unknown is always good to see you, my friend. thanks to you for joining us this evening. on april 3, 1968, the mason temple in memphis was packed. memphis was a city in mourning. it was grappling over the deaths of two employees of the memphis department of public work, employees who were crushed to death while taking cover from severe weather. today marks the 55th anniversary of their deaths today.th under the slogan i am a man more than 1,000 black employees were on strike and tensions were rising. so despite a bad thunderstorm that april night the room was filled, and there was one man the crowd wanted to hear from. martin luther king jr. had visitedhe memphis twice before. he was trying to help the black workers get a living wage and decent working condition, and that night he was back, delivering what would be his final speech the night before he was assassinated. dr. king began his famous mountaintop speech by saying something is happening in memphis, something h
and keep going from one death to the next. the issue now is voting rights and police reform. that is theno civil rights challenge of the 21st century. we must meet the challenge. do you think we re in agreement onth that those of us who want to see change, this is the civil rights battle of our era? yes, you can t be for civil rights and not see the importance of protecting our right to decide who leads us, protecting our right to be from police violence. there s nothing more fundamental to our rights as residents and citizens of this country than to be able to do both those things, literally to choose leaders and live and have anybody in a position of power to pay consequences for notr paying attention to the same laws we all have s to pay attention to. now, i will also say because the rev s is so right about this, is not given, it s not ever given, it s demanded. change and laws are demanded. and when we see the laws that do
that to white kids. the fact is you know on the white side of town how to keep crime down without brutalizing and killing people, so use the same police force.ol it s not a different police department on our side of town. what works there will work here if we are respected. and i think that what s so egregious about this is just ten minutes away from where dr. king wasm killed fighting for city workers and police are also city workers, you have five black cops who wouldn t have a job if it wasn t for the martin luther kings of thefo world beat a bla man to death. i don t know what they come up on social media as the reason. they beat a man to death that was unarmed and had not committed a crime. maya, i can t get over that backdrop that the rev so beautifully articulates and what is happening in terms of the
these systems move that should be a model for the nation for the next time a black person is killed by police. it s the next time the expectation that, oh, yes, there will be another innocent black person that s killed by police some time in the near future and we hope that law enforcement moves quickly to punish them. that s the part still so difficult to handle, to swallow, to just abide the notion this violence continues but maybe the circumstances around it can be made better. and we can t do it police department by police department or state by state. there must be federal law. that s why i said reverend jackson and reverend jones taught me you ve got to change the laws. her father we were taught drilled in this because we don t get anything out of this other than to try to do what is right, and what is right is to change
division,ns using race or sexua identity or any other number of things as a wedge between us, is to deny that our history is at allry connected to the experiens we re having. so let s remember what is historic today is not is not that tyre nichols is dead. that is common. what is historic that anyone is paying any price for it. that s what s historic. it was historic when officers went down for murder for george floyd s killing. that was historic. being killed by police for driving while black is not. it s really and i understand where you re coming from and i understand how memphis is u being sort of heldp and crump said this should be a template, thelacrity in which