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03:29Michael Franklin, Executive Director of Speechwriters of Color.
03:33Good morning, Essence.
03:49Good morning, Essence.
03:51Good morning, New Orleans.
03:53What's the best city in the universe?
03:57I need to hear you say it real loud.
03:59What's the best city in the universe?
04:02Unless except it's your hometown.
04:04But since New Orleans is our hometown, what's the best city in the universe?
04:08All right, good morning, good morning, great to be with you.
04:12I am honored to be able to moderate this panel, and I have our colleagues with me.
04:19So let me begin.
04:20So let me begin.
04:21Mark Morial here.
04:22I'm proud to lead the National Urban League, one of the nation's historic civil rights and urban advocacy organizations, the largest that provides direct services and focuses on the urban community.
04:36And we may be in your hometown, and we may be in your hometown, and we may be in your hometown, and we may be in your hometown, we've got 92 affiliates all across the nation.
04:41I've got powerful, influential, passionate people here with us this morning.
04:47And we want to talk about civil rights, civil rights.
04:53Derek Johnson, I want to go to you first, because the NAACP, founded in 1909, has been in the forefront of civil rights and has advanced so many important gains for our people.
05:08But now we are in the midst of a great crisis.
05:13From your perspective, what is that crisis?
05:16Well, the crisis, as we see it now, is a recalibration around the role of government and how this government see people and what rights they should have.
05:28Historically, the civil rights movement has really stood on a three-legged stool.
05:33Our aspiration for the future, education.
05:37Our ability to participate in public policymaking, our franchise, the vote.
05:42And our ability to negotiate for our labor, whether individually or collectively, so that we're not exploited for cheap or free labor.
05:51That's a three-legged stool.
05:53And everything kind of grows out from that.
05:55And we've seen this country go through several iterations around policy priorities.
06:00But now, with the passage of this most recent bill this week, they want to redesign and redefine who should be seen as human beings, who should be entitled to citizenship, and how our tax dollars are used in the communities in which we live in.
06:17Give Derek a round of applause.
06:19He leads the NAACP.
06:22Melanie and Janae, I'm going to ask this question to both of you all, because I think it's important that we always address this.
06:31Some people may say, not necessarily our allies, that the aims of civil rights have been accomplished.
06:40That black people and other people of color have made enormous progress.
06:48And that any challenges that you face are of your own making and doing.
06:57That narrative is prevalent in certain quarters of this nation.
07:02I don't agree with it, certainly.
07:03But Melanie and Janae, how do we confront that narrative?
07:08And we have leaders here.
07:10When they hear that narrative, how do you confront that narrative with facts and truth?
07:18Thank you, Mark.
07:19And thank you, Essence.
07:20And thank you for the Global Forum for making sure we have a party with a purpose.
07:25And you being, I would say, founding son of mayor when this started, it is always a blessing to be here.
07:35Briefly, I think we have to always remember that we've been here before in different ways.
07:41So if you think about the journey for African Americans, black folks in this country, we have to always know that we have always had to fight.
07:49And if you look at the first Reconstruction, we came out of slavery, what we had to do at that moment to fight for our rights, 13th, 14th, 15th Amendment, that my sister will go deeper into, right?
08:02And having the law on our side to get us out.
08:06And then there was what?
08:07A backlash.
08:09And then that took forever.
08:11And then we moved to the 1950s where we had to fight in the 50s and the 60s.
08:16We talk about the civil rights movement of that day.
08:18And then we fought and we won.
08:22You think about the March on Washington, 1963.
08:25Then you think about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
08:35And then we have a what?
08:36A backlash.
08:37And then we had the audacity as black people to take our political power that we gained and we elected the first black president.
08:44And then we turned around and we elected the first vice president.
08:47And almost voted, did what?
08:50Elected the first woman South Asian black woman president.
08:54And now we're in the backlash.
08:56And the backlash was swift.
08:58And the backlash wants to keep us off of our game, keep us confused and that there's nothing we can do.
09:04But we are resilient people.
09:06But we have to learn from that history, learn from the mistakes that we made, and unite as we are doing and with others, not even in this room, that we are in this fight.
09:15We helped build this country.
09:17And we have to be bold to understand that we are not going anywhere.
09:20We are not going to be erased.
09:21But we also have to take care of ourselves in the process.
09:24Absolutely.
09:24Give Melanie a big round of applause.
09:26Thanks for that response.
09:27Janae, let's come to you.
09:28Same question.
09:30Well, thank you.
09:31Good morning, everyone.
09:32My name is Janae Nelson.
09:33I am the president and director of counsel of the Legal Defense Fund.
09:37And my sister Melanie just gave you a whole law class on the Constitution and the civil rights statutes that continue to protect us.
09:46And let me say that they will have you believe that our civil rights statutes that we fought for, that we put in place that benefit black people and every other group in this country, that somehow those laws don't still hold weight.
10:03And they do.
10:04So we are not ceding any of that territory at all and are fighting to defend all of those laws.
10:11And you're right, that that makes some people think because we have these protections that somehow we have not been earning our way and earning all of the successes that we have achieved.
10:23And to that, I say this.
10:25There has never been a moment in this country's history where black people have had unfettered freedom and access and an equal playing field to realize our full potential.
10:37There's not one day in this country where every black person could just wake up and be who they were destined to be by God without a racist obstacle or system preventing them from realizing that potential.
10:53And so what we've done over the course of the past 85 years as an institution, we have worked to create laws to force this country to live up to the ideals and promises of the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment, and obviously the 13th Amendment with emancipated us from slavery.
11:12But that fight is far from over.
11:13And until all of us are free, until all of us have unencumbered access to education, to economic prosperity, to the right to vote and to determine our futures, until we are free from a criminal legal system that is predatory, that has locked up our children for generations,
11:35we are not all free, and therefore whatever successes we have are not only hard-earned and well-fought ones, they defy the very systems of this country that are meant to oppress us.
11:50Let's give Jenae Nelson a big round of applause.
11:53Thank you very much.
11:54Siobhan and Michael, and Michael is Executive Director, Chairman of Speechwriters of Color.
12:01Siobhan leads the National Council on Negro Women.
12:03So this is a question about generational and gender.
12:10So in research, polling, and conversations in the community on politics and other issues, there does seem to be a gender within the black community and generational divide.
12:27Now, I might say it's not completely new, but is it more acute today?
12:36And maybe both Michael and Siobhan, we'll go to you, Michael, first.
12:40You can maybe define it and talk about it, because what we have to do in our community is discuss things and not suppress things and just say, oh, that ain't the truth, that ain't the fact.
12:56Or some people say, yeah, it's going to tear us apart forever.
13:00So let's level set.
13:02What say you?
13:03Absolutely.
13:04Absolutely.
13:05And first, I just want to thank everyone for being here, because when we have this movement, it requires that we come together.
13:13And the messages that we articulate and the messages that we dictate are so important towards moving people.
13:19And so oftentimes, if we're caught up in a conversation, that conversation ends up not happening, because we're too stuck in our ways, too stuck in the mud of what we believe in.
13:28And we have to be real and root that in truth.
13:31And so when we started Speechwriters of Color, we recognized this was in the height after the murder of George Floyd, that there needed to be an opportunity to stop bad messages from coming out.
13:41Because you saw all of these organizations, corporations, having these messages that were not only tone deaf, but they were clearly not able to resonate with anyone across the generations.
13:51We saw civil rights leaders being able to condemn them for not showing up to support our communities well.
13:55We saw business leaders seeing that they were not able to be supported well.
14:00And so by bringing in this next generation of communicators, we're leaning into the tradition of the civil rights movement, because it's great orators in churches.
14:07It's great journalists.
14:09It's great folks who share messages across different mediums that allow us to build a movement together.
14:14And what we've been able to do with Speechwriters of Color is providing the opportunity, regardless of the medium.
14:19Sometimes it's a speech, sometimes it's an op-ed, but now it's a TikTok, now it's a headlines, now it's something that's bite-sized towards being able to ensure that we can have a message that makes a difference.
14:29Because there's a lot of noise and there's a lot of BS out there that people don't want to resonate with, and we've got to cut through it.
14:35And sometimes it's not going to be the things that folks are reading right now, but it's making sure that we're able to show up where people see us and where people hear us.
14:42And have the opportunity to be accessible, to push back, and give that conversation that we're looking for.
14:48Give him a big round of applause.
14:49Thank you, Michael, for that.
14:50Siobhan.
14:51I'm about to hire you.
14:53I think that, first of all, thanks for the opportunity and for the Global Black Economic Forum.
14:57I think one of the things that's really interesting, I lead an organization that will be 90 years old this year.
15:01But what we have found is that in many of our institutions, we have not dealt with the impact of toxicity and intergenerationalism.
15:10And the toxicity that it comes from is really rooted in methods.
15:16It's really rooted in methods.
15:17What I realize about most of us in our different generations is that we actually want the same thing.
15:23It's the how we go about it that's been the challenge on the ground.
15:27And what I want to push back on is we're not against each other.
15:31We're against each other's methods.
15:33And then what happens is when you get against each other's methods, then it becomes personal.
15:38Because my method was mine to have.
15:39And now there's someone that wants to take that over.
15:41As a woman in a civil rights space, we just launched a campaign at NCW called We're the Home of the 92%.
15:47The 92% are the black women from every background who made a decision and got an A for their decision because they got it right.
15:56But the reason why we're doing that messaging is because it takes black women to message to black communities.
16:04What we're clear on is that the gender issue, it's an issue when we make it an issue.
16:08Over 80% of black men actually voted correctly too.
16:12I don't want to diminish the brothers here.
16:15But what we do have to get at is then how does misogyny show up in other institutions inside of black spaces?
16:20I'm a preacher in a black church, right?
16:23That's a space where there's misogyny.
16:25There's spaces where black women are not given the same play, given the same access.
16:28And we're still fighting for equal pay for black women too.
16:31So at the end of the day, the ability to deal with gender in our community is an issue, but it should not be an issue.
16:38That takes us so far from the real goal, which is to liberate our people in advocacy and activism, but also bringing institutions, bringing young people together to be able to activate on the same page.
16:49Because look, there's not been a fight that we've ever lost when we were together.
16:53That's how we got all that legislation passed.
16:56And so I want us to, listen, in this black joy we're in, in essence, activating this.
17:00They can't come for us unless we let them come for us.
17:03And that's about us collectively activating together.
17:07Let's give Siobhan a round of applause.
17:09Thanks for that conversation.
17:10Let me set the next question up this way.
17:14This essence fest is now 31 years old.
17:18Let's imagine that we were in the year 2000.
17:242000.
17:2525 years ago.
17:27And I sat on this panel and prognosticated.
17:33And I said, within 25 years, we will have a black president.
17:38Wow.
17:39Within 25 years, we'll have a black vice president.
17:43Wow.
17:44Within 25 years, we'll have a black attorney general.
17:47Wow.
17:48Within 25 years, we'll have a black woman on the Supreme Court.
17:54Wow.
17:55And 25 years from now, we'll have five black people serving simultaneously in the United States Senate.
18:06And then I said, and the nation will also have elected the first avowed white nationalist supremacist to be elected.
18:15So I'm going to go to Derek and Janae.
18:19How do we reconcile that when you step away from that and you look at it and you said, that would be tremendous progress, especially compared to the previous 25 or 50 or 100 years?
18:36How do we reconcile that because if I had stood on the essence stage and said that in the year 2000, they'd be taking me out of here to go get some good mental health assistance.
18:51They say he's dreaming.
18:53He's being aspirational.
18:55And maybe we hope, but that's not going to happen.
18:58How do we reconcile Derek and Janae this?
19:00So one's ability to acquire a position or a title isn't a plan.
19:07Just because we got someone elected or appointed, it doesn't speak to the need to have long-term planning.
19:15In 2000, we also began to see the erosion of the black political machinery across the country that actually created the momentum to get the president or the vice president or the Supreme Court entity.
19:31We began to allow folks to come into our community under new systems, 527s or whatever you call it, and began to hire our folks or not hire our folks to turn our votes and not accelerate our ability to leverage our political power.
19:49We conceded our political power because we started seeing people with titles.
19:52I grew up in Detroit, Michigan, just like New Orleans when Mark's father was the mayor, we had Coleman Young, and then you had Marion Barry, and then you had Maynard Jackson.
20:04I could go on and on.
20:05They created systems of political power so people can get hired for livable wage jobs, get contracts that we couldn't get before, make sure that systems were more accountable to the needs and interests of our communities.
20:20Positions are not plans, and we need to get to the place where we have long-term planning, and in the plan, we get people in position, but not assume just because someone is in a position that they're going to do what needs to be done because they don't have an agenda that's informed by us.
20:38Give Derrick Johnson a round of applause, a great insight.
20:42So you're talking about one turn of the century, and if you go back a century before that, we know that when black people were emancipated, there were civil rights statutes that came not too soon after that that were immediately opposed.
20:57So even though we had just come out of centuries of slavery, they were already saying, and when I say they, I mean not only lawmakers, but the Supreme Court of the United States said in the 18th century, there has to be a point where, or in the 1800s, there has to be a point where black people stopped being the special favorites of the law.
21:23We still had literal people who had been enslaved with wealth on their back from a whip being told that they were the special favorites of the law.
21:39And so I bring us back to that history just to say we have always faced opposition whenever there's been even a bit of progress because this country was never meant for black people to succeed.
21:51And yet, and yet, and yet, we have done so.
21:57We have protected ourselves and many others by fighting for this country to be a actual democracy with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that we're celebrating the 60th anniversary of this year.
22:13We have done those things.
22:14And so the question I think we need to be asking ourselves is in that complicated back and forth, in that history of resistance and resilience that we possess, what do the next 25 years look like?
22:29Because we know that in that time period, America will become a majority people of color population.
22:39It will be a plurality society, meaning that black people, Latino people, Asian people, white people, people of every background will be living together.
22:50And there will be no majority that dominates if democracy prevails.
22:56What we're experiencing now is a growing white minority trying to hold on to power at all costs with no moral restraint, with absolutely no check on the lawlessness of this administration.
23:12And we have to seize this moment as an opportunity to do something radical, as we did when we did it in the turn of the last century, what we did in the middle of the last century with the civil rights movement.
23:26This is now a moment for re-founding, re-imagining, and re-establishing what it means to be an American in this next iteration of our country.
23:36Thank you very much.
23:37Thank you very much.
23:38Thank you very much.
23:38That just gives you a name.
23:39Now, Siobhan and Melanie and Michael, very quickly, you are sitting in front, let's imagine this, a room of aspiring people.
23:54They're running for office in 2026.
23:57All right.
23:59They're preparing to run for the big house in 2028.
24:04I want you to give them three things you expect, demand, and require of them if they're going to earn your support and the support of the people you represent.
24:19Very quickly, three things.
24:20I demand they repeal the big, beautiful bill that just got passed.
24:24I also demand that they offer equal pay as a standard across this country.
24:29And I also would say that health care becomes a right and not a privilege.
24:34Excellent.
24:34Excellent answer.
24:35Melanie?
24:36Well, I'm not going to be obedient.
24:38I'm saying what we better do, how many people in here are in here from the South?
24:43Okay?
24:44We talk about the power we have, and so goes the South, so goes the nation.
24:49So we have the numbers.
24:51We have to maximize those numbers.
24:53I see a brother over there in the corner wearing the power of the ballot T-shirt.
24:56All right?
24:57Stand up, my brother.
24:58Right?
24:58That's because of my shirt, too.
25:00Right?
25:00But it says what?
25:02It says we will not be raised.
25:03We will not be moved.
25:04We have the power to use it.
25:06Let's make sure that we take the South back and we will take care of the nation.
25:11Let's give her a hand.
25:13Great answer.
25:14Michael?
25:14And I think as we navigate the next years, we have to operate with purpose, power, and possibility
25:21because we have to be intentional with how we act and intentional with how we organize.
25:26We have to recognize that building power doesn't just come from electoral office, but it's about
25:30building community and narrative power because we must set the agenda and we must reimagine
25:35the possibilities of what we can do because black people are excellent.
25:39We are joy.
25:41We are the architects of so many amazing things.
25:45And we owe it to ourselves to build systems, to rebuild institutions that will be able to
25:52serve us because when black people are centered at what we want to solve, we are able to make
25:58things that work best for everyone.
25:59Amen.
26:00So let me offer, before we close, I say to them, I'm tired of drive-by politics.
26:09I'm tired of you showing up at the NAACP National Urban League Convention in essence during election
26:18year.
26:20I never laid eyes on you and you never laid eyes on us.
26:25I'm tired of drive-by politics.
26:30Where you walk in and you come in, you crowd the aisle to the pulpit of the church the week
26:39before the election and I never saw you before.
26:43I'm tired of drive-by politics.
26:46I'm tired of politicians that play uptown and pray downtown.
26:53They got one message over here and another message over here.
27:02And now it's time to set the marker down that we have worked too hard.
27:09We've been the foundation of too much success politically for too many people.
27:19And we demand a different measure of respect.
27:23We demand to be resourced.
27:28We demand that the issues from our perspective and how we define it is what you endorse.
27:35Right?
27:36And we demand, we demand an authentic approach to building relationships with our community
27:46and our leaders.
27:48We have to flip the script.
27:50That's right.
27:53Two out of the last three elections have been lost.
27:57National elections.
27:58That's unacceptable.
27:59The effort to suppress our votes now with the big, ugly bill to marginalize our vision for
28:10the country is too palatable.
28:14So I want to see, and I hope they're listening, I want to see you in the community, not just
28:23during election season.
28:25That's right.
28:26I want to see, and I say this with great love and respect for the tradition of African-American
28:36political leaders, of which I was one.
28:40All too often, people forget.
28:45They don't come around.
28:48They don't respond.
28:51I have people call me today as though I'm an elected official.
28:55I say, call your city council person.
28:58Call your mayor.
28:59They said we've been calling.
29:01Wow.
29:02And we've been texting.
29:04Right.
29:05And we have no response.
29:08So we're in this important moment where civil rights, which is what we work for.
29:17In 1954, NAACP and its legal defense fund at the time, got the United States Supreme Court
29:31made up of nine white men, all born in the 1800s, including one that had been a card-carrying
29:43member of the Ku Klux Klan, Hugo Black, to decide nine to zero that segregation in education must
29:55end and is no longer constitutional.
29:57Today, 70 years later, we have the most vigorous, well-funded assault on those gains in modern
30:13American history.
30:13So on the line for us is whether we're going to be silent, whether we're going to get locked, y'all,
30:23whether you're going to be like the lion in the Wizard of Oz with no courage, and we can't intelligently
30:31stand up.
30:32I don't care if you're in a corporate suite or you're on the street.
30:36I don't care if you live in a boulevard or you live in the alley.
30:40I don't care if you got more degrees than a thermometer, a Ph.D., a D.D., a J.D., an M.D.,
30:47or you like many with no D.
30:51We have to find a way to exercise our voice and to stand up.
30:55And the reason why is that generation, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Whitney Young,
31:03Dorothy Height, Roy Wilk, I can name all of them, when they were out there fighting, they
31:11weren't fighting for themselves.
31:14They were fighting for the next generation.
31:17King said it.
31:17I have a vision for a day when my four little children, not a vision for when I, so our work
31:27is not just about us.
31:30It's not just about my paycheck, my house, my Bentley, my Lexus, my BMW, my Cadillac, my stock
31:44portfolio.
31:44It is about the next generation.
31:49And we have to center ourselves that right now so much is on the line.
31:55And it's a fight for civil rights, which is really a fight for equal justice, a fight for equal
32:01participation.
32:02So give these panelists a round of applause.
32:04And also, we want to give the team at Essence, Alfonso David, Richard Lou Dennis, and the team,
32:13a round of applause for ensuring that we have a chance to have conversations like this.
32:19God bless.
32:20Enjoy Essence.
32:22And I want to announce, I just learned this, that at 4 o'clock on this stage, Justice Ketanji
32:28Brown Jackson will be here.
32:30So spread the word, because we have to come and support her.
32:37She's in there waging important battles within the Supreme Court.
32:43And she's riding excellent dissents.
32:46She's exercising an incredible amount of intelligence and courage.
32:51So we need to come out and support Justice Jackson.
32:54All right.
32:55Thank you for the great news.
32:56It's hiding number two.
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