A Quote by Van Jones
I'm not going to let Donald Trump take away from our community, something that Fannie Lou Hamer shed blood to give us. Something that Ella Jo Baker braved conditions in the South and sweatshops in Harlem to give us.
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Listen, here's reality. It is completely unfair and absolutely necessary that people who have been oppressed and marginalized have to lead everybody. That is MLK, that is Dolores Huerta, that is Fannie Lou Hamer, that is Ella Jo Baker, that is Nelson Mandela. You walk down the line.
When I saw Fannie Lou Hamer speech I said, "Well, how did this Democratic Party that Miss Hamer is talking about, become the Democratic Party that now is the party of the African-American community?"
In the world take always the position of the giver. Give everything and look for no return. Give love, give help, give service, give any little thing you can, but keep out barter. Make no conditions and none will be imposed on you. Let us give out of our own bounty, just as God gives to us.
Give us something else; give us something new; for Heaven's sake give us something bad, so long as we feel we are alive and active and not just passive admirers of tradition!
We want to have trade agreements that give us a level playing field, get other countries to respect the rule of law, intellectual property rights, lower their taxes to our barriers, that`s good for us, and that is something that I do believe that President [Donald] Trump agrees with.
Money is not the only commodity that is fun to give. We can give time, we can give our expertise, we can give our love or simply give a smile. What does that cost? The point is, none of us can ever run out of something worthwhile to give.
We have to build our own power. We have to win every single political office we can, where we have a majority of black people... The question for black people is not, when is the white man going to give us our rights, or when is he going to give us good education for our children, or when is he going to give us jobs-if the white man gives you anything-just remember when he gets ready he will take it right back. We have to take for ourselves.
This is the game of those who deny climate change or who deny the need for sustainability. They say, 'They are going to take everything away from us. They are going to take our cars away from us. They are going to take our steaks from us. They are going to take all the things that make life nice away from us. So let's not go there.'
When I looked at [Fannie Lou] Hamer and that speech it seemed to me that she had to be the bravest woman ever, to come before that body and to assert her rights, when she knew that she was going lose that battle. But she did it anyway, because she knew she was speaking not just for herself and for that day, but for me, and for all the other young women who were coming behind her. She didn't know our names, but she was working for us. I find that incredibly empowering.
If you can clean up the cesspool of the tax code and give us a pro-growth tax code, that is how you grow the economy. That`s how you take power and money out of Washington and give it back to the people and we are so excited. We have a president [Donald Trump] that is here to work with us in doing that.
When we give our minds and our responsibility away, we give our lives away. If enough of us do it, we give the world away and that is precisely what we have been doing throughout known human history. This is why the few have always controlled the masses.
Donald Trump is out to destroy people's lives, and he's trying to take our democracy down. That is something we can fight with everything we've got, but having compassion for one another while we do it is going to get us a lot further.
Let us give something to each person we meet: joy, courage, hope, assurance, or philosophy, wisdom, a vision for the future. Let us always give something.
I just think of Fannie Lou Hamer, because even though she didn't know my name Ms. Hamer was thinking of me. I just want to do a good job, because I want her to look over that edge of heaven and say, "That's why I did it. That's why. I knew we had the capacity and the talent to be everything America says we can't be. All we needed was an open door."
All talks about legacies of white supremacy must be tied to empowering the lives of poor and working people as a whole. The black agenda - from Frederick Douglas to A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr, Fannie Lou Hammer to Ella Baker - has always been tied to race talk inseparable from expanding possibilities of democracy, expanding empowerment of everyday people.
That is part of why we must keep talking about Fannie Lou Hamer and about our history as a party and as a nation. We can't forget. If we forget, we can get self-righteous. We are great, but we had to grow into that greatness. Let's not forget that we shut people out.
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