We have come to Baltimore to let the nation and the world know what we’re going to do. And I have also come to be brief, and to be seated.
We’ve come to Baltimore, the site of the very first anti-segregation sit-in of its kind at Read’s Drug Store in 1955, to let the nation and the world know what we’re going to do.
We’ve come to Baltimore, where Donald Gaines Murray and the NAACP took on the University of Maryland and successfully desegregated its Law School in 1936, to let the nation and the world know what we’re going to do.
Baltimore, Maryland, the birthplace of Thurgood Marshall, and Dr. Lillie Carroll Jackson. The home of Eubie Blake and Billie Holiday and Edgar Allan Poe.
Baltimore, the home of Cal Ripken and Johnnie Unitas, the birthplace of George Herman “The Babe” Ruth, and the place where Ray Lewis became the greatest middle linebacker of all time, and where Adam Jones hit his 21st home run last night.
Baltimore, where J. Howard Henderson and the Greater Baltimore Urban League have transformed the Orchard Street Church into their headquarters and today, a new entrepreneurship center – our 13th – to serve the small businesses of Baltimore in the name of economic empowerment.
Baltimore, where Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and the honorable Elijah Cummings led the effort to bring this Conference here.
Baltimore, where the traumatic homicide of Freddie Gray 16 months ago – whose funeral was held right here at New Shiloh Baptist Church – has fueled an ongoing national fervor for justice and racial reconciliation.
It is a fervor that has erupted after seemingly unceasing cycle of violence.
Urban Leaguers, if I may teach for a minute … the history of black people in America is intertwined and essential to the whole of American history.
You can’t talk about the Revolutionary War and the Boston Tea Party without talking about Crispus Attucks.
You can’t talk about the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia without talking about the three-fifths Compromise.
You can’t talk about Jefferson and Lincoln and Jackson without talking about Frederick Douglas and Harriet Tubman.
You can’t talk about the Twentieth Century without talking about George Edmond Haines and Ruth Standish Baldwin, Whitney M. Young and Martin Luther King Jr.
The history of Black people in America can be divided into four distinct eras:
The dehumanizing era of slavery, which lasted two hundred and forty years.
The brief and doomed era of possibility known as Reconstruction, which lasted just fourteen years.
The era of Jim Crow, of segregation, of Separate But Equal, of more than four thousand lynchings, which lasted for more than eighty dark and brutal years.
Today, more than fifty years into the so-called post-Civil-Rights-Act era, I believe a new era of civil rights, social justice and empowerment has begun.
We could say it began with the election of the first African American President of the United States. We could say it began when that President triggered a national uproar four years by saying about a murdered 17-year-old boy, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”
Why should this statement of fact, profound in its simplicity and deep empathy, have been controversial?
It’s true that every parent of a son – and I am the parent of a son – can see him in Trayvon Martin, in Michael Brown, in Tamir Rice. But to acknowledge that what these children have in common, what they have in common with President Barack Obama, is the color of their skin – to acknowledge that … is to acknowledge racial injustice.
What separates this new era of civil rights, social justice and empowerment from the centuries that have gone before is not that we are a nation free of racial injustice, but we are living in a time when there is a growing awareness that racial injustice remains a cancer on the American body politic.
With all of the successes of individual African Americans that loom large in our national consciousness … the CEOs and the billionaires, some of whom are here with us this week …. The athletes and the music moguls and the Hollywood A-listers …. With an African American in the Oval Office …. With all of this success and power that looms at the top of Black America, we have to ask ourselves: How can this generation fail to heal the rifts in our society and reconcile racial injustice once and for all?
The Black community cannot heal these rifts alone. It requires a movement of the willing – white, black, Latino, Asian, Native American …. Christian, Jewish, Muslim, agnostic …. gay or straight,…
… the determined, the enlightened, the outraged.
If injustice outrages you, if this cycle of violence grates at your inner core as a human being, then you can be – you must be – a champion of this movement.
You can be a labor leader, a faith leader, a business leader, an MD, a JD, an MBA, or hold no degree whatsoever, but you must be a champion of this movement.
We can’t be blinded by material success, by titles and positions. We cannot allow the success stories among us to be categorized as the exception to the rule.
For the first time in the 400-year-history of Black people in America, we are living in an era where it is almost universally accepted – at least in polite company – that it is morally unacceptable to treat people differently because of the color of their skin.
So when a black child is shot and killed without warning while playing on a public street, a large segment of our society can’t accept that it happened because he was black. Because racial injustice is morally unacceptable.
We cannot fix what’s wrong with this country by shielding our eyes and pretending that racial injustice does not exist.
Racial segregation in housing has been illegal for more than fifty years, but seventy-five percent of us live in segregated communities. Racial segregation in schools has been illegal for sixty years, and ninety percent of black children attend schools that are ninety percent students of color.
African Americans are more likely than white Americans to be arrested; once arrested, more likely to be convicted; and once convicted, more likely to face stiff sentences.
Refusing to acknowledge the role that race plays in these atrocities does nothing to alleviate them.
The fight we are engaged in is not a fight for equality under the law, but equality in the hearts and minds and actions of every man woman and child in these United States. It is a fight for opportunity not just in theory, or on paper, but in practice and in experience.
When Black children are expelled from school at three times the rate of white children, for the same behavior, that’s not equality.
When the rate of spending per student at a school goes down whenever the rate of black enrollment goes up, that’s not equality.
When black households hold one tenth of the wealth of white households – a gap that has tripled over the last quarter-decade – that’s not equality.
When twice as many Black Americans as white are unemployed, and three times as many Black children are living in poverty, that’s not equality.
When unarmed black men are seven times as likely as their white counterparts to be shot and killed by police, that’s not equality.
Earlier this year, the National Urban League released the 40-year-anniversary edition of the State of Black America. In that report, we compared the social and economic status of African Americans during the past year to conditions in 1976, when my predecessor Vernon Jordan released the first report.
The lack of progress over 40 years is profound.
The Black unemployment rate has consistently remained about twice the white rate at every level of education. Compared to 40 years ago, the income gap has remained basically unchanged, and the homeownership rate gap has actually grown. The foreclosure crisis has left Black homeownership rates at approximately the same point they were in 1976, while the white homeownership rate is now 5 percentage points higher.
We are in crisis.
The National Urban League has promulgated a plan to elevate urban communities through targeted public investment, called the Main Street Marshall Plan. Mister or Madame Next President, are you listening?
The National Urban League has promulgated a plan to hold police and communities accountable for unjustified violence against unarmed citizens, called the 10 Point Justice Plan. Mister or Madame Next President, are you listening?
Plans on paper, written in the most compelling prose, with the most prescient rationale, mean nothing if we do not put in place responsible, forward-thinking representatives with the power to put these plans into action.
The responsibility to put these plans into action lies with this generation.
That responsibility boils down to just one almighty action: We must vote.
If we want universal early childhood education … we must vote.
If we want a federal living wage, tied to inflation … we must vote.
If we want to fund urban infrastructure and build schools instead of juvenile detention facilities, libraries and community centers instead of prisons … we must vote
If you want to see our tax dollars go to rebuilding West Baltimore and Englewood, Chicago and Athens, Ohio, and Boone, North Carolina, as they have in Bagdad and Kabul …. We must vote.
If we want to see our urban youth working at summer jobs instead of floundering in hopelessness … we must vote.
If we want to see the dream of a college education within affordable reach for every student in America … we must vote.
If we are to see justice done in the killings of our brothers and sisters at the hands of police and self-appointed vigilantes, we must vote.
If we want to end the scourge of Blacks killing Blacks … We must vote.
If we want to erase the AR-17 and the AK47 – the weapon of choice for terrorists and mass killings – from our streets … We must vote.
If we want no fly, no buy and universal background checks …. We must vote.
If we are to honor the martyrdom of Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner and James Chaney, whose tortured bodies were discovered exactly 53 years ago tomorrow, we must vote.
If we want a compassionate system of immigration reform that leads to dignity and citizenship, we must vote.
If we want Black lives to matter because all lives matter, we must vote.
If we want continued, robust funding for the Urban League’s highly effective programs, we must vote.
If our vision is an America with liberty, justice and economic opportunity for all, we must vote.
If we are to change the heart of this nation, we must vote.
And if we are to achieve all this, through our vote, we must continue to fight with everything we have to protect our vote.
Last week, the nation celebrated the fall of North Carolina’s restrictive “monster” voter ID law. On the same day, a federal judge in Wisconsin threw out a host of discriminatory voting laws. And just days ago voting restrictions were tossed out in Kansas and North Dakota.
It’s no accident that laws like these began to sweep the country immediately following the first Presidential election in which the Black voting rate surpassed the white rate. The moment the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Section Five of the Voting Rights Act, lawmakers in North Carolina and other states wasted no time in demonstrating exactly why it was necessary in the first place.
There are some in this country who make no secret of the fact that they want to build a wall around the voting booth. I’ll find the Loch Ness Monster before they find any real voter fraud. How can any politician support a war to establish democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan then turn around and conspire to enact policies which are anti-democratic right here in the United States? It’s stunning in its hypocrisy. It’s stunning in its contradiction. It’s stunning in its inconsistencies.
We will be consistent.
We will be consistent in our passion to protect the vote.
We will be consistent in our determination to protect the vote.
We will be consistent in our righteousness to protect the vote.
We must be determined never to allow the work of those who came before us diminished or destroyed because we are complacent or ambivalent or just too comfortable.
The Old Testament text reminds us, To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate;
A time of war, and a time of peace.
Urban Leaguers, I say to you there is a time to talk and a time to act.
There is a time for reflection, and a time for decision.
There is a time to vote.
What are we going to do now?
We are going to vote.
What are we going to do now?
We are going to vote.
What are we going to do now?
We are going to vote.
Thank you, Urban leaguers.
And by the power vested in me, I hereby declare the 2016 National Urban League Conference officially open.
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