\Ne must accept that challenge. We owe it to the nation, we owe it to ourselves, we owe it to the world. "De^iniwy Ocei “litnee R e c e n t ly at the C itade l in ^ ^ ^ y Charleston, South Carolina, a black freshman student was asleep. Five young jun io r clansmen put on their sheets and hoods and walked in his room with a burning cross to intimidate him. He was driven out of school as a result of this terrorist attack. At Howard Beach in New York, three blacks stopped at a pizza parlor and were beaten. One was run over and killed. In Forsyth County, Georgia, some 50 clansmen threw rocks at peaceful marchers. We must not allow the symbols of Howard Beach, New York and Forsyth County, Georgia to define this period for us. They do not represent a majority trend in our country, is a new Georgia 50 clansmen throwing rocks, or is it a black man, John Lewis, winning a congressional seat with a majority of white votes, and Fowler being elected to the Senate with a majority of black votes? We must define our times. Racial violence is illegal. That is the result of our struggle for the past 20 years. But economic violence is far greater than racial violence and economic violence is not illegal. Driving 600,000 farmers from their land with no place to go is legal. Twenty-five billionaires at the top and five million homeless at the bottom is legal. Driving brilliant young minds out of school because they cannot pay tuition is legal. Schools down and jail rolls up, legal. Four years in a good college on a full academic scholarship cost less than $25,000. Those same four years on a penitentiary scholarship would cost more than a $110,000. It costs nearly five times more to incarcerate our children than educate them. Let's choose schools over jails, and give our youth a chance. I could not let these incidents define our times. Last summer 6000 farmers in v i te d me to spea k to them at Chillicothe, Missouri. When the state police would not make themselves available, they drove 300 tractors from six counties. A tractorcade of security. When the farmers and ranchers had a congress in St. Louis, Missouri, they asked me to be their keynote speaker. Willie Nelson sponsored Farm Aid in Austin, Texas on July 4th last year. I was his special guest with great acceptance. Farmers were reaching out across lines of race, and sex and religion, something they never realized they would do. Our best minds were turning to each other, and not on each other. Our fight is not blacks fighting whites. The people trapped must march together, not in confrontation on a beach or a lonesome road in the rural south. If we must march, let’s choose the site of our fight, and make the site a plant that closed on workers without notice. Make the site a missile site. Let us define our times. The fact is there is something misleading about putting all the focus on Howard Beach and Forsyth County, Georgia. The reality is that whites in Howard Beach and Forsyth County are not investing in South Africa. They are not foreclosing farms, they are not closing plants on workers without notice, they have not cut back on black, Hispanic, and female enrollment in colleges. They have been used as symbols and substitutes for the source, where we’re really locked out. Where has this acid rain of race come from? Who seeded the clouds? ^ o w e y to- the etanowtit eyetetw id (ihe faood to- the ieuwaw fady. Idwtedd the faood faowd. yM w i l l die. * v 7we*tty~faue fadiowained cefa toft. Menheated- fave twidiow fteoftle a t the fattoew. faeefatty. Mr. Reagan has not met with the Congressional Black Caucus one time in seven years. He has not met with women fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment on pay equity in seven years. He suggested Dr. King was a communist 18 years after his death. He vetoed sanctions on South Africa. These race conscious signals designed to divide us have come from the top down, not the bottom up. We would do well to stay together. We are more locked out of the White House than we are Howard Beach. We are more locked out of New York Times editorial board room, CBS, ABC, NBC, Wall Street law firms and investment firms than Howard Beach. Let us not view symbols as substitutes for the source. We must challenge this White House, challenge this Justice Department, challenge the speculators and the greedy on Wall Street to do justice and care about all of the American people. Money to the economic system is like blood to .the human body. If all the blood is in one extremity and clots, you will die. Unless the blood flows, you will die. Twenty-five billionaires up top, overheated; five million people at the bottom, freezing. The top 40 percent of our society make 68 percent of the income and they get a tax cut. The bottom 40 percent make 15 percent and they get a wage cut and a plant closing. It’s dangerous, it’s immoral and ought to be made illegal. There are two myths that must be destroyed. Most poor people in the U.S. are not black or brown. Of the 41 million in poverty, 29 million are white; most of the poor are white and'female and young. Whether white, black or brown, hunger hurts. Secondly, most poor people are not on welfare, and don’t want to be. Most poor people work everyday. Why aren’t they in the polls. Because they are in the bus before the poll takers get up. And they come back at night when the poll takers have gone home. Most poor people work everyday. They drive cabs. They buff floors at hotels. They raise other people’s children. They cook other people’s food. They farm. They teach. They work in hospitals, changing the beds and the clothes of the feverishly sick, and when they get sick and can’t afford to lie in the bed they have made up everyday, they die in emergency rooms, because they don’t have a green or a yellow card to go upstairs. So the bed is empty waiting for the rich to get sick. My friend, that is economic violence. We must end economic violence. f a ’u n c u deAtnue M K twenty M w e l t a e w o p t ion . Ih ey one not aehiwy ^on a hatidMt, they one M idwy fan a f a i t Ml. awd neAtncceiccniwy a / thein delte. we C M fac t M t Stenose eucd ^l^naet a n d fa ftaw we taw f a i t M t the ^menicaw fanewen. These farmers deserve help because all of us who eat are involved in agriculture. We save ourselves if we save them. These farmers deserve our help. They fed the nation and fed the world. It doesn’t say much about your character when you turn you back on the hand that fed you. They need more than management. They need mercy and understanding. They are victims of a government- induced crisis. If 40 or 50 farmers were driven out of business, you could say they misread the market. They planted late, it was a bad season, a drought or flood. But if 80,000 families are driven from their land, in Oregon and Mississippi, Missouri and California, that is an epidemic, that is systemic. If one person drowns or two or three, you can say they caught leg cramps, they couldn’t swim. If a whole city is under water, it’s a flood. At some times we can be so merciless in dealing with human problems. If a mother has five children and two pork chops, she will not run to a computer and conclude that she has three excess children. She’ ll cut up two pork chops into five pieces and make gravy because she is a merciful mother with common sense. These farmers deserve our mercy as well as new options. They are not asking for a handout, they are asking for a bail out, and restructuring of their debts. If we can bail out Europe and Israel and Japan, we can bail out the American farmer. "Dinty ^hciwcle And A “i^eant merica is a great nation, a na- y / y tion blessed by God. But we are a nation unto ourselves, j I s not a world unto ourselves. Our foreign policy has failed. In part because our vision of the world is too limited. A world too vast, a vision too small. America is six percent of the world’s population. When Mr. Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev met in Geneva and Iceland, they represented only one-eighth of the human race—it was a minority meeting. There are 500 million people between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In India alone live 700 million people. Most people in the world are yellow or brown or black, non-Christian, poor, female, young and don’t speak English.’ It is that real world that we must address and not Fantasy Island. The nuclear race is too dangerous, it’s too costly and too likely to explode. It is beyond human verifiability. Our whole world could be destroyed by computer malfunction, Our danger is that we have guided missiles and misguided leadership. We must go another way. We must end apartheid. We had to end Hitler and the Nazi reign of terror. When unbridled greed and fascism were unleashed, America and Russia—capitalist and communist, had to coalesce because fascism threatened both systems. How can we now condemn the ANSC, for it does not lock anybody out who is against fascism, Hitler’s historical successor, Nazi South Africa? We must end apartheid in our day. The war in Central America is so ungodly. One hundred seventy-five thousand Salvadorans have been killed in five years. Three times more than this country lost in the entire Vietnam War. They too are God’s children. Our government is openly planning to overthrow a government, trying to assassinate the head of state. How would you feel tomorrow morning if the CIA succeeded in killing Ortega? How would the world view us? In these past few years I have been blessed to travel around the world. I have met with friends and foes of our country. I have been to South Africa, East, West and Central Africa. The Caribbean, Central America, Europe and Asia. I met with Peres, Arafat and Hussein. I met with Gorbachev. Sat heads up and argued about human rights with him. I met with Ortega, Castro, and Duarte—the Pope, M it te rand , and the Queen of the Netherlands—Nakasone and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I have tried to get a sense of this world and its leadership. Those whose hands are clean, whose heart pumps forth purity, whose heads are empty, can’t lead us to higher ground. Many in leadership brag about having clean hands. You have got to have dirty hands if you work; have dirty hands and a clean heart. If we turn to each other, our land will be healed, our jobs will be restored, our national honor will be restored. We’ ll feel good about ourselves again and we will be the generation who ushers in peace on earth and good will to everybody. We have a chance to lead, a choice to make and a charge to keep. This story is edited from remarks delivered by Rev. Jackson earlier this year in Portland. It is used with permission. Artist Isaac Shamsud-Din, a long-time contributor to CSQ, lives in Portland. 22 Clinton St. Quarterly—Winter, 1987
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz