00:00Hi, I'm Reverend Al Sharpton. 50 years ago, when Essence magazine started, I remember because I was a teenager, when Ed Lewis, who was a banker, and his partners came to Operation Breadbasket, where I was a youth director in New York under Reverend William Jones, nationally under Reverend Jeff
00:30Jackson. And even as a teenager, I was intrigued that this young black man wanted to build with his partners a black woman's magazine. And to show the beauty, the intellect, and the depth of our women. The reason it particularly touched me, being that I was the youngest minister in the room, I was only about 13 or 14 at the time.
01:00It's because I was being, at that moment, that that meeting occurred. Being raised and taken care of by a single black mother. My father had left three or four years before that.
01:12And my black mother had to take me and my sister from living in a nice 10 room home, garage in Cadillac, down to live in the hood and readjust our lives.
01:27And it was the strength of that black woman, who went from a landlady to a welfare recipient who had to scrub floors to pay the rent to landladies. Yet, she never bent, buckled about under the pressure.
01:45She was committed to my sister and I. And the beauty and strength of black women needed to be shown to the world. That's why I believed in essence.
01:57And 50 years later, I'm still fighting for those black women. Some are not single mothers, some are married, but all of them are living in a country where we have a disparity in health services, which is why we are the ones most affected by this pandemic.
02:18Because we live in areas that are health service deserts. We are still fighting around police brutality like George Floyd and racial violence like Ahmaud Arbery and a black woman killed in her own home, Breonna Taylor, because of a no-knock law.
02:38We are still in the midst of a society that treats us less than equal.
02:45401 years we've been here, came here as chattel slaves, treated to the most brutal form of slavery. Our names taken from us, our families sold upon different states, children one state, daddy sold to another, never to be reunited.
03:05And somehow we survived. Maybe because during the Atlantic slave trade, many perished in the Atlantic because of the pandemics then. Many didn't survive the flus and the maladies, the storms, the waves that overtook the slave ships.
03:25But the strongest of the Africans survived. And we are the children, and our blood is the blood of the strong survivors. And that's how we took over 200 years of slavery.
03:38That's how we took Reconstruction and then the rollback and the terrorist attacks of the Ku Klux Klan. That's how we took 100 years of Jim Crow. That's how we took having to pay taxes and fight wars but couldn't even vote until we fought for it.
03:56And that's how we took over 200 years of slavery. And that's how we took over 200 years of slavery. And that is why we took over 200 years of slavery. And that is why, on this 50th anniversary, we must recommit ourselves to that strength.
04:21Now the whole world is standing up for social justice. The whole world are remembering with Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, all the way to Shirley Chisholm and Barbara Jordan and those sheroes of today.
04:36It was those that had to sometimes stand back and push the men forward because they wanted them to become the men that they could be and not the boys that they were called. That's what Essence was about. That's what fighting for George Floyd is about.
04:57We're not your slaves anymore. We're not your boys anymore. Why? Because we have women that raised us, women that married us, women that stood next to us, that they were so erect and regal and confident that they made us stand up and rail our shoulders back and forget our complexes and forget the fact that we'd been beat down to fear we were inferior.
05:22And our women and our women made us become the men that we were born to be because they never, ever broke who they were.
05:32As we celebrate this, celebrate it by showing that strength, yes, we need to keep protesting. Yes, we must vote in November. Yes, we have a national march, August 28th in Washington, to stand up for the dream of Dr. King, that you should join National Action Network and us in Washington.
05:52Yes, we need to build businesses in Washington. Yes, we need to build businesses in our community because we are always, have always been entrepreneurs since we had trade in Africa.
06:01Yes, we don't know our name. We have our slave master's name. But just because you gave us your name, we have changed your game. We are on our way to a land of fairness and justice. And it's going to change whether you liked it or not.
06:21Now, it's not going to be easy. It's going to be a long road. It's not going to be done by sprinter activists. It's going to be done by marathon activists, those that will run the long race, those that will take it no matter what it is, because we are determined not to live beneath our birthright.
06:42We are those that are collecting on what was put in this country and we never got paid. And we're not going anywhere because we built this country. Now it's time for us to be treated equally and fairly.
06:59We don't want favors. We want equality. We don't want handouts. We want reparations for what was done to us. We don't want you to give us black faces in high places. We want the power of our own self-determination.
07:17We want what is due everybody else that came to this shore because we were the ones that came here forced. We did not make a reservation to come. We did not say, oh, that's a new world. Let us go there and seek a better life.
07:35We were brought here. We were brought here against our will. But now that we've been here for 101 years, it is our will to say, since you brought us here and we built it, we're going to make it work for everybody, including us.
07:50And we're going to tell our story. And the first part, the eighth part, the first chapter of our story is the strength of our women that bore us in their womb and brought us out into our being and taught us how to stand up even when our legs felt too weary.
08:09That is what essence means to us. The essence of our strength has been our women, our mothers, our grandmothers, our daughters, our sisters, who may some kind of way found strength in the midst of all of our despair.
08:28We will not let them down. We did not come this far to turn around now.
08:35Yes, I can't promise that it will be an easy road, that it will be a trip with no turbulence as we journey.
08:44But I can promise you that if we don't give up and don't give out like our women have these 40 years, we will make it to where we need to go.
08:54Destiny is for those of us that grab it and guide it to where it rightfully is supposed to bring us.
09:03And that's what we fought 50 years for. And that's what we're going to demand now.
09:08We have more people now involved than ever before.
09:12But it's not about how many. It's about how determined we are.
09:16It's about sustained indignation. Beauty, yet brilliance.
09:23That is the combination, the essence of who black women are.
09:29And that's why we joined at a festival, even at a pandemic, to say that we are beautiful.
09:37We looked in the mirror you gave us, and we didn't look beautiful.
09:42We found out it wasn't that we wasn't beautiful.
09:46It's that you gave us a dirty mirror.
09:48We're going to wipe that mirror off so you can see us as we really are.
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