden State Parkway
in New Jersey, a little
historically black
vacation retirement community
called West (indistinct).
I was going to school
in New York City.
It's a long bus ride home--
lots of stops.
And I took out a notebook
like this one
I stole from the
Grand Valley student...
(laughing)
the treasurer of
the local NAACP,
and I just started
writing down
all of the things that
really ticked me off
because I had decided that
before I got off that bus,
I would figure out what
I was fighting for.
And as I would write
something on the page
that was clearly more
significant than something
else I had on the page,
I'd cross off the thing
that was less significant.
I just kept writing
and crossing off,
writing and crossing off,
and writing and crossing off,
and, all the sudden, I was
15 minutes from Port Authority
in New York City
and I realized I better
just pick something
because I had committed myself
to pick one thing to fight for
before I was
off that bus
because I just couldn't
take it anymore.
I looked at the history of
my family on both sides.
The white side going
all the way back
to the American Revolution
and through the suffragettes
and onto the
Civil Rights Movement,
and on the black side, going
back to black abolitionists
and coming up through
the Civil Rights Movement,
and it was pretty clear
that for most generations
on the white side and
for every generation
on the black side, we knew
what we were fighting for.
And my generation had been
told fighting was optional.
You know, it wasn't turning out
the way it was supposed to.
And so, I wrote it--
and then, I realized
there's 15 minutes left and
there is six things on the page
and, you know, I'm classics of
ADHD, like, Generation X-er.
And so, I...
(laughing)
I was like, "Ehhh!"
Indecisive.
And I just flipped over
that sheet of paper
and I wrote down
those six things
and I closed my eyes and I heard
that voice of my Grandfather
that always used to say,
"Son, never let the perfect
"get in the way
of the good."
I decided everything on
that page was good enough
to fight for and
so I flipped it over
and I wrote it down.
That circle--
I drew that circle
and I said, "You know,
whatever is most
"in the center of the circle
when I open my page,
"that is what
I will fight for."
And I opened my eyes,
and it said,
"End the injustice in
the justice system."
I had no earthly idea
how to do that.
I was like, "Wow, I
really wrote that down?
"How am I gonna
do that?"
But it occurred to me
that it worked pretty well
in the negative,
that I knew what I didn't
have to fight for,
that I knew what I--
the coalition meeting
I didn't have to go,
the class I didn't
have to take,
the speaker I didn't
have to listen to.
And then, I did something
that I'd seen my mom do,
but I'm a guy so I wasn't
gonna tape it on my mirror,
like she and Oprah
were doing that year--
my affirmations or
whatever, my goals.
(laughing)
I tore it out, I taped it
to the bottom of my
underwear drawer
so nobody else
would see it.
And everyday, I would open
up my underwear drawer
and there it would say,
"End injustice
"in the justice system,"
and I'd recommit myself every
morning to pursuing that goal.
And it was easy 'cause
I was living in Harlem
and going to Columbia
University, and the contrast
was incredible.
And you know, seeing kids
getting away on campus
with dealing drugs
by the boatload
and people getting-- mothers
getting rounded up in Harlem
for being addicts, kids getting
sent off to foster care.
And you know, a
funny thing happens.
When you really
commit yourself
to winning a battle
before you die,
a little light goes off
inside of you.
It's what we sing about in
the Civil Rights Movement
when we sang that song,
"This little light of mine,
"I'm gonna
let it shine."
But at first, it's not really
shining for anybody to see.
It's just glowing enough
that it keeps you warm
in the cold moments
of self-doubt...
and it shines
just bright enough
to show you the next step
in front of you.
And so, I just kept
taking the next step,
taking the next step,
taking the next step,
and the next
thing I knew,
I was in Jackson,
Mississippi...
fighting a governor who was
fixing to turn a black college
into a prison.
Take-- if you're a football fan,
take Jerry Rice's alma mater,
Mississippi Valley
State University,
and turn it
into a prison.
While he took the
other two public
historically black colleges in
the state-- Alcorn University,
where the great black
quarterback Steve McNair went
and shut it down
completely...
and he intended to take
Jackson State University,
Walter Payton's alma mater,
and make it majority white
in two years without any
compensatory increase
in spaces for
black students
at the historically white
colleges in Mississippi.
I said to the lawyer who
had invited me down there...
"What's my-- what exactly
is my job description?"
He said, "I'm just gonna write
it down on a napkin here.
"I don't want anybody
to hear me say this."
I said,
"All right."
Passes the napkin
across the table.
First line-- "Put the fear
of God in the judge."
Second line-- "Put the fear
of God in the governor."
I look at him, and he says,
"Son, this is Mississippi.
"Judges down here don't
do the right thing
"because it's
the right thing.
"They do the right thing
because they are real afraid
"of doing the
wrong thing.
"You got to make 'em afraid
to do the wrong thing."
I said, "Sir, how
do I do that?"
He said...
"You know those really
big street protests
"you've been organizing
in New York City?"
I said,
"Yes, sir."
"All you gotta do is
organize those down here
"in Jackson,
Mississippi."
I said, "Respectfully, sir,
aren't the stakes
"a bit higher here in
Jackson, Mississippi?
"Like, a lot higher?"
He said, "Well, son, aren't
you in the Ivy League?
"Man, we thought you
were smart enough
"to figure out that one
before you got off the bus."
(audience laughing)
I said, "Well, I guess
I got a job to do."
He said, "Yeah, son,
I suppose you do."
So I went to
work organizing
what would be the largest
student protests in Mississippi
since the students
were shot and killed
during a student protest
by the National Guard
in the same year the
students were shot and killed
at Kent State in the
early '70s, I guess it was.
And specifically, we wanted
about 15,000 students
to fill up the square in
front of the state capital
and push towards the
governor's mansion
and make it very clear
that this was outrageous.
And then, we decided
that the notion
of turning a college
into a prison--
think "school to prison
pipeline,"
no pipeline--
just school to prison.
"Sisters, you should leave,
brothers, you can stay.
"Don't mind the fence
and the barb wire."
That turning a
college into a prison
wasn't simply un...
anti the interests of the
black community of Mississippi
or the black community
of America
or the Civil Rights
Movement itself.
No, it was
un-American.
One thing we don't
do in America,
even in Mississippi, is turn
a college into a prison.
And so...
we decided we needed at
least 5% white participation
so that the photos would
look somewhat integrated,
and it wouldn't just
look like a "black thing."
It would look like
a Mississippi thing,
which meant we were looking
for 750 white liberals
in Mississippi
on short notice.
(crowd laughing)
Now, we knew some,
so we made a list
and we got to seven...
(audience laughing)
and then, somebody said,
"Well, you know,
"I'm looking at this list
and I realize
"that there are two
professors with ponytails
"and Millsaps College
who are not on the list."
Millsaps is known as the
"Harvard of Mississippi."
It's the great white liberal
private college of Mississippi.
"Liberal" is relative
in Mississippi.
So now we had nine--
we put down the two professors
with ponytails that got us nine.
Now, in the corner
was a guy
who didn't quite think
like the rest of us.
He was kind of--
a little bit to himself.
He was brilliant, and
he was socially awkward,
and he was going
through a calendar
back and forth like this
the whole time
while I'm trying
to get a list
moving towards 11 white
liberals in Mississippi.
And he just yells,
"Ben, Ben, Ben!"
I finally said,
"Yeah, man, what is up?"
And he said, "Earth Day
is coming up."
(crowd laughing)
And we all took a deep
breath and began to smile...
'cause Earth Day
in the deep south
is like Groundhog Day
for white liberals.
It's the day they
come out of their cave.
The rest of the year,
they live in a world
of like Brooks Brother
and Talbots homogeneity.
It's all cotton dresses
and blue blazers.
You can't tell
them apart
from the most conservative
members of the GOP.
But!
On Earth Day, man, it's
tie-dyes and Birkenstocks.
(audience laughing)
You can see 'em
a mile away.
And they gather like
in one of ten places,
typically at the historically
white universities
in Mississippi.
And so, we split up into
teams and we sent 'em
to the historically
white universities--
and it might be an
awkward phrase to you,
but that's the
reality of segregation.
Yes, we have HBCUs-- you hear
about them all the time--
"historically black
colleges and universities."
And we have historically
white universities.
In some places, we just
call that "Harvard."
(audience laughing)
(laughs)
And so-- sorry, my Dad's family
helped found
Harvard in 1636.
It's a family joke.
(laughing)
So, we fan out.
I'm the lead organizer,
which means I get to
sit at my desk all day.
Everybody's out giving speeches
but this is before cell phones
were either safe
or affordable.
They were like
this big.
They were very expensive,
and you were fairly certain
that they would cause cancer as
quickly as that microwave oven
that your friend's mom bought
like three years too soon.
And so, we weren't buying them
for a whole bunch of reasons.
So I sat there on
my phone all day.
And by 3 o'clock, it seemed like
things were going pretty well.
All the teams except one
had checked back in
and they say that the
rallies were great.
They got lots
of sign-ups.
They were
well-received.
Everybody's onboard-- we're
moving towards our number,
leaps and bounds,
thanks to the brother
with the calendar
in the corner...
except for one.
By 5:00, the other teams had
gathered up in the office.
We still-- one team
hasn't checked in.
7:00, the same team
hasn't checked in.
10:00, I sent
everybody home, I said,
"Look, when they call,
I'll call you.
"Maybe they are out
drinking-- I don't know."
But really, we
were worried
because we had sent them
up a narrow highway
that's framed on
either side by bogs,
the exact same bogs around
Philadelphia, Mississippi,
where they found the bodies
of all those other black men
before they found
the bodies
of Chaney, Goodman,
and Schwerner,
three civil rights
workers in 1964.
If your car goes off
at the right point
in the right way,
it just disappears,
and we'll never
find you.
And then,
you hang a left
and you go 40 miles deeper
into the piney woods
to Starkville, Mississippi--
Mississippi State University.
Any Johnny Cash
fans here?
Keep your hand raised if
you remember the song,
"Starkville City Jail."
Wow, that's the first person
who has remembered that,
over there, in like
several speeches.
"Starkville City Jail"
is a song by Johnny Cash
about the day
he was arrested
in Starkville, Mississippi
for picking a daisy.
Now, you might imagine
politics in the late 1960s
being what they were,
if you were arrested--
if you had arrested the man
who was second only to Elvis
in the entire state
of Mississippi
for picking a daisy, you
would be instantly famous.
And that's what had happened
to certain Sheriff Deputy
named Dolph Bryan,
and a couple of years later,
he became Sheriff
and he had been
Sheriff ever since.
I would once see him on
"Entertainment Tonight"
giving a check
to Rosanne Cash,
giving her like the
$25 Johnny had paid
to get out jail, and I noted he
didn't pay her any interest.
That was
Dolph Bryan.
30 years,
no interest.
Which is to simply say
that if you were to, say,
to put an adjective in
front of "SOB" with him,
you would just be
gilding the lily.
He was merely the toughest
SOB you'd ever met.
And we were worried
that our folks
hadn't returned
from his town.
At the time, there was a
rash of jailhouse hangings.
They literally had
created a theory,
as a spurious as
it was, called,
"Sudden Incarcerated
Death Syndrome,"
which said that are some people
who were so freedom-loving--
that was code for
the young black men
who were being found
hung in these jails--
that even though they were
like heading to the prom
or on their way to
Harvard University,
when they get
inside of a jail,
they hang themselves in a
matter of hours by themselves.
So we had reason
to be worried.
On top of that,
the week before,
the Ku Klux Klan had
put out a press release.
Who knew?
Saying they were gonna kill one
of the leaders of our march
in retaliation...
if Byron De La Beckwith, the man
who assassinated Medgar Evers,
who was on trial that
year 30 years too late
for assassinating
Medgar Evers--
if Byron De La Beckwith
was convicted.
And they were calling
every night to threaten us,
so I waiting there
by the phone,
and the phone rang
around 1 AM
and I feared it
was the Klan again
and I picked it up anyways,
and I said, "Hello?"
And I heard the voice
I had been waiting for.
It was my lead organizer
I had sent up
to Mississippi State
University in Starkville.
And he said, "Ben?"
I said, "Yeah?"
He said, "We had a
problem up at State...
"and we don't know
what to do,
"and we need you
to get down here...
"to the Waffle House at the
corner of I-55 and I-20
"so we can
figure it out."
You can tell
by my size,
I can make it to Waffle House
in five minutes flat
in any city in
America that has one,
and so I was there in
a matter of moments,
and I slide into the booth, and
I say, "Fellas, what happened?"
And they said, "Well,
we did what you said,
"and we got there early
and we asked to speak,
"and we asked to speak at
the end of the program,
"and they said, fine.
"You know, that's supposed
to be around 2 o'clock.
"And crowd should be at its
biggest, and we said, 'Great.'
"2 o'clock came and
program was still going,
"and they hadn't
called us, all right.
"2:30, we notice they are
breaking down the microphones
"and moving on the band,
and we said,
"'Wait, wait, wait,
we're supposed to--'
"And they said,
'No, no, no, y'all,
"'we said the end
of everything.
"'Y'all can speak after the
party that's coming up next.'
"Well, the environmentalists
gathering
"turned into a
frat boy party
"and at 11 PM at night, Ben,
after the third encore
"of 'Sweet Home Alabama,'
they invited us on stage
"to speak and we said,
"'We need your help to
save the black colleges,'
"and while a group
of drunk frat boys
"started chanting, 'Get a rope,
get a rope, get a rope.'
"And well, Ben, we
did that crazy little
Mississippi two-step.
"You know, the one
where you walk
"as fast as you
possibly can
"just to get the
heck outta there?
"And yet slow enough that
your knees don't buckle?
"So they don't think
you're running
"and they don't
chase you.
"And then, we drove just
as fast as we could
"to get out of here,
"but yet slow enough that we
didn't attract the attention
"of Sheriff Bryan's
deputies.
"And well, now we're here
and we don't know what to do."
And at that moment...
a cold wind hit the
back of all our necks
and we started looking
around like this
and we realized that
despite the fact
that this particular
Waffle House
was between a black college
and two white colleges
that typically had a
mix of students in it,
we were the only black
people in the place.
There wasn't even
a black dishwasher.
And on top of that,
there was an old guy.
Still fairly fit,
but an old guy,
white, feathered hair,
long white shirt, hanging
9 inches below his waistband,
staring at us
and not smiling.
Pays some money,
looks over his shoulder,
talked to the lady,
look over his shoulder,
keep starting at us.
And that 9 inches
was significant
because see, in Mississippi,
for a 150--
no, I think it was $100
back then and no felonies,
you could get a license to
carry a concealed firearm
wherever you
wanted to go.
And he walks over to
us with to-go bags.
I've established Waffle House
exists for obesity.
Back then, they were just
full-on paper grocery sacks,
and he says, "Y'all the boys
I've been seeing on television?"
And I'm from northern California.
One of my boys
is from Chicago.
And the other organizer--
he's from Saint Louis.
And the third is
from New Orleans.
We call each
other "boys,"
but we were not accustomed to
answering when an old white man
in Mississippi
called us "boy."
And yet, I've been
getting death threats
all week on the phone, and
they just got threatened
with lynching
to their face.
It's like
going on 2 AM.
We're the only black folks
in the restaurant,
so we give the only
logical response.
"Yes, sir."
He says,
"Hold on a second."
Turns around really slowly to
put down these gargantuan bags
of all sort of
obesity-ness...
(audience chuckling)
on the table and,
right then, my guys,
two of them are
football players,
and they kind of--
(tapping fingers)
go like this on the table--
(tapping fingers)
So I turn around
and I look,
and they with their
eyes direct me
to the fact we can no longer
see his dominant hand,
and they mouth, "Let us
take care of him."
And I said...
And they gave me
this look like,
"Respectfully,
you're from California
"by the way of
New York City.
"Let us take
care of him."
And so, I seize in the last bit
of positional power I had.
I slap my hand on
the table, and I said,
"Fellas, let's just hear
what the man has to say."
And they gave me
this look like...
"If he shoots us and
he doesn't get to you,
"our moms are coming
for you next."
(audience laughing)
And he's turning around,
and we're all in slow motion
watching his hand,
and he says-- and I'm just
gonna use the words
'cause that's
what he said,
"Well, I'm so proud
of you boys!
"Man, if I'd been born a
nigger in this crazy state,
"I'd be mad
as heck, too!"
Okay, he didn't
say "heck."
(scattered laughing)
This man has called
us "boy" twice.
He's called us
"nigger" once.
And yet, our heart's
beating a little faster.
We're flushed, and we
think we might be in love.
(audience laughing)
'Cause apparently,
he's taking a moment
just to think about
what it must be like
to be black in
Mississippi
when they are fixing to turn
your college into a prison.
"I'm so proud
of you boys!
"If you need anything,
if you need money,
"if you need somebody for
that crazy march of yours,
"if you need a car,
you come see me!
"I own the used car lot
right down Highway 49."
That night, we slept
a little easier.
The next morning
we woke up,
we did what good
organizers do--
we debriefed
the day before,
we talked about
the lessons learned,
and we decided that we had
made one mistake that day.
That we had assumed--
we assumed that we knew who
are friends absolutely were
and who they
absolutely were not.
They absolutely were anybody
at an Earth Day rally.
Turned out to be
about 90% right.
It was that last one where
they tried to lynch us
that almost got us...
or at least they
chanted about it.
And we assumed that we
knew who are friends
absolutely weren't,
and we were 100% wrong.
We knew it absolutely would
not be the old white dude
at Waffle House
at 2 o'clock in the morning,
staring at us
and not smiling,
and calling us "boy"
on top of that.
And so, we figured
we'd do two things.
One was they were
absolutely going to get down
to his used car lot
and get his money
and tell him how
to get to the march
'cause I wasn't taking our count
of white liberals for granted,
and I was making 85 bucks a week
and I intended to get paid.
And secondly, from
that day forward,
we would talk to
anybody and everybody
who would listen to us as if
we knew they were inclined
to be our ally
from the beginning
with the optimism
and the conviction
that we spoke to
a black church,
we'd speak to
a white church.
If we spoke to a Democrat, we
would speak to a Republican.
Because this wasn't just
anti-black or anti-civil rights
or the ideas of a
wayward Republican.
This was
un-American.
Those schools are
still open to this day
and that prison
was never built.
(applause)
If I had more time, I would
tell you another story
about a group of
young people.
A young organizer--
I'll just summarize it.
I want to get into
the lessons learned.
We can get in
some questions.
Young organizer--
you know, this country,
until-- I don't know--
somewhere in the last decade,
we still permitted ourselves
to execute children,
to sentence children
to death row.
They would be adults by the
time that we'd executed them
'cause our legal
process is complex
but the day they got
their death sentence,
it would be for a crime
that they could be as young
as 16 years old.
In some instances, 14.
You go back far enough to when
the protests first started,
literally, you can find
them executing girls
during the
Salem witch trials.
And there was a young
lady named Jotaka Eaddy
who, at age 16, decided to
form a coalition against this
in Johnsonville,
South Carolina.
Literally made up
of the NAACP chapter,
which is almost
all black,
and the Pro-Life Club,
that was almost all white...
and as conservative as
the NAACP was liberal.
And using
that strategy
at a moment when the American
anti-death penalty movement
was about to lose
and miss our window
to abolish the
juvenile death penalty.
When we had taken
a list of 20 states
where we thought we
could change laws
and lost battles in 17, and we
had to get three more states,
because you see, in American,
to outlaw a punishment,
it cannot be just
cruel OR unusual,
as it is in England.
No, see, in America--
Harvard wasn't one--
I'm just ripping
on Harvard tonight,
but Harvard wasn't
once what it is now.
You know, it was just a
little school in Salem
and apparently they didn't train
people as good as they do now,
and so, some Harvard grad--
I guarantee you--
was the one who, when
drafting the Bill of Rights,
substituted the word
"and" for the word "or."
British common law--
"cruel or unusual punishments"
are outlawed.
In America, if torture is
popular, it's constitutional
because our
standard is "and."
It must be "cruel
and unusual."
"Cruel" had already
been established
in the case of
juvenile death penalty.
A few years earlier,
the Supreme Court
had outlawed the
death penalty to the group
they backwardly refer to
as the "mentally retarded,"
when they could just have said,
"people with very low IQs,"
because they said,
A, it was cruel,
because it was like
executing a child,
so they had established
executing children was cruel,
but they said,
B, it was unusual
because a majority of states
now oppose the practice.
We had 23 states
opposing the practice
of sentencing
juveniles to death.
We had to
get it to 26.
We had targeted
20 states.
We'd only--
we'd lost in 17,
and then, we sent a young lady--
the one who had founded
that chapter, the largest
student anti-death penalty group
in the country
when she was 16.
She was now 23.
By merging a pro-life
group on campus
and a NAACP chapter into
a single-issue coalition.
We sent her to the
last three states.
South Dakota, Wyoming,
and New Hampshire,
and she won the battle
in every single state
without NAACP chapters
because they don't exist
in any of those states
in the high schools
by substituting Amnesty
International chapters
and teaming up with
pro-life groups.
And the lesson
we learned there...
was really taught to her
and us by those students.
You see, the lobbyists
had said--
you know, so
if you will,
she has this little
light she'd lit
when she was 16
when she decided
she would abolish the juvenile
death penalty before she died
and that light only
showed her two steps,
which was convince
the local NAACP group
and combine with
the pro-life group.
That's as far as they
got in South Carolina.
So she gets to South Dakota,
takes those two steps,
and students there go,
"What do we do now?"
She goes, "Well, this is
as far as I've ever gotten."
They said, "Well, what do the
lobbyists say we should do?"
She said,
"The lobbyists say
"we shouldn't focus
on these politicians
"because they are
always against us
"and we shouldn't focus on those
because they are always with us.
"No, we need to focus on
the ones in the middle
"and convert them
to our cause."
Students says, "Okay, how has
that worked for the lobbyists?"
"Well, they've lost 17
out of 17 states."
"Did they have
everything they need?"
"Oh yeah, no, most
of these were done
"by the wealthiest law
firms in the country."
"So what you're saying is
that strategy doesn't work?"
Yeah, I guess that
strategy doesn't work.
"Okay, well, why don't
we try a new one?"
"Well, what's that?"
she says.
"Why don't we talk to
every single member
"of the state
legislature?"
Brilliant strategy-- worked
three states in a row.
Turns out there's
no old politician
who didn't start out as
some kind of young idealist...
and when confronted
by young idealists
in their own party
and the other party
who are totally
on the same page,
they really would skip that
debate if they possibly could,
and so the opposition was
instantly de-motivated.
Our side was-- felt like
the cavalry had arrived,
that the wind
was at their back,
and the sun was in their face,
and they were emboldened,
and the folks in
the middle, well,
they are just
like most people.
They move towards light,
just like squid.
They move towards light.
And seeing the light
that was over here
on our side with all
these young people
so excited, conservative
and liberal agreeing,
and on this side, they were
just sort of depressed.
Man, we gotta
argue with that?
They moved to our side
and we won every state.
Now, what do these
lessons tell us
about fighting
mass incarceration?
Stopping a prison
in Mississippi from--
sorry, a college
from becoming a prison
and a prison from being
erected all together.
How did we do that?
We talked to everybody
without any assumptions
about the righteousness
of our cause
and we converted
more Mississippians
than anybody thought
was possible.
We were literally co-opted
the editorial departments
of newspapers that had
supported segregation
as recently as
the early 1980s...
late 1970s.
That's the first lesson.
Your cause is just
and righteous.
You don't assume.
You simply
approach people
with a sense of optimism and
clarity about your cause,
and you give them the
opportunity to join.
The second one taught
to us by Jotaka Eaddy
has turned out to be the
transformative strategy
of the American criminal
justice reform movement,
which is that you go to
the activists on the left
and you go to the
activists on the right,
and you squeeze
everybody in the middle.
As President
of the NAACP,
I and the president
of Texas NAACP
teamed up with
Tea Party members
brought together by
a Latina activist
named Ana Yanez-Correa and
her brilliant organization
the Texas Criminal
Justice Coalition,
and together, we convinced
Governor Rick Perry
to pass-- I'm sorry,
to sign 50 out of 52
progressive criminal justice
bills that we passed.
Prior to that push, Texas
had never shut down
a prison in
its history.
They built new ones and
refurbished old ones.
Because of that push,
they are now on track
to quickly shut
down 11 prisons.
(applause)
Thank you.
(applause)
And that is the
reason to be hopeful.
And understand the consensus
right now is fragile.
There are points
of disagreement.
Those are pretty sturdy.
The liberal activists
oppose the death penalty.
The Republican
activists are for it.
The liberal activists
oppose private prisons.
The Republican
activists are for it.
But literally, when there
are 10 points on a paper,
there is only two points
of disagreement.
There are eight
of agreement,
and we'd be fool to let--
fools, to let the perfect
get in the way
of the good
and let the two
overshadow the eight.
We'll knock out the eight
and then we can bicker
about the other two.
And so, Newt Gingrich
calls it "Right on Crime."
In the civil rights community,
we call it "Smart on Crime."
But 80% of it
is identical.
In fact, if you go online
to the NAACP website,
there is a report
on that issue
of prisons eating the lunch
of public universities
called "Misplaced
Priorities,"
and you will find
also, next to it,
a two-page letter of
endorsement, full-throated,
from Newt Gingrich
endorsing the entire thing.
But the other part
of it is that--
and I wanna get to
the conversation
we started back in the
beginning about the impact.
The other part of it is
that we have to recognize
that every single
young adult in America
pays a price, and
I mean a real price--
I mean, one, you can
measure either in debt
or in earning
potential squandered
because of mass
incarceration.
And listen
to me here--
again, we've already
established
we have the most
incarcerated young people
on the planet of
any and every color.
Black, brown, white, red,
yellow, you name it.
One.
So that means that,
in every community,
there is a group of kids
who are in prison
who don't need
to be in prison
because if they were
in a different country,
the things they
were in prison for
we would not-- they
would not be imprisoned
in the first place,
like drug addiction.
That's one group
that's paying a price.
Now the other group is
kind of invisible to us.
It's college students.
This generation of
college students
are the most indebted
college students
in the history
of America.
The ones most in fear that they
have just simply gone to college
to be duped into becoming
indentured servants.
They are also the
ones most likely
to default on
their student loans
and then, with probably one
of the most perverse twists,
the federal government
intentionally
profits off their
student loans.
(applause)
If they are at a public
university, it's clear.
See, public universities or
community colleges like this one
typically don't have
big endowments.
I mean, your president can
correct me if I'm wrong.
You guys may
have like a wonderful
Harvard-like endowment.
I don't think so.
So what happens is when the
state subsidy goes down,
tuition goes up.
Tuition goes up,
student loans go up.
Student loans go up,
default goes up.
All those things go up
and dreams get crushed.
But if you are at a
private university,
even if there is
a big endowment,
private universities
generally informally peg
what they charged for tuition
to the public universities.
They are comfortable always
being sorta "X" percentage
above the public
universities.
So when public
university tuitions
have an unprecedented spike,
private universities
who may be motivated
by other reasons,
including greed,
at the very least
have a cover.
Well, look what's
happening at UC-Berkeley.
Look what's happening at
the community college.
Okay, now, we have
two groups of students.
You say, "Well,
what about the ones
"who aren't in prison
and aren't in college?"
Well, those students--
that group just gets bigger
and bigger and bigger
as young people decide,
"I just can't afford
to go to college,"
because they're--
they're most terrified
about becoming the
group, you know--
after prison, the thing
most terrifies them
is that, "Maybe
I'll start college,
"maybe I can't
afford to finish
"and then, I'll have
the debt and no degree.
"And I'll be working
for nothing
"and yet paying the
debt of somebody
"who should be working
for a lot more
"because I invested in
three years of school
"but I couldn't
afford the fourth."
We have to--
we love our children.
All of these are
all our children.
We have to get back
to a place in America
where we are
more motivated
by our fear-- excuse me,
we're more motivated
by our love of
our own children
than our fear of
somebody else's kids,
and the only way I
would offer to get there
is to admit to ourselves that
they are all our children,
that we are all Americans...
(applause)
they are all American children.
(applause)
And therefore, we must
fight for all of them
as if they are our very own.
(applause)
(applause)
I'm pleading with
you tonight.
May seem orthogonal but I
guarantee you it's spot on...
which is this week--
not this month.
And certainly
don't take a year.
If you don't know what
you are fighting for,
if you don't know what you
are going to accomplish
before you die,
write everything that
really ticks you off
down on a
sheet of paper.
Cross off the things that
are clearly less significant
than other things,
and if you can't figure
out what to fight for,
flip it over and write those
two, or three, or four,
or five, or six,
or twelve things,
and then
draw a circle
and whatever is most in
the middle of that circle,
let that be it.
'Cause the only better way
to figure out the perfect thing
to change on
this planet...
is to figure out something
that's pretty good.
Win it faster than anybody
thinks is possible
and get the chance
to change it again.
But the other thing
that happens
when you have something
that you're fighting for
is you understand
the value of allies.
Other people
come to you--
they may be environmentalists
who show up to support you
in fighting for
voting rights.
They may be the pro-life group
that reads the doctrine of life
and figures out, "Oh, my gosh,
we cannot be pro-life
"and be pro-death
penalty,"
and shows up and
helps you abolish
the juvenile
death penalty.
And in seeing the
value of allies,
you decide yourself you have
to become an ally, as well.
And that's when we
get really powerful.
People often have this
wisdom, which is...
the state capital,
Congress--
please don't take on too
many controversial issues
in one year.
"After we get to this,
after we get to that,
"next year we'll handle this,
next year we'll handle that.
"Five years from now,
maybe you can hope.
"If everything holds together,
we'll get to your issue."
In Maryland, in 2012,
after watching the country
go through what it had
gone through in 2011,
Tea Party swept into
power and was attacking
all of our rights
at once.
The progressives-- we
regained our bearings,
and on our agenda was
pass marriage equality,
abolish the
death penalty,
pass the Dream Act, pass
sensible gun safety reform,
and expand voting
rights protections.
And the old wise men--
and it's usually men
who come to rain
on your parade--
the old wise men came and
said, "Please don't do that.
"We won't win
anything.
"It's too much controversy to
take on in one calendar year."
In one 12-month
period, rather.
Fall of 2012,
spring of 2013.
And we went back
and we talked
to some of the young
activists about it
and the young
activists just said,
"(stuttering indistinctly)."
Like, "We don't
want to hear that.
"Let's explain
something to you.
"If we don't fight
for the Dream Act,
"we're gonna lose
these folks,
"and if we don't fight
for marriage equality,
"we're gonna lose
those folks,
"and if we don't fight to
abolish the death penalty,
"we're gonna lose the
hardcore civil rights folks.
"So Mr. Jealous, we'd advise
you, we'd plead with you.
"Please just go back
to them and tell them
"that we have a
different strategy.
"It's called the 'Motto of
the Three Musketeers.'
"All for one,
and one for all."
Because in a democracy,
numbers matter,
and when we all
come together,
they all add up
right and we win.
And that year, we
won marriage equality,
and we abolished
the death penalty,
and we passed
the Dream Act,
and we expanded
voting rights,
and yes, we even got
pushed through...
gun safety reform.
Please, figure out what
you are fighting for.
Please, join up with others
and be good allies
in their struggle,
and please make sure
that one of the struggles
you are in an ally to
is the struggle to reform our
nation's criminal justice codes
as quickly
as possible.
It should be unacceptable
that the governor of Georgia
can reform his
criminal justice code
but the governor
of California won't.
That the governor
of Texas
will reform his
criminal justice code,
but Delaware wants
to move slow.
This is America.
We are the home
of the free.
We are the land of the free
and the home of the brave.
And in this land of the free
and the home of the brave,
we are literally
destroying the dreams
of all of our children
by our addiction to fear.
Let us be a nation
of courage.
Let us be a nation
of freedom.
Let us be a country that
destroys this barrier
like we destroyed segregation,
like we destroyed slavery.
Thank you
and God bless.
(applause)
So you literally had to do
as a cost-benefit analysis.
I would like to say like
sympathy or compassion
is all it takes,
you know?
But that's not the
way it works,
and your best allies
will typically be
the fiscal conservatives
on the Republican side,
who, when they see
that $1 invested
in educating an inmate
behind bars takes--
sorry, saves us $5 in
future incarceration costs,
we'll invest.
And then, you can go to
the students and say,
again, the reason that
tuition keeps going up
is because cost of
incarceration keeps going up,
and one of the ways we
can get it under control
is we can begin to
educate folks behind bars.
There are other things-- I
mean, whether it's conservative
or liberal prison
ministries do a great job
of kind of humanizing,
getting people connected,
you know, things like the
prison university project
that gets professors and
students behind bars,
helps people really understand
the potential that's there
but, given the crisis
our states are in,
just understanding the
brass tacks, you know?
In other words,
educating prisoners
is one of the fastest
ways to cut prison cuts,
cutting prison costs is one of
the best ways to free up money
for subsidizing
public universities
and lowering tuition.
I think it's proven to
the most effective argument
in state capitals.
>> Great, thank you.
>> Thank you.
(applause)
>> I'm never gonna get
used to hearing myself
at the same time,
but anyway...
earlier on, you
talked about how--
(sighing)
like I said, this
keeps throwing me off,
about--
>> Take your time, bro,
take your time.
>> Sorry.
>> It's all right, man.
Just take your time.
>> About the fact that slavery
is technically still legal
if it's criminals who are
properly sentenced and so forth.
Given how there's
an increasing number
of companies that use
prison labor on some level,
how much of an impact
do you feel that has
as far as making
it more difficult
to actually end
mass incarceration?
>> There are lots of
perverse incentives...
and you have
identified one of them.
So private prison labor--
the fact you can use slave labor
to manufacture almost
anything in America,
if you cut a deal
with the right warden
or the right
Department of Corrections
is one of them.
I'd say, even more pervasive
are the kickbacks--
the kickbacks that
Mignon Clyburn
of the Federal Communications
Commission has targeted,
that happened on
prison phone calls.
So you know, when you are
calling home from behind bars,
the question is, are they
charging you 60 cents per minute
or $3.50 per minute?
I'm an investor of
a company, Kapor Capital,
and a company that
has cut the costs
of calling home from
prison by about 90%,
by competing
with this guys,
but that's a whole
other story--
but the typical way that works--
the reason it's so high--
so I go a jail in Texas,
you might pay $3.50 a minute.
A call home from Dad
will cost you $35.
A family that might subsisting
on $12,000 a year
is two students may not--
whose children may not
have enough food,
have food and security,
and may eat most of
their meals at school,
and therefore may be almost
starving every weekend.
That $35
matters a lot.
The reason it's so high
is that for most jails,
and most prisons, and most
Departments of Corrections
are the number one factor
in who gets the contract
to operate the
jails and the prison
is how much they will kickback
to the local system.
Then, what happens
is that Western Union--
and I'll name
them by name
because they are
nefarious in this way.
Well, they said, "Well,
most of these people,
"they don't have
banking accounts,
"and so they are gonna have
to pay their bills in cash,
"and so we want the
exclusive contract
"for them to pay their
bill in cash with us,"
and for that, because
your phone company
is getting squeezed
by the prison system
including-- that's
insisting on kickbacks.
We'll give you, the
phone company a kickback,
off our fee, and then they'll
charge a huge percentage,
half of which will go
to the phone company,
half of which will
comes to Western Union
and gives them
profits.
Finally, the other sort
of perverse incentive,
if you will, for maintaining
high incarceration rates
or what private prisons
are doing
where they cut
deals with states
guaranteeing them a
percentage, if you will--
a bed count percentage that
at least 90% of the beds
will always
be filled.
At least 90% of the beds
will always be filled.
So we don't just have a
military industrial complex
that warps our
foreign policy.
We have a prison
industrial complex
that warps our
domestic policy,
and we all have to fight it
and you have to look.
And that's why
it's so important
that Hillary Clinton has
shifted her position.
She started off her
campaign accepting money
from the private
prison lobby.
If you want to know why
progressive activists
were so upset, that's
why they were so upset.
Thank you.
(applause)
She now longer takes
that (indistinct),
and we're very happy
that she doesn't.
Are there any
other questions?
Thank you, guys, it's
been a real pleasure
and honor to be here.
Thank you very much.
(applause)
Oh, wait, we have
one more question.
We have one more
question-- yep?
>> Sorry, Ben, I know you are
trying to get out of here.
>> It's all right.
>> I'll be brief.
So I loved--
at the end,
you talked about the
"Three Musketeers" motto.
>> Yeah.
>> One for all,
all for one,
etcetera, etcetera.
But I've also heard
of the argument
against trying to find
the intersectionality
between the plights of blacks
and the marriage equality group
and all these different groups
is that sometimes it diminishes
the strength of
your movement.
I mean, I've heard
people argue--
for example, right here
in Grand Rapids--
I saw the Black Lives
Matter chapter
try to focus on Black
Trans Lives Matter
and people were outraged
because they felt like,
you know, the LGBT community
may get equality,
but they didn't make anything
better for black people.
>> No, that's right.
>> And so,
I always wonder what is
the argument for that,
when you feel like we
should all work together
to just make the world
a general better place
when we all are expecting
different outcomes,
different pieces of legislation,
different results, and so--
>> Sure.
>> Just wanted to
know about that.
>> So again, what I was
suggesting, if you will,
is a connected mosaic
like a puzzle,
where everybody has
their distinct identity,
their distinct agenda and
we play different roles.
So on the death penalty
in Maryland, the NAACP led.
On marriage equality,
we were number two
behind the Human
Rights Campaign.
But the LGBT activists
were so appreciative of us
showing up that
they shifted votes
to support us on
the death penalty.
When you play
different roles,
then you avoid becoming
a multi-issue coalition.
Multi-issue coalitions
can exclude people.
They agree with
you on four things,
but they disagree
on one thing,
and so they won't join
the coalition at all.
What we say is that
you create an alliance
of single-issue
coalitions,
where the expectation
on any group
is that, if you will, they're
supporting at least one
of the other groups,
preferably more,
and that's the math
that adds up.
And also, I'll just kind of
close on this for a second
because I wanna talk about
sort of the urgency of this
and you touched on
something from me.
because, see, we in the
black civil rights movement
have a mandate that comes down
to us from Frederick Douglass,
but ultimately
Frederick Douglass
was also one of the definers
of the modern Republican party,
one of the definers of the
broader civil rights movement
of which the black civil
rights movement is a part...
and if you only read
one speech this year
by a 19th century orator...
(audience chuckling)
and you have
to read them
in the way that Toni Morrison
defines "reading,"
which is you may have to go
over one line multiple times
before you understand
its meaning.
Read this speech.
It's called 
"Our Composite Nationality"
by Frederick Douglass.
"Our Composite Nationality"
from Frederick Douglass.
In that speech, he
says a lot of things,
including the fact that
we didn't come against--
and I'm paraphrasing because,
man, you gotta paraphrase
kind of King James speakers
in the 19th century.
He said, "We didn't
come against a war
"to end slavery
in the southeast
"to let you enslave
somebody in the southwest."
He was talking about the
Chinese railroad workers.
This speech was prompted
by his opposition
to the Chinese
Exclusion Act.
The most important thing
that he says in that speech
is he says, "Every nation
has a unique destiny,
"and its destiny is
based on its character,
"and its character is
shaped by its geography,
"and its character is defined
by that nation as its best,
"not its worst."
Charitable words
from a man
who had been
tortured as a slave.
He said, "In the
destiny of America"--
excuse me, then he went on
to talk about geography.
He says, "And its character
is shaped by its geography,
"and our geography is
unique, our geography,
"well, we are bordered by
friendly nations north and south
"and we are connected
by oceans east and west
"to the rest
of the world,
"and therefore, our destiny,
based on our character,
"defined by us
at our best
"and shaped by our
very unique geography"--
and this part is
a direct quote--
"It is to be the
most perfect example
"of the unity and dignity
of the human family
"that the world
has ever seen."
That is a former
slave in the 1870s...
speaking to all of us about
the need to link together
and fight like hell--
there I said it--
and fight like hell to
move our country forward.
Thank you and
God bless.
(applause)
>> So we'll have
a book signing.
