(somber music) - Racism in this country is a religion.

The notion that all of this was ordained by God, that God ordained the racism, that God ordained the slavery is a form of heresy, as a form of idolatry and self-worship, which is why it has been so hard to eradicate it from the American ethos and political systems.

- The problem of racism in America is most deeply theological, theological.

It is the most important political issue in this nation's history and will determine the future of what America is.

But at root, it's theological, racism is a sin.

Racism is America's original sin.

- You know, there's this wonderful phrase or formulation by Frederick Douglas.

He said the church steeple was right next to the slave auction block.

And so here we see American Christendom shadowed by the contradiction that has defined this fragile experiment of democracy since its inception.

- Do I really believe that there will be a time when Black lives matter?

Do I really believe that there will be a time when at least my son's children will not have to worry about their lives being threatened simply because they're Black?

(energetic singing) - As native people, we die younger, we graduate less people.

We have more homeless people.

Our suicide rates rival third world countries across the world.

And I thought if white people just knew these statistics and knew this information, then there would be some change affected, but that didn't prove to be the case.

- The United States is the most religiously-diverse nation in human history.

It's the most religiously devout nation in the Western Hemisphere, and we are the world's first attempt at religiously-diverse democracy.

Religion plays a major role in the American imagination.

Think about these terms.

"City on a hill, beloved community, cathedral of humanity, almost chosen people, better angels of our nature."

All of these ways that we imagine our nation come from religious communities.

- Noted sociologist Gordon Allport wrote a book called "The Nature of Prejudice."

And he said in his studies that the most prejudiced people in the United States were people of faith.

And he said, the least prejudiced people in the United States, are people of faith, religious people.

So faith has the ability to divide us, and it has the ability to unite us.

(somber music) - Calvary Lutheran Church was founded in 1923 and was in a neighborhood that was primarily Scandinavian immigrants at that time.

The neighborhood was pretty homogeneous in those days, which means it was primarily European background folks, Swedish, Norwegian, German, perhaps.

And then later the neighborhood became more diverse.

And it wasn't until probably the '70s, that the church began to reach out more intentionally to the neighbors that were not white.

- When laws dictate and pain is overlooked, when tradition speaks louder than need, grant, that I may seek rather to do justice than to talk about it.

Disturb us, oh Lord, to be with as well as for the alienated.

Lord, make me a channel of disturbance.

- Amen.

- Amen.

- We, as a community have been talking about race and equity for a lot of years.

Started with some book studies, maybe a temple talk here or there, where someone from the congregation would get up during church service and share.

I mean, these were prepared things, and share something about race, and maybe race and equity, or equity.

That was not well received by everybody.

We had work that we needed to do.

We need to work to make our space less racist, have people understand the effect of their whiteness on people.

- I think there were folks who still felt, "I don't know why we're spending so much time on this," until George Floyd.

- Calvary Lutheran Church is located one block from where George Floyd was murdered.

(somber music) - The George Floyd I knew, I knew when he was really small, about four years old.

And as a kid, he was a humble kid, because we came from humble beginnings.

He and his mother were thick as thieves, each other's heartbeat.

I think he had his mom's name tattooed on him.

He always wanted to just be this person to make his family proud, you know?

And he was making a comeback when he came to Minneapolis, and he was working two and three jobs.

But when my sister died, he spiraled 'cause it was so hard and difficult for him.

But through all that process, this boy, Perry, he read that Bible every day.

Through his darkest times he kept reading the Bible.

And his favorite book was Proverbs, Proverbs.

- I learned about the murder of George Floyd when a friend sent me the video in the middle of the night.

I didn't know what it was, but I happened to wake up and I watched it.

And this is the video that was taken by Darnella Frazier, she's a student at the same high school my kid went to, and it was of Derek Chauvin putting his knee on George Floyd's neck until he squeezed the life out of him.

- This is just too unreal.

How can someone treat someone this way?

And this Black man saying, "I can't breathe."

You know, he said, "I can't breathe" 28 times.

28 times this man said, "I can't breathe."

The world watched it.

And when you break that down, all he was doing was asking for help.

That's all he was doing, was asking for help.

- There was gonna be a rally at 38th and Chicago and people wanted to know whether Calvary would be a place where they could organize.

- "Pastor Hans, can we launch this protest march out of our parking lot?"

"Yes."

And then a lot of the people in the congregation jumped in and their yeses look like, "Let's set up a table, let's have water, let's have food, let's have nurses.

Let's bring our signs, let's bring our banner."

And so people just showed up and marched.

- What's his name?

- George Floyd!

- Say his name!

- George Floyd!

- Justice for?

- George Floyd!

- Say his name!

- George Floyd!

- I think it hit people at the core of humanity.

It hit that rawness.

It hit people at the level of humanity that they have not even seen in their lifetime.

Brown and Black America, it hit us at a place that we knew that always exists, but we are saying now, "How bold can they get?"

Now they bold, now you got your hands on your hip, now you just don't really care who's watching.

And I think that's where the outrage of Black America and Brown America came in, because it was so bold, and nothing there, nothing there in Mr. Chauvin's eyes.

But white America saw the inhumane part of it, that's what got them, and then the race played in.

But Brown and Black people, we knew it was there from the beginning.

I think that's the difference.

- We are the people!

- We are the people!

- When the tragedy of George Floyd happened, it became just natural for us to go into the neighborhood and be present.

And that was kind of the mission of the church is something we were trying to figure out, and then it just came to us, and it came to us because it sent us out into the community.

Not to fix it, but to be present with those who were struggling, and those who were trying to fix it.

But it really was an opportunity for us to be the church in a way that is sometimes difficult for churches to do.

- And so there was then a recommitment to, "Oh, let's have some real conversation and dig in and talk about this."

We say that we are called to be the body of Christ.

Calvary is in this city for good.

We strive to live out our faith locally and globally by walking with God and worship in daily life.

Welcoming and loving one another and our neighbors, and transforming our world through peace, justice, grace, and mercy.

If those words are not true about who we say we are, then we need to adjust our words.

And that's the influence, I think, of George Floyd's murder on this congregation.

- We talked a lot about in the past about serving our community, about being a partner with our community.

But George Floyd's murder made that not an option.

And it made it also not be intellectual.

It was very real.

- There is a sense in which George Floyd's murder looked like a crucifixion.

George Floyd's murder really had to remind us that where Christ is present is in suffering.

That Christ is present in the sufferings.

Christ was present with George Floyd in his suffering, and it was so graphic and so awful that it was impossible to not see it and to not make that connection.

- If we're to call ourself Christians and followers of Jesus, we can't stand by.

We need to be actively with the marginalized communities.

- When I saw the banner on Calvary Church, I was very surprised.

I was kinda surprised because I didn't see it on any Black churches.

It was powerful because they took it to another level.

They took it to a level to say, "We care.

We care, we're part of this movement.

We're part of this change, and we don't care who sees it.

This is what we represent" (somber music) - Historically, what we have seen in our iconography and our representations of God and angels and then the devil and demons on the one hand, is that we typically have seen these images of God that portray God as this sort of white man sitting on a throne.

And when we image the devil or we image evil and demons, usually those images are of these black bodies.

We think of the devil, sort of with horns and the red devil, but what we really are doing is contrasting this image of pure whiteness with this image of Blackness.

How often have we seen in our churches images of a Black Jesus, of a Black Christ?

We usually have these images of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jesus.

- And if we take this seriously, what we see is that that light-skinned Jesus actually did theological work, generation after generation.

And if we're honest about it, what we see and what we see in the historical record is that that light-skinned Jesus was not just okay with segregation, Jim Crow, and slavery, and white supremacy in general, but that light-skinned Jesus conjured by white congregations demanded the defense of white supremacy in the name of Christianity itself.

- Now here's the thing, the problem with that image, not only is it historically wrong, but it is theologically incorrect.

It is historically wrong because Jesus was a first-century, if you will, Palestinian Jew.

In the evangelical tradition, there is this very intimate relationship with Jesus.

The language that gets used around salvation is, for example, let Jesus come into your heart.

There are hymns that literally repeat that mantra, let Jesus come into your heart, let Jesus come into your heart.

Now, if you think about that as a white man, it rings one way, but if we begin to envision Jesus as a person of color, right?

And we begin to sing that song with that image in our head, will that still fly in most white Christian churches?

"Let the Brown man come into your heart."

And it brings up this whole sexual politics that's combined with race as well.

And it is this danger of Black men to white women that fueled lynching after lynching across this country, throughout our history that comes right to the fore, right?

Are we really going to ask, are white evangelicals really going to ask their young, white girls to sing this song?

"Let the Brown man come into your heart."

And if the answer to that is no, which it would be, it would be very uncomfortable in most white evangelical churches to do that, then we have our answer about what power, the whiteness of Jesus is doing.

- And so when we began to continue to present these images of the divine as white, these images of Christ as white, we are also promoting not only these notions of white supremacy, white superiority, but we are also promoting notions of anti-Blackness because we are suggesting that that which is Black cannot in any way reflect that which is sacred, that which is divine.

And if indeed we want to begin to help people, help our children to have respect for those who are indeed blessed with ebony grace, those who are raised Black, for Black bodies, then we have to help them to see them as sacred bodies.

And one of the ways in which we help them to see them as sacred bodies is that we image that which is sacred.

(somber music) - American history is a totally different story for Black Americans than it is for white Americans.

Whether we can acknowledge the unique experience of Black Americans in the context of our collective history, whether we can acknowledge that Black Americans have lived a different kind of life in this country from white Americans.

One of the challenges in thinking about early America is to try to come to terms with the profound contradictions within the imagination of the founding fathers.

Thomas Jefferson, for instance, was a fervent Democrat and an unrepentant slave owner.

How, as Americans, are we to make sense of the fact that the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence owned slaves?

- You know, there's this moment in Thomas Jefferson's notes at the state of Virginia, and it's an extraordinary chapter on habit formation.

And he's talking about what happens to children, white children, who witness the cruel whipping of slaves, that it has a distorting effect on their character.

And the famous line of Jefferson worrying about what God would, what will be the punishment, what would be God's punishment for the sins of slavery?

- He knew that slavery was profoundly unjust, but he couldn't imagine a way out of that dilemma.

And so he died in some ways you might say, a fearful man, realizing that someday retribution would come to the United States over the issue of slavery, and indeed it did, about 40 years after his death in the form of a civil war whose consequences are still with us.

- One of the most neglected parts of Frederick Douglass's autobiography, abolitionist, African-American statesmen, one of the most prominent African-American speakers, really, even during the Civil War and after, is actually an appendix where he talks about white Christianity.

And so people will read his biography but not read that part where he talks about white Christianity, and it is just such a painfully honest excoriation of the practices and the complicity of white Christianity with white supremacy.

- And Frederick Douglas said, "Because I love the religion of Jesus, the Christianity of Jesus, that is first pure, and peaceable, and just, and for justice.

I must hate the religion of the slave master.

I must despise the religion that seeks to justify racism, seeks to justify hatred."

- In fact, at one point he himself says that besides being a slave itself, "I could think of no greater calamity to befall me that I be sold to a Christian master."

And the reason he says that is because he found that Christianity gave slave owners kind of this sense of moral authority, and it actually removed some of their humanity because they thought it was a God-ordained institution, and it made them more cruel.

- Given the cruelty of slavery, given the barbarity of the institution, something has to happen in the soul of people, particularly those who claim to be Christian.

When they know that they're selling their children, that the child that they just put on the auction block was seared by him.

We have to tell ourselves the truth.

We have to finally grow up.

And that means an honest confrontation with all of the ugliness that is who we are.

(energetic singing) (drums rumbling) - In native communities, here in Minnesota, there's a long history of the complicity of the Christian Church in their oppression.

So a good portion of the initial work around truth telling, as we pursue truth telling, has to be telling the truth around the role of the church, the Christian Church in the oppression of native peoples.

- I stand on the land of where my ancestors are from.

My great, great, great grandmother was here on this land.

This is where she came.

These were her sacred spots or sacred places for the Dakota people.

And what's the beauty of where we are today is that we are in an urban area where we are home to one of the largest urban Indian populations in the United States.

(energetic singing) (drums rumbling) And on this land where we are, it's home to this powwow every year where the community comes and they celebrate the Dakota people, and you see representations of different indigenous people celebrating, as well as non-native people.

And the dances that you witness at these powwows are not just for show, but they tell stories, and they are very sacred, they have deep meanings behind them.

So you get to see these beautiful regalias that take a lot of time to create because often they're created in prayer.

(bells chiming) (drums rumbling) - In America, in the western world, white people can't really know the gospel, because the gospel is a text for oppressed people to navigate their way into liberation.

And so here in the west, in America, white people are not now and have never been oppressed.

And so you have to ask the question, how can they really understand the stories that come from and are born from an identity of oppression and speak of liberation?

This valley, for as long as story holds, has been a place of deep sacred significance for the Dakota people.

One version of the Dakota creation narrative says that the people were created out of the stars in the heaven, and they were placed on earth.

And for the Dakota people, this valley holds the stories of both genesis and genocide.

Because in 1862 when the Dakota people were literally starving to death, they rose up and declared war on the United States of America.

And at the conclusion of this war, Dakota elders, women and children, were forced to march across the entire state of Minnesota, and ultimately spend the winter in an internment camp, a concentration camp, right here, right here behind me.

- I grew up hearing these stories of my great, great, great grandmother, Maggie Frazier.

She was a part of the Santee Dakota people, and was one of the many that were imprisoned here on this land.

- 1,700 people contained in two and a half acres.

We know how that story ends.

Disease will take its toll, and it did with quick efficiency.

Every morning a handful of soldiers would make their way, their only job was to collect the bodies of those that didn't survive the night.

On average, they lost between three and four people every single day.

Over 300 Dakota dead through the span of one horrible winter.

- And then to think that my grandmother was on this land imprisoned because people didn't understand who she was, or who they were.

So I feel this heavy responsibility to tell her story, and to tell my story of who I am, because it breaks my heart to think of the pain that my grandmother went through and her people, that she had to watch the ones she loved be buried, that she had to bury the people she loved.

My grandmother was a healer, and the pain that she went through breaks my heart.

When the missionaries were there, and some of them were actually good people who cared for the native people when they were on these reservations and in these encampments.

And it wasn't that it was difficult for them to understand the word of Christ, the stories of Christ that the missionaries were teaching them.

My grandmother understood Christ because they were already living a Christ-like life.

So those stories, they understood, because they were living that way.

So it wasn't Christ that caused the trauma, that caused all that pain.

What I know through my family, my understanding is that who caused that trauma was the messengers, it was the people.

It wasn't Christ, it wasn't the word of God.

- When Europeans came to America, they came as Europeans, Irish, Italian, Swedish, German, English.

They weren't white till they came to America.

They were different ethnicities from Europe and became white in America where they were promised, "No matter, you will always be better, get better, do better."

- Many white Christians, when they hear the word "white supremacy," have a negative reaction to it, have a defensive reaction to it.

And if they're thinking anything, it's usually conjuring up some image, of a black and white image from the 1920s, maybe faded around the edges of a KKK member in a robe burning a cross.

Now that is white supremacy, but it's also a very convenient form of thinking about white supremacy 'cause, "It's back there, it's not me, I don't know anybody who does that sort of thing."

It's a way of distancing ourselves, I think, from white supremacy.

But I think what's more important today is to think about a much simpler form, really, of white supremacy, maybe a more intimate form of white supremacy.

And what I mean by that is just this basic belief that white lives matter more than others.

Now, we may not wanna articulate that outwardly, but there's all kinds of ways where we demonstrate that we've believed that, the way that we have set up parks, pools, libraries, the better parts of town, all reserved for whites.

- One of the things that we don't often talk about when we talk about this legacy of white supremacy, this legacy of a culture that is whiteness protecting white privileges.

That it also, one of the privileges and one of the legacies, if you will, has been this legacy of how we see the world, our gaze on the world.

As long as we are shaped by this white gaze, this white culture, which protects the privileges of what it means to be raised white in this country.

We cannot live into the highest aspirations of who we can be as a people.

We can't live into the highest aspirations of who we can be as a nation because this nation is so committed to protecting not this vision that it had at one time of liberty and justice for all, but protecting this notion of American exceptionalism, which is equivalent to protecting this culture of whiteness.

- One way to see the power of white supremacy in Christianity is to see how it has structured the material artifacts in white Christianity.

There's a Bible in the possession of Fisk University that has been dubbed the Slave Bible, and it was a Bible printed in England, but for use with slave owners, with their enslaved people.

And that sounds maybe unremarkable at first glance, but then when you start looking through the pages, you'll notice that there are pieces of the Bible missing.

So for example, one of the biggest passages in the Old Testament is the Book of Exodus, right?

That book is most known for the liberation of the Israelites from being slaves in Egypt.

What's in the book of Exodus in this version of the Bible?

Their enslavement is in the book, but their freedom has been cut out.

- One of the central texts that was influential in the African-American Christian tradition was the Exodus story.

And in the Exodus story, the people of Israel find themselves enslaved to a more powerful nation, the nation of Egypt, and God intervened on behalf of the oppressed people, the Israelites, to set them free.

So God clearly is going to support our desire for liberation.

And so one major thing that the Bible did for African American Christians was to give them the theological resources to construct an anthropology, a belief about what a person was that made us essentially equal with our enslavers.

The issue at the bottom around slavery in the Antebellum South was not simply the interpretation of biblical text about slavery, but an argument about what a person was.

'Cause in order to enslave someone or in order to enforce segregation, the first thing you have to do is dehumanize the person.

And if you can make that person a lower rank, then you can justify mistreating them.

Some people think that African Americans are drawn to Christianity only because they told them things they already knew, that they wanted to be free from slavery, and the Bible speaks against slavery, that they suffered and that Jesus suffered.

And it's true that certain aspects of the Christian story fit with the African American experience, but you also see the ways which Christianity shaped the African American imagination.

One example to this is this idea of love and reconciliation.

Why might African American Christians hold out this hope that on the other side of slavery, they could be a part of one community with the people who formerly enslaved them?

That's because the Bible speaks about the possibility of forgiveness, of about transformation.

Now, forgiveness doesn't rule out justice, but this idea that we can be free, justice can be served, on the other side of justice there's forgiveness, reconciliation, and community shows that the Bible doesn't just tell people stuff that they already knew, it also shaped their vision of the future.

It's really hard to think about the civil rights movement and King's idea of nonviolent love being transformative, and not see the ways in which the story of Jesus shaped not just his imagination, but his method.

- When we tell the story of Black Christendom and African-American Christianity, right?

It's a story that's inextricably bound up with Black political life.

It's tied to the ways in which the institutions that emerge, Black churches that emerge as central to Black civil society and the gospel gives language, offers language to engage in politics, to engage in challenging the state.

Dr. King is an inheritor of all of that tradition.

He's an inheritor of those itinerant preachers in the context of the plantation who under a turned-over pot preached the gospel and told those slaves that they were somebody in relation to God.

That their souls mattered as much as anyone else's.

Dr. King was an inheritor of those who went out and founded Black denominations like the African Methodist Episcopal Church or Africanist Episcopal Zion Church, and he draws on the language of the prophetic Black church tradition.

That language that came out of the church, out of Black religion, which decried white Christianity as idolatrous, who drew on the languages of the gospel to imagine that everyone should be treated as a child of God, with dignity and standing.

Grace-centered piety, right?

A sense in which nonviolence was rooted in a love for one's fellows.

An idea that if we together, through love, work to dismantle Jim Crow, that we could actually build a beloved community.

African American Christianity offers languages for Black political life.

The very thing that King draws on.

One of the languages that it offers is the language of Exodus.

We imagine ourselves as the children of Israel.

And that imagining allows us to see ourselves as a people with obligations to each other to challenge the state.

- So I am Kelly Brown-Douglas, the dean of EDS at Union and am here, as you all know, on this pilgrimage, this civil rights racial justice pilgrimage that will take us from here to Selma, to Montgomery.

We oftentimes talk about the legacy of white supremacy, and as we talk about that legacy of that is white supremacy, we talk about that legacy in terms of the systemic, the structural, the political, the economic.

But we don't talk about the legacy of white supremacy that is the spiritual, what's the spiritual legacy of white supremacy?

- We've gotta talk about the corrosion, the corrosive effect, both on the one who is being called inferior, as well as the corrosive effect on the one who's trying to build a world around this false notion of superiority.

- I talk a lot about this as a person who's a queer person, that the church has been complicit in the oppression of queer people in the same way the church has been complicit in enforcing and reinforcing white supremacy, and reinforcing these notions that there are some people who are chosen and not chosen.

That is a part of our theology, this notion, this idea that some of us are worthy and others of us are unworthy.

And so until we acknowledge that and begin to break that down and decolonize our theologies, then we are all spiritually broken.

- I mean, I think for me, what is particularly striking in this country is not just in the church, but in this country, the idea that history is something that you're meant to be proud of, and that's the only history that you teach, rather than that history is something that we learn from by telling the whole truth of our history.

I think that's a very American thing, in fact.

I mean it happens in the other parts of the world, but even, I went to school in England, even there, at least they do talk about the terrible things they did, even if it's only for a week.

(everyone laughing) They talk about them, they do talk about them, right?

And yet, I am struck that not just in our churches, but that is the culture of this country, is that if the history is an uncomfortable history, then we bury it.

(somber music) - On March 7th, we gathered on the playground of George Washington Carver homes and led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams came down Broad Street and over that same bridge and met a wall of policemen.

When that line stopped, John Lewis asked permission to pass.

The policeman said, "There will be no march between Selma and Montgomery.

You have two minutes to disperse and go back to your church or your home."

In less than 30 seconds they attacked.

(crowd yelling) And they were just beating people.

Old, young, Black, white, male, female, it didn't matter, they were just beating people.

And you could outrun those men on foot, you couldn't outrun the ones on horses.

The poor horses were afraid, they were rearing and kicking because the men were just running the horses right into the crowd.

The next thing I remember, I was on the city side of the bridge.

I was in the back of a car, my head was in my sister Linda's lap, and Linda was crying.

When I became fully awake, I realized what was falling on my face were not my sister's tears, it was her blood.

My 14-year-old sister had been beaten on that bridge and had wounds in her head that required 35 stitches.

Yet, on that following Tuesday, I held that same sister's hand as we followed Dr. King and Dr. Abernathy across that bridge.

When I crested that bridge and could see across it, I saw the same scene I had seen that Sunday.

I'm not ashamed to tell you that I didn't want any more freedom.

Whatever the cost of this freedom was, was just too much for this 11-year-old.

Dr. Abernathy said a prayer.

And after prayer, he and Dr. King took us back to Brown Chapel AME church where Dr. King held a mass meeting.

At that mass meeting he told us he had applied for a court order that would give us the legal right to walk from Selma to Montgomery if we so wanted to, but more importantly be protected.

That order was signed on March 17th by a judge in Montgomery named Frank Johnson.

And on March 21st we left Brown Chapel one more time, came down Broad Street and over that same Edmund Pettus Bridge, and those policemen who beat us up on the 7th had to protect the marchers all the way from Selma to Montgomery.

- Here is the bridge they crossed, at risk of their lives.

What is the bridge we're gonna have to cross?

We have to cross the bridge that says, "Finally multiracial democracy.

Finally the soul of our nation.

Finally the integrity of our faith."

Yes, it's about the integrity of our faith, depends upon acknowledging each other as equal in the eyes of God and having equal access, yes, to power, the power that will change and determine America's future.

- And do you know, August 6th of that very same year the Voting Rights Act was signed and it removed those obstacles that prevented us from voting.

And that same act has been under attack ever since.

That voting thing must be awfully valuable, huh?

- What did you walk away with feeling after we left the experience with Joanna Bland and when we walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge?

Let's start, what did you feel walking across that bridge?

- I was really struck by how high up we were, and how far the drop was.

What was highlighted was the isolation of being on the bridge, and this sense of being trapped, you can't disperse.

And the awareness that the people there willingly stepped into that entrapment.

- There was nowhere to go, right?

They had to keep going into the danger.

And I thought, "My gosh, I would've been scared that they would've pushed me."

- That's what I was gonna, yeah.

- As we were walking, one of the things I was noticing was all the cars driving both ways, and that struck me a little bit about the desensitization we have to all the things happening, or the question I had was, "How do you live in such a sense of history?"

I don't know what the people driving in those cars were thinking as they were driving over.

- [Rev.

Dr. Brown-Douglas] When people drive over that bridge, do parents, particularly white parents, tell their children what happened on that bridge?

(somber music) - Come, Holy Spirit that we might listen.

Listen to footsteps of times long past.

Listen to the voices of those who raised their spirits and their voices for justice.

Listen to the cries of those who were wounded and killed.

Come, Holy Spirit, help us to listen to the voices and leaders and prophets of our past that we may hear your call this day.

- God of our weary ears, God of our silent tears.

Thou who has brought us thus far along the way, thou who has by thy might let us into thy light.

Keep us, keep us, keep us forever in thy path, we pray.

Amen.

- It's faith that helps us find the courage and the hope to take the risks necessary always for justice.

- Dr. King understood the Pharaoh of history was the Pharaoh of today.

That the fierce urgency of now is the call to stand up against Pharaoh, wherever it shows up, which for us today is systemic racism, mass incarceration, and the various forms of voter suppression.

But Dr. King, if he were here, would also remind us one of the ways that Pharaoh thrives is by pitting the slaves against each other.

And so it is that when different marginalized or oppressed groups fight amongst themselves, liberation is not possible.

Dr. King's understanding of the way that Pharaoh divided and conquered is a call to action of us today.

All marginalized communities, all minorities, to stand up, step up and act together in a collective voice of saying, "Hineni, here we are together."

- We are the wealthiest nation in the world of the 25 wealthiest nations, but we are the only one of the nations, only one of the 25 wealthiest that doesn't offer some form of universal healthcare.

The child poverty in this country doesn't have to exist.

The gross number of people without healthcare doesn't have to exist.

The brokenness in our education system doesn't have to exist.

We have to have the kind of moral revival that does not ignore the great disparities in our country, and refuses to even look at them.

We're gonna come out of the shadows, come out of being unseen, unheard, and we are going to build power and exercise that power in the political realm.

♪ We won't be silent anymore ♪ Come on, raise your voices and sing ♪ ♪ Yes, somebody's hurting our families ♪ ♪ And it's gone on far too long ♪ ♪ Yes, it's gone on far too long ♪ ♪ I tell you it's gone on far too long ♪ ♪ Yes, somebody's hurting our families ♪ ♪ And it's gone on far too long ♪ ♪ And won't be silent anymore ♪ Did you hear?

♪ Somebody's trying to steal our vote call ♪ ♪ And it's gone on - Now is the time for a third reconstruction.

We are the rejected who've been rejected by the politics of trickle down economics, and rejected by neoliberalism.

150 years ago, Black and poor whites built a first reconstruction.

Over 50 years ago, Black, and white people, and Latinos joined people of faith and followed the prophetic servant leader Martin Luther King, and took on racism, poverty, and militarism, and a second reconstruction.

But now is our time for a third reconstruction.

We are not an insurrection, but we are a resurrection.

(audience cheering) I love this country, but you have to be honest about how many times America has engaged in politics of rejection.

Whether it's rejecting women's right to vote, or rejecting slaves or rejecting people 'cause of the color of their skin, rejecting people who are indigenous, and we still suffer from policies of rejection today.

We must have this moral fusion, intersectional, interracial, intergenerational, cross-geographical movement that comes together that has the power to put folk from Carolina in the same room with folk from California, folk from Massachusetts in the same room with people from Mississippi, people from Appalachia in the same room with people from the Deep South.

That's the movement that is so necessary in this moment.

And I don't see any way that America can ultimately be moved forward if we don't have a moral fusion movement that is doing the work of transforming this country.

- I'm here from Memphis, Tennessee because the injustices in our society from systemic racism and systemic poverty, ecological devastation, the denial of healthcare is having real implications for over 140 million people who are dying and suffering under the status quo.

- As a strong, empowered Latina Christian woman, I am obligated to take action because I was raised with the ideology that I am my brother's keeper.

I cannot adhere to that and still see 140 million poor in our society.

That does not comprehend in any humane, civilized society.

- I grew up Christian in a Christian household and part of the teachings of Jesus is doing things for those who can't do for themselves.

And the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount, those are really important, talking about having the poor always with us and believing that we have to be the people to help the poor out.

- People aren't where they are because they chose to be there.

Sometimes they're there because of circumstances beyond their control.

So I wanna raise that awareness and that's why I am here trying to do that.

- 54 years ago when my father launched the Poor People's Campaign, he called for a revolution of values, and a radical redistribution of wealth.

I make that same call to our nation today.

(audience cheering) And do not be fooled into thinking that the issue of poverty is someone else's problem.

As my father said, "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.

What affects one directly affects all indirectly."

Poverty is a system that will continue to consume more and more people, beget more violence, disenfranchise millions, and leave even more underserved until our nation and our people commit to creating the beloved community to dismantle it.

(audience cheering) Fuss if you got to, fight if you got to, but get over it together, children, and don't get weary.

But don't forget to pray together, children 'cause you might just get weary.

But one day if we continue to walk together, children, we will be able to eliminate poverty and a new day will dawn.

But until then we won't remain silent anymore.

(audience cheering) (everyone singing) - That's our challenge in America, to get America to not only say the right things, but do the right things.

And I challenge America not from a position of hate, but from the position that I take her seriously when she says she wants to be a nation that focuses on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

But I also take her seriously in that same document called the Declaration of Independence, when she says, "Anytime a government engages in a long train of abuses that are the contrary to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the people have a duty and a right to change, to alter, to turn that government from the wrong way to the right way.

That's true patriotism.

♪ I hear the change calling ♪ I hear the change calling (gentle piano music) ♪ Lift every voice and sing ♪ Til earth and heaven ring ♪ Ring with the harmony of liberty ♪ ♪ Let our rejoice (indistinct) ♪ Let it resound loud as rolling steam ♪ ♪ Facing the rising sun of this new day ♪ ♪ Be gone, let us march on to victory ♪ ♪ As one (bright jingle) (upbeat jingle) (upbeat jingle)