Jesse Jackson and the National Rainbow Coalition argue Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington vision—economic justice, not just "I Have a Dream"—was betrayed by policies like NAFTA, GATT, and racial baiting (e.g., Pete Wilson’s Proposition 187). They expose the "jail industrial complex," where corporations profit from overcrowding, with Texas matching 1948’s prison population of 155,000. Sentencing disparities ($29 crack = 5 years vs. $5K powder cocaine) and $31B in 1992 prison spending reveal systemic slavery. Jackson demands Clinton and Reno address voter suppression (600K unregistered blacks in Georgia), redirect funds to urban revitalization, and end "dream-busting" policies that leave workers abandoned while billionaires thrive. [Automatically generated summary]
But 32 years later, we still pursue that dream of an even playing field, of equal protection under the law, of a society free from race and sex discrimination, of a society that's driven forward by hope and not backwards by fear.
In the past 32 years, many Americans have tended to celebrate the 1963 speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington for its alliteration and its poetic climax, I have a dream.
But many have missed the point.
That is the marketed dimension of that speech, not its substance.
The leaders who pulled that march together would not have marched behind the banner of the dream march.
It was a march for jobs and justice and freedom.
The purpose of his speech.
He said he had come to the nation's capital that day to dramatize a shameful condition to cash a balanced check because the bank account of the Negro, quote unquote, had been marked with insufficient funds for 100 years since slavery.
The context.
They miss his statement that his dream was rooted in the American dream.
And in the 1960s, the American dream was focused on rapid economic growth and social progress.
At that time, we were exporting products and technology.
Now we're exporting jobs and plants.
The issues.
Finally, they miss his view that the Negro, quote unquote, was still crippled by the manacles of segregation and discrimination and had come to demand freedom and justice.
32 years later, the basic reasons for remembering his magnificent speech and its true meaning and message have become urgent.
Easy access to guns.
Hate is now a commodity sold on radio and television shows.
Exploited by political leaders at the highest levels of the land.
The violence has increased dramatically, blown by the winds of a decline in moral values, a national permissive attitude towards the thriving drug trade, the fiscal neglect of national policy and policy makers, and the indifference of the corporate structure to economic growth and full employment.
The mass media is so much of a force in this environment.
It continues to be white male dominated, and a skewed view of the culture tends to be a factor of how African Americans are projected as being a less intelligent than we are, as less hardworking than we work, more violent and less patriotic.
At 4 o'clock every day, when the editors meet to discuss the next day's news consumption, it is perhaps the most segregated hour in America with the most concentrated use of power.
Some would prefer to believe that young black males created this subculture all by themselves, that it is all right for America to turn its back on them, that they deserve to be Whitehouse.
But they did not do this alone.
Many city leaders are now obsessed with the building of stadiums, lottos, and casinos as sources of income, while the threat to that income is the unacknowledged need to fund the education and job training of minority youth, unless they can play football or baseball and now soccer.
32 years later, economic downsizing is the number one problem, the greatest gap in the industrial world between the very wealthy and the very poor, the frightened and the sinking middle class in America.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that 3 million people have been reorganized out of their jobs.
These individuals become the new homeless, adding to the working poor and the quote-unquote angry white males.
They do not see the effect of the recent series of mergers by corporate giants, ABC and Disney, Westinghouse and CBS, Viacom and Paramount, Chase and Chemical Bank.
This process of merging capital, purging workers, and submerging hope, is a form of economic violence.
It creates a few more billionaires who are called geniuses.
A few more millionaires who are called smart.
But more unemployed, frightened workers will call the unblessed, unlucky, or untrained.
Many workers, blinded by race-baiting deception, do not see the tremendous concentration of capital that occurs, pushing the gap between the haves and have-nots greater and greater apart.
But while millionaires will be made in this process, the many millions who will lose their jobs see only the wrong symbols of race and ethnicity as escapegoats for their pain.
Politicians like Pete Wilson capitalize on their misery, feeding them the bait of race in exchange for votes.
32 years later, urban America deteriorates.
Black babies have a third world infant mortality rate in the richest country on the globe.
And those who want the right to life are all of a sudden silent when those babies grow up.
It's necessary to find them resources for jobs, housing, and education.
As a consequence, black adults are likely to live and work as they did 30 years earlier in equality.
Black babies more likely to die as infants, black adults more likely to die earlier than whites and prematurely.
The Federal Reserve Bank found that blacks are twice as likely to be denied a loan.
A recent bank in San Diego, for example, 30,000 loans on the 27th to blacks.
Blacks and Latinos are twice as likely to be denied access to housing in affordable neighborhoods.
Blacks are more than twice as likely to suffer unemployment discrimination and more likely to suffer far less access to health care, college entrance, and premature death.
So 32 years later, there's still no adequate urban policy.
In fact, the giant sucking sound heard all over America is actually the twin force of jobs being sucked out of the cities, disenfranchised adults, destroying families, while the youth become painfully antisocial, sucked into the new jail industrial complex.
Instead of the economic stimulus of opportunity, the plan to reinvest in America, we have the growth of the jail industrial complex to house and profit from the victims of the sub-economy.
The number one growth industry in urban America is jails.
Half of all public housing built the last 10 years have been jails.
That is the urban policy.
As I traveled to several urban cities recently, I saw two new industries that are growing.
One, athletic complexes, the other, jails.
Whether in New Orleans last week, St. Louis with the new Ram Stadium on the one hand, the new $7 million jail on the other, Chicago, the United Center on the one hand, and the jail industrial complex on the other.
Between these two mountains, the athletic industry and the jail, there are no industries.
There is just a canyon.
And thus the giant double-sucking sound, sucking out the jobs of adults, destroying families, and sucking up youth battered and maimed in the process.
Make no mistake about it, Dr. King would have despaired at the fact the plight of many of our cities, especially the inner part of some of America's largest cities.
They resemble the worst nightmare, not the dream for which he gave his life.
While many have risen from the ashes in the marvelous resurrection, which have carried an estimated one-third of the black population to middle-class status, we have begun the long march backward in the income of the average American over the past 25 years.
This has affected not only blacks, but other non-white minorities and whites as well.
As a matter of fact, since 1972, the male income ages 25 to 34 has dropped 26%.
Profit Motive in Prisons00:05:44
On any given day, one out of every four black youth in this nation have some association with the criminal justice system.
This has resulted in a new form of slavery called incarceration.
In 1980, for example, the nation spent $4 billion in its prison system.
By 1992, the cost was $31 billion and it's rising.
And while 455 new prisons have been built in America during the last 10 years, housing 200,000 more black youth in jail than in college.
700,000 plus black youth in jail, 500,000 in college.
This system has created a pipeline in the new sentencing guidelines.
To spend five years in jail, you must possess $5,000 worth of powdered cocaine.
To spend five years in jail for possession of marijuana, you must possess $42,000 worth.
To spend five years in jail for the possession of crack cocaine, you must possess $29 worth.
$42,000 worth of marijuana, five years.
$5,000 worth of powdered cocaine, five years.
$29 worth of crack, five years.
94% of those in jail for crack cocaine, the $5 high, are young black and brown males.
75% of those that powder cocaine are white males.
The difference between powder and crack is a match.
The big boys bring in the powder.
The little mules light the powder.
It becomes crap.
94% in jail, black and brown youth.
54% of the users of crack cocaine are white males.
The U.S. Census Commission recommended to Attorney General Reno and Mr. Clinton that they change the ratio.
In this climate of lock them up rather than lift them up, they ignore the evidence and keep locking them up, creating the jail industrial complex.
This is what caused the nation's prison system to grow at a rate of 1,200 inmates per week.
32 years later, the Congress is still charged with not only making policy, but enlightened policy.
It now wants to invest in a new $270 billion tax break for the wealthy, for the rich.
They want to make prison tougher, to take away the investment in rehabilitation, in job training skills, in education, even in weight training and television, and return to the barbarous and inhumane chain games.
These chain games, an international symbol of inhumanity to the man, would be denounced by Dr. King where he alive today.
He would have led our march of 5,000 people in Chicago this past Saturday to publicize the viciousness and backwardness of American public policy.
32 years later, Dr. King would have protested the new pattern of investment in prisons by financial giants.
New investors, Smith Barney, part owners of a prison in Florida.
American Express, part owners of a prison in Oklahoma.
General Electric, part owners of a prison in Tennessee.
Prudential, Merrill Lynch, and Goldman Sachs, all have begun to finance aspects of the prison system.
If they invest in Marriott, a Hyatt, or a downtown hotel, it's about a 55% occupancy rate except for conventions.
If they invest in jails, they're always overcrowded.
As a result, between 1979 and 1990, prison building has increased 612%.
The prison workforce has also risen.
In 1972, 169,000 people worked in the nation's prisons.
By 1992, more than half a million worked there.
If the investment in South African apartheid was morally objectionable, but rationalized as fiduciary responsibility.
On the same ground, we will start a process of negotiation and confrontation to halt the use of pension funds in this country for the development of the jail industrial complex.
The profit motive toward prisons has deepened.
Governor Tommy Thompson and other governors have, for example, given private companies the right to use prison labor to make their products, while the proceeds from the sales go to their victims.
So while we protest against the Chinese for the export of prison products to America, we're making the same right here right now.
How can we see a spot in the eye of the Chinese and not see a log in our own?
Likewise, the prison population has skyrocketed.
For example, in 1948, the prison population in America was 155,000.
Now in Texas, 155,000.
And this is the preferred national strategy to deal with the problems of poverty, illiteracy, broken families, and broken dreams.
Continuous Challenge00:14:52
Three strikes in your out.
A decadent, expensive non-remedy.
If the crime is vicious enough and the person is sick enough, one strike should be enough.
And judges have that power now.
What about four balls in your own?
Prenatal care and head start, ball one, an adequately funded public education, ball two, marketable scale access to college, ball three, and a job ball for and your own.
That's the American dream.
What do we go from here?
The National Rainbow Coalition will continue in the tradition of Dr. King's dream to raise the vexing questions and yet unsatisfied answers, also raising our Constitution of Liberty and Justice for All.
Number one, we'll continue to put forth a gallant effort to reclaim our children through a crusade which targets ministers and judges as key to the rehabilitation and the development of our youth.
We want 100 ministers to meet with juvenile court judges.
100 churches to reclaim 20 youth each as all turnitists to unnecessary jailing, monitoring, nurturing, and tutoring our youth.
That's 2,000 youth.
Time 50 cities, 100,000 youth can be reclaimed.
We want 20,000 parents to do five things.
One, take your child to school.
B, meet your child's teachers.
Exchange home numbers.
Turn off a TV three hours a night and pick up a report card every nine weeks.
Teachers teach children differently when they know the parents, and children behave differently when parents and teachers know each other.
If it happens in 50 cities, it's a million parents joint venturing with our teachers.
We will seek to register 1 million new voters to create more ballot access for independent political candidates, especially for those who want to represent enlightened public policy.
Too many lives have been lost.
Too much blood has been shed to surrender the vote.
Lastly, we want to rebuild urban America, not only by continuing to oppose NAFTA and GATT, of which drive the wage of vulnerable workers down by putting low-wage workers against low-wage workers.
We also want to push for pension fund investment and corporate investment and government investment and community investment in the revitalization of our cities.
This is why I will enter the city vote presidential preference election this November in 18 cities to raise the issues that are so central to discussion about the future of America, its cities, and its children.
So stated in 1984, to raise the issue of those boats stuck on the bottom is not to be self-centered or to support purely narrow interests.
It is to raise the question Dr. King raised 32 years ago.
What kind of America will this be and therefore what kind of America will we share?
And how can we contribute to the answer which lies in the future?
We must have a generation of graduates of schools, not parolees, from jails.
That is the real meaning of his speech.
We should seek to live by this meaning rather than just remembering the words.
Thank you.
What kind of fight will the Rainbow Coalition is going to present for his cause to counteract the candidacy of Pete Wilson?
And what is your reaction to his candidacy?
Today, as I watched a portion of his speech, At the point where he tried to engage in a veil suggestive, curse words for emphasis.
He said the governor should not have to go to Washington to kiss some bureaucrats, left a blank and said ring.
I contrast the decadence, the degeneracy, and the desperation of that statement in contrast to Dr. King's I Have a Dream.
Dr. King was trying to lift the nation up and set a new moral tone 32 years ago.
Wilson suggesting governors kissing a president's rear in 32 years later.
What a contrast.
What a gap.
And that gap needs to be filled by leaders who have a sense of moral mission.
Secondly, he has attempted to use affirmative action as diversion and race bait as scapegoat and not focus on the substantive issue of the crisis of economic downsizing.
Not stupid workers at Long Beach, California base two weeks ago.
Those workers are losing their jobs and they're not going to affirmative action.
We're closing military bases without a plan for conversion.
Workers' jobs going to the NAFTA and GATT zones.
Already we see that the pesos evaluation has hurt workers in Mexico, workers in America, and we bail the speculators out.
The mergings, the ABC and Mickey Mouse, and Western House and CBS and now Chemical and Chase.
And rather than address real issues of economic downsizing and a plan to reinvest in America, his plan is escapeboarding the poor and building jails rather than creating jobs and education.
We deserve better leadership than that.
How do you see his immigration point?
How do you see his immigration point?
Well, his Prop 187 was a part of the baiting process and a part of the pancake political style of Wilson.
For on the one hand, we were marching with Cesar Chavez to organize farm workers that they might have liberal wages and not be on welfare and educate their children.
As Senator, he fought to bring the Mexican workers in to undercut the organizing effort.
Then as governor, he went to the other side of the pancake to cook it, which was to then disenfranchise the children of those parents.
As mayor, he supported not only affirmative action in San Diego, he supported parity.
Even running for governor, he supported affirmative action.
But now, while running for the White House, he wants to misappropriate language to deceive the American public.
Opening doors of opportunity is not reverse discrimination.
Affirmative action is designed to end the quota of zero.
And if there is no glass ceiling for women, if there are no closed doors and deeper holes for blacks and browns, we don't need affirmative action.
We don't need a way to open doors.
But the evidence is that there are closed doors and there are lower ceilings.
Affirmative action happens to be a rather conservative remedy that's legal and working.
You mentioned a moment ago the lack of moral mission from some of our politicians.
Can you comment then, assess the state of the dream in Chicago where that illness has afflicted two straight second district congressmen?
Well, it didn't just affect two second congressional dicks, two second congressional district congressmen.
That's also the place where Ross and Koski comes from.
It's Chicago, but it's throughout.
And that is the challenge to lift the moral tone and for public officials to honor public trust.
I think a big step toward dealing with the corruption is to in fact fight the campaign finance reform.
Both parties are eating from the same trough.
And that's why so often you have what amounts to one party with two names, or two parties with one assumption, because they're being fed by the same cook and corrupted by the same process.
And they're devaluing the vote while accentuating the value of dollars.
And therefore, public services is losing to money chicanery.
So there is some need not only to have a higher moral tone, but also to end the official corrupting process.
And you looked at the list that Mr. Dole finally made public of those who invest in him.
And look at those who invest in Gingrich and those who invest in Minneapolis Democrats.
You compare the list of the investors and their votes.
It's just official legitimate corruption.
And the voter becomes just an appendix in the political process as opposed to central to it.
Will your decision on whether or not to run for president be in any way influenced by how well you do in city votes?
It would be a factor.
But the bigger factor is the continuous need to apply pressure to get urban policy back in the center of our national debate.
To say it is immoral and unfeasible economically to abandon cities, to disenfranchise parents, to let schools deteriorate on children, and then have as a solution entertainment and incarceration.
Just imagine in these major cities, whether Memphis or St. Louis or Chicago, you have the giant athletic arena for entertainment and the giant jail industrial complex, and then there is no industry in between.
So there's this canyon, and there's this double sucking sound, sucking out jobs, the cheap labor markets, and then sucking up their children into this machinery.
And now, of course, we find in Illinois, for example, researching around the country, as high as 280 products are being made by prisoners.
This is slavery.
Exploiting prison labor.
We complain that China shouldn't do this.
We shouldn't do it either.
And organized labor has to, again, look at the impact of the use of prison labor to, in fact, compete with the workforce.
It's not just enough to find some exploited time on these workers in California.
Look at now the growth of the idea of a prison workforce.
Just as a follow-up, would you say your entrance into city vote would be your first formal challenge to President Clinton?
I wouldn't enumerate it that way because our challenge to reinvest in America, our challenge to choose schools over jails to make reinvestment in America and labor law reform a priority has been a continuous challenge.
But during this season, going to these cities, registering people to vote, urging the reinvestment of pension funds in these cities, developing economic incentives, including tax incentives to invest behind the red line and the green line, the red lines, is a big part of our message.
We hope that the president and the Congress not only hears our moral appeal, but sees the economic sense of this.
Jail scholarships cost more than academic scholarships.
Unemployment costs more than employment.
Job training centers be far more productive than these new warehouses that have been built around the country.
We now find urban mayors and legislators competing for who will get the new jail.
If they can just get a new jail out in the country where they've lost a farm or wherever they lost a plant, they can get the jail the contract to build it.
And they can get the contract to maintain it.
And now as they seek to privatize it, the contract for cleaning uniforms and for food.
In Chicago now, with 10,000 in Cook County Jail, they make five collect telephone calls a day.
So the AT ⁇ T makes some money.
And 10,000 uniforms.
Three meals for 10,000 people, 30,000 meals a day, a $10 million a year food contract.
The highest source of employment in Cook County now is the Cook County Jail.
If you want to get money out of Washington now, go to the Justice Department.
That's where the money is.
This has become a business deal.
And to think that Smith Barney and American Express and Prudential are now using the workers' money to invest in this industry and therefore create a profit motif for sucking up our youth, this is wrong.
Yes, Madam Sir.
In answer to the question about city vote and how it will play in your decision to enter the presidential election, you said the bigger factor is the continuous need to apply pressure.
Is that the role you hope to play in the 1996 election to be kind of lead the debate as opposed to actually joining the race yourself?
I've not arrived at a conclusion about that.
Clearly, the work we do in those cities will be a factor as we weigh our 1996 options.
But then there is the issue that by December some decision must be made about the primaries.
But then that is next May or June to make a decision about an independent challenge to open up the entire process.
We would hope, number one, that the president would review his campaign speeches.
Attempt to Appeal Voters00:05:16
One case it made was not a child to waste.
Right now we're wasting them at the rate of $1,000 a week.
Another was an economic stimulus to reinvest in urban America.
Instead of the economic stimulus, we have the jail industrial complex.
Another promise was labor law reform and even playing for workers.
Instead, we have NAFTA and GATT and now trying to expand that.
That, to us, would have changed economic priorities.
The argument there was that you put people back to work and they work their way out of a hole.
That they earn their way out.
When people go to work, they generate revenue, they can pay taxes, and we grow out of the economic crisis.
Right now we're into an arrangement, in effect the Republican arrangement that says abandon those people and starve them into submission.
Will you play a role in your son's primary?
I'm sorry.
Will you play a role in your son's primary?
Well, I will.
I'll play a supportive role in this campaign.
I am very impressed with this campaign, with its prospects.
There is a sense of fatherly joy as I watch Jess and the other children come of age with a commitment to the public service.
He's played by the rules.
We urged him to do well in school.
He did.
To go to college.
He got a business degree to go to seminary.
He got a master's degree in theology to go to law school.
He graduated.
Then he made a commitment to public service.
Last season he spoke at 14 schools for commencements and has perhaps registered more new voters than anybody has in town.
I'm also impressed that a number of young people are now rallying around that campaign because it's their time to make a move toward responsibility.
He's 30.
Some say, well, that's awfully young.
Dr. King was 26.
He led the march and the movement in Montgomery, Alabama.
Newt Gingrich began his congressional career at age 25.
And so he is constitutionally old enough.
He's intellectually prepared and willing to earn the opportunity to serve.
And I will certainly support him in that process.
You have the list, sir, of these 18 cities in which you are going to run in the city vote.
We'll get the entire list to you.
I know it includes Newark, New Jersey, and Pasadena, California, Pasadena, California, Boston.
We can get the list to you, these 18 cities.
Do you have to run under a party label right now?
Not necessarily.
Have you made up your mind whether in city vote you'll run under a party label or not?
What I made up my mind to do is to enter the, I think the first debate is October 6th to be in that debate.
And frankly, I do not know what all the structural arrangement is.
It's a kind of a preference poll.
It's not based upon party.
I mean, Democrats and Republicans engage in those debates.
And just as there was a certain focus on those who did not vote for Democrat or Republican in 92 and went with Parole, that was the Parole Conference.
And there was an attempt to appeal to, reach out to those voters, which was an important thing to do, I thought.
And just as that was the Our Straw poll, there's a lot of focus really on rural issues and mobilization.
When the mayors conceived of city vote, it was the attempt to force candidates to put some real focus on cities in the regular process between five months of work in the snow in the cornfields of Iowa and the elimination process, and then up to New Hampshire.
By the time you get down to cities, they're out of the equation.
So this is an attempt by mayors to say that we need the infrastructure rebuilt in cities as a way to put America back to work.
They're saying that it's costing us to lock these youth up rather than to educate them.
They're saying that the merging of big corporations and the exiting of jobs, they are literally tumbleweeds in downtown Detroit.
Literally tumbleweeds across from the big hotel in downtown Detroit.
But in all of these cities, you see these extremes of wealth and poverty and the two big growing institutions, the athletic institution and the jail, and in that canyon that there is no industrial development.
Tumbleweeds In Detroit00:05:39
One to the other side.
Reverend Jackson, will you encourage Congressman Reynolds to actually resign just as Senator Braun has and House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt has?
I'm not sure what value that would be.
He's between a sentence and a conviction.
So why look at a man who is on skid sliding down the hill and throw grease on as if you are a great moral leader?
He'll make a decision in the next few days.
I do not think, I've talked with him several times, had prayer with him just today, as a matter of fact.
He's not likely to drag his family further through the agony of this.
He's not likely to be willing to face a Congress that will certainly try to impeach him and further embarrass him.
But these are very tough decisions he has to make, but the alternatives are kind of established.
If they want to get some moral points, let them take on Packwood.
We're talking about Mel Reynolds and one or two women, and Patwood and 21.
He declares that he blanked out and woked up just in time to erase his diary.
So they want to engage in some real moral leadership.
Put Packwood in the mix.
Allegedly there are 10 times more women involved.
Through all of this pain, there must be some appreciation of something called one set of rules.
She was a girl.
It wasn't a woman, it was a girl.
And it was wrong.
It was wrong and immoral and illegal.
But he remembered who she was.
Pegwood said he was so high he forgot who they were.
He doesn't know what the age was.
He was high and blanked out.
And he sits there as a recovering alcoholic who blanked out at critical times, who obliterated his diary, and we still are searching for some moral room for him.
It's unreasonable.
Can I ask a question about the jails and about your drive?
I can understand your desire to be sure that there's a liberal voice that represents the interests of cities.
But are you concerned about where the country is, that is, that it seems the American people were sending the Republicans to Washington to control the Congress?
And also that the Americans seem to suggest that they like the idea of sending people to these jails.
Are you proposing something specific about the jail?
That is why leadership in this time cannot follow opinion polls.
They must mold opinion and be driven by conviction, not just by polls.
Rosa Parks would not have sat on the back on the front of the bus if she had read a poll for us.
It was the principal position.
Dr. King would not even merge as leader waiting upon a consensus by a political party.
Every now and then a politician should do something just because it's right.
It seems that educating our children is just right and productive.
Employing their parents is just right and productive.
And most folk who have these quick fixed solutions to the urban crisis think that somehow they can fly over it in planes and drive around it on skyways and drive under it in subways.
But somewhere in that mix are human beings.
And that's where moral leadership has to raise the question, not will it work politically, but is it right?
And if it's not right, it will not stand the test of time.
In this mix somewhere must be a moral voice.
It is that you can easily say, give me the 99 sheep.
They got the most wool.
They got the most meat.
They got the most packed money.
After all, you can't save everybody.
That's a kind of conservative political view.
Jesus raised another question.
But what about the lost sheep?
Why is that sheep lost?
It's because the sheep couldn't follow directions.
The sheep could have had heart trouble.
It could have been kicked by a bigger sheep.
Could have stepped in a hole, could have been bit by a snake, could have been bit by a wolf, could have had a broken spirit.
For those who would have a sense of give me your tired, you'll pull your huddled masses, somewhere in their view, must be room for the lost sheep in their consciousness.
You can't say, well, the coal miners are now a lost sheep.
We don't need them anymore.
The Texas workers are now a lost sheep.
We don't need them anymore.
This whole idea of losing people and locking them out when they no longer fit.
Now military workers are a lost sheep.
So we don't need the workers anymore at the plant in San Diego or Long Beach.
So they are now lost sheep.
But what is the new thing is, it's got a contribution from the billionaire who did the merging, a donation from the millionaire who was on the inside track.
But dismiss the workers.
That's not right and it's not good.
And it represents a dream-busting process.
It's not good for the country.
Voted To Revive Unregistered Scared00:06:30
And I would urge leadership who really cares to put focus on the economic downsizing, to put focus on the shift of jobs and not divert attention away arguing more and more about affirmative action and scapegoating race as a way to antagonize the American people.
Two more questions.
Question on the million man March.
Are you participating in it, Reverend Jackson?
I think it's about six weeks from today.
I can't comment on that.
I'm going to focus on what I'm focusing on.
What I'm really focusing on is the 18-city city vote.
I'm focused on the need to focus on the substance of that dream, which was the economic bounce check on the plight of American workers, and focusing on targeted registration.
That's kind of what I'm what I'm doing.
And there are many efforts of protest in this country taking place.
And this is the area of my focus.
Is your message for President Clinton to return to these lost sheep, these disaffected masses that you talk about?
Is your message to him to return to them or risk having to deal with you on the campaign trail?
My position is not so much a threat but a promise.
I promise to keep fighting for a plan to reinvest in America.
I promise to keep fighting for a full employment economy, as Dr. King argued for 32 years ago.
I promise to fight for a comprehensive single-payer health care plan.
I promise to fight for some plan to mobilize ministers and judges to create some alternatives to the unnecessary incarceration of many of these youth.
I promise to help mobilize parents and teachers to joint venture to assume more responsibility in the rearing of their rearing of their children.
And to urge Mr. Clinton, we want to meet with Mr. Clinton.
One, to have a conference on equal opportunity.
President Johnson didn't just make a speech at Howard.
He followed the speech up with a conference that fall.
Mr. Clinton has made a very significant speech, but then there must be a conference where he convenes corporate leaders, military leaders, university leaders, labor leaders, civil rights and religious leaders on a plan to implement equal opportunity and the front of inclusion.
We want to meet with him and Janet Reno to talk about the plan to end the disparity in sentencing.
We want fairness in our judicial system.
And now it's becoming established to have chain gangs busting rocks and humiliation, their lives endangered, more and more to have prison labor forces making products that ultimately compete with the labor force.
And therefore labor must rally and people who care must rally.
And let me say this, for those who are the most heinous criminals, people who drive babies in rivers, people who engage in these acts of massive killing, they should be in jail.
That's a place for them.
But what we see now is a systemic process whereby more and more youth are locked up unnecessarily.
There's a rather outstanding article, almost a political surprise by Courtland Molloy last week, it seemed to me, that they took some youth to jail in Freeport, Louisiana, to engage in the scared straight tactic.
They wanted to go to jail and get scared.
They went to jail and saw the new building and the gymnasium.
They saw the adult supervision, the cool air in the summertime, the heat for the wintertime, the three meals a day.
They were excited about the jail.
Now, I made the case some time back that things are real bad when our youth jump up and touch the basement, and we're going to jail is for them a step up.
Right here in our nation's capital, in Washington, our nation's capital, there is not one Olympic-sized swimming pool in town that's available to these children.
There is a partial summer league baseball team.
There is no roller skating rink for the children in our nation's capital.
Most of these playgrounds are no longer supervised.
But if they can just make it to prison, there they'll have adult supervision, less likely to be shot, warm in the wintertime, cool in the summertime, three balanced meals a day.
That is a misappropriation of funds and is morally bankrupt.
And if the president doesn't respond to this call for a meeting, then what?
Well, I would assume that he would meet.
But let me put it this way.
The burden of his reaction to our focus on jobs over jails, our focus on urban policy, that burden is left to him.
But this is not just a challenge to the White House.
It's a challenge to Congress as well.
For many urban dwellers with their broken spirits did not vote according to their own need in November of 94 as well.
The ginger forces won by 19,000 votes, cumulatively.
There's 600,000 blacks in Georgia alone unregistered.
8 million nationally unregistered.
Four of the congressmen voted against our interests.
40 of them won with less votes than they lost within the previous election.
In the 1994 election, with all the talk about the tidal wave of water and chains, that's not what happened.
Six million fewer people voted in 94 than 92.
It's not that their water was high, our walls were low.
Now, why were the walls of labor low?
Because rank and file voted for Mr. Clinton for the economic stimulus, the labor law reform, they got naft and gap, and they were dispirited.
Why couldn't mayors mobilize citizens of cities?
They voted for the stimulus, they got the jail industrial complex.
And so the burden really is up on the president to, in fact, revive that base and revive that message.
I hope he will carry that message.
Whether he does or not, the message will be carried.
President's Medal of Freedom Ceremony00:00:51
We will be in this equation in 96.
The debate for reordering our priorities and for reclaiming our children and enfranchising their parents will be in the equation in 96, one way or the other.
I want to thank y'all very much.
In August 2000, President Bill Clinton honored Reverend Jesse Jackson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House for his civil rights activism throughout his life.
The medal is the country's highest civilian honor.
You are now about to witness one of the best things about this ceremony.
For a change, I don't have to follow Jesse Jackson.