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"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
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1996 Democratic National Convention - Rev. Jesse Jackson
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| Parent | Parent Candidate |
| Contributor | Craverguy |
| Post Date | , 12:am |
| Description | Thirty-three years ago tonight, a young preacher about the same age as my son was putting the final touches on one of the great prophetic messages of our age.
On August 28, 1963, Dr. King projected a vision of peace and equality that could heal our nation, and a troubled world. His vision touched America's conscience. The Republicans in San Diego put forward the image, the vision, of a big tent.
Remember, America - you can't judge a book by its cover. On the cover, Powell and Kemp. But inside, the book was written by Newt Gingrich and Ralph Reed and Pat Buchanan. What is our vision tonight? Just look around.
This publicly financed United Center is a new Chicago mountaintop. To the South, Comiskey Park, another mountain. To the west, Cook County Jail, with its 11,000 mostly youthful inmates.
Between these three mountains lies the canyon. Once Campbell's Soup was in this canyon. Sears was there, and Zenith, Sunbeam1, the stockyards. There were jobs and industry where now there is a canyon of welfare and despair. This canyon exists in virtually every city in America. As we gather here tonight:
- one-fifth of all American children will go to bed in poverty;
- one-half of all African-American children, growing up amidst broken sidewalks, broken families, broken cities, broken dreams;
- the No. 1 growth industry in urban America - jails;
- one-half of all the public housing built in this nation during the last decade - jails; - the top 1 percent wealthiest Americans own as much as the bottom 95 percent - the greatest inequality since the 1920s.
As corporations downsize jobs, outsource contracts, scab on workers' rights, a class crisis emerges as a race problem. The strawberry pickers in California, the chicken workers in North Carolina, deserve a hearing - and justice. We must seek a new moral center. We have been here before. |
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