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Jesse Jackson
Civil Rights Leader; President, Rainbow/PUSH Coalition
I was given the most challenging topic: the greatest challenge we face today. The more I thought about it, I thought about a song by Stevie Wonder, "Joy Inside My Tears" – for we are in the face of a long, threatening, dark night, and yet the hope of light must guide us. The darkness cannot be allowed to break our spirits. And, though there are abounding tears, we must not let these forces steal our joy.
I think of the greatest challenge within a certain context. America for 246 years, from 1619 to 1865, had awesome political power and a solid infrastructure, a growing economy, but it was on the backs of Africans being enslaved; it was the slave trade that drove the economy. Two hundred and forty-six years of work without wages was the basis of America's original wealth. We had political and economic authority but we had no moral authority; we were morally bankrupt. Then, after a war, a civil war about two views of America – what America shall we have? who shall we be? who are we? – the Union prevailed, and the Confederates, the states'-righters, lost, and we became, in many ways, a new nation. Not so much when the Emancipation Proclamation was proclaimed, because it was proclaimed without the emancipation. It was the battle of Gettysburg when we became a new nation.
There was the promise after these 246 years of legal slavery – the promise of a "one big tent" America, the promise of shared hope, the promise of shared security, the promise of equal protection under the law – that we would all share a common ground. And the law changed with the 13th Amendment, but the culture reacted and the religious order reacted. So by 1877, with the Tilden-Hayes Compromise, the winner lost and the loser won, and Florida was a pivotal factor in that determination. The devastation for those who faced slavery was that they removed the troops, removed the protection from those who were facing awesome hostility – then another 89 years of legal Jim Crow.
In many ways the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision ended 346 years of legal race supremacy. We think of the period of race supremacy in Germany and the Holocaust and all of the tragedy and pain of that period. We think of the South African apartheid system, and we rose to fight it and finally prevailed, but in our nation, for 346 years, legal race supremacy was the order of the day. The '54 Supreme Court decision ended that 346-year reign of legal race supremacy, and those who profited from it have never stopped resisting to undermine that decision. The idea of a non-racist legal system by law is just 50 years old. The idea of an open, free, fair democracy where all can vote is just 39 years old; so we are really young in the idea of a non-racist legal system. The idea that all Americans can vote is all within this last 50-year frame.
An interesting parallel is that the forces for human rights and civil rights and equal protection prevailed in the '54 Supreme Court decision, led by Thurgood Marshall, and the next year a traumatic event occurred: Emmett Till was lynched. To be sure, he was not the first to be lynched – there had been 8,000 such lynchings between 1877 and 1900 – but something about that moment in time when he was lynched – there was some drama. After several days in the Tallahatchie River, a body riddled with bullets, his mother did a courageous thing: She brought his body back to Chicago and displayed him in an open casket. One hundred thousand people saw his water-marked and bullet-riddled body, and something happened to them. A spirit was born – that has not died yet – out of that, on August 28, 1955. December 1, just three months later: Rosa Parks got on the bus and the sign above the driver's head read, "Coloreds Seat from the Rear and Whites from the Front and Those Who Violate Will Be Punished." She refused to go to the back of the bus and was arrested because she broke the Jim Crow law. Dr. King, a 26-year-old minister, said to her, "Better that we walk in dignity than ride in shame." Someone asked Rosa Parks in subsequent years, Why didn't you just make the adjustment and go to the back of the bus and avoid being arrested? She said, "I thought about Emmett Till and I couldn't go back."
There is this sense of dignity over death. The sense of struggling against the odds, of joy through our tears; it is that special quality of character that advances the human cause. Today the American Dream is under attack: the idea of a "one big tent" America, where all of us with our many persuasions, our many religions and our varying degrees of faith, will live in our faith under the law. There is a rigid ideological division today, and the dream of the "one big tent" America is under attack. The promise of equal protection under the law is under attack.
If I were to ask many people what Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech of 1963 was about, they would say, It's the dream speech. Well, it was not really the dream speech. That was the alliterative poetic climax. He started off by saying, I stand here in the shadows of Lincoln and you promised 100 years ago the Emancipation Proclamation; 100 years later we do not yet have it. From Texas over to Florida up to Maryland, we can't use a single public toilet; you promised. The Congress, with the 13th Amendment; you promised, Supreme Court, you promised. Here we stand today, can't use a single public facility in the South of our country. We are veterans of foreign wars with less privileges on the military bases than Nazi POWs. It is a broken promise. There is a promissory note, a bounced check marked insufficient funds. He said, I dream of a day when the promise will be honored. I dream of a day when my children will go to theme parks and not be limited with access based upon their skin color or their gender or their preference or their religion.
Today the promise is under attack again, in so many ways. We say in almost a trivial way every election, This is the most important election of our lifetime. Well, they're not always that. There is a certain assumption that, whether you are Eisenhower or Adlai Stevenson or whether you are Kennedy or Nixon, there is an assumption that we embrace the premise of the Union, and if we accept the premise of the Union, then we vary in texture more than we do in ideology. No matter who is flying the plane from here to Chicago, or whether the person is black or white or Asian or male or female, they abide by the same rules, so you still get there.
We are, in many ways, back at the challenge: Shall we follow the vision of Jefferson Davis, or the vision of Abraham Lincoln – the vision of the Union, or the vision of states' rights? That's what makes this election the biggest of our lifetime. Right-wing ideological forces are now fighting for a kind of ideological supremacy. That's why they would not go to the World Conference Against Racism in South Africa before 9/11, why they rebuked the Kyoto treaty before 9/11. That narrow ideology – where you start with the conclusion and walk backwards – is what led to the pre-emptive strike. That ideology has driven us into isolation and disgrace. It's antithetical to democracy, antithetical to checks and balances, antithetical to separation of powers. It is driven by narrow ideology, and most of us cannot fit in the tent because there is a kind of fork in the road. We are trapped, squeezed in the fork because there is less room for this broad base of the American people. It is back to Gettysburg. What is our choice? The Union, or is it the states?
The U.S. after the '54 decision gained moral authority. We couldn't have spoken about human rights in Africa or China had we not the '54 Supreme Court decision. We couldn't have challenged the world on democratic governments and the right to vote unless we ourselves passed the '65 Voting Rights Act. Our moral authority is born of the last 50 years of successful struggle by human rights and civil rights organizations. We were trapped on our own perverse use of power. In the Second World War we began to gain some. We were seen by the world as rescuers; now we are seen as invaders and occupiers and conquerors. We are choosing might over right. We are losing something dear. When I went to meet with the president of Sudan to challenge him about the humanitarian crisis – about 1.5 million people will die unless something happens quickly, and we need the U.S. to help – they said, "We don't need your help. Based upon your presence in Iraq you don't have the authority to tell us what to do. You invade and occupy and now you seek to conquer, you bomb thousands and you call it collateral damage, you cannot tell us what to do." If China were to attack Taiwan pre-emptively, we couldn't tell them what to do. We are trading off our moral authority. We are choosing might over right.
Pride Precedes the Fall
The challenges of our time are to overcome the arrogance of power, to overcome the growing North-South gap. At least the black-brown-white gap is illegal. Forty-five million Americans without health insurance is legal. A $1.5 trillion surplus and half of it goes to the top 1 percent. Even when people like Mr. Buffet and Mr. Gates say, We don't need the money, Bush says, You got to have it. The top 1 percent get the money, and rather than reinvest and feed the flower that they rob, they are allowed to go offshore to avoid paying taxes, and then get no-bid contracts and steal – the Enrons, the Halliburtons, MCI/WorldComs. The gap between haves and have-nots is subsidized by government ideology. They believe in a weak central government. That's ideology. They can count; there is no miscalculation. It is an idea that we thought we defeated at the Gettysburg in 1863. We can't address Sudan and Haiti because we don't have the strength to reach beyond the sinking sand of Iraq.
The word poor becomes pejorative. Don't mention the poor, because if they're poor they must have done something to be poor; they're inadequate, they did not do something right. The fact is that poor people work the hardest, with the most risks and are the most vulnerable. They work harder and they make less, because of predators they pay more for less, they live under stress and don't live as long, but to mention the word poor is pejorative. The word liberal is vulgar. Liberal! You are a liberal. You're not fit to run America. We duck the term liberal. America is a liberal idea. America is a generous idea. France for the French and Britain for the British, Australia for the Australians – but America, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." I'll take rejected sons and make them cornerstones. America is a liberal idea.
Pharaoh was the conservative; Moses was the liberal. Those who enslaved masses were the conservatives; the abolitionists were the liberals. Those who deny workers the right to organize were the conservatives; those who fought for the dignity of the workers were the liberals. Those who sought to deny women the right to vote were conservatives; those who affirmed the personhood of women were the liberals. Herod was the conservative; Jesus was the liberal and the liberator. Medical care based upon need, not based upon money; feed the hungry just because they are hungry. By what authority do you stone this woman? And there are among you those who are guilty for throwing the rock. He was a liberal. A liberal. A liberal. The Grinch is not the source of the Christian's faith; Santa Claus is liberal. You can come here and work and get citizenship, you can grow, you can be somebody, you can be here, but you couldn't be where you left. America is a liberal idea. Somehow poor becomes pejorative and liberal becomes nasty. It's a challenge to us to regain our moral authority, to overcome a growing indifference to suffering humanity.
We look today at the kind of reverse Robin Hood: Take from the poor and subsidize the rich. In every state there are more young black men in jail than in college. That's no longer headline material. South Carolina is a classic case – but just a kind of biopsy of this season. Thirty-five percent of the population is African American; prison is 80 percent African American. One hundred and ten thousand blacks are arrested a year over the last six years – that's 110,000 arresters who keep their job, 110,000 calls to lawyers, 110,000 calls to bailiffs, 110,000 court appearances. Thirty-two state prisons and one state college. The largest industry in the state is no longer cotton or textiles. The largest industry is the arrest, processing and maintenance of African Americans. Our challenge today is to not become indifferent to suffering.
Lastly, the black vote is the swing vote. We speak of: 40, 40, 20, go for the center. The center is not the swing vote; the black vote is the swing vote. In 1960, Kennedy was running against Nixon, and Dr. King was in jail 30 days for a traffic ticket. Nixon would not reach out to him. Dr. King's father and many others were Lincoln Republicans. When Nixon would not reach out for him, they switched parties and joined Kennedy. Between this switch and William Dawson in Illinois, Kennedy beat Nixon by 112,000 votes, less than one vote per precinct. They swung the election.
I ran for president in 1984; we put on 2 million new voters. By 1986, the white male that left with Reagan, we didn't get those people back, but what we did get was 2 million new voters. By '86 we regained the Senate, because in North Carolina and Georgia and Louisiana neither candidate had as much as 50 percent of the white vote, but the black vote came alive; it was the swing vote. In '92 and '96, both Bush and Dole got more white votes than Clinton; he got more white, black and brown and he won; it was the swing vote.
In 2000, Bush ultimately became president by 537 votes. But 2.1 million voters were disenfranchised – 1 million black voters were disenfranchised. Why does the right wing target that vote? Because they know it is the swing vote. The extent to which it is free determines the quality of American politics, the extent to which it is oppressed determines the outcome.
While we face the darkness of an incomplete war in Afghanistan and the sinking sands of Iraq; guided missiles and misguided leadership where we have lost lives and lost money and lost our honor; our economy, which has a net loss of jobs in every state, where we are exporting jobs rather than product – the tendency is to become cynical because it is dark. But I close by saying that it's dark but the morning cometh. Hope is our weapon. What makes America great is the right to fight for the right. Help is on the way and hope is in the air. Don't let them break your spirit. We must not let them steal our joy. They can steal votes but not steal our joy, our will to fight back, our resilience and the right to say, Yea, though I walk through the valleys and shadows of death, I fear no evil, Thou art with me, hope is in the air. It's dark, but the morning cometh, hope is in the air. Weeping men duel for a night but I'm not going to cry all night because the morning cometh, joy cometh in the morning, hope is in the air. And if my people will call by name, will humble themselves, friends, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then they will hear from heaven and God will heal their land; a time of healing and hope, and so joy through our tears. Keep hope alive. Let nothing break your spirit nor steal your joy.
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Marwan Muasher
Arianna Huffington
Ben Stein