Transcription
Hello, hello. Earl, ham, quiet us now.
Oh Spirit, grant us your strength, for we recognize that whenever you call men and women to say anything in your name, in your presence, you take a risk of putting that which is so precious into that which is so frail.
But somehow, let the words of our mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in thy sight, oh Lord, our strength and blessed Redeemer. Amen.
I am so honored to be at Ram today, to be able to come back home. I was born in Indiana in 1963, and I count it such a privilege.
I want to give honor to the president and all of those who had anything to do with my coming here. I always like to give a special shout out to the tech folk; they can really mess up an event if they want to.
I want to thank Dr. Logan for his gracious introduction, for his kindness, for his brilliance. I just picked up an article that he had written about bodies and the environment that I had not thought about.
I also recognize now that, you know, all comics are genius, as they say, and certainly he has some committed genius to suggest that the hair on his head was doing anything, unless that's a skull cap.
But it's good to be here with all of you, my friend, Reverend Dr. Fletcher, who's here today, and with his sister, Shamain Fletcher, who's such a gift in the movement.
I want to talk today for a moment and lecture. I've actually come for revival; at the end, it's going to be an altar call. I know that might be tricky at a Quaker institution.
I always struggle with being invited to a Quaker institution because, you know, you have to be quiet until the spirit says speak. But I'm going to suggest that your hand clap at the end of the video was the spirit saying it was all right to speak.
We are witnessing the birth pains of a third reconstruction, and I want to talk about why America needs a third reconstruction, a Poor People's Campaign, and a national call for moral revival.
On election night last year, I felt a great sadness for America—not a Democratic or Republican sadness, but a sadness for the heart and the soul of our nation.
It is impossible, I believe, to react to the election of Donald Trump with anything less than moral outrage. Trump is, as David Remnick wrote for The New Yorker, vulgarity unbounded, and his election has not only struck fear in the hearts of the vulnerable but also given rise to hundreds of documented cases of harassment and intimidation.
I know Trump ran his campaign sensing the feeling of dispossession and anxiety among millions of voters—white voters in Maine. Many of those voters, not all, but many, followed Trump because he was willing to trumpet their fury and air their sense, deeply rooted in this nation's history of race and class, that a new world was now conspiring against their interests.
Trump offered no answers to their fears; he merely said, "You are right to be afraid, and very afraid. Obama is the boogeyman of a coming diversity that will undo the world you grew up knowing."
Then he committed one of the greatest sins of idolatry: he said, "I and I alone can fix it."
Now, while we do indeed face a dire situation, I must also say we must be careful to understand this is not new. Trumpism is as American as apple pie.
There could be no Donald Trump without America's first black president. President brother Van Jones got it right on election night; he said we experienced a white lash.
We must be clear: every stride toward freedom in U.S. history has been met with the same backlash. It is what Neil Paynter, the Princeton scholar, calls the call and response of American history.
Donald Trump is an icon, an iconography of that call and response. We had seen this in North Carolina in 2012.
We saw it right there when, after the 2012 election, in the first five months, we saw a regression of extremism like we had never seen, like we had not seen since the 19th century.
And it all came when the African American community had voted in record numbers in North Carolina, along with the progressive white and Latino community.
Let's go back in history for a minute. Trumpism is not new. We faced it during Reconstruction—the first Reconstruction—in the shadow of slavery and amid the wreckage of the Civil War.
African Americans joined hands with whites in the North and with whites in the South—the poor whites who had found out that they had been fooled during the Civil War.
They had been made to fight the rich planters' war, and they came together after 1865 in the South and saw black and white people as allies.
Within four years after the end of the Civil War, white and black fusion alliances controlled every state house in the South—every one of them.
Some of them had majority black leadership in the South in the 1800s. Together, they elected new leaders; almost all the southern legislators were controlled by either a predominant black alliance or a strong interracial fusion coalition.
They hammered out new constitutions from a deeply moral perspective. In North Carolina, they wrote a constitution, and this was the preamble: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all persons are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, the enjoyment of the fruit of their own labor, and the pursuit of happiness."
They guaranteed public education as a constitutional right in the first articles of a new Southern constitution. They guaranteed equal protection under the law in 1868, before it was even passed in the federal constitution.
These fusion coalitions, now 150 years ago, built the first public schools and, in state constitutions, gave all persons a constitutional right to public education—something to this day that has not been done in our federal constitution.
In the state constitution, for instance, of North Carolina, they even had an article—Article 11, Section 4—that said, "Beneficent provision for the poor, the unfortunate, and the orphan is the first duty of a civilized state."
This is black and white people working together in the Deep South right after the Civil War. They included labor rights in 1868, long before the Knights of Labor came South with their first labor campaign.
Black and white fusionists included labor rights. They knew then, black and white together from a moral fusion perspective, that labor without living wages is just a different form of slavery.
They expanded access to the ballot and wrote new fairness into the criminal justice law.
But in four years after these first black-white fusion alliances, the experiment of the first Reconstruction faced powerful and demoral opposition.
And we understand that opposition. Then we must understand what happened then to understand America right now.
Many former Confederates saw black citizenship and interracial alliances, fusion coalitions, as inherently illegitimate. They organized the Ku Klux Klan in places like Indiana and others to terrorize first white people who dared to work with black people.
They were seen as race traders, and then they attacked black leaders.
We can't make sense of what's happening in front of us now because somehow we fail to see that it has been happening all along.
Anybody that tells you that we've never seen anything like this before did not pay attention in history class, was not taught it in history class, and they do not know the American project.
Back then, in 1868, they began to wail against taxes. They cried about cutting taxes because that was an effort to end the programs of the first Reconstruction, like the Freedmen's Hospital in health care.
They wanted to keep state governments unable to fulfill the promises of a post-slavery economy and the promise to lift up the former slave.
They wanted to keep the fusion coalition from expanding opportunity and enlarging democracy and supporting public education.
So their watchword was, "We have to cut taxes."
Why were they doing all of this? Why were they rolling back voting rights, taking away criminal justice reform, undoing equal protection under the law?
They said they wanted to redeem America, or if you read Faulkner's book, they wanted to take back America and make it great again.
In the 1800s, they said, "We have come to redeem America." Look at that word, redeem. They used moral language for immoral acts.
By the turn of the century, all of the gains of the first Reconstruction had been overturned.
Think about it: in 1875, they passed a civil rights act that made it a federal crime to discriminate.
In 1877, you have an election where the person running for president does not win the popular vote but becomes the president through a deal with the Electoral College.
If you put me in as president, I'll give you the Supreme Court and I'll pull the troops out of the South.
By 1883, the 1875 Voting Rights Act was overturned.
In 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson established "separate but equal" as the law of the land.
In 1898, the Wilmington riots occurred, where black and white people were killed—massacred.
More people were killed on November 10, 1898, than were killed on September 11 in New York, per capita.
Then, between 1896 and 1922, you know what happened? They raised Confederate statues.
Most of those statues were not raised right after the Civil War; they could not have been raised after the Civil War.
They were raised between 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson, and 1922 to celebrate the reincarnation of white supremacy in the law.
In fact, the one in Charlottesville, which caused all of the controversy, was raised in 1970; it was commissioned and raised in 1919.
Why? It was to pay homage to Woodrow Wilson, not Robert E. Lee, who was a white supremacist who had entered the Oval Office in 1914, played "Birth of a Nation" to his entire staff in 1916, and ended the desegregation of the federal government.
So when that statue was commissioned in 1917, it was commissioned to say to America, "White nationalists have a friend in the White House."
If you understand that history, then you understand why Richard Spencer chose that statue to have the first Unite the Right rally.
This plain pattern of progress and backlash repeated itself during the second Reconstruction, called the second Civil Rights Movement.
I know I'm glossing over a lot of history, but bite me back; I'll do the other part.
But the second Reconstruction, the second Civil Rights Movement, you know, after the Civil Rights Movement, white people who were afraid of you had—excuse me—during 1954 to 1968, you get Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
Social Security was opened up to those in the Aquarian culture and those in the domestic culture.
Remember when Social Security was first passed by Roosevelt in 1935? Most white women couldn't get it because he had to cut a deal with Southern senators who said, "We will not pass this to black folk."
Brown folk and white women can benefit; that didn't change until 1954, right after the New Deal.
Remember there was a movement called by the spiritual mobilization led by a guy by the name of James Fifield out of California?
He was a preacher who wanted to preach everything but social justice. He was funded by General Motors, the son of oil, the National Chamber of Commerce, the National Manufacturers.
They gave him billions of dollars to come up with this weird theology that says if you're good, you go to heaven; if you're bad, you go to hell.
So if you're a good American, you're wealthy, middle class; if you're a bad American, then you're poor.
So the reason you're poor is because of your own personal morality; it has nothing to do with systems of injustice.
His goal was to undermine the social gospel movement that had pushed Theodore Roosevelt to declare that things like health care were moral issues and had pushed Franklin D. Roosevelt to push the New Deal.
That theology argued that any government program that helped people up when they were down was violating the principle of God because people should only get up if they live according to certain personal moral values that they had determined.
Then you get the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. King, Rosa Parks, the Civil Rights Movement, Rabbi Heschel, and others.
You get 1954, the Brown decision; 1963, the March on Washington, which actually was on August 28th because August 28th is the day that Emmett was killed in 1955 in reaction to the Brown decision.
In 1964, the Civil Rights Act, after much death and much pain; in 1965, the Voting Rights Act.
And then there is this backlash. White people who are afraid of losing power learn how to perpetuate a culture of racism without appearing to be racist.
They came up—Kevin Phillips taught Richard Nixon. He said, "I know how we can tear America apart and win. All you got to do is find out who hates who, and you got to play the race buttons. You got to play them, but you can't sound racist like Wallace did."
So they came up with code words and dog whistles. The Southern Strategy was what it was called; it was a strategy deliberately designed to play the race card in a way to drive Southern whites to vote for conservative white politicians.
Leave the ranks of the Democratic Party that had elected people like John Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had helped to usher in public policy goals and demands of the Civil Rights Movement.
In a starkly revealing interview, former GOP strategist Lee Atwater described how the Southern Strategy worked to undermine fusion politics, to undermine the second Reconstruction.
This is what he said: "You start out in 1954 saying 'nigger, nigger,' but by 1968 you can't say that because that'll hurt you politically; it'll backfire.
So you change the language. You talk about forced busing; you talk about states' rights."
Remember what Kelly was talking about the other night? You talk about states' rights. Now you're getting abstract.
Then you talk real abstract; you only talk about cutting taxes, and it sounds like you're only talking about economics.
But the byproduct of these things is that blacks get hurt worse than whites, and whites begin to believe that blacks and brown people are the cause of their problems because of all of the money going to give them free stuff.
Now, the target of the Southern Strategy was initially the old Confederacy—the 13 former Southern states from Maryland all the way to Texas—because the goal was to control 171 electoral votes.
If you control the electoral votes from Virginia to Texas, that's 171 electoral votes, which means you only need 99 from the other 37 states.
That's 26 U.S. senators, which means you only need 24 from the other 36 states to control 25.
That's 31% of the United States House of Representatives, which means you only need 20% from the other 37 states.
The goal was to have a solid South to start any national campaign with 171 electoral votes locked down because of race and fear.
But the only way you could do that is you had to make sure that black, white, and brown people in the South never saw their common agendas, never saw their commonality.
You had to resist and repeal any fusion political alliances with African Americans.
But it turned out that the race-baiting worked also in other parts of the country too because when George Wallace stood in the door of the University of Alabama, he got 100,000 congratulatory letters from the North.
So he found out that race wasn't a Southern problem; it was an American issue.
Then when he ran in 1964 in Wisconsin, in the Wisconsin Democratic primary, Wallace got a third of the state's Democratic votes.
The man who gained attention the year before by defying a segregation order in the doorway of the University of Alabama, the man who said, "Segregation yesterday, today, and tomorrow," the next year got a third of the votes in Wisconsin.
Three weeks later, he got 30% of the votes cast in Indiana, and the only staff he had in Indiana was two Ku Klux Klansmen who ran a shoestring campaign out of a service station phone book using deconstruction and fear and race.
In the Maryland Democratic primary, Wallace won 16 of the state's 23 counties and 43% of the final tally.
He said this in '64: "Without the block vote, we would have won the whole thing."
Now, Wallace didn't win, but he was the greatest loser of all time, according to those who wanted to split America and win.
Republican George H.W. Bush saw the volcanic white opposition to the Democratic Party's embrace of civil rights, and he sought to open the door for this kind of Republican in the solid South.
A hopeful Bush decided to run for the U.S. Senate, though he had never before held elective office.
Bush declared himself emphatically opposed to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He said this: "It trampled upon the Constitution by mandating equal access to restaurants, hotels, restrooms, and other accommodations."
Bush explained to a crowd in his run in 1965-66: "The new Civil Rights Act passed to protect the 14% of the people, but I'm concerned about the 86% of the people."
This is the kind of gentler white supremacy that brought Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats into the Republican Party, paving the way for the campaigns of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and the Bushes—all of whom employed the same political operatives and the same divide-and-conquer tactics.
So don't let anybody tell you that the problem is just Trump; that's the point I'm trying to make.
First, yes, he has embraced and emboldened white nationalists who rallied in Charlottesville and elsewhere.
Yes, many of them feel like they can take off their hoods, banner, and stand tall with Trump in the White House.
But long before Trump mastered the con of the Southern Strategy, a hundred years before, Bannon was ever in the White House, "Birth of a Nation" was in the White House.
What we saw Trump use has been an audience that has been cultivated for 50 years.
What ought to concern us is not that he won, but the ease at which he used these strategies, and the media nor his political adversaries knew how to unpack it.
Only with this history in mind can we understand what brother Ta-Nehisi Coates has said so well.
He said for Trump, it almost seems that the fact of Obama—the fact of a black president—insulted him personally.
Replacing Obama is not enough; Trump has made the negation of Obama's legacy the foundation of his own.
And this too is whiteness. Race is an idea, not a fact.
The historian Nell Irvin Painter has written an essential work on the construct of a white race as the idea of not being.
And this is tough language, but this is true.
Before Obama could be manufactured out of Sister Souljah, Willie Horton, Dusky Salis, but Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent: an entire presidency with health care, climate records, justice reform—all of which could be targeted for destruction in order to redeem America, thus reify the idea of being white.
Trump is truly something new—the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president.
So it will not suffice to say we cannot merely say we have never seen this before.
The reality is now, I believe, what we're seeing and what we're witnessing is the birth pains of a third reconstruction.
An attempt to move this nation to a third reconstruction and an attempt to hinder it.
When you see a president run and his whole first speech is about racism and xenophobia and what white nationalists call the first battle—the battle against immigrants—when you see even the Supreme Court unleashing the opportunity for pornographic sums of money to be put into our political system, when you see a general suggest that all that was needed was a little compromise to not have a civil war and not understand that it was compromise that has led to the worst racism and worst genocide the world has ever seen, when you see a constant call for tax cuts and what one, what Steve Bannon called the destruction of the administrative state, when you see a goal of taking a trillion dollars from Medicare and Medicaid, cutting it, when you see the kind of attacks on voting rights, you are seeing the same.
When all of that happens virtually at the same time, what you are seeing is an effort to deconstruct the possibility of reconstruction.
And why is there such a fear? It's not just because Obama got elected, but because the demographics are changing in the South and in the country.
We know now that if you just register 30% of the unregistered black voters in the South and you get them to vote along with progressive whites and Latinos, the South is no longer solid.
If you just break four states in the South, like North Carolina, say Georgia, Virginia, and Florida, then that whole block is over.
If that ever changes, then the extremists don't have a chance, particularly in national elections.
What we saw with the breaking through of President Obama in 2008, it wasn't about President Obama; it was the expanded electorate—black and white and young and others coming together.
He basically got about the same percentage of the white vote as all other Democratic candidates, but it was an expansion of the vote.
When he won North Carolina, Florida, Virginia, and South Carolina, that was the first sign of an idea whose time has come.
When he broke through, that is why we witness firsthand the white lash that America is reeling from right now.
People who sometimes say they disagree with Trump—no, they don't.
They disagree with his antics; they don't disagree with his agenda.
They disagree with the fact that he's putting out in the public discourse what is only supposed to be talked about behind the curtain.
The policy agenda of making it great again and the policy agenda of white supremacy is pretty much the same thing.
Somebody asked me the other day, "Is Trump a white nationalist?"
I said, "Well, let's look at what white nationalists support."
They said, "Well, is he a white nationalist in his heart?"
I said, "I don't know what's in his heart, but I look at the heart of his policy."
Jesus said, "Where your treasure is, that's where your heart is."
Where your heart is, that's where your treasure is.
That's how you determine racism.
Racism isn't whether you got a black friend.
Racism isn't whether or not you kissed a black baby at Houston during a hurricane shelter.
In fact, you can be black and be a white nationalist, sir, if you endorse the policies and if you understand the racialized context of the policies.
So what is the agenda here?
It is tax breaks to the corporations and to the wealthy and hurting the poor.
Well, that's the same agenda as white nationalism.
Attacking public education—that's the same agenda as white nationalists.
Denying public access to health care—well, white nationalists don't believe in health care for everybody either.
Attacking immigrants—white nationalists attack immigrants.
Attacking the LGBT community—white nationalists attack the LGBT community in the name of religious liberty.
Stripping environmental protection—most white nationalists believe in stripping environmental protection.
Expanding the carrying of guns and military weapons—well, white nationalists believe in that.
So you don't have to say you're a white nationalist; you can actually be against what happened in Charlottesville and against the death of Heather, against hate, and still be a white nationalist.
Because you can't be against personalized, interpersonal hate, but you can support hate for destructive public policy, which is really what white nationalism and white supremacy is all about.
So we know what it looks like; we've seen it.
We saw it in North Carolina.
But just as there's been a movement in every area to raise a moral dissent against extremism, we need that same moral movement today.
The public policy polling analysis said about Tom Monday—we weren't paying attention because, you know, we were in the movement—but they said it laid the groundwork for the only successful resistance to the Trump effect.
We didn't say this, but public policy polling said the only successful resistance to the Trump effect on down-ballot races said that after seven weeks, the consciousness and the moral consciousness of the state had so shifted that the governor, who came in on a divisive agenda, an extremist agenda, after seven weeks of moral Monday, seven weeks of people getting arrested around a moral agenda—not a Democrat, a Republican, but a moral agenda—his numbers dropped to under 39%, and he never recovered.
When we connected that to a voting strategy and to a legal strategy, it made a difference.
So what have we learned? What do we need in this moment?
If this is the analysis, what do we need?
Well, first, we must recognize the need for indigenously led, state-based, deeply moral, deeply constitutional, anti-racist, anti-poverty, pro-justice, pro-labor transformative movement building.
There's no shortcut around this.
We must build movements from the bottom up.
America was never changed from D.C. down; it was changed from Birmingham and Montgomery up.
We must build relationships; that's why Iram College is so important.
We must build relationships.
The extremists see the possibility of a third reconstruction; that's why they're working so hard in this time to strangle it in its cradle.
We must understand that if people have to go all the way to Russia and have to block and suppress the vote and have to put ungodly sums of money in the political arena to beat you, that doesn't mean you're weak; that means you're strong.
Because people won't cheat you unless you're strong.
We have to recognize that helicopter leadership by so-called national leaders will not sustain a moral movement.
What we need is a local movement, state-based.
Secondly, we need to use moral language like the devotees of the first and second reconstruction.
They didn't talk party; they talked about what was right according to the moral law.
Moral language reframes and re-critiques public policy regardless of who's in power.
A moral movement claims higher ground than merely a partisan debate—something that's bigger than left versus right, conservative versus liberal.
When I went to the Democratic Party convention last year, they asked me to speak.
The first time, Doc, I said no.
They said, "Why?"
I said, "No, unless I get to speak from a moral tradition and unless the people in the movement agree to it."
Because the goal of the moral movement is not about any party.
Then they said, "Well, we need you to say this and that."
I said, "No, we can't do that."
"Well, can you take out some of the scriptures?"
"No, no, can't do that."
"Well, can you take out saying 'Brown-skinned Palestinian Jew'?"
"No, no, can't take that out."
They said, "Well, you know, if you go up there and there's something up there we don't like, we can cut off the teleprompter."
I said, "You don't want to do that to an old country preacher. Oh no, you don't want to cut the teleprompter off. Now that's the last thing you want to do."
Now afterwards, people were crying and saying they—if you notice that speech, go back.
I didn't talk a lot about party; I talked about the heart of the nation, and people responded.
Because folk need something other than just vote for her against him or him against her.
People need to understand how the process will be used to change the reality of poverty and hurt and racism and what kind of moral agenda we have to begin to frame the conversation.
Not to talk about left—people say, "Are you left?"
I said, "I got a left hand and a right hand. I'm not on the religious left; I'm not on the religious right. I'm talking about the moral center."
I'm not at the political left or the political right.
That language didn't even part of this century; it comes out of the 17th century in the French Revolution when the left didn't want the monarchy and the right wanted the monarch.
Wrong language, too puny, too small, doesn't inspire.
We need some moral language.
We need that kind of language that comes out of the scriptures, like Ezekiel 22, where it says, "Your politicians have become like wolves when they devour the poor and the least of these and the stranger and the immigrant, and your preachers are covering up for them by saying things God has never said."
That's the kind of language we need.
We need that kind of language that Jesus talked about: "The spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he anointed me to preach good news to the poor."
In Greek, it means the "potoos," those who've been made poor because of economic exploitation.
We need that kind of language to say to America, "I don't care how great you are with your buildings and your warfare; the fact of the matter is one day, America, you're going to be judged like every other nation in history."
And here's the category: "When I was hungry, did you feed me? When I was naked, did you clothe me? When I was sick, did you come see about me? When I was in prison, did you deal with it?"
We need moral language to reinvigorate who say amen, hallelujah.
They say amen when we say we want to fight for the poor. Amen.
When we want universal health care, amen.
When we want to end the proliferation of guns, but then you say, "Well, I don't want to do the scripture."
All right, go to the Constitution.
Here are the moral principles of the Constitution.
The first moral principle of the Constitution is unity: "We the people."
The second moral principle of the Constitution is repentance.
We are striving to be a more perfect union, which is to admit you are not perfect, that America is not so exceptional that America still needs some work done on it.
I'm talking Constitution now.
The third principle is the establishment of justice—not an establishment of the lobbyists.
The next principle is the providing for the common defense.
That means everybody being defended, not just the wealthy.
The next principle is promoting the general welfare.
Welfare is a constitutional word; we should have never taken that out of our public discourse.
Welfare is in the Constitution.
And then the next one is domestic tranquility, not domestic division.
Only after all of those principles are met do you have a liberty or a freedom that's worthy of being passed on to your posterity.
So we need to have moral language—moral language that says, "How does this policy help the general welfare? How does this policy line up with our deepest moral and religious values?"
The 2,500 scriptures in the Bible that talk about the issue of poverty, talk about how we treat the poor, how we treat the least of these, how we treat the hurt.
There are only about three in the Bible that talk about homosexuality, and not one of them trumps the scripture.
You still got to love your neighbor as yourself.
It doesn't say your straight neighbor, your gay neighbor; it says your neighbor.
So we have to challenge this Christian nationalism, this white evangelicalism that has told everybody that the way you know you're right in the public square is if you're for prayer in the school, if you're against gay people, if you're against abortion, and if you are pro-guns and pro-tax cuts for the wealthy.
And if you are trying to convince everybody that God—that Jesus was an original member of the NRA, we need to challenge that foolishness.
It doesn't line up with Orthodox Christianity, Islam, or Judaism.
We need to challenge it.
There would have been no labor movement without a moral underpinning.
There would have been no abolition movement without William Lloyd Garrison and Levi Coffin and a deep moral understanding.
There would have been no women's suffrage.
There would have been no social gospel movement.
There would have been no New Deal.
Franklin Roosevelt didn't just get to the New Deal; Frances Perkins, a social gospel, was there in his ear, the first woman labor secretary, telling him he better do right.
Yes, sir, by the God of the universe.
And pushing him.
There would have been no Civil Rights Movement without a moral framework.
There have been no critiques on poverty and unchecked capitalism and labor rights and health care.
Not even Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the one that called for universal health care long before Obama.
In 1912, the social gospel movement got to him so bad he said there are certain issues in politics that ought not be partisan: public education, health care, social security, minimum wage, and protecting the environment.
Finally, we must insist on connecting economic issues with our racial history.
Too many people are too easily blaming the rise of Trump on Democrats for forgetting the white working class.
Now, Trump appealed to real economic fears among working people, but he lost every income bracket below $48,000 and won every group above it.
Blowing the dog whistles of race to divide poor and working people—that's how he did it.
Any resistance to Trump that doesn't address his divide-and-conquer tactics that he used, particularly around race, cannot offer a real political alternative.
And Democrats make the mistake; the only time they talk about racism is David Duke.
You think about it: we had 26 presidential debates, primary and general election.
We have less voting rights today than we had in 1965.
We had 22 states engage in voter suppression; it represents over 54% of African American voters.
44 senators, over 50% of the United States House—voter suppression like we haven't seen since the days of Jim Crow.
And we didn't have one hour debate on voting rights.
We got the Supreme Court calling certain voting laws "surgical racism," like it did in North Carolina.
The Voting Rights Act has been gutted.
The Congress under Ryan and McConnell has refused to fix the Voting Rights Act for over a thousand days.
Strom Thurmond only blocked the Civil Rights Act of '57 for 24 hours.
This current Congress has blocked fixing the Voting Rights Act for over a thousand days.
We had 26 presidential election debates, Democrat and Republican, and not one hour debate on the voting rights side—not one hour on poverty, not one hour.
And so, my brothers and sisters, as I close, we believe that right now, if we understand what's going on and how it is a part of the American project, we need a Poor People's Campaign and a national call for a moral revival that will address, call out, and give answers to the issues of systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation, the war economy, and to challenge the false moral narrative of so-called Christian nationalism.
We need moral analysis that does not simply follow the talking points of our time.
We need moral dissent that, because of our deepest constitutional and religious traditions, we challenge those who have tried to hijack those traditions to serve greed, racism, and lies.
We must understand that in this moment, silence is not an option.
It wasn't an option for Levi Coffin; it wasn't an option for Lucretia Mott, and it's not an option for us.
We will never say a supermajority of any party has a right to run roughshod over the Constitution or the higher moral laws of the universe.
We must never allow hate to have the stage and the microphone without lifting up the demands of love and justice, no matter who's in power.
We must remember the moral dissenters like Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King, Fannie Lou Hamer, Dorothy Day, and Rabbi Heschel.
But not only must we have analysis, and not only must we have articulation, moral articulation, we must have moral activism.
We must disrupt what is destructive, not with hate, but with revolutionary love.
We must love this nation enough, yes, to take a knee.
We must love it enough to stand between the ICE agent who's been ordered to do wrong to an immigrant neighbor who wants to do right.
And we must love this democracy enough to go to jail for it in nonviolent civil disobedience.
To go to the places of power—not just the streets, but literally in the halls of Congress, like Jeremiah 22 said, "Go down to the palace."
We must sue in the courts, and we must register everybody we know to vote.
We don't have to be in despair; we know what works.
How did people turn back white nationalism in the 20th century?
They came together; they built fusion coalitions.
We must declare that now and henceforth and forevermore, certain issues will not just be the issues of any party.
Anti-poverty, pro-labor, anti-racist policies are moral issues.
Full employment is a moral issue.
Living wages are a moral issue.
Guaranteed income, guaranteed help for the poor are moral issues.
Transition away from fossil fuels and helping those who are in those industries get new jobs are moral issues.
Labor rights are a moral issue.
Affordable housing is a moral issue.
Fair policies for immigrants, critiquing policies around warmongering that undermine our moral standing, challenging the war economy is a moral issue.
Equality in education by ensuring that every child receives a high-quality, well-funded, constitutional, diverse education, as well as access to colleges and universities, is a moral issue.
Health care as a human right for everybody—full health care.
It is ungodly; it is sinful for us to be one of the 25 wealthiest nations and the only one of the 25 that doesn't offer universal health care for all of its citizens.
Protecting women's health and protecting the care of those who are handicapped or disabled—fairness in the criminal justice system by addressing the continuing inequalities in the system for black, brown, and poor white people.
Challenging the ungodly way we still treat the first natives, the people who were here before we were ever here, the Apaches, are moral issues.
Stopping the proliferation of guns and stopping the ungodly hold that the NRA has over our politics is a moral issue.
Voting rights—expanding voting rights.
If you're registered for war at 18, you ought to be automatically registered to vote to vote on the people that send you to war.
That's a moral issue.
Women's rights are a moral issue.
LGBTQ rights in a democracy are a moral issue.
Labor rights, freedom of religion, immigrant rights are moral issues.
Equal protection under the law is a moral issue.
And there must be a moral movement committed even to mass civil disobedience, where the people impacted by immoral, unjust policies lead that movement with others.
How do I know? Where did I get that from? Dr. King?
Well, you could say that, but I also got it from Amos in the Bible 2,600 years ago.
When Israel was going backwards, when Israel was having to deal with these tower-building egomaniacs that love to put their name on their towers, God told Amos 2,600 years ago in the fifth chapter of the Book of Amos, he says this, verse 15: "Hate evil."
I need somebody that will hate evil and love good, and I need some folk that will work it out in the public square—not just send a tweet or an email, but work it out.
I'm reading the Bible here; I'm reading it here.
It's in the Bible, in the public square.
And maybe God, the God of the angel armies, will notice your remnant and be gracious.
He then goes on to say in verse 16, God says, "Go out into the streets and lament loudly."
I need some folk that will fill up the malls and the shops and the government headquarters with the cries of doom.
I need some people that will weep so loud they make the whole nation weep at the way they're treating the least of these.
I need some folk who will empty the offices, the stores, the factories, the workplaces, and will enlist everyone in a general lament.
And then God says, "I want to hear you fighting for justice in the street. I want to hear you crying loudly in the street, and when I hear it, that's when I'll help you; that's when I'll make my visit."
There must be the power of a moral movement in order to have a breakthrough.
It's time for a breakthrough—a moral breakthrough, a moral movement all across America.
We've got to break through the tweets and the shiny office.
We've got to break through the money, the silence, the bad theology.
We've got to break through the hate.
We have to break through until every child is educated, until the sick receive health care, until the poor are lifted and not pushed down, until voting rights are secured.
Why? Because we want a democracy that protects the rights of everyone, where we are truly one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice under God, with liberty and justice for all.
Where all of God's children are seen as special and loved as important, where the powerful seek to serve and not be served.
That's what Dr. King was calling for 50 years ago when he called for folk to stand against militarism, racism, and economic injustice—all as one.
He said that poor people—black and white and brown and Native—had to come together, and people responded all over the country.
He did not get to finish that, but in this time of a Trump presidency, and more importantly, the rise of white nationalism and the backlash we're seeing, our democracy depends on a third reconstruction.
Our democracy depends on a moral movement.
We are not trying to save a party; we are trying to save the heart and soul of this democracy.
And that is why I stepped down as president of the North Carolina NAACP and answered a call from other people to join as co-chair with Dr. Liz Theo Harris, a New Testament scholar with Repairers of the Breach in Kyo Center, to help lead, servant lead, a Poor People's Campaign—a national call for a moral revival.
We saw what could happen in North Carolina; we see it needs to happen across the nation.
I'm on a 15-state tour right now, training people all over the country, getting ready to help us say, "Can't we, as progressives and revolutionaries and liberationists, can't we have 40 days of unity?"
40 days of unity in 2018.
Can't we launch a movement?
Can't we not commemorate what they did?
We don't need another commemoration; we don't need another ceremony to talk about what they did.
It's time for us to stand up now.
It's time for us to stand on their shoulders.
Can't we, out of 365 days, can't we all come together and stand against systemic racism and poverty and ecological devastation and the war economy and the false moral narrative?
Now let me suggest what we're talking about.
We're talking about preparing for 40 days from, let's just say, Mother's Day to June 21st, to summer solstice, birthing light.
You hear me?
And what if we could organize a thousand people in 25 states and 200 in the District of Columbia, and Indiana be one of those states?
And what if we would write an audit?
Let me see a good name for it: "What About the Souls of Poor Folk? Auditing America 50 Years After the Poor People's Campaign."
And what if it analyzed and showed the intersectionality of all of these issues?
And what if we had the best scholars and poor people and impacted people and anecdotal and empirical evidence?
'Cause you don't want to be loud and wrong; you know when you go to jail.
And what if we announced this audit and this campaign on, let's just say, December the 4th?
And what if we did 15 regional trainings and brought anchor groups in around the country?
And we ended that, let's just say, on December the 4th.
And what if it's a movement not for the poor, but with the poor?
And what if it's black and brown and red and yellow and gay and straight and young and old and physically capable and physically disabled?
What if it's all of that coming together?
And what if we decide that we've got to come together?
And let's just say on Mother's Day weekend, you know, we have religious groups—Muslims and Jews and Christians—all decide for the next six weeks in their sanctuaries, synagogues, and mosques, they're going to talk about these issues.
And what if each week we chose an issue?
Let's just say we start with child poverty.
And what if clergy and religious leaders hook up with poor women and fight for children?
And what if on, let's just say, the week of Mother's Day week—I’m just saying—CNN had to report 150 to 200 people just walked into the state house in Indianapolis, Indiana?
They were led also by students and faculty from Iram College.
I'm just saying.
And they had poor women and welfare rights women going in with them, and they got this agenda with them, demanding America to do something.
They recognize that there are 14 million poor children in America right now, and if we just took 2% of the federal government money and spent it in the right way, we could end 60% of it tomorrow.
And the issue is not do we have the resources; the issue is do we have the will?
Because we're putting all this money into war, killing people, and not money into helping people live and fight the war against poverty and the war against devastation.
Wait a minute—breaking news!
What is it? What is it?
AR, what is it? What's that guy's name on Wolf Blitzer?
Well, I just heard that another 150 went in in Michigan State House.
Wait a minute—another 150 went in in the State House in Kansas and Missouri.
I'm also hearing that 150 to 200 went in in Mississippi State House.
Something's happening!
They're telling us that hundreds of people are going in, and they're sitting down and saying, "Ain't going to let nobody turn us around."
Wait a minute—250 just went into Ryan's office.
250 went into McConnell's office.
Now why didn't they do the White House?
Because he's temporary; we got to deal with the Congress.
Well, you know what I'm trying to say.
We know where the real power is.
We know all those tweets are just a distraction while the real Congress is passing the laws and filling the courts.
And they set, and they—wait a minute—they're all getting arrested, and it's happening at the same time.
We've never seen anything like this.
We're checking the history books; there's never been a simultaneous gathering of poor people and religious people and black and white and all this that take over state houses and the Congress like this.
It has never happened.
And they're not mad; they're not throwing Molotov cocktails, but they're making us ready.
We're having to fill up the jails.
Wait a minute—here it is, second week; here they come again.
And what if we did that for six weeks straight to launch a movement?
And what if we could inspire the 150 million working poor, poor, and extreme poor people to say, "We don't have to sit down forever; we can stand up together and make a difference"?
What if we would come together?
What if we recognize that Martin is dead and Malcolm is dead and Levi Coffin is dead and Rabbi Heschel is dead and Dorothy Day is dead, but we are their children, and it's time for us to stand up?
I want you to know that all over the country, what you saw on that video, people are ready.
People are coming together; it's boggling my mind.
We started out thinking if we could just get places where we could fill up 200, 300 people.
Everywhere we go, a thousand people are showing up, and 30,000 and 40,000 people online.
And Indiana is in the mix because they understand we must build a campaign and not a commemoration.
We can't give up on this democracy, on this world—not now or not ever.
Do y'all mind if I be a country preacher for about three minutes?
'Cause I want y'all to understand I believe this stuff because the Bible says in the Psalms, "The stones that the builders rejected can become the chief cornerstone."
And I believe that if the stones that have been rejected come together—anybody in here ever felt rejected?
Any women in here ever felt rejected? Raise your hand.
Any gay people in here ever felt rejected? Raise your hand.
Any black people in here ever felt rejected? Raise your hand.
Any Latinos in here ever felt rejected? Raise your hand.
Any men in here ever felt rejected? Raise your hand.
Any poor folk in here know some poor folk, came up poor, been rejected?
You know what it's like.
Any disabled people, handicapped, ever felt rejected?
Well, the Bible says that if all the rejected come together, they become a stone that can actually rebuild the nation.
And I'm telling you, I'd rather die trying to see the stones come together than to live and die and it be written on my epitaph that in the time of transition, I didn't do anything but sit down and just be quiet.
No, I believe that the rejected can lead a revival.
I believe that the broken can lead a breakthrough.
I know it's possible.
I heard y'all had a school of religion on this campus; go ask them that when Pharaoh was on the throne, God put the rejected together and brought Pharaoh down and opened up the Red Sea.
Go ask them over there in the religious school that when Nebuchadnezzar, a tower-building egomaniac, was on the throne, God sent a breakthrough that was called Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
They got together, and there was a breakthrough.
When Jesus went on the cross, they put him in a grave, but early Sunday morning, there was a breakthrough.
And then on Pentecost, he got a mighty crowd together, but when the spirit came, they stood up to the Caesar of their day.
When slavery looked like it was ruling, God sent a breakthrough.
When white abolitionists and black former slaves and freemen all got together, Jim Crow looked like it had everything, but then God sent Martin and Malcolm and Fannie Lou and Rabbi Heschel, and when they all got together, they were able to shift the very course of this nation.
It looked like apartheid had the last word, but when Nelson Mandela and Bishop Tutu and others got together, they were able to turn apartheid around.
I'm not saying it's easy, but it says when the stones that the builders rejected get together, we can become a new cornerstone—a chief cornerstone to a new democracy.
But we got to get together, y'all.
And I can tell you not only from what happened in moral Monday and not only what happened in the Bible, but what I can tell you is what has happened in my personal life.
You see, I walk with a cane, and sometimes folk come up to me and say, "Lord, we're going to pray that the Lord just takes that cane from you."
And I want to say to them, "You don't even know what the Lord has already done."
See, what you don't know is that I was paralyzed for 12 years.
What you don't know is the doctor said I might never walk again.
What you don't know is according to my x-rays, I'm not supposed to be walking.
But let me tell you what can happen when things get together.
I even went into depression; I had a hard time with it.
But somehow, preacher, in the middle of that, my mind got together, my faith got together, my family got together, my pharmacist got together, my doctor got together, the prayer warriors and the mothers of the church got together, my physical therapist got together, and good God, I can jump now!
I can walk now!
I can move now!
Because when we all get together, what a day of justice it will be!
When we all get together, what a day, what a day, what a day, what a day of justice it will be!
There is no need to despair; it is time to build a moral movement—a Poor People's Campaign and a national call for a moral revival.
Let's come together and save the heart and the soul of this democracy.
[Applause]
Question?
Oh, now stand.
While you're standing, grab somebody's hand.
Say, "Don't you go anywhere; don't you go anywhere."
If how many of y'all got cards? Are there cards here?
You have a chance to fill out those cards—whatever you can do.
If you want to be a part of the civil disobedience group here in Indiana, fill it out.
If you want to do D.C., if you just want to pray, if you just want to help.
But we need those cards back, or you can go to www.breachrep.org, click on Poor People's Campaign, or www.poorpeoplescampaign.org and fill them out.
There's an anchor team here in Indiana.
I'm going to get those to the organizers.
We need a thousand people in Indiana—a thousand people, 150 for six weeks—that will help us launch this movement.
Not end the movement, not commemorate, but launch a revival movement.
If we take over, we got to—first thing we have to do is change the narrative.
And we're not going to change that with emails; we got to do something revolutionary enough to force a new narrative.
Then we can go after the agenda, and if you deal with the agenda, you can change the politics.
But we have to change the narrative.
Somebody said, "Well, is it going to work?"
I said, "I know this: if we don't do nothing, it ain't going to work."
Hallelujah!
Fill out those forms and turn them in at the end.
Thanks again, bar.
All right, everybody, I announce that we'll have a reception out in the Carpenter lobby.
But can we just take just a couple of questions?
We'll just take two, and then we'll keep it moving, okay?
Just two—maybe one from down here and one from up there.
Yeah, somebody get those cards on the outside for me.
Somebody stand at the door and just get them and bring them to us right there, right there.
I'll repeat it.
Oh, okay.
I was just wondering, like, as a young person, like, where are there small things that I could do to help make change?
Like, at my age, are there any small things that I could get started to help?
She said, "As a young person, first of all, I want to honor your youth, and I want you to understand that the people who built the Civil Rights Movement were young.
Many of them were still in college; they did academics and activism.
Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman—they weren't old people.
William Lloyd Garrison—they weren't old.
So let's honor that.
The second is, one way is to be engaged in the community.
But for this movement, you got a card; there are a multiplicity of things you can do.
Everybody doesn't have to do the civil disobedience; we need a thousand who will.
But we're going to need some people that are good on Facebook and the internet.
You know, we need some people that can help saturate the issues of the movement.
So I would love for you to fill that out.
All of my organizers are under 35; in fact, one of the biggest groups that are starting to sign up for this movement is the two groups that's interesting: it's the young folk and the old folk.
Now that crowd about 45 to 50—I don't know what's going on; that's my crowd.
But we're getting 96-year-old women talking about, "I'm going to jail."
I'm telling you, I'm sick of this.
I'm talking about white women, old white women.
And then we're getting young people, you know, college students who are saying, "We're organizing."
So don't ever underestimate the power of your youth.
There's a scripture in the Bible that says, "Old men are for counsel, but young people are for war."
And what that means—and I know to say that at Quaker, at this school, is like, "What is he talking about, war?"
Now, he knows—yeah, I'm not talking about that kind of war.
I'm talking about when you stand nonviolently and engage in nonviolent struggle against the systems of evil and violence—that kind of battle.
That's—I can get one more question.
Anybody up here or down here?
Uh-oh, we got—oh yeah, I—oh Lord, I know who this is.
That's all right; come on.
Who is that? Y'all all know her, don't you?
Uh-huh, uh-huh.
So first and most, thank you very much for being here.
I wanted to pose a question in regards to civil disobedience and putting our bodies on the line, particularly when it comes to being arrested.
And wondering if there's any discussions about community bail funds being created, particularly for those who are poor and thinking about the fines that come with being arrested.
And then also, you know, being out of jail and that potentially being problematic for your work and being fired.
And so I'm wondering if there are efforts to create that.
I'm glad you raised that because once you sign up in this thousand, there's going to be multiple trainings prior to May.
We have a team of lawyers—lawyers who've been saying, "I've been waiting all my life to do something with this law degree or with a movement."
So there's a whole team of them organizing now; they're checking the rules of every state.
Yes, there are people who are—we have people to—we take care of our folk.
Now, I have to say, though, that you never say it's not risky because part of it is the willingness to challenge the system.
And once you challenge them a couple of times, you know, they get interesting.
You know, like right now, they're trying to ban me from the state legislature in North Carolina.
They're going to lose eventually, but that's what they're trying to do.
So, but we protect our—this is why we're only saying a thousand people.
You say, "Well, let's make it 100,000."
No, most successful movements had a strong small core rather than a great big crowd.
There's a place for rallies, but targeted civil disobedience is for two reasons:
Number one, so everybody's trained; it's not just you jump up and decide you want to do it today.
Number two, so you can watch out for infiltration and you can control it.
That's why I was saying so.
And number three, because people—you don't want—like we're telling folk now, we love you, but if you got to wear a mask, you can't be in this.
Even if it's—I mean, I'm not pushing; I'm just—if you got to hit somebody, then we need to put you somewhere where you—but not this.
'Cause what we don't want—violence is a tool used by the empire to discredit movements.
So they want the violence, right?
They want the violence in order to discredit.
So yes on the training, yes on the funds, sign up, and be a part of the groups that's going to be organizing here.
And it doesn't mean 40 days you have to be in the 40 days.
We're talking about 25 state capitals.
And let me tell you quickly why we've chosen those state capitals.
We did a map, and I might come back and do this piece where we put a map of the United States, and we put all of the states that had the worst voter suppression laws.
Of course, you know Indiana was up there, right?
And then we overlaid that map with the states with the highest level of poverty.
Then we overlaid that map with the highest level of women poverty, child poverty, black poverty, Latino poverty.
Then we overlaid that map with the greatest need for health care but the lowest opportunity for health care.
Then we overlaid that with the greatest attacks on the immigrant community.
Then we overlaid that with the greatest attacks in the law for the LGBTQ community.
And then we overlaid that with the states that had the highest need for living wages but the lowest wages.
And then we overlaid that with the states that claim they have the highest level of Protestant evangelicalism.
And we found out they were the same states.
If you merely start with voter suppression, if you start with race voter suppression, and if a state has engaged in systemic voter suppression, you can almost predict it's poor, that don't have living wages, doesn't have labor rights, doesn't have health care, attacks gay people.
Attacks—you see what I'm saying?
So we're trying to show people we are facing an interlocking injustice, which means you can have silo battles, but you can't stay in your silos all the time.
There's a time in which we have to have understanding.
If the same people are attacking voting rights, are attacking health care, the same people attacking health care are attacking the LGBTQ community, the same people attacking the LGBTQ community are attacking immigrant rights, the same people attacking immigrant rights are attacking public education.
If they are sinister enough to be together, we must be smart enough to come together.
That's that.
So, and not have just one issue.
So the answer to your—my long answer to your short question is yes, yes, and yes.
Yeah.
All right, can we give one more hand?
Thank you, and then we're going to go down the—