Jesse Jackson, Jr.: Speech to the Democratic National Convention (1992)

▪ Primary Source

      Between the Civil War and the Great Depression, the overwhelming majority of African American voters cast their ballots for the Republican Party. As the party of President Abraham Lincoln, signer of the Emancipation Proclamation, Republicans naturally appealed to black voters. In 1936, however, President Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first Democrat to win a majority of the black vote. Democrats have maintained the allegiance of African American voters in every election since then. Indeed, by the 1990s, Democrats routinely received 90 percent of the black vote in presidential elections. Bill Clinton aggressively courted African American voters when he ran for president on the Democratic Party ticket in 1992. In particular, Clinton struck an alliance with the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the most influential black Democrat in the country. Jackson first came to national prominence in the 1960s when he worked as an aide to civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. After founding the Rainbow Coalition, a civil rights lobbying organization, Jackson ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984. In the strongest showing ever by an African American candidate, Jackson won several million votes before being defeated by Walter Mondale in the primary. Jackson"s influence in the Democratic Party grew even stronger in subsequent years. At the Democratic National Convention in July 1992, Jackson"s address, printed here, electrified the delegates.

      Chairman Ron Brown, you"ve done a difficult job well. You have brought down barriers. Your work makes us proud. President Bill Clinton, you have survived a tough spring. It will make you stronger for the fall. With your stripes you must heal and make us better. The hopes of many depend upon your quest. Be comforted that you do not stand alone.

      Vice President Al Gore comes to this task tested and prepared. He has been a reasoned voice for environmental sanity, a supporter of social justice, an original sponsor of DC statehood. And I, for one, look forward to the vice-presidential debate.

      We stand as witnesses to a pregnant moment in history. Across the globe, we feel the pain that comes with new birth. Here, in our country pain abounds. We must be certain that it too leads to new birth, and not a tragic miscarriage of opportunity.

      We must turn pain to power, pain into partnership, not pain into polarization.

      The great temptation in these difficult days of racial polarization and economic injustice is to make political arguments black and white, and miss the moral imperative of wrong and right. Vanity asks—is it popular? Politics asks—will it win? Morality and conscience ask—is it right?

      We are part of a continuing struggle for justice and decency, links in a chain that began long before we were born and will extend long after we are gone. History will remember us not for our positioning, but for our principles. Not by our move to the political center, left or right, but rather by our grasp on the moral and ethical center of wrong and right.

      We who stand with working people and poor have a special burden. We must stand for what is right, stand up to those who have the might. We do so grounded in the faith, that what is morally wrong will never be politically right. But if it is morally sound, it will eventually be politically right.

      When I look at you gathered here today, I hear the pain and see the struggles that prepared the ground that you stand on. We have come a long way from where we started.

      A generation ago—in 1964, Fanny Lou Hamer had to fight even to sit in this convention. Tonight, 28 years later, the chair of the Party is Ron Brown from Harlem; the manager is Alexis Herman, an African American woman from Mobile, Alabama. We have come a long way from where we started.

      We are more interdependent than we realize. Not only African Americans benefitted from the movement for justice. It was only when African Americans were free to win and sit in these seats, that Bill Clinton and Al Gore from the new South could be able to stand on this rostrum. We are inextricably bound together in a single garment of destiny. Red, yellow, brown, black and white, we are all precious in God"s sight. We have come a long way from where we started.

      Tonight we face another challenge. Ten million Americans are unemployed, 25 million on food stamps, 35 million in poverty, 40 million have no health care. From the coal miners in Bigstone Gap, West Virginia to the loggers and environmentalists in Roseburg, Oregon, from displaced textile workers in my home town of Greenville, South Carolina to plants closing in Van Nuys, California, pain abounds. Plants are closing, jobs leaving on a fast track, more are working for less, trapped by repressive anti-labor laws. The homeless are a source of national shame and disgrace.

      There is a harshness to America that comes from not seeing and a growing mindless materialism. Our television sets bring the world into our living rooms, but too often we overlook our neighbors.

      We have a president who has traveled the world, but has never been to Hamlet, North Carolina. Yet we must not overlook Hamlet.

      It was there that 25 workers died in a fire at Imperial Foods, more women than men, more white than black. They worked making chicken parts in vats heated to 400 degrees, with few windows and no fans. The owners locked the doors on the outside. The workers died trapped by economic desperation and oppressive work laws.

      One woman came up to me after the fire—she said:

      “I want to work. I don"t want to go on welfare. I have three children and no husband. We pluck 90 wings a minute. Now I can"t bend my wrist, I got the carpel thing. Then when we"re hurt they fire us, and we have no health insurance, and no union to help us. We can"t get another job because we"re crippled, so they put us on welfare and call us lazy.”

      I said you are not lazy, and you are not alone.

      Her friend, a white woman came up and said:

      “I"m 7 months pregnant. We stand in two inches of water with two five-minute bathroom breaks. Sometimes we can"t hold our water, and then our bowels, and we faint.”

      We wept together.

      If we keep Hamlet in our hearts and before our eyes, we will act to empower working people. We will protect the right to organize and to strike. We will empower workers to enforce health and safety laws. We will provide a national health care system, a minimum wage sufficient to bring workers out of poverty, paid parental leave. We must build a movement for economic justice across the land.

      We face a difficult challenge. Our cities have been abandoned, farmers forsaken, children neglected. Floods in Chicago; fires in Los Angeles. They say they can"t find $35 billion for the mayors, but the latest down payment for the S&L bailout was $25 billion. It is time to break the mold.

      Now is the time to rebuild America. We must be the party with the plan and the purpose. Four years ago, we fought for a program to reinvest in America, paid for by fair taxes on the rich and savings from the military. This year, Governor Bill Clinton has taken a substantial step in that direction. He has expressed Democratic support for DC statehood, same day on site universal voter registration. He has vowed to challenge corporations to invest at home, retrain their workers and pay their share of taxes. He has made a commitment to raising and indexing the minimum wage. We must build upon that direction and go further still.

      In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt ran on a “balance-the-budget” platform in the middle of a recession. Working people in motion pushed him into the New Deal. The impetus for change will not come top down, it must come bottom up.

      The Rainbow Coalition has put forward a “Rebuild America Plan.” At its heart is a proposal, with the aid of Felix Rohatyn, one of America"s leading experts in public finance, for an American Investment Bank. There are $3 trillion in public and private pension funds, that with government guarantees, could provide $500 billion in seed money, and attract an additional $500 billion, to create a ten-year, $1 trillion plan to rebuild America. Pension funds are the workers money. That money is now used to prop up South Africa, for LBOs [leveraged buyouts], and high risk speculation and greed. We should use the workers" money, with the workers" consent and government guarantees, to secure our future by rebuilding America.

      We must have a plan on a scale that corresponds with the size of the problems we face. Taiwan has a $1 trillion plan—it is the size of Pennsylvania. Japan has a $3 trillion plan over ten years. We found the money to help rebuild Europe and Japan after World War II, we found the money to help Russia and Poland. We found $600 billion to bail out the mess left by the buccaneer bankers. Surely we can find the money to rebuild America and put people back to work.

      We must have a vision sufficient to correspond with the size of our opportunity. Across the world, walls are coming down. The Cold War is over; the Soviet Union is no more. Russia wants to join NATO. We can change our priorities, reinvest in educating our children, train our workers, rebuild our cities. Today Japan makes fast trains; we make fast missiles. If we change our priorities, and build a high speed national railroad, we could go from New York to Los Angeles in 8 hours. We could make the steel, lay the rail, build the cars and drive them. Scientists can stop devising weapons we don"t need and start working on environmental advances we can"t live without.

      We must have an imagination strong enough to see beyond war. In Israel, Prime Minister Rabin"s election is a step toward greater security and peace for the entire region. Rabin"s wisdom in affirming negotiation over confrontation, land for peace, bargaining table over battle field has inspired hope, not only in the hearts of democratic Israel, but on the West Bank. Israeli security and Palestinian self-determination are inextricably bound, two sides of the same coin. If peace talks continue, this generation may be able to witness a Middle East tasting the fruits of peace.

      In Africa today, democracy is on the march. In Nigeria, we witnessed successful elections last week. But democracy cannot flourish amid economic ruins. Democracy protects the right to vote; it does not insure that you can eat. Today, President Deuf of Senegal, head of development for the Organization of African Unity, is pushing for African development. Like other regions of the world, Africa needs debt relief and credits so it can have the opportunity to grow.

      We must understand that development in the Third World and economic prosperity at home are inextricably bound. We can be a force for peace in the Middle East, development to Africa and Latin America, hope in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

      Politics cannot be reduced to a matter of money and ambition. We must stay true to our values, or lose our way.

      —In 1939—900 Jews were turned away from the shores of Miami by the U.S. government, sent back to Germany haunted by Hitler.

      —In 1942—120,000 Japanese Americans were rounded up and put in American concentration camps.

      —In 1992—the U.S. government is turning Haitians away, back into the arms of death, and relaxing sanctions on South Africa.

      It was anti-Semitic and wrong in 1939 to lock the Jews out. It was racist and wrong in 1942 to lock the Japanese Americans up. And it is racist and wrong in 1992 to lock the Haitians out and abandon Nelson Mandela in South Africa. South Africa remains a terrorist state. Sanctions should be reimposed until the interim government is established.

      We hear a lot of talk about family values, even as we spurn the homeless on the street. Remember, Jesus was born to a homeless couple, outdoors in a stable, in the winter. He was the child of a single mother. When Mary said Joseph was not the father, she was abused. If she had aborted the baby, she would have been called immoral. If she had the baby, she would have been called unfit, without family values. But Mary had family values. It was Herod—the Quayle of his day—who put no value on the family.

      We who would be leaders must feel and be touched by people"s pain. How can you be a doctor and not touch the sick? How can you be a leader and not touch the hurt? Gandhi adopted the untouchables. Dr. King marched with violent gang members, hoping to turn them to the discipline of non-violence.

      Above all, we must reach out and touch our children. Our children are embittered and hurt, but it is not a congenital disease. They were not born that way. They live amidst violence and rejection, in broken streets, broken glass, broken sidewalks, broken families, broken hearts. Their music, their rap, their video, their art reflects their broken world. We must reach out and touch them.

      Before the riots in Los Angeles, Representative Maxine Waters and I visited the Imperial Courts and Nickerson Gardens housing projects in Watts, where we spent the night with our children, and then visited the youth detention center with Arsenio Hall and James Almos. We listened to the youth describe their busted and deferred dreams. They suffer 50 percent unemployment, with no prospects of a job or going to college. It costs $5,000 to send them to high school, $34,000 to send them downtown to the youth detention center.

      For many of them, jail is a step up. In jail, they are safe from drive-by shootings. In jail, it"s warm in the winter, cool in the summer. In jail they get three balanced meals, access to health care, education and vocational training. Everything they should have on the outside they only get on the inside.

      Too many of our children see jail as a relief station, and death as a land beyond pain. We must reach out and touch them. Surely, it is better to have dirty hands and clean hearts than clean hands and a dirty heart.

      If we reach out, we can win—and deserve to win. We have heard many different arguments about a winning strategy—whether to rally the base or appeal to those who have strayed. But these are not choices. We will win only if we put forth a vision that corresponds with the size of our problems and the scope of our opportunity, if we reach out to those in despair and those who care, reach across the lines that divide by race, region or religion.

      As for the Rainbow Coalition, we will continue to build a movement for economic justice in this land. We will work to mobilize working and poor people to change the course of this country. We will join in defeating George Bush in the fall—that is a necessary first step.

      We must continue to build. When Roosevelt came to office, a movement of working people made a new deal possible. When Kennedy came to office, he did not teach Dr. King about civil rights; Dr. King led a movement that made civil rights unavoidable. When Bill Clinton comes to office, we must build a movement that keeps economic justice at the forefront of the agenda.

      I know it"s dark. But in the dark the flame of hope still burns.

      In Los Angeles, they focused on Rodney King beaten by white officers, who were acquitted by an all-white jury. But it was a white man who had the instinct and the outrage to film it and take it public. The media focus was on the white truck driver beaten by black youth. But it was four young black youth who stepped in and saved his life, good samaritans.

      In the final analysis it comes down to a question of character. On a small Southern college campus, I once observed a lesson never to be forgotten. I saw a dwarf and a giant walking together—they were an odd couple. He was six feet three, she was three feet tall. When they reached the parting paths, they embraced. He handed her her books and she skipped down the path. It looked to be romantic. I asked the president—what is this I am seeing? He said, I thought you would ask. You see, that is his sister, in fact his twin sister. By a twist of fate he came out a giant, she a dwarf. All the big schools offered him athletic scholarships. The pros offered him money. But he said I can only go where my sister can go. And so he ended up here with us.

      Somewhere that young man learned ethics, caring for others. Few of us are driven by a tailwind. Most of us struggle with headwinds. Not all of us can be born tall, some are born short, motherless, abandoned, hungry, orphaned. Somebody has to care. It must be us. And if we do, we will win, and deserve to win.

      Keep hope alive.

Source: Vital Speeches of the Day, August 15, 1992.

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