13th Page #3

I think that one of the most brilliant

tactics of the civil rights movement

was its transformation

of the notion of criminality.

Because for the first time,

being arrested was a noble thing.

Being arrested by white people

was your worst nightmare.

Still is, uh, for many African Americans.

So what'd they do?

They voluntarily defined a movement

around getting arrested.

They turned it on its head.

If you looked at the history

of black people's

various struggles in this country,

the connecting theme

is the attempt to be understood

as full, complicated human beings.

We are something other than

this, uh, visceral image of criminality

and menace and threat

to which people associate with us.

We're willing to be beaten for democracy,

and you misuse democracy in the street.

Let us lay aside irrelevant differences...

and make our nation whole.

The Civil Rights Act

and the Voting Rights Act said,

"Finally, we admit it.

Though slavery ended in December 1865...

we took away these people's rights,

and now we're gonna fix it."

For the first time,

you know, promise of equal justice

becomes at least a possibility.

Their cause must be our cause, too.

Unfortunately,

at the very same time

that the civil rights movement

was gaining steam,

crime rates were beginning to rise

in this country.

Crime was increasing

in the baby boom generation

that had emerged

immediately after World War II.

Now they were adults.

So, just through sheer demographic change,

we had an increase in the amount of crime.

...and became very easy

for politicians then to say,

um, that the civil rights movement itself

was contributing to rising crime rates,

and that if we were to give

the Negroes their freedom, um,

then we would be repaid,

as a nation, with crime.

The prison population

in the United States was largely flat

throughout most of the 20th century.

It didn't go up a lot.

It didn't come down a lot.

But that changed in the 1970s.

And in the 1970s, we began an era

which has been defined by this term,

"mass incarceration."

This is a nation of laws,

and as Abraham Lincoln has said,

"No one is above the law.

No one is below the law."

And we're going to enforce the law

and Americans should remember that,

if we're going to have law and order.

Breaking rocks out here

On the chain gang

Breaking rocks and serving my time

Breaking rocks out here

On the chain gang

Because I've been convicted of crime

Hold it steady right there

While I hit it

Each moment in history

is a fleeting time, precious and unique.

But some stand out

as moments of beginning...

in which courses are set

that shape decades or centuries.

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