Good evening. I am honored to be with you tonight at the first chartered branch of the NAACP, at the institution often known as the labor branch of the NAACP. And I am humbled that you are honoring me, and allowing me a small part in the shared history of the civil rights and labor movements.
It’s especially meaningful to me to accept this award in 2014. This is a anniversary year for civil rights milestones. A few weeks ago, we marked the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. In 1954, before the AFL-CIO was born, the CIO filed an amicus brief in that landmark case. And less than a month from now, on July 1, we will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Civil Rights Act.
These milestones have prompted me to think about the hurdles our movements face, both then and now. In the struggle for rights in the workplace, in civil society and at the voting booth, haven’t we always faced the twin challenges of public indifference and concerted opposition?
Activists in every movement and every era, I suppose, must feel that the world into which we are born is a conspiracy against the cultivation of our dreams of freedom and justice. Yet it is only because the world views our ideals with such coldness and outright hostility that we are compelled to broaden our reach and organize those who share our dreams and values.
Back in Washington in the offices of the AFL-CIO, we have many objects and pieces of art gathered by the labor movement over the past 100 years. Among them, no object is more prized, and no object issues a greater challenge than a case of 100 pens that hangs in our hallway. President Lyndon Baines Johnson used each pen to sign a bill enacted by Congress during a brief, extraordinary period in our nation’s history that began following the assassination of President Kennedy.
President Johnson presented that case to the AFL-CIO when I was just a boy in school, in gratitude for the help working people gave in passing the legislation that truly made America a greater society. At the top is the pen that signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The men and women of the American labor movement who earned this gift are for the most part no longer with us. I’m talking about the first African American Vice President of the AFL-CIO, A. Philip Randolph, who, with his deputy Bayard Rustin, were organizers of the 1963 March on Washington. I’m talking about Walter Reuther, the president of the United Auto Workers who helped fund the March, and I’m talking about so many other men and women who endured every day disrespect and discrimination, yet never lost their dignity or determination, and found it within themselves to organize for their dreams and for the children of a nation.
We here tonight are who we are, we lead the lives we lead, we live in a far better country—because of them.
How much better? That is the fundamental question, isn’t it? In the America of 50 years ago, we did terrifying harm to each other routinely and without consequence. In different parts of our country, for African Americans, Asians, Latinos or Native Americans to enter a public space was to be humiliated. To be told, “You can’t go in there” when you wanted to go to a restaurant, to have to explain to your children why they could not go to the amusement park or to the beach they saw on TV, to have to use the side entrances everywhere from movie theaters to railroad stations—a system of humiliation designed to cater to and reinforce the deep social sickness of racism that has infected white America from the days of slavery and conquest. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 changed much of that.
The workplace, too, was routinely a place of discrimination and humiliation and dreams denied—for people of color, for women and for Jews and Catholics. A place of closed doors, iron ceilings and raw bigotry. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 changed a lot of that—and gave us many tools we still use today to continue the work of ending discrimination in the workplace.
The way to honor the women and men of the Civil Rights Revolution is not by giving them halos and isolating them and their causes in museums and memorials. Because those men and women themselves spent little time looking backwards. They had their eyes on the prize, and so should we. The question we should ask tonight is not, “What is our past?”—because we know where we came from. The question we should ask is, “What will be our future?” What will the civil rights movement mean 50 years from now? What will we accomplish that will be worthy of remembering at the 100th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964?
Because the great questions of the civil rights movement are not specific to any time. They are as old as the Bible and as new as racial profiling and the deportation crisis tearing apart immigrant families.
Are we truly brothers and sisters? Do our country, our government, our laws defend the dignity of each of us equally? Are some of us shouting and others silenced? Do we share in the great wealth of America as much as we share in creating that wealth—or are some of us so rich and some of us so impoverished that we forget our own humanity? Is our country’s economic model a plantation or a community?
These are the questions of our time. To get to the answers we want, we have to be clear-eyed, big-hearted and very, very smart. To get to the answers we want, we need to free our national spirit. We need the vision to see 50 years ahead, and the vigor to get there one day at a time.
It won’t be easy. We can see the struggle to incubate this new America all around us.
It is often a struggle between those who want to embrace our future and those who can only be dragged forward, kicking and screaming. The attacks on voting rights. The appeals to racial hatred. The murder of Trayvon Martin. The war on women. The irrational hatred of our president, fomented and funded by highly rational people with a perverse agenda. And the hatred toward Latino immigrants and the great rush to deport them and tear apart their families.
This struggle—between hope for the future and fear of it—points to the questions we must answer.
Will we reverse the terrible economic destruction wrought on communities of color by Wall Street? The mass destruction of African American home ownership? The economic collapse of African American and Latino families—whose median net worth is less than the value of a second-rate used car?
Will we end the shame of our dual caste society—where more than 11 million of our undocumented friends, neighbors and co-workers do our country’s work but cannot vote? How will the Americans of 2064 judge us for letting this injustice continue?
Will we, in 2064, still incarcerate more of our citizens than any other developed country? Will mass incarceration of young men of color seem as far away in 2064 as segregated water fountains do today?
In 2064, will our government treat people of color, and young people, and seniors who try to vote as if they are doing something wrong? Will our nation still be playing the strange game of Jim Crow—with arcane ID laws designed to stop fraud that doesn’t exist, closing polling places and limiting registration hours—or will we do as other democracies do and try to make it easy to vote?
And finally, in 2064, what will we be able to say about how men treat women in our workplaces? What will an hour of women’s work be worth?
We do not know the answers to these questions, but we do know what will determine the answers. It is not the passive good will of our fellow citizens. It is not the inevitable march of progress. There is no such thing.
You could say that the Civil Rights Act was the product of Lyndon Johnson’s formidable political will, or Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision and leadership, or the martyred little girls dead in a church in Birmingham. But the real truth is that the Civil Rights Act was the product of all of that and so much more—of political and moral and social power—of our movements—and the mass movement made visible on the Mall in the March on Washington in August 1963, after years and years of marches stubbornly organized and held.
The March on Washington and a great and peaceful movement propelled the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but that was not all the March set out to do. The demands of the March on Washington were Jobs, Justice, Education and Freedom.
We need jobs, justice, education and freedom today. In our time, each of us will have a part to play in the movements that will take us to 2064. Those who grow the movements of tomorrow need our help. So ask yourself tonight, “What can I do to organize, to build a new movement for jobs, for justice, for education, and yes, most of all for freedom—in my workplace, in my community, in my country?”
So that when our grandchildren call the roll in 2064, you and I—each of us here—holds a place in the great journey of our country.
Stretching back to Dr. King and Eugene Debs, to Mother Jones and Harriett Tubman and Rosa Parks, to Cesar Chavez and Harvey Milk.
To names long forgotten in the dim past of slave revolts and peasant rebellions and citizen uprisings.
And stretching forward in time to people yet to be born who will ask of us: What did we do? Where did we march? With whom did we stand? What did we do, in our time, here and now, to make justice flow down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream?
And let our answer be: We played our part, we took our steps in our nation’s journey toward justice.
Thank you.