Cynthia McKinney
Celebrating the Vision, Enduring the Struggle
Newtown Florist Club
Gainesville, GA
November 22, 2003
First of all, let me thank the Newtown Florist Club for
inviting me to be here this evening. And I'd like to
recognize the men here who are smart enough to support
the strong women who are here.
During this past year, I have had an opportunity to
travel around the country and see that there really are
more people who think like us who are rejecting the
vision for our country that the Bush Administration has
laid out. Even some Republicans.
But on this day, nothing could be more sacred than for us
to reflect on the vision that we have for our community,
our country, our world, and how we will endure the fight
to get there. Forty years ago today, snipers' bullets
stole our President and changed our world. A President
who sent federal troops into the South to protect our
right to peaceful assembly and our right to vote. A
President who stood up to the racists and the
segregationists while we were standing up to the church
bombings, the dogs, the water hoses, and four dead little
girls.
Before he was snatched away from us, it is reported that
President Kennedy had managed to tell his advisors that
he was going to get us out of Vietnam and splinter the
CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.
And then the bullets got Martin and Bobby. I have been
told that Bobby Kennedy was considering naming Martin
Luther King, Jr. as his running mate. If that is true,
just imagine the America we could have had? But
instead, without John, and Martin, and Bobby we are mired
in the America that we have now.
[joos-herbert
poster]
Malcolm X once said that when you have two boxers in the
ring, the first boxer will take a jab at the other
one. He will hit him and hit him hard. And if the
boxer who's hit fails to respond, then the first boxer
will hit harder and harder and harder and harder.
And more and more and more and more. Because the first
boxer will have sized up his opponent to be a chump.
The American people largely remained silent after the
Kennedy, King, Kennedy tragedies. You could say we,
the American people, were sized up. Now, we almost had a
tragedy in the Philadelphia mayor's race, but black
people responded with vigor to the targeting of their
mayor.
However, down here in Georgia, it's been a different
story. In two Fulton County elections, we failed to
rise to the occasion. And for the next four years,
we'll surely get chumped. The measure of us as a people
is being determined by our reaction to events that affect
us. No national agenda, grumbling inside our
community, split on the Presidential candidates, and not
a single black Member of Congress has endorsed Al
Sharpton, yet one has endorsed Wesley Clark, two have
endorsed Howard Dean, and one has endorsed Joe
Lieberman. And I'm still trying to find out what
any of those candidates has done for black America?
Where were they when Amadou Diallo was killed and Abner
Louima was plungered? And what was the black agenda put
forward to each candidate to earn these endorsements?
How long will Ward Connerly, Condoleeza Rice, Colin
Powell, and Clarence Thomas be allowed to speak for us?
But the sad fact is that they are not the only ones; and
their prominence speaks volumes about politics now in the
black community. On every school board, city
council, state legislature, and even in Congress, we are
forced to suffer through "leadership" that
doesn't represent us. We are plagued by malevolent public
policy being made in black face and these people strut on
the political stage and the world thinks that they
represent you, and me, and our children.
How can we give them the impunity to act in our name? You
might say, "oh no, they don't act in my
name." And to those who say that, let me say
this. Public silence is consent.
On December 3rd, 1964, Mario Savio, standing in front of
the Berkeley arch made famous by his Free Speech Movement
said: "There is a time when the operation of
the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at
heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively
take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the
gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the
apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got
to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who
own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be
prevented from working at all!"
Now, I'm about 40 years late at Berkeley arch, but I read
those words and know that they're as true today as they
were 40 years ago. That there comes a time when we have
to say no to the machine. Because anything less is
consent.
Well, for ten years in Congress, I put my entire body
against the gears and the wheels and the levers--against
the entire apparatus of the machine. And I tried to
stop it. I tried to warn the American people of the
dangers that I saw emanating from this
Administration. And during this past year, I've had
plenty of time for introspection, even vindication. I
know I was right to ask for accountability from the Bush
Administration on the Florida election, 9-11, the 2.3
trillion dollars missing from the Pentagon, the apparent
conflicts of interest with corporate sweetheart deals at
the
taxpayers' expense.
I authored legislation to stop the use of depleted
uranium weapons; I passed legislation, severely amputated
by the Democrats, that put an arms trade code of conduct
into the discourse at the US State Department. I
authored legislation that would allow localities to
choose for federal elections a
voting system other than the winner take all version that
we have now. I authored the National Forest
Protection and Restoration Act to protect our forests,
and I called America's hand on its manufactured wars in
Africa.
I was vindicated when the President signed my legislation
into law that extended Agent Orange benefits another 25
years for millions of Vietnam War vets. And when the
Administration tried to deny 9-11 families the
opportunity to sue whoever was responsible for the
tragedy of 9-11, I offered as my last legislation a bill
to allow them to participate in any government
compensation fund
as well as to sue the guilty culprits and their
accomplices, whoever they might be.
I worked with fearless journalists in Tennessee to save
lives of families suffering the health effects from
living near Oak Ridge--I did that when their own
Tennessee Senators ignored them, and I tried to stop
tritium production at Savannah River Site and to shift
the jobs to cleanup.
I met with the CEO of Lockheed, before the 6 people were
murdered by a man filled with hate at one of their
plants, to warn him that if Lockheed didn't heed the
pleas of its black workers and deal with its race
problem, something terrible would happen.
I gave hope to hundreds of thousands of blacks in
Georgia's rural and extremely poor black belt and showed
them that they could still believe in America, after all
they'd had done to them. I didn't compromise their
dignity and I didn't back away from protecting their
fundamental rights when they were attacked.
I challenged the Administration on the Crusader Missile,
wrote about the Carlyle Group in my official
Congressional dissent to the defense bill, and stood up
to the DynCorp Company that had huge federal contracts,
but whose employees were buying women in Central Europe
and turning them into sex slaves. And by the way,
how did DynCorp get the contract to administer the
smallpox and anthrax vaccines for the Pentagon?
Could those vaccines be the cause of the mystery
pneumonia and mystery blood clots our young men and women
are experiencing now?
And to better understand my son and the Hip Hop
generation, I reached out to Tupac's mother and began to
put on Hip Hop Summits where I brought Hip Hop back to
its political roots. I reached out to young people
because I realized that what was happening to them was
eerily similar to what happened to the black activists of
my generation who were discredited or otherwise
neutralized, to use the FBI's lingo. So I dedicated
much of my time to COINTELPRO and the murder of Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. To try to understand how we
black people could get the Voting Rights Act, and over
4,000 black elected officials, and yet Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. Drive in almost any city in America is
fundamentally different in its look and feel from Main
Street.
But, just think about it: Katherine Harris,
Florida's Secretary of State who participated in the
illegal disfranchisement of innocent black and Latino
voters was rewarded with a Congressional seat by the
Republicans and I was taken out of one by the
Republicans.
How I respond, how we respond will largely determine at
what level we want to play in the political process and
how dearly we want that vision for our community and our
world. You and I care about health care, education, our
children, employment, homelessness, transportation,
veterans, the glass ceiling, affirmative action, urban
sprawl, air quality, race relations, drug abuse, poverty,
incarceration, social justice, death penalty, political
prisoners, US standing in the world? War? Peace?
But a new breed of leader has invaded Washington DC, and
they don't give a darn about the things we care about. In
addition, around the President, are a group of men who
believe in the following and wrote it in a major policy
document, Rebuilding America's Defenses. They say:
"[A]dvanced forms of biological warfare that can
'target' specific genotypes may transform biological
warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful
tool."
Now, as an African American, I know that to mean MK-Ultra
and Paul Robeson; hundreds of black men for 40 years in
the Tuskegee Study; the black bomb experiments of
apartheid South Africa when they were trying to find a
biological agent to put in the water that would kill only
black people.
 Now is not the time for us to have
weak responses to the challenges that confront us.
Now is the time for us to regroup, reunite, and come back
stronger than ever. Our very lives could depend on
it.
Thank you.
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