Illinois Governor JB Pritzker delivers a strong message on Donald Trump, Black history, voting rights, and minority representation in America. Pritzker raises concerns about efforts to eliminate Black and Hispanic congressional districts and highlights the importance of protecting voting rights and preserving Black history in schools and libraries. He also reflects on Illinois’ historic role in Black political representation and the ongoing fight for civil rights. Watch Pritzker’s remarks on Trump, voting rights, racial representation, and the growing political debate over America’s future.
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NewsTranscript
00:00And when Trump and his MAGA henchmen put voting rights in their crosshairs, Illinois again
00:06showed that there's another way.
00:09We took Donald Trump to court, we stopped his illegal effort to squash mail-in voting.
00:18And today, Illinois is one of the only states in the nation to offer mail-in voting to every
00:24eligible voter. No excuse needed.
00:29Oh my, oh my, oh my. I'm fired up. How about you?
00:33I mean, when you listen to Boise Kimber and you listen to Marshall Hatch and you listen to Christian Mitchell,
00:41I can't do anything except jump up and want to speak to you.
00:45Thank you all very much. Thank you all for being here. Please sit, please sit.
00:50Thank you so much to Christian. Good afternoon.
00:54Thank you to Reverend Blackman. Thank you for having us here at the Evening Star Missionary Baptist Church.
01:04I really am in awe of the community that you've built here and that all of you are building all
01:10across this city,
01:11all across the state and all across this nation.
01:14Now, I especially want to acknowledge those of you who traveled from so far away to be with us today
01:21here.
01:22All of you work where doctrine meets activism.
01:28And that is so crucial in this moment.
01:31You understand that it falls to all of you and to all of us to lift up the least of
01:39us.
01:42Inequality must be fought.
01:45We have to fight poverty.
01:47We have to make sure that every American can get a quality education
01:51and has the dignity of work that pays ahead of household wage.
01:56No less.
01:58Now, leadership has never been more important than right now,
02:02when our national government is falling down on the job.
02:07Now, I want to give a special shout-out to a gentleman who could not be here this morning,
02:13but has become a good friend of mine.
02:15That's Yusuf Jackson, who wasn't able to join us.
02:17But I also want to thank Dr. Jeanette Wilson.
02:25She is here on his behalf.
02:26And I think I speak for all of us when I say,
02:29it is good to know that Rainbow Push is in great hands.
02:36Now, it's hard to think that this is our first general election
02:41since the Reverend Jesse Jackson was called home.
02:45For so many of us, his moral compass was a beacon of light.
02:50He was a living icon.
02:52Now, I can only imagine what Reverend Jackson would be saying
02:56as we enter these final weeks of this vital moment in electoral history.
03:04I know what he would say now that I think about it.
03:07Keep hope alive.
03:09Because democracy is all about hope.
03:12It takes hope to register to vote.
03:15It takes hope to take the affirmative act to vote.
03:20It takes hope to vote for people who we know will make things better than they are today.
03:28It takes hope.
03:29And I'm brimming with hope.
03:31I am an optimist.
03:33And I'm an optimist because change can happen if we work for it.
03:39I know that because my mother was an activist in the 60s and 70s when it was hard.
03:46She made her advocacy a family activity.
03:48She used to take me to marches and to host meetings, well, in our own home.
03:54And then she'd sit us down.
03:55I was a little kid.
03:56She'd sit us all down at the kitchen table to stuff envelopes with flyers and send them to people in
04:02the neighborhoods.
04:03And we knew those people would benefit from the causes and candidates that she supported.
04:10I was the youngest of three kids, so I got the worst job at the kitchen table, just so you
04:14know.
04:15Right?
04:16I was the one that they had at the end, right?
04:18My brother would fold, my sister would stuff and write the addresses on the envelopes.
04:23I had to lick the stamps and the envelopes so my tongue would stick to the top of my mouth
04:29by the end, you know.
04:31But that's the job of the youngest.
04:32I was 7, 8, 9, 10 years old.
04:34For any young people in the room, by the way, today, we didn't have TikTok or Instagram back then.
04:40So mail was like social media with a lot fewer trolls, you know.
04:45But that's what we did.
04:47I wish, honestly, I wish I had had more time with my mother.
04:53She was a widow at that point in my life when I was young.
04:58She was a widow who struggled with alcoholism for as far back as I can remember.
05:04And that disease ended up taking her life when she was just 49 years old and when I was 17.
05:10Still, I remember her as this unstoppable force.
05:15Because, yeah, she was an alcoholic, but she was, you know, you know how it is when you're addicted to
05:22something.
05:23On the wagon, off the wagon, struggle.
05:25It's a real struggle.
05:26But when she was well, boy, was she special.
05:32She was and she still is my hero.
05:36And in the 17 years that I knew her, she managed to pass along a lifetime of lessons.
05:42The biggest one was that we have an obligation as human beings to protect each other.
05:48To stand together in solidarity with our neighbors.
05:52Especially when the siege comes.
05:55That's when we need each other.
05:57For voting rights, for women's rights, for civil rights.
06:00She taught me that our job is to stand in the breach and stand up for myself, but also for
06:07strangers when they're being wronged.
06:10That's our job.
06:12And the best way for me to honor my mother in this terrible moment in the history of this country
06:19is to be a fighter.
06:23I'm honored to be in this fight with all of you because you all are fighters too.
06:31Now I carried my mother's pursuit of justice into my very first job in politics and I want to tell
06:37you about that.
06:38I was an advance man.
06:40You know what that is?
06:41Someone who travels with the candidate.
06:43I was an advance man for a Democratic candidate named Terry Sanford who ran for United States Senate in North
06:51Carolina.
06:52This is in the mid-80s.
06:55Terry Sanford had an uncommon political trajectory.
06:58He was 69 years old when I worked for him.
07:00But back in the 1950s, when Southern Democrat tended to mean segregationist Democrat, he was unusual.
07:10He was an early believer in the New South.
07:14He was a white Southern Democrat who believed in the fight for civil rights.
07:21Yeah, hard to believe.
07:23And he was an ally of John F. Kennedy, 1960.
07:27And when he ran, when Terry Sanford ran for governor in 1960, he ran against a guy named Beverly Lake
07:34Sr.
07:34He was a racist who said he'd rather shut down the public schools than allow black children in them.
07:42Sanford, the civil rights advocate, won that election in 1960.
07:47And then, as governor, from 1961 to 1965, Terry Sanford steadily worked to release his beloved North Carolina from the
07:57cruel grips of Jim Crow.
08:00A white Southern Democrat.
08:03He was the first Southern governor, the very first one, to desegregate the public schools.
08:09He hired and he appointed black professionals to positions in state government.
08:14And then he sent his own kids to a public integrated school.
08:18He directed the State Highway Patrol to protect the freedom riders from segregationist violence when they came to North Carolina.
08:29And those things didn't leave Terry Sanford especially popular with a whole lot of white voters by the time he
08:38was finished being governor in 1965.
08:41Sanford knew he was sacrificing his political career.
08:44He knew it when he was doing it.
08:46But he did it anyway.
08:49Because he knew it was the right thing to do.
08:53Fast forward 21 years.
08:54I was just a kid who got hired to join a campaign for this 69-year-old U.S. Senate
09:00candidate named Terry Sanford.
09:02By 1986, people had already begun to see him in a different light.
09:09The things once seen as radical back in the early 1960s had begun to look visionary.
09:17So when people call me radical for believing that we ought to make sure that workers ought to have a
09:24living wage.
09:26That we ought to, well, make sure that every kid gets a great education regardless of their zip code and
09:33where they live.
09:34That we need to invest in communities that were systemically left behind.
09:39And that we shouldn't let ICE terrorize our neighbors.
09:45When people tell me that's radical, I remember that history is long.
09:52The Sanford campaign, way back when, showed me that there was a place in politics for people who believed that
09:59doing what was right mattered more than doing what was popular.
10:06Through the fights to right the wrongs of the past and the victories that were won, my faith, just watching
10:13all of that,
10:14being a very small part of it as I was young, my faith in our great republic got cemented.
10:24And that's why when you, the people of Illinois, made me governor of this great state, I got to work.
10:30Now, in Deuteronomy chapter 16, verse 20.
10:48Should I start over?
10:52God says, justice, justice shall you pursue.
10:58In Illinois, that's exactly what we've been doing.
11:01Economic justice, social justice, racial justice, more work to do.
11:06But we nearly doubled the minimum wage to $15 an hour, giving 1.4 million Illinoisans a raise.
11:14We created a child tax credit to give working families a tax cut, just a little bit of a break,
11:20up to $600 a year.
11:23We raised state spending on minority-owned small businesses to 30%.
11:31We passed, this is one of my favorites, we passed universal paid leave because life's most precious moments happen outside
11:39of business hours.
11:42And everyone deserves a little time off.
11:46We made historic investments in early childhood education because, well, every kid, and I mean every kid, should get preschool.
11:58Every kid.
12:0111,000 more kids are getting a high-quality preschool education because of the work we've done.
12:08We took on a crisis that's been allowed to fester for far too long.
12:13In Illinois, the black maternal mortality rate was more than twice the national average.
12:18In close partnership with our great current Lieutenant Governor, Julianna Stratton, who's going to be an amazing United States Senator.
12:29Together with her, I enacted the Birth Equity Initiative.
12:32Because of that law, we broke ground on the first birth center serving black women on the south side of
12:39Chicago earlier this year.
12:41And more to come.
12:44And when Trump and his MAGA henchmen put voting rights in their crosshairs, Illinois again showed that there's another way.
12:54We took Donald Trump to court.
12:56We stopped his illegal effort to squash mail-in voting.
13:02And today, Illinois is one of the only states in the nation to offer mail-in voting to every eligible
13:10voter.
13:11No excuse needed.
13:14We became one of just a handful of states to make Election Day a state holiday so everyone can get
13:21to the polls.
13:22And then we added, added polling locations.
13:28Because it shouldn't be hard to get to a polling location.
13:32And we opened them weeks early.
13:35And as of today, there are polling locations open all across all 50 wards of Chicago.
13:44And this year, I enacted a new law that helps high schoolers get registered to vote.
13:50And we named it in honor of Chicago's best.
13:54It's called the Reverend Jesse Jackson Youth Voter Empowerment Act.
14:03But while we've made it easier to vote in Illinois, that's not enough.
14:07We still need to stop the assault on voting rights.
14:11And in Washington, finally passed the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
14:20Donald Trump told his hatchet men in red states to redraw the congressional maps to eliminate black and Hispanic congressional
14:30districts.
14:32It's disgraceful.
14:33And as long as I am your governor, I will never let that happen in Illinois.
14:42Over the course of American history, our state has sent more black congressmen to Washington than any other state.
14:51We hold the record here.
14:53And by the way, we're about to, well, send not our first but our second black woman to the U
14:59.S. Senate when we elect Juliana.
15:04It's a legacy we all ought to be proud of.
15:07Now, we have the freedom that we have today because generations of civil rights and voting rights activists like Jesse
15:13Jackson, Fred Hampton, Ida B. Wells, and so many others planted seeds of justice, never quite knowing at the time,
15:22well, whether they would be around for the harvest.
15:25First, the best parts of our nation are the fruits of their labor.
15:31Some of them knew it before they died.
15:33Some of them didn't.
15:35But we are living testament to the work that they did.
15:39We owe it to them to keep planting those seeds, and we need to keep hope alive.
15:45I think, especially when it comes to politics, that we've gotten into a bad habit, a bad habit, all of
15:53y'all, of spending so much time fretting about what could go wrong that we've forgotten to imagine what could
16:03go right.
16:05And I'm running for re-election because I believe that things can go right.
16:11If you work a full-time job, you ought to make enough money with that one job to put food
16:17on your table, to see a doctor when you're sick, to live in a dignified home, to save for retirement,
16:25and to take a vacation every once in a while.
16:28We can and we ought to make that happen.
16:31That work lies ahead, and when it comes to civil rights and voting rights and standing up to a wannabe
16:38dictator sending federal agents to snatch anyone with dark skin or an accent off the street for the sake of
16:44our children's future, we must be sure that Illinois remains a beacon of freedom.
16:53That's why when you've seen me stand up to ICE, when you've seen me stand up to Donald Trump, it's
16:59because our future is at stake.
17:02Our children's future is at stake.
17:04We have to be the beacon of freedom here, the land of Lincoln, the land that elected Barack Obama as
17:11our first black president.
17:15And by the way, we can continue our work and beat the extremists who are trying to whitewash the truth
17:22of slavery and black history in our schools and libraries.
17:26That's why I banned book bans in the land of Lincoln.
17:33And we can move past the so-called leaders who shout things like, get out of this country whenever someone
17:40disagrees with them.
17:41You've heard them do that.
17:43Especially when that someone happens to be a person of color that they're yelling at.
17:47Because being a racist doesn't make you edgy.
17:51It just makes you a racist.
17:55With election day just 15 days away, it is time to embrace optimism and imagination and faith.
18:02And it's time to believe that things can be better and we can make them so.
18:09I don't think we should give in to the dread when our ancestors refused to do that.
18:15Remember, we are here to keep hope alive and then actualize our dreams.
18:21So I am inviting all of you to join me in an act of hope and march with me to
18:27the polls.
18:29At the Dr. Martin Luther King Center.
18:32Let's march for freedom.
18:34Let's march for equality.
18:36Let's march for the ancestors who brought us to this day.
18:39For the people who shed blood for all of our right to vote.
18:43My only question for all of you is with 15 days to go to fight for justice.
18:48Are you ready for the fight?
18:51Are you ready for the fight?
18:53Let's go get them everybody.
18:54Thank you all very much.
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