A man could not be more overwhelmed. Reverend Sharpton. Reverend Al. Reverend brother.
Thank you for the cloak of your introduction which allows me to feint as if I can locate my own
meager accomplishments in the stream of the history that you’ve just expounded.
Thank you for your brotherhood
that has made my journey that much lighter. Thank you for your sacrifices that have extended
a halo of protection over all of our children in America’s streets that are caught in the crosshairs.
Reverend, you and I will always have the Slave Theater in Brooklyn.
Rev, tonight, as I acknowledge this extraordinary honor,
I'm going to pick up the theme of this conference, and I'll say a little bit—I'll say just a little bit—
about what it means to fight back in darkest of times.
But I’ll also raise a question about the fundamentality of our citizenship.
These are issues that Reverend Sharpton and I litigated on
the streets of Brooklyn, when yet another young black life was knocked out because of repressive policing.
And in the streets of Broward County, where in the richest nation in history,
our people have to go pleading for a minimum wage in an age of reason.
I can’t help but observe that thirty years ago this summer,
Reverend Sharpton and I were in the streets demanding justice
in the aftermath of the race-based slaying of 16-year-old Yusuf Hawkins.
This grim anniversary reminds us that the conditions in America
demand that each generation fashions its own radical citizenship.
Chairman Russell, a salute for your dynamic stewardship of this historic organization.
President Johnson, thank you for all you’ve done to revitalize the tools of struggle
in this moment of moment vulnerability.
You all know that I can't come up and show up at an NAACP function
without observing the protocol of calling out the activist godmother
of so very many of us that Reverend Sharpton mentioned.
Someone who, if you listen to her, she'll tell you that she raised me up from the streets of protest
to the marbled White House.
And that's, of course, Hazel Nell Dukes, the fiercest pound-for-pound fighter in America.
Friends, family, brothers, and sisters of the NAACP, architects of the Beloved Community,
if the humble are crowned with salvation, tonight I am truly served in a humility that is bottomless.
It is not by my own hand that I have arrived here in the shadow of prophets and champions.
A man has got to know his limitations.
It’s clear that some divine mixture of the hand of provenance,
the tutorials of loving mentors who are seated here,
and the love of family, has put me on a path that leads me here inexplicably—undeserving
and unanticipated—as the recipient of an honor that makes me feel my smallness,
even as I gain proximity to the distinction.
There is no false modesty in stating plainly and simply to all of you
that my accomplishments, however trumpeted by the good reverend—
who doubles in his off time as my hype man—
that those accomplishments need to be bloated in order to stand alongside the works of your past recipients.
But here I do stand, in the fading echo of a question from the ages that that still resounds:
“Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” and meekly, I am saying, “here I am, send me.”
So despite the weight of history, and with the audacity that this current era demands,
at a time when we dare not let the politics of performance trump the politics of principle,
I am accepting this honor, not as a sinecure for past works, but rather as a provocation
to spur me on to step boldly and righteously to meet the onrushing demands of justice.
I accept this with a knowing nod to my wife and my son and daughter who were the real ambassadors
to South Africa, and with a salute to my siblings who are here—they are sitting here and they are wondering
when on earth I'm finally going to amount to anything.
I accept on behalf of those who are here seated—you know who you are—
who accompanied me here as friends
but who first took me under their wing as their little brother in organizing for the
rights of workers and the most marginalized. I accept in the orbit of Spingarn recipients
of the past century who have defined the shape of our diaspora that spans the Black Atlantic
from Dahomey to Detroit. I accept in the spirit of WEB Dubois’s radical scholarship.
I accept in the spirit of Paul Robeson, who taught us all that salvation comes when you give all up
and you stand firm and you speak where you sing
In the spirit of A. Phillip Randolph, mobilizing workers
who had nothing except the assurance of things hoped for
and the conviction of things not seen. In the spirit of Langston Hughes, who took up our
dreams and our hopes and our testimonials and wrapped them in words to protect them
from the too harsh fingers of the world. In the spirit of Barbara Jordan, who taught and showed
that a woman’s voice is the earthquake that will bend the arc. In the spirit of John Lewis who marshaled love as
the greatest and most powerful force in the universe. In the spirit of Jesse Louis Jackson who counted
up the cost, and yet marched on. And in the spirit of my great hero, Harry Belafonte, whose soul’s
high song carries our unblemished beauty and our unbroken solidarity.
In the spirit of my mother, Constance Gaspard, who arrived, a stranger in a strange land,
who did all to claim a space for her immigrant children in this American narrative,
who cleaned up after the barons of Park Avenue in order to feed and ultimately to affirm.
Hers is a citizenship that is earned and staked. NAACP, there’s a queen sitting there—a Haitian American Queen.
A citizenship that is earned.
In essence, that’s what the epic African American journey is about. The quest for full citizenship animates
our history—and the broader struggle over it poisons our politics. Citizenship has been
the central feature of my organizing, from my first protest as a young man to my time now leading
the Open Society Foundations. From campaigns to enable communities to access better education and
health care; to demonstrations to liberate Haitian asylum seekers held prisoner on Guantanamo Bay
Bay; to boycotts and rallies, fists raised with black South Africans disenfranchised
in their own land; to civil disobedience in solidarity with Puerto Ricans simply seeking their own self
determination; to organizing mass sit-ins in police stations with Reverend Sharpton in the wake of
the denial of Amadou Diallo’s humanity; to mobilizing for ballot access to the ballot for the formerly
incarcerated because they too can sing America.
This lifelong investment in citizenship led me to be alarmed by an exchange that I had
with my son. In the run up to this engagement, I had a conversation and exchange with my son
a few short weeks ago, on the occasion of the celebration of the imperfect Independence of the U.S.A.
My son watched the assemblage of armored tank units on the people’s mall,
a place that should excite reflection, a place where
a King once marched to collect a promissory note from America. My son saw the tanks, and considered
them in the context of a government that strategically and viciously has locked up and separated
brown children at its borders. He realized immediately that this marshal display—this parade—of the military
and the silence of too many married with the complicity of the powerful had an incongruence with
the projected and stated values of his nation. He said to me, plainly and plaintively, “I can’t
be in America.” I can’t be in America. This is what I heard from my son. As I understood it in that moment,
he was prepared to forfeit the citizenship earned by his grandmother. The citizenship of his
maternal grandfather, born and raised in the shadow of the Fourth Street Baptist church
in Montgomery, Alabama, where four little girls gave the best of themselves for a cause, and for their citizenship.
A citizenship that bled onto the streets whenever my father took to the picket line to demand his own
dignity or took to the public square to protest when the latest authoritarian was under
the embrace of an American president. My beautiful, American born son, my brilliant American born
daughter, this pearl of great price is not yours to cast aside. This is an hour where
your resolve and your resources will be tested past breakage. But you will not break.
You will not cede your citizenship to those who govern with a savage hatred in their hearts.
Know that surrender, silence, retreat is the haven of cowards and the choice of the privileged.
On behalf of past and future citizens of our Black Atlantic diaspora, you will fight back, and you'll win.
This new generation, stirring at the shores of a morally malnourished America, has been
drafted to craft a citizenship that can salvage the democracy itself, even while holding open arms
to invite communion with those who fear you. You are not the first African Americans who have been
thus summoned. One hundred years ago—in 1919, in a sweltering season, in what James
Weldon Johnson called “The Red Summer,” at a juncture when the President then sitting in the White
House gave succor and support to white supremacists spreading terror in the streets—black men, women, and
children were viciously beaten and lynched in over 30 U.S. cities. This American carnage
followed the start of the Great Migration and the return of Black soldiers from fields
of Europe where they spilled their blood for this nation, even though they had not barely
evolved beyond what Lincoln termed “a peculiar and powerful interest.” One hundred years
ago this season, these economic and political refugees found themselves in the midst of
a class struggle—a working class struggle—that was fanned and exploited by cheap politicians
and those were prospering elites. Their government left them to the mob, without the protection of
nationhood. They—we—were supposed to die. But Black life found a way. Nineteen nineteen
became 1920—Black workers mobilized, Black workers organized.
The ranks of the brand new NAACP swelled and overfilled. Women won the right to vote
and a new Negro movement in arts and culture lit a flame from Harlem to Haiti.
A citizenship staked and earned. Because when we fight back, we win.
But citizenship and belonging in this republic has always
tracked along a chain of evolving values. Feel this truth as we live through the fever swamp
that’s currently afflicting us. The mutability of citizenship was twisted into a barbed wire in the 1880s
with the Chinese Exclusion Act, which explicitly denied naturalization to all those of Chinese origin.
The noose was further tightened in 1923 when the constitutional term “free white persons”
was interpreted in this democracy to rule out Japanese and Indian migrants. Well into the 1960s,
my brothers and sisters, many state laws prevented Native Americans from exercising
a basic and fundamental right to vote. In truth,
this sacred American citizenship was only made great and given value
through the sanctified blood of people of color, bloodied yet unbowed in the march
towards a more perfect union. History should be studied in reverse, starting
with all the messy little bits in our present amnesia. This is how we locate parallels
and find our own brave voices. Who knows what 2020 might hold. There’s nothing—nothing at all—that's akin to
the sensation of crossing over to the other side of the river of history, by dipping in your
own oar to stir the current. I have known such stirrings against the tide.
I can remember a crisp autumn day in 2008, in St. Louis, Missouri, at the lip of the Mississippi, when
I traveled with a young senator who dared all of us to join him on an improbable quest.
On that day, over 100,000 Americans of every stripe gathered in a public plaza and took
up his call. As a student of history, I could see in the proximate distance the gleaming dome of
the St. Louis Courthouse, where Dred Scot, 150 yards away, and a 150 years previously in history,
had been deemed less than a man, and never a citizen.
How the current stirred on that day. But to get to renaissance, we cannot avoid
the dark night of our American souls. We have to walk through the breech, aflame in the
light of our own radical citizenry. But, with modesty, as I greatly revere this
new generation of activists, allow me to offer guidance from a man who yet
burns to lead for justice, but knows well the power of being a follower.
I'd like to—and am ready to—be led by this new wave, this new generation.
But I'd like to remind them to be mindful that they are the first
generation to be organized as consumers and not as citizens; I might ask them to interrogate
whether the grenade that feels good when launched on a social media platform is useful and impactful in building
common purpose and unity. I would implore them to be daring, but sober to the unrelenting
ways of power in America. I would tell them that citizenship expressed passively is a devalued currency,
and that democracy is a full contact sport; but I would be quick to add that being an
active citizen means being an exposed person, and it means—like Reverend Sharpton—
having a target on your back. I would allow that power is not fixed,
and it can be disrupted, but that disruption can only be developed and sustained by building institutions
and collective action of communities that are in correspondence.
I would ask them to be attuned to the lessons of those who came before, but to not build cathedrals
to a romanticized past, and to honor those who are in the trenches with you today
making sacrifices in real time because when you're in the trenches and in a fight,
a living dog is better than a dead lion.
And lastly, I would ask them all to go where the silence is.
Go to where the silence is. Hear a stranger’s name and let it mean you.
Go to where the silence is. Feel a child’s dying heartbeat at the border, and let it be yours.
Go to where the silence is, stand still, and speak where you sing.
Like Claude McKay, the Jamaican immigrant who in 1919 gave voice to the anguish and the radical
citizenship of Blacks in America in the Red Summer with his iconic poem, “If We Must Die”:
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave? Like men, we must meet the murderous, cowardly
pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
And so we fight on, to the other side of citizenship. We fight on when the tongues of presidents
are barbed with spitefulness and a brutish ignorance; we fight on through the hypocrisy
of those who have traded away all decency—Mitch McConell—for a toehold on power. We fight back and
we dare to be a powerful people, captured in the mirror of history which reflects back our radical beauty.
Thank you NAACP. Thank you my fellow citizens.
Love one another too well, and keep the faith.