would have been 38 years old next year I
will be 38 years old five hits the earth
day Martin Luther King had written two
books he’d marched on Washington and
delivered the I have a dream speech he
boycotted and desegregated the buses of
Montgomery Alabama he marched on Selma
oh yeah if you want to develop his prize
so needless to say 2017 is gonna be a
very busy year for me 50 years ago
people that look like me lived in terror
the kind of terror that we ascribed to
other countries like Syria and Turkey
Iraq and Afghanistan they were bombed
and beaten and bruised they were lynched
and murdered without the protection of a
lot and sometimes even with the
complicity of the law they were
segregated they were estranged they were
hated all because of the color of their
skin in the zip code that they lived in
because of an unreconciled history of
our people that was the energy it’s
burned the civil rights movement and
while I related by the spirit of today
and by celebrating dr. King last week
and Black History Month next month
I’d be doing a disservice to the
movement not to pause and reflect on how
far we still have to go and how much
it’s going to take for us to get there
right now we’re having one of the worst
civil rights violations in our history
and we don’t talk about it with each
and if we do we talked about it in our
own circles and hushed tones perhaps
because we’re ashamed that it’s
happening on our watch sure we read the
books and we’ll watch the documentaries
and we might even put something online
about it but when the pages are shut and
the screens are dark and the Twitter
feed is rolled over the conversation
ends we need to have that conversation
every single day we talk about criminal
justice reform as if it’s linear in
acute we just say well some people are
working on it and I do my part and
everything’s gonna be okay if we
re-examine some laws and take some
people out of prison and protest about
the police but I hate to tell you that
it’s gonna take a lot more than
celebrating a day or month it’s gonna
take a lot more than a protest or March
it’s gonna take a lot more than just
those few people working on it to move
the needle on this issue I’m talking of
course about mass incarceration in the
land of the free in the home of the
brave we represent 5% of the world’s
population but 25% everything part of
incarcerated population 2.2 million of
our neighbors are in jails and prisons
right now of the number 7 million people
on probation and for a one misstep away
from getting locked up 70% of people
coming out of our jails and prisons
recidivate within a few years
one out of four every Americans has a
criminal record
one out of three every black men born
today will end up in prison at some
point in their lifetime despite making
up 14% of the national population
African Americans represent almost 50%
of the incarcerated population indeed
there are more African American men
under correctional control now than
there were slaves on the eve of the
Civil War these are problems that are
going on in our justice system and it
continues to operate in the same way
without innovation without creativity
with the same result it’s because we
don’t have the tough
conversations it’s time for new civil
rights movement this isn’t new news to
the black community we’ve known this for
a long time we’ve been saying it for
decades and we blame inertia for
something not happening we blame the
lack of leadership for something not
happening we were waiting for our next
Martin where we’re late waiting for our
next Malcolm we’re waiting for our next
Rosa Parks we’re waiting for someone
anyone to take us to the promised land
you know what I say stop waiting the
leaders of the new civil rights movement
are sitting in this room take a look
around go ahead take a look around
I’m not talking about that next Martin
Luther King is going to get that great
speech I’m not talking about the Rosa
Parks who’s going to sit in that bus at
the risk of personal safety I’m not
talking about Malcolm X who’s marching
through the streets with this end up I’m
talking about each and every one of you
you all came in here today with the
ability to make to be the new leader of
the civil rights movement before we get
there though I want to cut and see what
kind of leaders we have in this room and
how many of you are keyed into the
issues how many of you who have been
convicted of a crime and gone to jail or
prison or guarana how many of you have a
family member or a friend who’s been
convicted of a crime or is in prison few
more how many of you are appalled at the
numbers and at the functioning of our
criminal justice system today how many
of you would like to do something but
you don’t know what good because each
one of you can do something we think
about the civil rights movement we think
about these big marches in these big
speeches these big protests but the
civil rights movement was so much more
than that it was young children leaving
their schools and flooding the jails in
Birmingham Alabama it was the death of
four young girls and Birmingham in a
church it was a death of one young boy
in a swamp bed in Mississippi that
everybody saw in the news it was the
people who went and volunteered with the
Freedom Riders and Markson
streets it was the teachers it was the
students it was the people sitting at
home watching the news picking up the
phone calling a local official having
conversations and schools and churches
and in homes it was people who didn’t
have the right to vote
having people who had the privilege to
do so come and represent them in a way
that gave them the power that’s what the
Civil Rights was about and that’s why
now if 19 years old I remember standing
in front of a police officer handing him
money and drugs and drug paraphernalia
thinking in my mind that my life was
about to end
why not because I knew anything about
the criminal justice system but I knew
that I might get grounded
I knew that my car might get taken away
I knew that I might not be able to go
back to school but I was standing there
thinking God my life is over I had no
idea how close I was to the edge I
didn’t know that if I had been convicted
that crime would have convicted felon I
would have lost the ability to go to
college the next year and probably a
year after that and probably thereafter
that I didn’t know that if I lived in
another zip code and I was convicted
drug felon I would have lost my
opportunity of public housing forcing me
out on the street I didn’t know that I
would have gone on probation had a 75%
likelihood of violating within the first
six months and that that violation would
have entered me up at least the house of
correction if not state prison and then
coming out of that house of correction
in state prison I would have been in an
environment that would were required me
to go back a drug dealer and something
worse and then something worse usually
meant physical violence against another
person by stealing something and from
there the cycle continued and continued
and continuing until I was in safe
prison for the rest of my life on your
dollar I had no idea that that was going
to happen but I knew something so bad
was going to happen I was standing on
the edge of my life and then I did I was
allowed to go back to college I was
allowed to go to law school I graduated
from law school with honors I went on to
get one of the most prestigious jobs in
the country as an assistant district
attorney and
County district attorneys in Boston and
a highly decorated Korean within the
last year I’ve sat with celebrities with
athletes with musicians with secretaries
of state with the 44th cars in the
United States Barack Obama advising him
on the criminal justice reform bill
how did that happen because that police
officer did it stop me stop me in my
living a police officer but it’s got me
it was white a police officer that
stopped me was my father and because my
father and my mother were the most
wonderful people and they adopted brown
children I was protected with the shield
of white privilege and that privilege is
what protected me from the depths of the
criminal justice system just by growing
up in a different zip code and just by
having parents who didn’t see me the way
that the rest of the world did because
if I had grown up in another place in
another zip code I would fallen down
that rabbit hole because the shield I
had of that privilege which most of the
people in this room carry with you every
single day I’m here before you that’s
why you were to position to be the new
civil rights leaders of our time because
in my career I’ve had the opportunity to
meet lots of men like me in fact the
young man named David when I met him he
was 19 years old he lived in one of the
worst projects in Boston he lived there
with his three older brothers and his
mother he was nearly homeless and to put
money and food on the table he was out
selling drugs he got caught yucch
probation he got arrested then he got
probation and he violated then he came
out join a gang the gang robbing stolen
did bad things to people but he was
doing it not because he was a bad person
but because he missed out on all of
these opportunities just because of
where he lived and he continued to do
bad things to continue to go to prison
he continued to come out and still be in
this gang and then one day when he’s 26
years old David died on a sidewalk david
was one of the brightest young men that
I knew two weeks ago as an Angola prison
one of the worst prisons in our country
in Louisiana and there I met 50 men all
serving life without parole sentences
for crimes they’d commit
before the age of 17 I met a man who’s
been in prison for stealing a purse from
a woman by gunpoint and I don’t want to
diminish his crime or the feeling that
the victim had in that case but when I
was speaking to this man he was telling
me about how he lost his five brothers
while he was in prison while he lost his
three sisters while he was in prison
while he lost his father while he was in
prison and that he was up for parole
next month but he didn’t think he was
going to get it he was 53 years old not
because he was a bad person not because
he was a violent evil person but because
so what are we gonna do I became a
prosecutor because I realized I could
use the privilege that I got not only as
a shield to myself maybe others around
me but as a sword to fight the people
that were trying to take it away from
these folks you can do that you don’t
even need to go to law school let me
tell you that science tells us that when
a baby’s in utero and the mother is
suffering from any type of trauma or
stress including homelessness or just
not being able to get a job or not being
able to take care of a nutritionally a
child has a very strong likelihood of
ending up in the criminal justice from
the ages of zero to three seventy-five
percent of people in jail and have had
at least three interactions with the
child welfare system seventy-five
percent of the people sitting in jail
right now
when they were infants we’re telling us
when they’re in the child welfare system
I’m gonna go to prison unless you do
something right now come take care of me
come read to me come hold me do
something and then those kids go into
elementary school by the time they reach
the first grade kids in the inner city
have heard thirty million less words
than kids in the suburbs kids in the
inner city have been read to on average
24 hours from the time they’re 0 until
the time they’re 6 kids in the suburb
that number is 1800 that gap in literacy
that gap and having someone sit there
and read with
you to share words with you talk to you
show you some attention and love that
disparity directly correlates in
trajectory into the criminal justice
system and by the time they reach middle
school having lost the opportunities
kids don’t have the opportunity to read
learn from reading in middle school
we’re not smart enough we’re not
developed enough to say listen mister
I’m having a problem understanding I
didn’t learn how to read so I can’t
learn from reading please help me that’s
not what we do when we’re in middle
school what do we do we act up we throw
things with a class clown when we sit
the back and we fall asleep those kids
because they’re failing in school age
have direct path in the criminal justice
system and what does we do it what do we
do as adults we punish them we suspend
them we expel them and by the time
that’s happened two or three or four
times they’re so disengaged in school
but it’s time to get the high school
they have the opportunity to drop out we
wonder why do you not want to come back
to this place what do they do they seek
out other young men and women like them
because those young men and women won’t
love them and give them loyalty and
respect when I was in high school and I
searched that out when I was looking for
those young men that I loved and I would
do anything for and we’d go out on
Friday nights and we’d commit violence
against groups of other men we called
but in the inner city that’s called a
gang not because of the violent inherent
nature of these kids but because of the
resource the zip code and the color of
their skin and then those gangs get
shook down there more arrested there
more prosecutors are more detained and
finally finally when they commit that
bad act we sit there and point our
fingers at them and we punish them for
their failure you screwed up
we absolve ourselves of all the failures
that we made as adults along the way by
simply not having a conversation by
simply not taking the time to volunteer
to do something anything that each of
you can do as the new civil rights
leaders 50 years from now we’re gonna
look back in this period of time much
like we’d sit here and look back 50
years we’re gonna look back into 2.2
million people in jail you were you have
the government killing people 50% of
your population in jail only represent a
14% of the population and you just stood
by 50 years from now they’re gonna be
saying that and you’ll have one choice
in it how do you want to be remembered
because the dr. King said in the future
we will not remember the words of our
enemies will remember the silence of our
friends so in 50 years from now it’s up
to you do you want to be remembered as
the person who stood silent apparently
50 years from now when we look back on
this period of our time in this period
in our history do you want to be
remembered as someone who remain silent
do you want to be remembered as someone
who took the time to take a pregnant
mother and ask her if she needed
something do you want to be someone that
took the time to take a kid and go to an
elementary school in the morning instead
of maybe the yoga cap class and read to
a child for 30 minutes do you want to be
the one that can volunteer after school
kids were having trouble learning from
reading do you want to be the one that
takes the time to volunteer in an
after-school program do you want to be
the one it takes the time just to have a
conversation with a neighbor that might
disagree with you just have a
conversation the neighbor that you might
not look like just to invite someone
into your neighborhood or even better go
into theirs and try to find out and
understand something about their life so
that you can use your sword you can use
your shield you can use your privilege
to give them the opportunity to be in
this room and not locked up in prison do
you want to do that so who is going to
in 50 years from now you’ll be able to
remember that some of them remain silent
and someone who’s a leader in a new
civil rights movement I encourage you I
thank you I plead you to join me join
everyone else that has been committed
and stand there in 50 years or lay there
and be remembered and someone who didn’t
remain silent and someone who did
something thank you let’s get to work
[Applause] [Music]