N All right now how you doing you good I’m glad to be here glad to be uh back uh in uh Charlotte glad to see so many folks here glad to see congresswoman Alma Adams here uh uh we spend uh lots of time in DC uh of course uh I uh I
Have the uh the only blackowned news and information network uh in the country Blackstar network uh we make it a we we we make it a point to uh speak to the issues that matter to us um we don’t waste our time with gossip silliness and stuff along those lines
It’s enough of that crap out there and so our goal is to constantly be about the issues that matter uh to us when I say us not just African-Americans but all people it it’s always interesting I have folk who hit me and they say well you target African-Americans I said yeah
But that’s not the only folk who watch uh I had a uh we were talking about some protest in West Virginia with the Poor People’s campaign uh and one of the uh Co one of the co-leaders in West Virginia uh was uh a 50 plus year old
White woman and when the interview ended she says rolling before I go uh I want to tell you that uh I happened to come across your YouTube channel and you were interviewing Reverend Dr William Barber and she said when I saw that and I saw him talking about what was was
Happening in West Virginia I immediately called the office in West Virginia uh and that’s how I got involved in this campaign so here was a white woman in West Virginia who had no idea about the work that we do no idea about the work that Reverend William Barbara and the
Poor People’s campaign was doing who came across uh what we were talking about and the issues that we speak about on my show and my network resonated with her and that’s how she then volunteered and and the mistake that we make is that we don’t always realize how far
Messaging goes mass media is called mass media for a reason uh and it’s a whole lot of folk uh who uh don’t understand the power of media and how you might be speaking one place and you’re reaching thousands and millions and you don’t even know uh they’re even watching or
Paying attention which is why I say to many of my brothers and sisters uh who are in meting you must respect this thing you must respect the microphone and you must think about what comes in your head what comes out of your mouth because you don’t understand who’s on the receiving
End of what you have to say and there a lot of people who don’t fully respect it and they say crazy things and they they make up stuff and uh they will ask questions and make statements and don’t have any basis of fact to back those things up uh and I
Challenged them and I’ve even had some folk tell me that man you know I don’t like how how how you stepped to me I don’t like uh how how you came at me I said well uh if you don’t make stuff up if you don’t disrespect the microphone I
Would have never said nothing uh because I’ve always operated in my career a very simple philosophy if you do good I’ll talk about you if you do bad I’ll talk about you at the end of the day I will talk about you I don’t let folk come on my
Show and lie I don’t let folk come on I love people say well man why are you always interrupting some folks I said they start lying I’mma interrupt them and that’s because I can’t let a lie stand because if you are watching or listening to me and somebody lies and I
Don’t correct them in the moment you will then go well what they’re saying must be true because Roland didn’t say anything and so I tell anybody you want to come over here be feel free we can have a great conversation debate but when you start lying you are going uh to
Get checked and so uh that that’s just how I roll uh and so I don’t apologize for it uh because that’s how we have to have folks uh with integrity and credibility uh when it comes to our business I want to thank so many of you for supporting the show we launched this
Show five and a half years ago after TV1 cancel news one now people told me it wasn’t going to work we launched with 157,000 YouTube subscribers we’re up to 1.19 million we then 2021 we launched the network we have five with six shows uh on the network uh
And we’re building it uh and uh our fan base has been tremendous in five in those five and a half years our fans have contributed in excess of $2 million for uh the show and the thing is we don’t send them hats or shirts or mugs
Or anything along those lines uh I tell them every dollar is going back into the network because people appreciate uh information uh that is credible and real and in this time uh in this season uh where we are seeing folks who believe in alternative facts who accept lies at
Every turn we’ve got to have credible sources uh where you can go for truth and uh that’s why my show is called unfiltered because that’s how we roll out every single uh step of the way and so that’s why uh we do what we do uh
Before I get uh into um the uh the main part of my remarks I do want to say this here uh and that is um when it comes to this holiday uh this is the federal holiday for the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr uh but I think we have to change our
Perspective in terms of how we approach this holiday because the holiday is not supposed to be solely about him when he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 Dr keing accepted the award on behalf of the movement and the money money that he received from the Noel Nobel Peace Prize
He actually spread it out among various organizations uh when my fellow Alfred Brothers when we led the building of the memorial yes it is the it is the MLK Memorial but it is symbolic of the entire movement and we make a mistake when we make this thing solely about one
Individual because there is no Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr without thousands upon thousands of or Ary people who did extraordinary things and then when you talk about this movement again we focus we we put the centerpiece on him or a thur good Marshall or uh on
A Roy Wilkins or a Whitney Young and we’d often do the Roll Call of the the black male pastors uh who were involved with it but I need to remind people that he was the spokesman for the mcgomery Improvement Association but if if it was not for the women’s political Council if
It was not for women like Joanne Robinson do understand they were doing the work in Montgomery before he even arrived there a lot of the heavy lifting that took place at Montgomery was done by that women’s political Council she was a professor at Alabama State College
They were there when you talk about even that boycott if you go to my go to the network you’ll see my with Fred Clark who was King’s attorney uh they sat in her uh uh kitchen uh and they sketched out what that protest would be uh there
Is a book about their work and again we we we love talking about these other figures but there’s a book called The mcgomery Bus Boycott and the women who started it the Memoir of Joanne Gibson Robinson David Garo who want to pull a surprise for a book of Dr King writes
The forward and in this book he has the letter that she sent to the bus company 4 days after Brown verse Board of Education calling on them to desegregate the buses that was 1954 the boycott was 1955 so a year before Rosa Parks even sat down she sent the letter in the book
He shows the copy of the letter I I I’m saying that because we make the mistake when we ignore the work of other people who are involved in this movement and we give short shrift especially to the number of black women who were the foundation of the movement I’m not
Dismissing the work of any of the brothers but if you really want to be honest you cannot have a black Freedom Movement some called the Civil Rights Movement without a Joanne Robinson with without an Ella Baker without a sep mclark without a constant Baker Motley without a Diane Nash without isona
Clayton and on and on and on and so if we continue to only focus on one person and ignore so many other people then what we’re doing is a disservice to the Next Generation so my suggestion is this for next year’s essay contest in the Spirit of Dr King you should make next
Year’s essay contest a focus on the women of the movement so now what you do is you now Force the Next Generation to have to do the proper research on all of those unsung heroes who did their work and so we need to expand this holiday
Beyond him and we need to include so many others who actually were involved in doing the work um I was uh contemplating uh what I wanted to uh speak from and any any time uh you speak um a lot of times folk uh have no idea they don’t remember nothing
You say uh and so uh I always make it a point to title what I speak about uh or I will then or or of course being in church we say allow me to tag this text now clearly some of y’all have no idea what tag this text mean which first
Means one you likely have no experience in a black church two it means that you don’t go to church anymore so if you have no idea what tag this text means just lean over to somebody and say what he talking about and so I also do this because if
Somebody can’t remember what I talked about they can at least remember the title so allowed me to speak from the perspective of reclaiming the rattle cless of Dr King many of us are familiar with congresswoman Maxine Waters uh popularizing the term I’m reclaiming my time I’m reclaiming my
Time and what is driven me crazy over the years and it has reached a boiling point it’s when we have these annual events speaking of Dr King we have completely stripped him of the radical that he was America including Black America has created what I call a civil rights
Mascot who we Trot out every single year and hold him up as somebody who just loved everybody and wanted everybody to get along and everything was just nice and wonderful we allow politicians black white Latino Asian Native American straight gay conservative rep uh conservative liberal Democrat Republican
To talk give quotes of Dr King we allow companies to post comments and post pictures about Dr King and when you actually look look at what they are posting uh they are posting these nice wonderful quotes but there’s nothing actually behind the quote and then when you look at the
Policies that they Advocate the policies that they vote for when you look at uh the lack of investment of these same companies how can these people hold up Dr King and praise Dr King and literally have nothing to say about the agenda of king and the black Freedom
Movement see you you can’t divorce the person from the issues you can’t divorce him from the agenda you can’t cite a quote but then don’t talk about what the quote was about and then what we’ve done is we’ reduced Dr King to two speeches as if that’s the only thing he
Ever talked about in my home Library more than a thousand plus books I have eight volumes a red uh leather bound volumes from Stanford University uh of their MLK project where they actually put together all of his writings and his speeches it’s eight volumes it’s more
Than uh 4,000 plus Pages uh of content so he goes beyond two speeches but even if we talk about those two speeches what drives me crazy is when I go to Black History Month events and when I go to MLK weekend events well used to be MLK day then it became MLK
Weekend then became m month so really now between day and the end of February is like a 45 day uh process which is fine with me cuz it should be longer but what’s interesting to me is I will sit there and I will listen to these people talk about the
Dream and and let and let me just say I heard a little bit earlier uh just just just give do me one more favor uh please remove the Dream from our mindset because see here’s the problem we focus on the dream part of a speech but we ignore the reality of the
Earlier part of the speech you can’t talk about the dream but ignore when he said America gave us a check stamp insufficient funds you can’t talk about the dream when you ignore when he talked about police brutality you can’t talk about the dream when he talked about voter suppression
You cannot do that you can’t skip the hard stuff to get to the aspirational stuff because you can have a dream but eventually you got to wake the hell [Applause] up you can be laying in your bed having a fantastic dream about living somewhere in nice homes and well manicured Lawns
And taking great vacations and when you wake up you got to confront the reality of being broke so I can’t make my dream a reality unless I deal with reality and then what we then do is we talk about his Mountain Top speech I love him talking about oh I’ve been to
The mountain top I see seen the promised land that’s 2 minutes of a speech he gave at Mason Temple the night before he was assassinated but you can’t talk about the Mountaintop if you ignore the previous 41 minutes of the same speech it’s a 43 minute 16 second speech where
He is talking about the reality of the condition of African-Americans in Memphis and across the country in the very same speech he is talking about uh how we must redistribute the pain in the speech he says Jesse what do you call it he said redistribute the pain he said
The sanitation workers they are are enduring the pain we now got to redistribute the pain to everybody else in the same speech he calls out the companies that are not doing business and not hiring African-Americans he name checks them he says we must have an insurance in where we are buying from
Black insurance companies he said where thec deposits their money in Black Banks he’s laying those things out he says in the speech that African-Americans individually are poor but collectively are wealthy calls on us to learn how to move together to be able to respond together to act together in one Accord
To be able to change What’s Happening Now what he’s talking about in ‘ 68 is exactly what they did with operation Bread Basket which was an initiative from the Reverend Leon Sullivan in Philadelphia Sullivan tells King about bread basket that concept King says come to Atlanta to present Toc he comes to
Atlanta present Toc Dr King says we’re going to adopt the concept they re renamed it Bread Basket he then tells Reverend Jackson you’re going to be over a Bread Basket if you walking around today talking about Reverend Jackson and rainbow push Coalition rainbow push Coalition is an outgrow of operation
Bread Basket there is no rainbow push Coalition without operation bread basket and so operation Bread Basket was an initiative where they challenged companies when it came to their lack of putting black products on their shelves but they didn’t just challenge them for products they challenged them when it
Came to hiring not just senior Executives but also entry-level jobs not just that but also investment in Black Banks and using blackowned companies Martin Depp the white Pastor in Chicago wrote a book and it’s called operation Bread Basket an untold story of civil rights in Chicago 1966 to 1971 this is
Arguably one of the greatest achievements of King and thec and the black Freedom Movement that we never talk about what they did was they went after companies and the reason you had your first class of of African-Americans who became millionaires and begin to build companies because Bread Basket forced
Them to put the products on the shelves and when they negotiated these deals they forced them to invest money in Black Banks they forced them to hire black companies they launched boycotts against those companies who were not doing business with African-Americans and so if you look at the success of
Black folks in Chicago and Detroit and those places it was because of the power of operation Bread Basket they use the collective power of protest to force these companies to change how they were doing business and how they were hiring our people that is a radical idea and
That is somebody who was willing to use the power of His voice to change what was happening in this country see again we don’t talk about that King we talk about just getting along and everybody night no because ketta Scott King said they killed my Martin when he started talking about the money
See America didn’t mind Dr King talking about voting rights America didn’t mind King talking about can we go into parks and hotels but the moment America heard him discussing the money then America changed see Le let’s just not play this whole thing cute see this is the problem
Again when we have these annual ceremonies in the last last year of his life he was one of the most hated men in America the polling show that only 30% of Americans approved of Dr King black folks could not stand Dr King why because the day he gave a speech at
Riverside Church on April 4th 1967 called Beyond Vietnam that’s when it was changed and in fact it was on that date that he stamped his death certificate you can’t convince me that he gives a speech on April 4th 1967 calling out the war in Vietnam and to the day A year later he’s
Assassinated in Memphis oh that’s a direct correlation to that because America was scared to death of the moral leadership of Dr King speaking out against the war in Vietnam he says in the Riverside Church that what we experience by having that war the funds that will go to that war then
Will sap the resources that will be used for the war in poverty and let me stay right there for a second because see again see we’re here in North Carolina and we’re here uh in the South and and I got to remind some folk that when when
LBJ launched the war on poverty he did not go to the Mississippi Delta when he launched the war in poverty he did not go to the west side of Chicago when he launched the war in poverty he went to White Appalachia in West Virginia and what I need folk to understand
Especially anybody who’s white in this room or who’s listening when black folks have always fought for rights for African-Americans the quality of life of poor white Americans increased oh you want to walk down that path we can talk about what happened in this state after the Civil War when you
Begin to see African-Americans elected to State houses in North Carolina and South Carolina elected to congress uh elected to the United States Senate what you then begin to see those free uh people of Africa descent instituting policies that begin to change things for people you did not have prior to the
Civil War state financed education it was those freed slaves who were elected to the state houses who changed how education was funded James D Anderson in his book The education of blacks in the South 1860 to 1935 lays out in his book that black folks has such fervor for Education that in
Memphis 91% of black children were going to school where in Washington DC just 37% of white kid kids were going to school he lays out that in the aftermath of the Civil War days after the Emancipation Proclamation days after the war ended white abolitionists came down to South Carolina and North Carolina and
Mississippi and they came to say we’re here to help these freed folk uh uh uh uh to learn how to read they didn’t realize that 500 schools had already been opened in the aftermath of the War ending in fact if you want to talk about collective bargaining meaning you are
Bargaining for rights freed slaves bargain with plantation owners saying if you want us to work on your land you got to build a school at the same time and what began to happen What begin to happen was uh broke white folks and broke black folks cuz let’s be perfectly
Clear when you broke your skin color don’t matter broke is broke if you can’t eat and you can’t read and you can’t get a job I don’t care if you are pale you broke and I would hope that many of our white brothers and sisters today who are
In that category would stop voting against their own economic interest voting for folks who want to cut public education voting for folks who want to cut a food assistance and Reverend Barbara told me a story when he was actually at a march here in North
Carolina he said he said a red neck with a Confederate flag draped around his neck came up to him in tears saying Reverend Barbara you and I don’t agree on much but I got to thank you and the folks with moral Mondays for fighting for our rural hospitals I was at the I
Was at the state conference for the N for the north NAACP given the keynote for his last uh conference and I met a group of white women from North Carolina they said I bet you ain’t never met five white women from the hills of North Carolina who were founders of a NAACP
Chapter because what folk found out during moral Mondays what they found out was that what the NAACP was fighting for were the exact same things those same broke poor impoverished uneducated white folks in North Carolina needed they were fighting for Education fighting for jobs fighting for health care and they
Realize when you land in your bed and you are not trying to die you don’t care if that doctor is white or black or democrat or republican when you can’t eat you don’t care what they look like so they realized that what they were fighting for were the same things that
They needed and so we’re sitting here right now still battling over Medicaid expansion dealing with a political party that claims to be pro-life but how can you be pro-life when you vote against Medicaid expansion how can you be pro-life if you vote against providing food and Aid to people who need it how
Can you be pro life if you know if you say nothing or do nothing about black maternal Health Care where in this country black women are dying even financially well off black women are dying at higher rates because of child care I made it perfectly clear to most
Of my folks who are conservative don’t tell me that you a pro-life no you really are anti-abortion cuz you cannot be pro-life if you refuse to say folk need a guaranteed income you cannot be pro-life if you are against a living wage in this country and you want folk
To work for free and then you mad when they get assistance and then you can’t tell me you pro-life when you say nothing when a black man or a black woman is shot and killed by cops and then you begin to dare say you don’t
Show up you’re not present I say no if you going to be pro-life be pro-life from the womb to the tomb not just in the Womb that’s the radicalness of King and so what we’ve done is we’ve done a disservice where we continue to walk around throwing out quotes that have no meaning not attached to policy and what we do is we then allow the day to come we come to programs and
We have speeches and artwork and all of those different things what do we do the day after King always talked about that the event the protest is one thing but the action after that thing absolutely matters and so if we say that we want to follow his example and that so many
Others and the folk who are out there doing the work you got to deal with the question of what happens now what happens now how do you use your vote do you use your vote and then what are the things things that you actually care about we’re sitting here living in an
Age we’re in this state you have a party that has done everything it could to deny people of fundamental Rights that will use the power of the super majority to make cuts to the poor but provide tax breaks to corporations see for me I I I don’t understand how you can have one of the richest individuals in America own a football team a soccer team and using taxpayer dollars to finance Stadium
Deals for somebody who’s a multi-billionaire don’t dare come to me talking about how you against welfare for broke folks but you down for welfare for Rich NFL billionaires those two simply don’t go together and again I I know some somebody sitting here was like man why
You got to go there man we we we we you know we we love you know we love our our football team and that’s part of the problem part of the problem is we’re walking around every single day loving and making excuses for billionaire owners to become richer and then when
It’s now a conversation on how to fund an education program or how to fund a food program now it’s a debate I’m confused it’s no different that in Congress it’s amazing President Biden sends a budget for the Pentagon they add $40 billion and it’s no conversation yet if we have a
Conversation about a five or1 billion doll food assist program we have massive debate oh I know some of y’all looking at me now saying well look we got to have a strong defense I understand in this state it’s a strong focus on Military but you can’t say you love King
If you refuse to recognize that he said there are three evils in this country he said war poverty and racism the fact of the matter is we are so quick to fund defense projects and ignore people who are starving when 30,000 Americans die on an annual basis because they are
Poor and then what we do we sitting here our loud politicians we look down on broke folks we listen to them say if these folks would just get their act together but ain’t it amazing when covid hit how we needed a whole bunch of them
Folk who were on the front line it was amazing during covid how folk were had so much care and compassion about front line workers because see the problem is when we are fine we ain’t paying any attention to those poor folks who working at grocery stores who are
Picking up trash who are working in hospitals but during Co all of a sudden we realized how important they were I’m unpacking all of this because that’s the agenda of MLK so why don’t we still talk about quotes and speeches but ignore agendas that’s a mistake that we’re making and
So we can’t keep saying well uh is his dream alive if we are not saying is his agenda alive are we fighting for those very things if you actually read what he laid out and this is where I’m also always challenging our organizations because it
Bothers me when we run around and I see my Alfred Brothers here and I see AKs and deltas and I see C and omegas and Prince Hall Mason and links and easn star and we have all of these organizations but I’m constantly asked the question what are we doing outside of our internal
Meetings the divine nine spent its resources and his time organizing and mobilizing around buying out movie theaters for folk to see The Color Purple organized and mobilized to to buy out movie theaters for folks to see black panther when for The Color Purple all you doing is making money for Warner
Brothers for black panther all you doing is making money for Disney but the question is do we have the same orchestrated Court Nation for issues that are impacting our community oh I know okay so see some see it’s at this point where some of y’all like well uh that sound like uh you
Speaking uh Brother Martin no no no it’s not because see again uh you need to understand here uh here is King’s book Where Do We Go From Here chaos or Community this is what he says on page 132 he said there are structured forces in the Negro community that can serve as
The basis for building a powerful united front the Negro Church the Negro press the Negro fraternities and sororities and negro professional associations we must admit that these forces have never given themselves given their full resources for the cause of negro Liberation there are still too many
Negro churches that are so absorbed in a future good Over Yonder that they condition their members to adjust to the present evils over here that too many negro newspapers have veered away from their traditional role as protest organs agitating for social change and have turned to The Sensational and the
Conservative in place of the substantive and the militant too many negro social professional groups have degenerated into snobbishness and a preoccupation with frivolities and trivial activity but the failures of the past must not be an excuse for the inaction of the present and the Future these groups must
Be mobilized and motivated this form of group Unity can do infinitely more to liberate the Negro than any action of individuals we have been oppressed as a group and we must overcome the oppression as a group so if you had a problem what I had to say then you were disagreeing with
King and so what that means is we begin to understand what is happening in this country when we begin to understand the battles that we are involved in right now when you literally have white Nationals and white supremacists who do not want to see it advancement doing all
They can to stop it when I see people making excuses for what took place on January 6th 2021 let me remind you that Donald Trump was constantly complaining about voting in four places Atlanta Philadelphia Detroit and Milwaukee if you ask anybody black what does that mean he was talking
About four black cities in fact when they had a partial recount in Milwaukee in Wisconsin it was only in Milwaukee the top Republican in Michigan said let’s count all the ballot in Michigan except Detroit and so what you saw really was uh a targeting of folks on
That day because they were angry with how black folks were voting that’s why on the cover of my book White fear of a photo of a white man with his arms outstretched he’s basically saying all of this is ours I know some of y’all looking at me saying well I brother that
Might be a little too tough really explain this to me then how is it that North Carolina had one of the lowest voting participations in all elections until 2008 when in 2008 North Carolina had one of the highest voter participations of any state in America oh by the way what happened in 2008
Barack Obama won North Carolina by 14,100 votes and what happened after Obama won North Carolina by 14,100 votes Republicans in this state begin to change the voting laws and ever since then y’all have been fighting trying to go back to where you were in 2008 so how can the same people who fund
The military to the tune of $890 billion talk about Freedom talk about our love for the military and fighting for what’s right but doing all they can to stop folk from access accessing the ballot that’s because they don’t want to see righteous people in place that’s why it
Was an Abomination when you had a black woman who was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who lost by 400 votes and now you have a party that has a 52 control of your Supreme Court and they are trying to pass laws that will impact
Folks in a negative way that’s why you have right now some folk who all folk who our skin folk ain’t kin Folk that’s why right now you’ve got a deranged individual running for governor of North Carolina who is simply a sick and demented individual who has no business
Being anywhere the governor’s office who cannot articulate an agenda that speaks to all people but he would rather kiss up to Donald Trump who have the audacity and unmitigated G to say that Mark Robinson Jr is in the same vein as ml okay if anybody could say that the only
Thing they might have in common both wore black pairs of shoes but I can’t compare them in any other way you will never ever hear me say MLK Jr Mark Robertson Jr they in the same category you got to be stuck on stupid and outside of your [Applause]
Mind and everybody needs to understand and I mean everybody whether you black or white or Latino or Asian-American Native American you have right now an effort being funded by billionaires in Washington DC to inact what is called project 2025 if Trump wins these folks have made it clear they are going they have
Studied everything that happened during his four years and they made it clear they going to simply just wipe all sort of stuff away it is one of the most dangerous things that we have ever seen they are promising retribution from the Department of Justice they are promising
To to use the IRS to attack their enemies they have made it clear that they’re going to be wiping out thousands of people who work in the federal government when you hear there’s a fight for democracy we had better understand that it’s not a simple basic statement
It is a fundamental truth so we can’t be sitting here just focused and celebrating on this day this has to be a day where you’re using it to mobilize and organize I made it clear I was in Jamaica for two weeks of vacation and I
Said when I get back we are on an 11mon focus of for what we’re doing I don’t have time for foolishness I need people to understand that there are people who want to attack every single thing that has benefited African-Americans people of color and white women the affirmative
Action ruling by the Supreme Court was by cers did not just impact African-Americans let me be real clear so folk in this room can understand there’s been no greater beneficiary of affirmative action in America than white women that’s a fact check any contractual contractual program with with the federal government with states
With counties cities school districts the numbers do not lie but let me also remind folk because this is where history somehow gets ignored if you are a woman largely a white woman today and you are a doctor an engineer a lawyer an architect and you had to go to the
Professional schools you should be thanking black folks for fighting because we talk about Title Nine and and somehow believe that Title Nine was only about sports y’all Title 9 had nothing to do with sports Title 9 was about opening the professional schools up to women who discriminating check the facts
The explosion of women in in uh in those Fields happened after 1972 and you might be saying well how does that impact black folks well what’s Title 9 Title 9 is a provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act without the 1964 Civil Rights Act there is no Title Nine if you are
Disabled in this country and you now have access to ramps and elevators you might want to thank black people because the 1996 American with Disabilities Act is a vision from the 1964 Civil Rights Act and if you are Latin if you a Latino or you a Korean or you are Japanese and
Chinese and you get to vote in your native language you need to be thanking black people because it’s the 1965 Voting Rights Act that makes that possible and if you are Latino or Asian or Native American and you are saying I now get to live where I want to live you
Better thank black folks because that was because of the fair housing act also known as the 1968 Civil Rights Act and if you and if you are gay or lesbian and you love and appreciate that you can now get married you may want to thank black people because that’s the equal
Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment which was one of the three reconstruction amendments the 13th the 14th and the 15th Amendment and if you are sitting here recognizing that the insurrectionist should not be able to run for office that’s because of section three of the 14th Amendment what am I
Saying every single group in this country that has its civil rights and its fundamental rights has benefited because of black blood that was spilled from the Civil War through Jim Crow through the black Freedom Movement and so what I’m saying is those rights are now being threatened so we cannot have
Just black folks standing up we need people of integrity and honor and courage standing with us saying I want my rights as well and I don’t want someone taking them from us and that’s exactly what’s happened you’ve got conservatives right now who are planning to launch a broadside against M tomorrow
And the 1964 Civil Rights Act they are angry because of those rights you’ve got Ed Bloom suing the Fearless fund creating grants for black women and other women to start businesses when less than 2% of all venture capital that is spent in this country actually goes to African-Americans I need folk to
Understand that we are literally in the middle of a war and as Papa Pope said on Scandal too many of us are walking around with bombs going off and thinking we’re dancing in a field of lies at some point folk have got to recognize there
Is a fight truly for the soul of America for the soul of North Carolina for the soul of Charlotte you have got to decide right now whether you want to be in this fight or you want to Simply Be an observer now is not the time for us to
Come in this Church Celebrate King have artwork have writings and say oh my God how he was wonderful if you were not willing to do what he was willing to do and that was to organize and mobilize and protest and strategize and push and fight and take the fight to them at
Every single turn they were unwilling to back down from a fight which is why black folks and white folks can sit sit in the same church at the same time and not be arrested we need this generation to wake up and to understand you might
Have to take off your Hugo Boss or your ammani suits and and take off your St John and take off your lubaton and realize you got to be in this fight in this battle because we cannot allow these folk to roll us back to the old
Days and if you need to understand what it means that my frat brother vertner Woodson Tandy said at best we will fight until Hell Freezes Over and then we will fight on the [Applause] ice [Applause] W He Oh
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