Transcription
[Applause]
It's my great honor to introduce our keynote speaker, really a person who needs no introduction, but he deserves it: Reverend Dr. William Barber, a true moral leader, a tireless advocate for justice, and a senior fellow at the Kettering Foundation.
Reverend Dr. William Barber is President and Senior Lecturer of Repairers of the Breach. He is a Bishop with the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, an executive board member of the Christian Church Disciples of Christ, and a professor in the practice of public theology and public policy. He is also the founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at the Yale Divinity School.
He is a co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, a national call for moral revival. Yep, we all know it. He is the author of a number of books, including *We Are Called to Be a Movement*, *Revive Us Again*, *Vision and Action in Moral Organizing*, *The Third Reconstruction*, *Moral Mondays*, *Fusion Politics*, and *The Rise of a New Justice Movement*, *Forward Together: A Moral Message for the Nation*, and his newest book, *White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy*.
I've read it cover to cover, and I can tell you it is an amazing book. I'm hoping that Reverend Dr. Barber will tell us a little bit about what he brings to us in this book because it is so, so, so good.
Reverend Dr. Barber served as senior pastor of the Greenleaf Christian Church Disciples of Christ for 30 years and as president of the North Carolina NAACP from 2006 to 2017. He was on the national NAACP board of directors from 2008 to 2020. He is the architect of the Forward Together Moral Movement that gained national acclaim in 2013 with its Moral Monday protests at the North Carolina General Assembly.
In 2015, he established Repairers of the Breach to train communities in moral movement building through the Moral Political Organizing Leadership Institute and Summit trainings. In 2018, he co-anchored the relaunch of the Poor People's Campaign, a national call for moral revival.
He is a highly sought-after speaker. I can tell you that he has said yes to me more than once when I have asked him to share his talents. Just last week, when we were in Washington for the legislative week put on by the Congressional Black Caucus, and again this week, they bring him all the way to Dayton, Ohio, to share with us some of his thoughts at a challenging time for us here in the state of Ohio as we think about our fellow brothers and sisters in Springfield and also as we think about the challenges of our nation.
Let us welcome him. He will be coming up to the podium. All right, let us welcome him, ladies and gentlemen, the Reverend Dr. William Barber.
Thank you.
That's my book. Is this your...? Yeah, we can give it. I'll give it to you afterwards. Okay, got it.
Let's thank God for our CEO, wow, and her willingness to share her stories. I'm a reader of biographies and autobiographies, particularly looking at the backstories—not just looking at people where they are, but where they have come through.
Let us pray. Gracious God, Eternal One, however you name you, come to us. We thank you. We know that we can do nothing without your spirit, so help us and hold us, we ask. Amen.
I am deeply humbled to be here and want you all to know that on Sunday at 2:00, we are going to Springfield to have a prayer vigil with clergy. I don't know if you all have an email listing for this group, but if I can get the press release to somebody, then people can be sent it so that you can join us.
We're going to be meeting with the Haitian community by invitation, as Jews, Muslims, Christians, people of faith, Unitarians, and others who are coming together to stand in prayer and to stand in moral protest of what we see happening right here, and not just in Springfield, but in so many ways that I want to talk about today.
I'm so thankful for the Poor People's Campaign here in Ohio and all of my dear friends on your panel this morning. I'm just honored to be here, even in these trying times. I think some of us must decide, particularly with our age and our graying hair, that we must have been born for this time. God's letting us hang around for such a moment as this.
I want to tell you an American story today, a story that you don't often hear. If you don't hear it, you will actually say something that is probably one of the most untrue statements you could make, and that is, "We've never seen anything like this before. Things are worse than they've ever been."
If you make that statement, you actually undermine your ability to know that one scholar said what we see right now is often, in some ways, a repeat of what we've seen in the past. Part of what we have to do is understand the past—both what happened and how people responded—to understand our role in this particular moment.
So I want to talk about reconstruction and resurrection, not deconstruction and insurrection. Those are always the choices before us in this experiment called American democracy. America is a democracy that has needed a lot of work throughout its existence because, often, as one preacher said, America has had a high blood pressure of creeds but an anemia of deeds.
So over and over and over again, each succeeding generation has had to engage in some form of reconstructing the country, the nation, and resurrecting our deepest ideals over and over again because of the role of division, the role of classism, and racism that have played a constant role in trying to deconstruct our written desire.
For instance, we said in the Constitution, one writer says it was the finger of God that was really at work in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Because it wasn't just the men who were there, but notice I said women. It wasn't just landowning men because at that time, white non-landowning men couldn't vote either.
But they would not have written some things that were written because they actually wrote into the Constitution a way to change it, which says that the finger of God was at work, in my estimation, because they knew when they were writing some of this stuff it was wrong—or at least God knew, the Divine knew.
So we wrote, "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union." Right there is a key that they knew we were not perfect. It was a confession from the beginning.
"In order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States."
I notice they use the language which is the watchword of this democracy, which is whenever you hear a politician or someone wanting to lead us stand up and say, "I, I, I can do this, I can fix this," they have just violated the first principle of our Constitution.
Because the watchword is "we," it's not "I." In fact, before the phrase about moving forward became popular in the current news cycle, Repairers of the Breach brought to the Poor People's Campaign a phrase: "Forward Together."
You see how they know it? I have to say "Forward Together," right? Because we recognize that the great watchword, the great hope of this democracy is not what I can do, but what we can do when we work together, stand together, struggle together.
Our Declaration of Independence had some high and lofty hopes. Actually, the Declaration of Independence declared that reconstruction and change is a necessity of citizenship and a necessity of democracy itself.
The Declaration of Independence actually says that there has to be, in every generation, a group of people who are willing to reconstruct things when this nation gets off course.
Listen to these words: "That to secure these rights—what rights? Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed."
"That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people, it is the duty of the people to alter it or abolish it and to institute new government."
Right in the Declaration of Independence, we are instructed that a part of our citizenry is not to moan and cry and say, "Oh Lord, what can we do? Oh, it's so bad." No, a part of our moral, politically moral function as citizens is when there are forms of government and policies that violate the fundamental principle of life, liberty, and happiness for everybody.
We are called to either alter it or abolish it, but never to apathetically accept it. Our national hymn even says that.
Listen to this line: "Oh beautiful for pilgrim feet, whose stern impassioned stress a thoroughfare of freedom beat across the wilderness. America! America! God mend thine every flaw."
Right in that national hymn, there is a prayer that we will constantly be working on our flaws as a nation, that we will not live in some weird place of American exceptionalism that doesn't need any kind of correction.
"God mend thine every flaw." John J. Chapman once wrote, talking about the development of American history, he said, "Let us consider that the first 50 years of our national history, there was never a moment during this time when the slavery issue was not a sleeping serpent underneath the table of every conversation."
He said, "In the first 50 years of our history, the issue of slavery lay coiled under the table during the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and it poisoned every consideration from our Declaration of Independence in 1776 to the start of the Civil War in 1861."
Slavery posed a fundamental contradiction to our American identity, and the poison continued to flow in the veins of the nation. We said on the one hand, "All men are created equal," and yet at the same time, we allowed slavery.
Then he says, "Unable to resolve differences over slavery, our founding 'quote unquote' fathers avoided mentioning the word in our Constitution."
This is how, in the American story, we have fooled ourselves. Slavery is not in the Constitution, and yet it was protected by law. Race was a created reality. It was designed not because somebody disliked people, and as I am Kimman said, it wasn't that somebody disliked people and then decided to write laws.
It was that they looked at the function of the democracy and how could they get free labor and decided that they would use race as a way to place laws on top of people that only applied to them and their degradation for the purpose of taxes and the purpose of representation in Congress.
You know why I'm so against any law that's written to oppress people? Whether it's a law written to oppress the LGBT community, it's because, as an African American, and I'm also Native American, I'm Tuscarora, and part of my family is Caucasian.
But when I'm stopped at night by the cops, I'm clear that I'm African American. I know what happens whenever you codify discrimination. That's why I have to stand up against it.
When I see somebody wanting to write a law against women or a law against the LGBT community, I say, "Why are you involved as a black man, as a preacher?" Because I historically know that in this nation, when we codify discrimination, it can take you 250 years of slavery, 100 years of Jim Crow, 400 years, and you still can't get it out of your system.
That is why we have to stand against the codification of discrimination and unequal treatment against anybody. Chapman said slavery and division of...
And you know what was the basis of slavery? You know, you can find this. I teach at a university, Yale University, that has had to do a study called Yale and Slavery because Yale was founded by slave owners.
The first ten trustees were all slave owners. I tell Yale and the folks we need to apologize to Southerners because folk have said that slavery was just a Southern issue.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. There were four signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution from Yale, all were slave owners. The mayor of New Haven, who was a Yale graduate, blocked the development of the first HBCU that would have been developed in New Haven by white abolitionists and black people.
They came together and put up $20,000 to develop an HBCU, and they said, "No, no, no, no, no." Yale early on was supported by the rum trade and the Caribbean slave trade, which was the worst of the slave trade because it was in the part of the triangle in the Caribbean where slaves were broken before they were brought to the mainland of America.
It was in New Haven that Amistad, the ship, showed up, and the people on the ship got their freedom, not because the courts agreed that they were human beings, but the courts agreed they were property, and the wrong person was holding them as property.
But if you go in the stacks and look at the writings of Jonathan Edwards, who led the First Great Awakening but who was also deeply involved as an apologist for slavery, you start finding out what was the basis of this division of race.
Race being created, and there were five things. The first of them is sick sociology. Sick sociology suggests that some people, we can be around each other, but somebody has to be up and somebody has to be down.
Then bad biology—that is, that skin color determines brain size. Then evil economics—that is, the end justifies the means. So if the end is money, it doesn't matter how you make the money.
Then political pathology, and that is when every decision that you make considers how do we hold on to this division, how do we hold on to this system.
But here's the one that we don't deal with enough and why so much division around race persists: it is heretical ontology, and that is the notion that God intended it to be like this.
So that racism is not merely a political issue; it is a religious issue. For some people, racism is their religion. Division is their religion. Hate is their religion. Tearing people down is their religion, and racism is not just against black people; it is against democracy itself.
[Applause]
And so reconstruction is what we call the earnest attempt to build a multiethnic democracy in America. But let's walk through this story of America from the perspective of reconstruction versus deconstruction.
Let me take a moment, if you will. Let's turn this into a classroom, and I'm going to lecture for a minute.
We had a civil war. 600,000 people died. It lasted four years. Don't ever forget that America went to war over division, over race. And you can't ever forget the connection between race and class.
America went to war, but I don't know if you know that the white slave owners passed legislation to keep their sons out of the war. They said that if you owned so many slaves, your son didn't have to go to war.
So it was in the war that many poor white people figured out they were being used, and that factors into some of the reconstruction later on when poor whites and poor blacks come together after the Civil War to reconstruct society.
Now, by 1860, you should know, you can never separate race from class. People ask me, "Is it race or is it class?" I say it is, in this democracy, you can never forget that by 1860, two of every three of the relatively few Americans whose wealth surpassed $100,000 lived in the South.
They lived below the Mason-Dixon line. New York at that time had fewer millionaires than Mississippi. South Carolina was the richest state in the Union because of Charleston and because of the port there.
The source of Southern wealth was staple crops like cotton produced by enslaved men, women, and children for world markets. The world markets came through the South, and so matchless were the profits that more money was invested in slaves than in industry and railroads.
You have to know this history to know some of the struggles we still see today. When they first became citizens following the ratification of the 13th Amendment, African Americans joined hands with whites in the North and in the South who were willing to see one another as allies.
Within the first four years after the Civil War, white and black alliances controlled every state house in the South. Did you know that? That within four years after the Civil War, white and black fusion coalitions controlled every state house in the South?
Together, they elected new leaders, many of them African Americans, many of them former slaves. Almost all the Southern legislatures were controlled by either a predominantly black alliance or a strong interracial fusion coalition.
And there were forces that said, "We can't have this." Every one of the states, by 1868-1869, rewrote their constitutions.
Listen to how black and white people coming together in the South rewrote the Constitution of North Carolina. This is what it said in 1868: "We hold these truths to be self-evident." This is the preamble: "That all persons"—notice persons, not men—"are endowed by their creator with certain and inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, the enjoyment of the fruit of their own labor, and the pursuit of happiness."
What is interesting is that language was put in the Constitution by an African Methodist Episcopal Zion bishop and a Congregationalist from Ohio that had moved to North Carolina. This is the language of 1868.
Imagine if that was the way our Constitution read today. The 13th Amendment was passed. These are the amendments that saved America. Without the 13th Amendment, the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment, we would not have even the America we have today.
The 13th Amendment ended slavery. The 14th Amendment said equal protection under the law for all citizens. Nope, it's not what it says. Equal protection under the law for all persons, whether you're a citizen or not.
That's why I struggle with folk who say, "Well, we have illegal aliens, and they shouldn't..." Wait a minute, wait a minute. The Constitution says that once you are on this soil, you are provided equal protection under the law, regardless of your immigration status.
You're not supposed to be lying on Haitians or lying on Mexicans or lying on anybody or mistreating people. You're not supposed to have a broken immigration system. You're supposed to fix it because you're not supposed to just use immigrants to make money, and then when they finish making your money, you want to throw them away.
That's not biblical, nor is it constitutional. I tremble for this nation when I think that even God, Jesus said that the way nations would be judged when all is said and done, all is said and done, I'm a preacher.
I won't be judged by this cross. I won't be judged by this robe. I won't be judged by the size of the church. The nation, the government will be judged by these: "When I was hungry, did you feed me? When I was naked, did you clothe me? Watch this: When I was an immigrant, did you welcome me?"
These fusion coalitions in the 1800s, between 1865 and the 1870s, built the first public schools. They rewrote state constitutions. They began the process of labor rights.
Do you know black and white people were working together in labor unions in Birmingham, Alabama, in the late 1800s? The Knights of Labor went to the South. But about four years into this experiment of the first reconstruction, it faced a powerful immoral opposition.
You have to understand that opposition then to understand some of the struggles we're having now. Many of the former Confederates saw black citizenship and fusion interracial alliances as inherently illegitimate.
So they organized the Ku Klux Klan to first terrorize white people. That was the role of the Klan: first to terrorize white people who were working with black people.
There was a political group over in Indiana. There was a time when the Klan ran the government in Indiana. They were the biggest political power block in the country. It was about power. It was about deconstruction.
They attacked white leaders. They attacked Jewish leaders working with black folk. They attacked black leaders, and so-called extremists began.
They also, at the time, started wailing against taxes. The whole issue of cutting taxes began to start when tax money was used to provide public schools for black and white children.
We got to know this history. All the argument got cut, "Tax, cut taxes." It was designed to say disable, disembody the government so that the government cannot carry out reconstruction.
Huh? Reconstruction, deconstruction went on through the state governments. They wanted to keep fusion coalitions. Somebody say fusion coalitions.
They didn't want to expand opportunity. They did not want an enlargement of democracy. They didn't want black men voting. They didn't want people who didn't own land to vote.
All of this stuff changed with the 15th Amendment. It didn't change for women yet—that's the 19th Amendment. But for black men and women, men who didn't own land and white men who didn't own land, they owe their participation in government to the 15th Amendment.
And there were forces that did not want people voting. When you hear people today saying, "There was a politician recently say he didn't want everybody voting," he's harking back to this philosophy of deconstruction.
The enemies of the first reconstruction, guess what they also did? They slowly took over the courts. They slowly took over the courts.
And why? Watch this. In 1875, America passed the Civil Rights Act, which basically shut down all the... If we had just stayed with the 1875 Civil Rights Act, you wouldn't have had the 1960s. You wouldn't have had Jim Crow, none of that.
That's why Dr. King, when he stands at the March on Washington and he opens like this, he says, "But 100 years later," what he's really saying to the nation is, "Why are we dealing with this again?"
We passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875 that made it a felony to discriminate. But then in 1877, there was a selection for president.
Now watch this. The candidate for president lost the popular vote, lost the Electoral College, went to the Southern delegation and said, "If you give me your Electoral College votes, even though I didn't win the popular vote, I will win. And when I win, I'll give you the Supreme Court."
Their mantra, they called themselves the Redeemers. They said, "We have to redeem..." They used the theological term, but they used it in the wrong way. They called themselves the Redemption Movement, and they said, "We must redeem America from all this diversity, all these black and white people working together."
This is getting... What we need is to take America back. Actually, in some of the writings, they said, "And make it what it was supposed to be again."
Why y'all act like y'all heard this stuff before recently? I'm talking about 1877. [Music]
Y'all, his name was Rutherford B. Hayes, Ohio. He gets elected by cutting that deal. As soon as he gets in office, he begins to appoint extremist judges.
In 1883, those judges overturned the 1875 Civil Rights Act, basically throwing out all of the gains of fusion coalitions. They said, "We must redeem. We must take back America."
By 1896, the Supreme Court rules on Plessy v. Ferguson, which says separate but equal is constitutional. Only one justice dissents, Justice Harlan from Eastern Kentucky.
But all of the other justices—in fact, it was Justice Harlan's dissent, a white man's dissent—that gave Charles Hamilton Houston, a black lawyer who became the dean of Howard University Law School, and Thurgood Marshall and others the legal outline for the case that would later on become Brown v. Board of Education.
But it took 50-some years. Dr. King said it like this: "The leaders of this Redemption Movement feared the awakening of poor white masses and former Negro slaves coming together."
They did not want to see them come together. So the Southern aristocracy began to engineer the development of a segregated society.
Dr. King said this standing on the steps of the Alabama State House at the end of the Selma to Montgomery march. I think it was this speech that got him killed.
It wasn't one in Memphis; it was this speech because in this speech he told a truth that folk didn't want to hear, and that is the greatest fear of the racist aristocracy in this country is the possibility of poor whites and poor Negroes and black folk coming together and forming a coalition, a voting block that fundamentally reshapes the economic architecture of the nation.
And he said, "Every time it started happening, they would sow division." He said, "Thus the threat..."
Listen to this. This is Dr. King in 1965: "The threat of the free exercise of the ballot by the Negro and white masses alike working together resulted in the establishment of a segregated society."
A segregated society wasn't merely people not liking people because of the color of their skin. The segregated society and division was about power, about power.
And so by 1898, the fusion reconstruction is shut down. It's over. Part of the signal of it is in 1898. There's a riot in Wilmington, North Carolina, where 10% of the city is killed—more people per capita than killed on 9/11.
Duly elected black and white fusionists were run out of office. The black newspaper that was run by the out-of-wedlock child of the white governor by a black woman was burned down, and they sent telegraphs all around the country: "This is how you take the country back."
From then on, 1898 into the 1900s, you see all these riots that happened. Then Woodrow Wilson gets elected, and though he's from Princeton, he's a racist.
The first thing he plays when he gets to be president is *Birth of a Nation* to his senior staff. *Birth of a Nation* glorified the Klan and demeaned black and white people working together.
It was Woodrow Wilson that lied about a pandemic. It was Woodrow Wilson that tried to blame the pandemic on the Spanish people, on minority people.
It was Woodrow Wilson that did not deal with the pandemic, so 600,000 people died that didn't have to die. It was Woodrow Wilson who watched while racists had riots and killed black folks—so many of them between 1919 and 1920—that James Weldon Johnson called it Red Summer.
What was Woodrow Wilson? But isn't it strange how some of this stuff sounds eerily familiar? If you don't know this history, then you really don't understand the divisions we see now.
Well, we get to World War II, and after World War II, I don't have time to go over all the history. We have a second reconstruction. Black and whites, Latinos, and young people start coming together—Jews, Christians, Muslims, Catholics—and they're willing to march and suffer for a second reconstruction.
Leaders like Dr. King and Jewish rabbis like Rabbi Heschel spoke against the... spoke for the urgent moral necessity of now. The language in... with that language in the street talking about moral issues—not Democrat and Republican, moral issues—from the jail cells, they changed the language in the halls of power.
Presidents and senators and legislators and governors and editors and poets all began to talk about moral urgency. It began with the Brown decision that overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision.
When all of the justices—even though one of the justices was the former head of the Klan—voted unanimously that separate but equal was unconstitutional. It was a gay woman out of Paulie Murray that actually wrote the legal philosophy that Thurgood Marshall and others would use.
Black and white and Jewish lawyers went to court together and fought, got a unanimous victory. They began to live out what Langston Hughes had wrote in 1935: "Oh, let America be America again. America has never been America to me, but I swear this oath that America will be."
What happened in that second reconstruction didn't just have black folk. During the second reconstruction, we saw the desegregation of public schools. We saw Medicaid. We saw Medicare.
We saw the expansion of Social Security because when Social Security was first put in place in 1935, 50% of white women couldn't qualify because if you were in the agrarian culture or you were in the domestic culture, you could not pay into Social Security.
But in 1954, Social Security was expanded, included women, minorities. The Economic Opportunity, the War on Poverty, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which has benefited white women and black folk and Latino women.
Then the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that said you couldn't use racist ways to continue to control the vote allowed blacks to get elected, but it also allowed fusion coalition candidates to get elected, regardless of their color.
The increase in the minimum wage—did you know at the March on Washington it wasn't just "Come by y'all, black folk getting together"? It was a diverse group. It was labor and civil rights.
And you know what the first agenda item was? Raise the minimum wage by 75 cents to $2 and index it with inflation, which if that had happened, the minimum wage would be about $20 an hour today.
But oftentimes when we remember these days, even on King Day, we don't talk about this dude. We don't talk about it was Bayard Rustin, right, who brought people together when the Civil Rights Movement was failing and falling off.
He brought people together. We don't talk about that it was a fusion coalition. We don't talk about the fact that it was about civil rights and educational rights and economic rights.
We don't talk about the fact it wasn't about one person speaking; it was because six in 600 cities around the country people were mobilizing and organized like you're doing here today, and they joined together in that great march.
But it wasn't just a march because there was a march before August 28th. August 28th was the anniversary of the death of Emmett Till, and the reason that was so important was because it was the death of Emmett Till that moved Rosa Parks to do what she did when she saw his killers get off.
She asked two Jewish white women to send her to Highlander to learn how to do nonviolent civil rights action, and she brought that back to Montgomery.
If you think that Montgomery just happened because she got tired one day, if you think it... No, there had been a lot of work. There had been a lot of people even before Rosa Parks that had moved.
But something happened in 1955 because it was a reaction to Emmett's death, and Emmett's killing was a reaction to Brown v. Board.
Tell somebody, "You got to know this history." Two years after Bloody Sunday, two months after Bloody Sunday, you get the Voting Rights Act.
And guess what? It was introduced by Mike Mansfield, a Democrat, and Everett Dirksen, a Republican. We don't talk about this. It was we that got us the Voting Rights Act.
Huh? It was the Voting Rights Act that was basically reinforcing what had already been passed in the 15th Amendment.
Then in 1966, for the first time since the 19th century, a substantial number of blacks voted in the South. Still had all kinds of problems with gerrymandering, and gerrymandering did not start in the South; it started in Boston.
Gerrymandering was first designed to cut out Irish people during the second reconstruction. That came a moral commitment to lift the poor. That's how we got Head Start, K through 12 funding, Pell Grants for higher education.
Anybody know about Pell Grants in this room? All these programs began to enjoy public support. The War on Poverty had three parts. The first boosted wages through education and job training.
The second part provided income support, particularly for single mothers and the elderly. The third part was to create a system of government healthcare for the elderly and the poor.
So while you have the Civil Rights Movement breaking through, what happened in that movement was not just for black folk. It was a reconstruction of America.
It was a reconstruction of how we were supposed to use government. It was going back to the Declaration of Independence, saying, "Look, any kind of government that is against life, freedom, and hope ought to be altered or abolished."
If it's against life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, go back and read the speeches of Kennedy and Johnson. They didn't talk... They didn't talk Republican. They didn't talk Democrat.
They said we have a moral crisis facing us. And then right in the middle of the 1960s, 30% of our nation's kids were in poverty, were in poverty, and 60% of hundreds of thousands of our senior citizens.
People came together. Dr. King, just before his assassination, was talking about a Poor People's Campaign, said we need to address poverty, militarism, and what? Racism as three issues in one.
Stop the separating. Stop black people over here and white people over here and brown people over here, and let's come together on these three issues that were the triune evils hurting and deconstructing America.
And we were getting there, and then here comes the Redemption again. There was a reaction, a reactionary to that extremist. Now they call themselves at this time the New Right.
They revolted against the second reconstruction. They turned to violence and terror. They killed the four girls in Birmingham. They killed Schwerner, Cheney, Goodman.
They killed Medgar Evers. And the reason I say killed, they killed Kennedy because, as Dr. King said, it wasn't so much about who killed him, but what spirit, what political attitude created...
Do you know it was in 1963 when George Wallace was spewing his division, "Segregation yesterday, today, and tomorrow," a governor talking like that? By the end of that year, Medgar was dead, four girls in the church were dead, and Kennedy was dead.
The Bible teaches us that the power of life and death is in the tongue, and whenever you have leaders spewing division, this is not new, and we have to remember that so that we understand what we're seeing today and how dangerous it is.
And why we cannot just let it pass, nor can we say, "It's never been this hard before." It's been harder than this before. And that's why if we come together, we can turn it around.
It's actually been harder. Let me share this, and I'm through. You had all of these attacks, but one in particular was developed by a guy by the name of Kevin Phillips.
Now, I'm not talking partisan; I'm just talking history. I got the footnotes. I know how to swim in deep water. So if you want to question it and say I'm partisan, I can show you what books to go to.
But right after... But George Wallace almost won. You know he got shot, but he almost won. And Kevin Phillips went to Nixon.
Kevin Phillips was a Nixon campaign aide, and he said to President Nixon, "I know how to win. I know how to win, but the secret to this is what he said."
Now listen, "The secret to American politics is knowing who hates who or how to make people hate one another, and you must engage in positive polarization."
Listen now, he also joined up with Atwater, who would manage George Herbert Walker Bush's campaign in the 1980s. George Herbert Walker Bush deployed an ad called Willie Horton.
The Willie Horton ad was designed to paint black men, particularly with beards and whatnot, as rapists. This idea of painting one group of people as doing something, like whether it's eating dogs and cats or being rapists, is not new. It's an old, dangerous playbook.
Huh? Atwater said the Southern strategy. They came together. Kevin Phillips convinced Nixon. This is what he says, and it's in a book called *The Time of Illusion*.
He says, "If we engage in positive polarization, if we use the hatred that people have for the gay community, for the black community, for progress, if we can convince Southern whites that they are losing their poor because black folk and brown folk are getting things, then we can divide the South."
"If we divide the South, we can control nearly 170,000 Electoral College votes at any time. We can control governorships. We can control 30% of the Senate at any time. And if we do this right, not only will we split the South, but we'll split white ethnics in the industrial states like Ohio and Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and we'll split the ethnic groups in New York."
"We can turn the Jews and the Negroes and the Irish against one another, and if we get caught, we'll lie and say we didn't do it." This is actually written down.
We'll actually say we didn't do it. And they played that Southern strategy. Nixon used it. Reagan became governor of California by attacking King, attacking the Black Panthers.
He championed the movement to repeal the Rumford Act that prevented property owners from refusing to rent or sell on the basis of race and religion. He started his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, that was known for one thing: where Schwerner, Cheney, Goodman, and Schwerner had been murdered.
He gives a speech there. He calls the Civil Rights Act of '64 bad legislation. He said the Voting Rights Act was humiliation to the South.
He told tales of welfare queens who drove fleets of Cadillacs purchased with food stamps. He claimed to have been in a grocery store beside a strapping young big buck with a fistful of food stamps and a stack of porterhouse steaks, and he declared it was time to make America great again.
This reign, the tactics that we are seeing today, have their roots in this movement called the deconstruction movement. This movement to say we're redeeming the country, we're taking it back, but it's not about redemption; it's about deconstruction.
It's been used. It was picked up by Reagan, continued by Pat Buchanan and George Bush. Trump just... It has been funded by billions of dollars.
In fact, there's a new movie out called *Bad Faith*, and it even shows how they built a theological piece around it called the religious right, the moral right that traces all the way back to slave religion.
And they got their financing from oil money, from oil money. So what we are seeing today is the struggle for America.
But alongside each of these attempts to deconstruct America has always been a movement to go forward. And guess what? By the virtue of you being born and being alive, you have been recruited into that movement.
Now, this division has gotten us in trouble. We've got some hard places. We're right now in a country where the wealthiest country in the world, and we've got 140 million poor and low-wage people in this country.
Poverty is the fourth leading cause of death. 295,000 people die every year from poverty—800 people a day. We've had presidential debate after debate, and not even 30 minutes have focused on poverty.
87 million people are either uninsured or underinsured. 51% of all our children are poor and/or low wage. 41% of all our children are poor and/or low wage.
We have 52 million people in this country who make less than $15 an hour. $15 an hour! We have not raised the minimum wage since 2009. The federal minimum wage is currently $7.25, and the minimum wage for tipped workers is $2.13 by law, by law since 2017.
The Republican tax cuts—the 748 U.S. billionaires are $2.2 trillion richer. 7 million families were behind in rent or house payments in December of 2023. 400 families make an average of $97,000 an hour.
54 cents of every discretionary dollar is used to support the military-industrial complex. That's what division has gotten us.
But it doesn't have to remain this way. First of all, we've got to recognize that we need a third reconstruction. That the key... I hear people saying we need to hold on to democracy.
We need to do more than that. We need to not just hold on to democracy; we need to create a democracy worth holding on to.
And that means, is it a democracy that can take care of that manufacturing worker that works all day and then sleeps in that car at night because they don't make enough money?
Is it a democracy that ensures that healthcare workers who clean our backsides can also have health insurance and get treatment themselves?
Is it a democracy that will take care of all of our children? Is it a democracy that will respect people regardless of their race, their creed, their color, their sexuality?
That's the question. Is it a democracy that lifts from the bottom? Is it a democracy that says once and for all we're going to address systemic racism and systemic poverty and denial of healthcare and ecological devastation and the war economy and the false moral narrative of religious nationalism?
It's not just having a democracy; it's having a democracy that's worth having. That's the question.
And then the second thing we have to understand: we've been called in this moment to a third reconstruction because the cost of division and the cost of inequality is too high.
Child poverty costs us a trillion dollars a year. Unstable housing costs us $100 billion a year. Hunger costs us $60 billion a year. Public assistance costs us $163 billion a year.
Much of it we wouldn't have to have if we just paid people a living wage and they could take care of themselves. Mass incarceration costs us $175 billion a year.
And if we put that money in education, we wouldn't be locking up folk; we would be lifting up folk. A broken immigration system costs us $123 billion a year.
And since these folk who don't want to fix the immigration laws need to understand that if by the laws they want to implement, their own grandmas wouldn't have been allowed in the country.
So what we need to do is fix our current healthcare system. It costs individuals $1.6 trillion. We have the best and the greatest healthcare system in the world.
But here's the question: the question is not, "Are you going to make America great again?" Nor is the question what some Democrats are saying, "Well, we're great, we have this, this, this."
There's a larger philosophical question that is not, "Can you make America great again?" or "Are you great?" But what are you going to do with your greatness?
What is the responsibility of a great healthcare system? What is the responsibility of a great gross national product? What is the responsibility of all the money we have?
Well, I believe that responsibility is to lift from the bottom because if you lift from the bottom, then everybody rises—everybody.
And then finally, thirdly, not only must we recognize the need for a third reconstruction, not only must we recognize the cost of all this division in public policy is too bad, we can't keep having political conversations and talking more about innuendos and who kissed who and who went where and not dealing with the real issues that affect people's everyday lives.
The third thing we need to hear today, and hear me well, I know that history was hard, and I know it's hard now, but I come from a tradition that says inside of every dark Friday is a resurrection possibility.
The numbers are bad, but here's some other numbers. There's a scripture in the Bible that reads like this: Psalm 18, "The stone that the builders rejected has now become the chief cornerstone."
The truth of the matter is we got 140 million poor and low people in this country, but you need to know that 85 million of them can vote.
You need to know that in the last election, 57 million of these people voted, but 30 million didn't. You need to know the number one reason they didn't vote is nobody talked to them.
Nobody talks to them politically. None of the candidates talk to them. Oftentimes, we don't talk to them in our churches, talk to them in our banquets, talk to them.
We don't talk to them. But you need to know God has fixed it now. The Divine has fixed it such that there are so many poor and low-wage folk that if just 20% of poor and low-wage voters who didn't vote in 2020 were to cast votes in 2024, they could have the power to change every election in every state.
You need to know that where the marginal victory was only 3%, like in Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, where the marginal victory was only 3%, the poor and low-wealth people make up 43% of the leory in that.
That's why this past weekend, the Poor People's Campaign reached 8.1 million poor and low-wage voters, and 1 million of them were Spanish because we know where the real swing vote is.
Celinda Lake, who runs one of the biggest, baddest research firms in the country, says that poor people, poor and low-wage folk—that is, people who make $50,000 and less in a family of four—that's poverty.
That's what we're talking about. Now, the government says that if you make $144,000 a year and you're single, you're not poor. They say you're in the lower middle class.
But the scholars say that poverty, you have to measure from $50,000 down in a family of four. That's poverty and low wealth. In that group, the majority of those folk vote progressive when they vote.
The number one reason they don't vote is people don't talk to them. There was a study done about sermons in churches, and even though Jesus started his ministry with the poor and ended his ministry with the poor, the foundation studied 50,000 sermons in pulpits in America, and not 1% of them were about the poor.
But if we talk to the stones that the builders rejected, the stones that the builders rejected have the power.
Why do you think there's been a thousand voter suppression cases since 2013? It's because somebody recognizes that we have the power right now to begin a third reconstruction right here in Ohio.
Poor and low-wage folk make up over 40% of the electorate. And so when we do our movement, we ought to be touching poor and low-wage folks, not just saying vote for a candidate.
What we ought to do is show them where the candidates voted on living wages and show them where they voted on healthcare. And don't tell them where to vote; just show them where people have voted and trust that if people are talked to and if they've conversated with, then they'll know what to do.
So my grandmama used to say, "It's time to dig a little deeper. It's time to go down a little deeper. It's time for us to come together and put the stones together."
Lord have mercy! And I just wonder what fusion politics would look like in America today if the stone that the builders rejected come together.
See, what that really is saying is that the rejected always lead to revival. Y'all hear what I'm saying? It's the rejected folk that always make a difference.
God has a way that God always uses the folk that we least expect to make a difference. The stone that the builders rejected has now become the chief cornerstone.
And this is the day that the Lord has made. So right now, you don't need 100% of poor and low-wage folk. You don't need 80%. You don't need 60%.
Madam Coe, if we can just get 20% of the 30 million poor and low-wage folk to get understanding and educated and they engage in participation, we can cause all of the predictors of the election to start scratching their heads and say, "What in the world happened?"
What am I talking about? Well, if the rejected stones can get together, is there anybody in here known rejection? You known rejection?
Anybody known rejection because of your sexuality? Come stand with me.
Anybody known rejection because of where you were born? I need somebody to be honest and come stand beside me.
Anybody known rejection because people tried to hate you to feel good about themselves?
Anybody known the rejection of hate? Come on up here.
Anybody known rejection because of the color of your skin? Come on here.
Anybody known rejection because you had to make a decision about abortion?
Anybody known rejection because of your gender?
Anybody known rejection because of your faith? Somebody rejected you because of your faith.
Anybody known rejection because of your lack of faith?
Anybody known rejection because you don't just go along to get along?
Do you see what's happening? The truth of the matter is our rejection connects us.
And I want you to understand right here, I want you to understand that if all these stones get together and these stones join hands, if the hands that once picked cotton join the hands of Latino hands and join the hands of progressive hands and join the hands of faith hands and labor hands and Asian hands and Native hands and poor hands and wealthy hands and gay hands and straight hands and trans hands, and if we all get together, and if we even get some of our confused friends to come on over here and honor their rejection too, we have the power to turn this nation around.
We have the power to change this nation until every child is educated, until women are respected, until everybody has affordable housing, until we have voting rights, until we save the world rather than blow up the world.
We have the power if we just come together. And I want to test it. How about you?
I want to see a third reconstruction. I want to see us be on the right side of history. I want to see us change things like our foreparents and our foremothers changed things.
So look at your neighbor and say, "Neighbor, neighbor, ain't nobody out there because all the rejected folk are up here."
But when we get together, together, when we get together, when we get together, we get together.
What a day! What a day! What a day! What a day! What a day! What a day of justice it will be!
It will! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!