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POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 1

JACKIE JENKINS-SCOTT: Good afternoon everyone. I’m Jackie Jenkins-Scott, President of Wheelock College and a Board member of the John F Kennedy Library Foundation. On behalf of John Shattuck, CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation, and Tom Putnam, Director of the John F Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, we thank you for joining us this afternoon for what will be a wonderful conversation.

Let me begin by acknowledging the underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums, including lead sponsor Bank of America, along with Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, the Corcoran Jennison Companies, The Boston Foundation, and our media sponsors, The Boston Globe, WBUR and NECN.

President Kennedy, in his inaugural address, reminded us that, “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” Almost a half a century later, these are challenging times that our new President has inherited. In the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, President Obama has promised to improve our schools, fight poverty and promote economic opportunity for all. Acknowledging the changes we face are real, President Obama in his Inauguration address assured us that they will be met. But not without hard work and sacrifice. “Starting today,” he said, “we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”

Joining us here this afternoon to discuss this remaking of America are two of our country’s most important voices for social justice and equality. Marian Wright Edelman is the President of the Children’s Defense Fund, an advocacy group she founded in 1973 for poor, minority and handicapped children. When she graduated from Spelman College, she planned to enter the Foreign Service. However, as she recalled in a recent interview, “I got mad one day when I went down to the NAACP and saw that all these people who POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 2 did not have lawyers. The white lawyers wouldn’t take cases, so I applied to law school -- hated it, but I stayed because it was the right tool then.” And we are so glad you stayed. After graduating from Yale Law School in 1963, Ms. Edelman worked in New York for the NAACP Legal and Defense Fund, first in New York and then in Mississippi, where she became the first African-American woman to practice law. During a tour by Robert Kennedy of Mississippi’s poverty-ridden Delta slums, she met Peter Edelman, an assistant to Kennedy, whom she later married. Marian Wright Edelman has received many honorary degrees and awards including the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Prize, the Heinz Award and the MacArthur Foundation Prize. In 2000, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award for her writings. Her newest book, The Sea Is So Wide and My Boat Is So Small, is on sale in our museum store, and she will be signing books at the conclusion of the forum.

Dolores Huerta is the President of the Dolores Huerta Foundation, an advocacy group for the working poor, women and children. In 1962, Ms. Huerta and César Chávez founded the National Farm Workers Association. Her organizing skills were essential to the growth of that organization, though she faced challenges being a woman. In one letter to César Chávez, she wrote, “Being a now…ahem…experienced lobbyist, I am able to speak on a man-to-man basis with other lobbyists.” She was instrumental in securing Aid for Dependent Families and disability insurance for farmworkers in California. She was also one of the most visible spokespersons in Robert Kennedy’s 1968 Presidential Campaign, and he acknowledged her help in winning the Democratic Primary in California just moments before he was assassinated. She has received numerous awards, among them the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award from President Clinton, the Ladies Home Journal 100 Most Important Women of the 20th Century, and nine honorary degrees from American universities. POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 3

Our moderator this afternoon is Bob Herbert, an award-winning New York Times columnist, whose writings examine our national politics and spotlight issues facing the disadvantaged and disenfranchised. Mr. Herbert has been a frequent participant in the Kennedy Library Forums, discussing his book, Promises Betrayed: Waking Up from the American Dream; providing a soldier’s view of war during the Presidential Library Conference, The Presidency and Vietnam; interviewing then-Senator Obama two days before he announced his run for the Presidency; and, just a couple of weeks ago, Gwen Ifill for her first public appearance for her book, The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama. Please welcome to the stage, or please welcome, I guess, this afternoon, Marian Wright Edelman, Dolores Huerta and Bob Herbert. [applause]

BOB HERBERT: Thank you. Good afternoon on this lovely afternoon. Thank you for coming out, everyone. I am privileged to be up here with two stalwarts of the social justice movement. And we’ll get started. We may tell some stories this afternoon. What I would like to do is to get a sense of some of your early experiences. And as we listen to them, we’ll move on to see how issues of poverty and social justice have changed over the years. So starting at the end, Ms. Edelman, maybe you can start by telling us (we heard a little bit) how you began to get involved in these kinds of issues.

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: Well, it never occurred to me not to be involved. I grew up as the daughter, grand daughter, of Baptist ministers. My father was a minister who tried to live his faith. My mother was the head of the missionary society, the Mother’s Club, the church organist, the chief church fundraiser. And my parents and the wonderful community elders in my little segregated town of Bennettsville, South Carolina were people who really did try to live faith. And whenever they saw a need, they tried to respond. We could not go and sit down and have a drink in the drugstore lunch counter, and so my parents began a canteen behind our church and a skating rink so that black children would have a place to go and to be safe. We didn’t have homes for the POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 4 aged, for black adults and so my parents responded to [inaudible] that we now know, in retrospect, had Alzheimer’s Disease. But he has not a place to go, was wandering the streets. And so they started a home for the aged across the street from our church, and all of us children had to cook and clean. But we didn’t like it at the time, but that’s how we learned. But everybody was our neighbor.

So I felt so blessed to have come up at a time when it was segregated and where the white folk in our town told us that we weren’t worth much. But our parents said it wasn’t so. Our churches said it wasn’t so. Our elders said it wasn’t so. So we knew it wasn’t so. And we also knew that education was important and that those of us who had the privilege of getting education had to give back. So I just do what my parents did. I just do it on a different scale.

And then I went off to Spelman College, and we had compulsory chapel which I hated. But I remember chapel now more than I remember any of my classes because we had Dr. King and Dr. Mays and Mordecai Johnson . All the great visionaries of our time came through. And they, again, preached the same thing that, you know, “You’re here to serve. And those who have much, owe much.”

And I’ve just been blessed with an extraordinary experience to have lived in a time with a convergence of great people and great historical events and to be able to engage with adults and changing the things that we didn’t like about the world, and then those great folk in Mississippi, Ms. Hama(?) and these wonderful, ordinary people of grace with extraordinary courage. And so I have been mentored all of my life and been privileged to see a revolution of the end of legal apartheid in this country because of what ordinary people of courage did, you know, little Ruby Bridges, six years-old, walking through mobs in New Orleans, the poor parents who wanted a better life for their children. And POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 5 now to begin to see the downward mobility and to ignore that sacrifice … But we’ve been given another chance.

And to now live in another period where we can hopefully finish the job that Dr. King talked about. And when he died, calling for economic justice and for putting the social and economic underpinnings beneath politics and civil rights, and calling for a cross- racial movement to end poverty in this country, that is our unfinished agenda. And how wonderful to be at this miraculous time with a new President and a chance for us, in the middle of this best and worst of times, to finish that job of our elders. So wonderful. [applause]

BOB HERBERT: The same question to you, Ms. Huerta. How did you get involved in this? And what were some of your early experiences?

DOLORES HUERTA: Well, I was born in the state of New Mexico. And my mother was also very religious in terms of being faith-based. In New Mexico, many of the people really admired St. Francis Xavier, who was actually a devotee of St. Francis of Assisi. So growing up, we also had the same kind of a mandate: if someone needs help, you help that person. You don’t expect any kind of remuneration or even thanks. I mean, you do these to help people with their need.

Then we moved from New Mexico to California. My parents divorced, and I was really blessed because I grew up in a town called Stockton, California, which is about 60-some miles from San Francisco. But in our community -- It’s an agricultural community, and it was a very ethnically diverse community. This is after the Depression. And so in our community we had, you know, the people had come in from the Dust Bowl, the Okies and the Arkies. We had Greek immigrants, Italian immigrants, Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, African-Americans. And so it was so great that we grew up with all of these POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 6 different ethnic groups as kids, which I think really prepared me for the future. I was a girl scout from the time I was eight till the time I was 18 years-old, ten years of my young life. But the other thing, of course, growing up as a Latina, the one thing that we always faced was racial discrimination. You know, we’d go to a basketball game, and we’d be coming home and the police would stop us. And they would search us and harass us all the time. So you kind of grew up with this feeling that something isn’t right. And then going to school, going to high school where our counselors told us, all of the Latinos, we need to get into business classes. My African-American friends were told that -- one of my friends was told (she wanted to be a nurse) -- “Well, you can’t be a nurse. You’ll never get a job. You have to take up domestic work. Learn how to do housecleaning.” Luckily, she didn’t listen to that advice, and she did become a nurse. So, again, you had all of this discrimination in the high schools and the colleges. So by the time I got to college, most of my friends that I had grown up with had already dropped out of school, which is very sad. And then I got involved in organizing …

BOB HERBERT: Let me just interrupt though. Why was it that you went to college? How did that occur when that was unusual?

DOLORES HUERTA: Well, I think what was different is because having been born in New Mexico, and, you know, for many generations my family that had been there, we didn’t … Both of my parents graduated from high school. And so the fact that you might want to drop out wasn’t even in the cards. You know? You knew you had to finish high school and eventually try to get into college. But even then, it was a fight. Because you knew that as you were going to school that there were people that didn’t want you there. You know? And then when I started -- got into organizing different types of groups -- I actually started some teenage clubs which the police shut down, because they didn’t want to see these Anglo young women hanging around with Filipinos and Mexicans and blacks, right? POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 7

But then I got into serious organizing when I met this great gentleman named Fred Ross, Sr., who had been hired by the Industrial Areas Foundation, Saul Alinsky’s group in Chicago, to go into the Latino community. This was after what they called The Zoot Suit Riots that happened out there where you had American sailors going into the Latino community and beating up the Mexican kids and tearing off their zoot suits, et cetera. So they started doing some serious organizing in California. And I got involved with Mr. Fred Ross. And we started doing organizing in the communities to change things.

So that’s where I met César Chávez. And then César and I, after having worked in that organization, then decided that we needed to do something for farmworkers. And I remember the first time that I went into a farmworker home and we were doing voter registration, which was part of what we need in the CSO, and coming to a home where there was no linoleum or wood on the floor. It was a dirt floor. And the furniture was orange crates and cardboard. This is where people had their little bit of clothes that they had. And the children were barefooted. And these were farmworkers. And I thought, “Why is this?” Because I knew that these families would go out and they were working every single day. And yet, they didn’t have enough money for their own children. And that made me very angry. And so we worked with farmworkers in the CSO.

And then, at some point in time, César said, “We’ve got to start a union.” And we did start the union. But interestingly enough, he said, “We will never see a national union in our lifetime.” And I said, “Why César?” He said, “Because the growers are too rich. They’re too powerful. And they're too racist.”

So doing that method of organizing that Mr. Fred Ross taught us which is through house meetings, we were able to organize the farmworkers and pass very major legislation. People may not believe this but farmworkers did not even have toilets in the field. And POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 8 we can imagine in California, all of the food that comes out of California for the United States and through the world, farmworkers didn’t have toilets. And they didn’t have drinking water. They didn’t have the basic necessities. They didn’t have rest periods even though they worked very hard picking tons of fruits and vegetables in one day. So we were able to change those laws with our first contracts that we were able to get through going on strike and boycotts. We got toilets. We got drinking water. We got unemployment insurance and eventually the right for farmworkers to organize.

BOB HERBERT: I want to continue along those lines to get a sense of what poverty was like. And I’m going to come back to you, Ms. Edelman, for the same thing. So they lived, in some cases, in homes with dirt floors and didn’t have furniture. What kind of education did the kids receive? What kinds of healthcare did they receive? What happened if you were an adult and you were injured or you became ill? What went on?

DOLORES HUERTA: Well, there was no healthcare whatsoever because farmworkers had to migrate from one county to the other. They couldn’t even get the simplest commodities in those days. That was one of the first laws that we were able to change. And any kind of care that they would get would be, say, the emergency room care. And, unfortunately, that situation still exists today. Because in most of our United States of America, except for a couple of states, farmworkers in most of our United States don’t even have workers compensation. If they get injured on the job, nobody pays their medical bill, nobody pays their disability during the time that they’re injured and they can’t go back to work.

Farmworkers today don’t have unemployment insurance in most of our states. And they definitely do not have the right to organize. And the interesting things is -- and this is important because we think of our new President Obama and we think about our Congress -- that all of this stems from the fact that back in the ‘30s when they passed the POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 9

National Labor Relations Act, they left farmworkers out of the Act. And once, one of the Presidents of the Farm Federation, when he was asked at a press conference, “Why did they leave out the farmworkers?,” he said, “Because they were Mexicans and coloreds.” So right from the beginning there was a racist reason why the farmworkers were left out. And so to this day, farmworkers are still, you know, 70 years behind the times in terms of the wages that they earn. And when you think that they do the most precious work of all, because they put the food on our table, you know, the most important work of all. In fact, when I speak, I say to students, “If you had to go on a deserted island, like on Survivor, who would you take with you? A farmworker or an attorney?” People get it. But the farmworkers, unless you have a union contract in California with the Farmworkers Union, you’re really relegated to poverty.

BOB HERBERT: Ms. Edelman, when you were a child and you had the comfort of your family and the church and that sort of thing, the poor people that you saw, that you came into contact with, what were their lives like? What was poverty like at that time?

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: It was pervasive and it was horrible. And a lot of the experiences of my childhood guide me now. I lived in the parsonage, but three doors down were very poor people. And across the street were very poor people. And little Johnny Herrington, whose story I tell a lot, was about ten when he stepped on a nail. And his grandmother, Ms. Ruth, who was a member of our church (there was no healthcare; there was no health insurance) didn’t know to take him and get a tetanus shot. And so he died.

Little Henry Munnerlyn(?), who was my classmate and lived around the corner, and again, poor, grandmother -- and we children didn’t have a swimming pool; there was no place for us to go. And there was a creek that was very close to our house. And that’s where people fished, and that’s where people swam. And I learned in my adulthood that POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 10 that is the hospital sewage outlet where people fished and swam. But little Henry Munnerlyn at 13 dived off the bridge, broke his neck and he died.

But the thing that seared me most was going out in the middle of the night on a highway after a bad accident had occurred. And it turned out it was a group of migrant workers had run into a truck with a white truck driver. And I remember the ambulances coming, and we all kind of ran out ... I don't know, I was probably about ten years-old then. And I watched as the ambulances came and found that the white truck driver was not injured and saw that the people who were injured were these farmworkers of color. And they turned around and left them there. I never got over that. I never got over that.

And the last thing is that I guess that there are many, many people who could not meet their just most basic needs of life. And so fostercare -- I had 12 foster sisters and brothers after I left. And I still feel very guilty about my selfishness. Because I would wake up some mornings and there was another child in my room. And I would say, “Who is this?” and all the things. But, again, the parents, we had -- there was not very much separation between the adults and the children. I went everywhere to visit the sick. I went everywhere to do things in the community. And at Christmas, Christmas was about delivering coal and food for the poor. And so despite all that misery, there was this sense of community. And that sense of community and the buffer for children and the willingness to reach out, not only hand the dollar but more importantly to sort of provide ongoing succor to people who needed it, I think has waned in this new era.

And so while the Children’s Defense Fund has a headquarters in my hometown, part of what we’re trying to do is to re-weave the fabric of community, to re-weave the fabric of caring and to begin to set up alternatives for children, which the church used to provide and the teachers used to provide -- when I was a brownie scout and a girl scout, they used to provide. And my public school teacher was my brownie scout master -- mistress. POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 11

But a lot of those mediating, socializing implements have waned. And in my home county, the biggest business there now is a Federal and State prison. And there are more things to do in the prison than outside the prison. And we’re trying to say, “How does this community come back and re-own this and reclaim its children and begin to put them back on a path towards successful adulthood?” But we’ve lost something.

BOB HERBERT: Well, you’ve brought us up to the present day. You know, we’ve had poverty programs and we’ve had improvements over the decades. And I notice in the political campaigns and also in the media, you don’t hear much about poverty anymore. The candidates don’t talk about poor people; they talk about the middle class. Even with President Obama, we have, I guess, a commission being headed up by the Vice President. It’s a commission on the problems the middle class are facing nowadays. I suppose it’s possible that poverty has left us and we don’t need to be concerned about it anymore. But maybe that’s not the case. We’ll continue with Ms. Edelman on this one, and you let us know — what’s the face of poverty in the United States right now in 2009? How extensive is it? How does it manifest itself? Or is it over?

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: No, it’s not over. It is not over. When Dr. King died calling for a poor people’s campaign, there were 11 million poor children. Today, there are 13.3 million poor children before we count the newly poor. Because of economic downturn, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that probably another one to two million children are poor and living in extreme poverty. Of that 13.3 million, 5.8 million are living in extreme poverty. And that is again growing.

The difference is, well, we’re three times richer. Our GDP is three times bigger than when Dr. King died calling for poor people’s campaign. And I think it’s no great surprise POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 12 to us that the gap between rich and poor is at its highest ever recorded level both in our country and in our globe. And it’s one of the great things that we have got to address.

And while we are all worried about our nuclear precarity and climate change crisis and we’ve got to fix the economy, the biggest thing we face now is how do we deal with our human capital deficit and the fact that our children are losing ground, and we’re not preparing them for the future. And what is different about poverty than it was in Dr. King’s day when we first started doing something about it (and we’ve had some significant decreases in poverty; we’ve made significant progress) is that the face of poor is largely working people. And we have not been able to provide the kind of jobs with the kinds of wages that would allow them to escape poverty. So that of those 13.3 million poor children, an overwhelming majority of them are living in families where somebody is working and playing by the rules.

We’ve got 9 million uninsured children and 90 percent of their parents are working every day, playing by the rules. Employers don’t cover themselves with health insurance. And so here we are now in this period of absolute economic crisis where we’re teetering on the brink of total collapse in our economic system, driven there by rampant greed, but a time when our safety net is at its weakest, and while the President of the United States has been talking about the middle class. He talks about the middle class, but if you look at that economic stimulus package, the people who get the most in it are the poor. And I really do hope that you all will help because the House version … You’ve got to help. You’ve got to help. There’re a lot of children that depend on you, a lot of poor people depending on you. But the House version really would lift millions of children out of poverty with the Child Tax Credit being extended down to the first dollar and the benefit being increased. It would lift one million, a hundred thousand children out of poverty and increase the benefit for others. The expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit would, again, lift many more people out of poverty, make work pay. POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 13

And so the tax credits, while you will watch his strategy, he talks middle class. But in almost all the range of proposals on tax credits, he tries to make them refundable, and you will find that the poor are benefiting. And there are huge new efforts to invest in child nutrition and family nutrition. Childcare has got a couple billion in there. Head Start has got $2.1 billion, but they took a billion away in that Senate package. Tell Susan Collins to put it back in there. You tell them to defer to the House version of that.

And they weakened the Child Tax Credit in the Senate side with zero in the House side. They’ve now put it at $8,100 dollars, which loses billions of dollars for low-income working families. And they have put in $115 billion dollars in tax cuts that they do not need to have in the Senate package. While they’re cutting Head Start, they’re cutting back on state and local relief. They’re cutting back on infrastructure in the schools. And so I hope between now and Friday, now and tomorrow, you all start getting your calls going, to say, “Really support those provisions in the House bill that really make work pay, that really invest in children to try to break the cycle of poverty.” And tell them we don’t need that other $115 billion dollars in tax cuts for people, because it’s clear from the experts it’s not going to stimulate the economy, and the most people who will benefit are people who don’t need it.

So we’ve got some movement forward. And I think the strategy of using the tax system, while we are also investing in preventive programs, is a very good one. So I don’t care if he never uses the word ‘poverty’ as long as he does something about it. [applause] And frankly, we don’t need any more commissions [simultaneous conversation] …

BOB HERBERT: And this is a good point, Ms. Huerta, and I’d like you to follow up on it. The President, during the campaign, and the other candidates as well, did avoid talking about the poor. You never heard the word ‘poverty.’ It’s a no-no in the national POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 14 discourse. You don’t see it on the Sunday morning programs. But there was a lot for low- income people in the House version of the stimulus package. And, in fact, there’s still significant stuff in the Senate version, but they did weaken it. Why do we have to follow these two tracks? Why do you have to start leafing through the legislation to find out what’s in it and what’s not in it for the poor? Why can’t we have an open conversation about poverty like we’re having today? Why isn’t there more of that in this country?

DOLORES HUERTA: Well, I think that people look down on the poor, like I mentioned how people look down on farmworkers. Right? It’s, I guess, sort of a new mentality that we have. And when we think about some other policies that really affect the working people -- and there’re working poor, you know? It’s not all poor people are unemployed or on welfare. But the working poor, people who are working out there but they’re not earning enough money … And, actually, our minimum wage … You know, we brag about the fact that we have a minimum wage now in California, we’re, like, at $8 dollars an hour or something and a little higher in Washington and Oregon. But the minimum wage, had it kept up with the cost of living, should be over $25 dollars an hour. I mean, our minimum wage is a third of what the minimum wage should be today. And, you know, people don’t even think about that.

You know, there was a time, you know, like. what? 20-some, 40 years ago I guess, where what a Chief Executive Officer earned, compared to a worker, was 40 times more than a worker. Today it’s up to 400 times more than a worker. So our whole system is totally, totally off balance. And other policies, which will, of course, be legislation … But if we think again of labor unions -- right? I talked about how we organized the farmworkers, or the farmworkers organized themselves to make the changes. But I remember when we got the first union contracts in Delano, California, we had 11 kids that went to college from those families because they had a steady job. When they finished their job, they could get unemployment insurance, whatever. So the kids could POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 15 stay in school. You asked about how it affected children. Before, children were migrating from Texas to California to Oregon and whatever. But once the families had a better wage and stability, they could buy a house, a home. The kids could stay at school. So all of that, you know, the income that the family gets really affects what’s going to happen to that family.

So one of the pieces of legislation that’s going to be absolutely crucial is what we call The Free Choice Act which will allow people that want to choose a labor union to do it with a signature. Now the people who are opposed to that, the employer community, are saying, “No. We want secret ballot elections for workers.” Well, what happens with a secret ballot election is that the employer could put a lot of pressure on the workers. They can fire some of the leaders, whatever, the labor leaders. And sure, you could make a complaint to the NLRB, but it might take a year or two to resolve that complaint. So the labor unions say a signature should be enough for a worker to choose their union representative. Well, think about that. If our signatures are good enough to get married, to buy a house, to buy insurance, right? You know? For anything -- get your passport. It’s good enough that it should be good enough to be able to choose your own labor organization.

And this affects the total politic of the country. Because if we look and we see where are the blue states and where are the red states, right? Well, we see the blue states are on the coast, you know, the east coast and the west coast. Well, that’s where you have stronger labor organizations. And so the fact that people can belong to a labor union, not only does it mean that they can negotiate their wages, that’s how they get national healthcare, they can get health benefits. But it also means that they get information, and it’s not all Rush Limbaugh or whatever, but that they can get accurate information about what’s going on in the country. And then they can, you know, elect representatives that are more to the keeping of what people need. POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 16

So the support of the Free Choice Act to allow labor unions to grow … Because right now our labor movement has grown and it’s shrunk. I think, we’re -- what? -- like, eight percent maybe of the population now? I think when George Bush came into office we were, like, fourteen percent. So the fact that workers are losing their organizations that can represent them I think is another thing that really impacts our economy.

BOB HERBERT: Well, it seems to me that there’s a continuum. Because you were talking, Ms. Edelman, about the importance of feelings of community and organizations within the community. You’ve been talking, Ms. Huerta, about the importance of labor organizing and that sort of thing. And it just seems to me that when working people, poor people are not organized, there is no collective voice raised on their behalf, they become much worse off. There’s no one fighting their battle and they’re not really fighting it on their own. How do you begin to turn this around? This is a big order. Labor is important, but labor is not the whole story here. So we’ll start with you, and then we’ll come to Ms. Huerta.

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: We all can turn it around. I mean, we’ve got this miraculous new President in this miraculous time of transformation. But what challenges face us as a country? I mean, you’ve got this economic debacle. You’ve got climate change. You’ve got two wars you’ve got to solve. You’ve got this huge gulf. The country’s been raided. I mean [simultaneous conversation] …

BOB HERBERT: Why did he want to be President again?

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: What?

BOB HERBERT: Why did he want to be President? POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 17

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: Because I think he wanted to serve and to change something. And thank god he did. But, you know, he can’t do this without a movement from citizens like us. And we have got to pick up the bottom. And we have got to be … I mean, not letting the poor and not letting children and those left behind get lost at this table with so many demands. That’s our job as citizens. And so we’ve got to build a citizens’ movement. And we’ve got to be yelling when they cut Head Start or they cut the other good thing. Listen, you’ve got one more thing to say when you call up to tell them -- they just cut out Medicaid protections for unemployed people. And that’s really very bad. And we’ve really got to get some health coverage until we get national health insurance for everybody.

But there’s a group of folks, they’re losing their jobs, they’re losing their homes. And we’re trying to see how they can at least get a way to get health coverage. Well, the Senate just cut out a little new thing, that piece, and that needs to be retained. But our job now is to pick up where Dr. King left off in calling for a cross-racial movement to end poverty in this country which affects many more millions of people and people who are playing by the rules. And we’ve seen what’s happened when citizens acquiesce and when the media too often acquiesced and when we did not speak out against injustice.

So now, at this extraordinary moment of opportunity and challenge, now we’ve got to come together to say, “Let’s break that cycle of poverty. Let’s get every child a chance to succeed.” I mean, the figures for children today, despite our enormous progress, are just downright scary in terms of where this country is headed. You know, a child drops out of school every 10 seconds of every school day. The majority of all of our children, of all race and income groups cannot read at grade-level in fourth, eighth, or twelfth grade if they’re still in school in twelfth grade. Over 80 percent of our black and Hispanic children cannot read or compute at grade level. What are you going to do if you can’t POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 18 read and you can’t do basic, proficient math in this globalizing economy? You’re being sentenced to social economic death. You’re being sent to prison is what you’re sending them to. A black boy today has a one-in-three chance of going to prison in his lifetime if he was born in 2001.

BOB HERBERT: One-in-three?

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: One-in-three if he was born in 2001, a Hispanic boy, a one-in-six chance, a black girl and a white boy, a one-in-seventeen chance. We have this horrible distinction of being the world’s biggest jailor. We’re spending $200 billion dollars a year to maintain 2.3 million people in prison. Our states are spending three times more for a prisoner than for a public school pupil. I can’t think of a dumber …

BOB HERBERT: I think we’ve got five percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s prison population.

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: It is the dumbest investment policy. I want them supporting me, not us supporting them in prison. So we really have got this cradle to prison pipeline that comes from our failure to provide every child a level playing field from birth: lack of health insurance, lack of quality early childhood education. And they cut that billion dollars from early Head Start which serves only three percent of the eligibles. We’ve got to get our children ready for school. And we’ve got to get them born, not at low birth weight and not with four or five strikes against them, a poor, a single or teen mother. We’ve got to get them money for school by a quality, universal, preschool program and quality childcare, the very things that I think we’re seeing trying to get done in the House package as a start. POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 19

And then you’ve got to deal with these schools. I mean, what kind of schools can’t produce … You know, eighty percent failure rates, we’ve got to really begin to say, “We’ve got to give every child a first-class education.” And then you also got to make sure -- and that gets back to your community -- you’ve got to see that children have something to do after school because they’re in school only 17 percent of their time. And they’ve got to have quality after-school programs and summer programs to compete with the drug dealers and the gangs that are out there 24/7. So they’ve got to have things to do, be engaged with caring mentors and adults.

So we know what to do. How do we change the psychology and the paradigm from punishment as a first resort to prevention and early intervention? It saves children’s lives. It will break the cycle of poverty. But it also saves taxpayers’ money. So that’s the movement we’ve got to start. We’ve got to help people who are already poor. But then we’ve got to break that cycle of poverty. And we know how to do it, but it’s going to take all of us really causing a ruckus and making sure that you don’t have people who continue talk about more tax cuts for people who don’t need it, should never of had them in the first place, and that we’re going to really invest in our human capital. But it’s going to depend on us.

BOB HERBERT: All right. Ms. Huerta, I want you to solve this and solve it right now.

DOLORES HUERTA: Well, actually, the solution is a people solution. You know? When we started organizing farmworkers, people would say to us, “How are you going to organize these people?” You know? “They can’t speak English. They’re not citizens. They don’t have any assets. They have to migrate from place to place. How are you ever going to organize them?” POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 20

And the solution was really quite simple. We said to the farmworkers, “You have power.” And they’d say, “What kind of power?” “You have people power. You have your person. You have your person, just your person who can come to a meeting, you know, who can go to the city council board of supervisors to do a march to Sacramento, to come out on strike, to come out and do a boycott.” I’m sure many of you in the audience didn’t eat grapes for a long time, right? Or lettuce or Gallo wine, whatever we happen to be boycotting. This is people power.

We had farmworkers that went from California to New York City to Canada, some even to Europe to ask people to boycott grapes. We had 14 million Americans that didn’t eat grapes till we got the growers to the table to say, “Yeah, I’ll give the workers some toilets.” Right? You know? So it’s people power. And I think we saw the manifestation of people power in Obama getting elected in the first place. But we’ve got to use that same people power then to go one step further to do the advocacy, to get out there and concentrate on our senators and our congressmen and say, “Hey, enough is enough.” You know? We’ve got to get this legislation through. We’ve got to get good people like Hilda Solis, you know, the Secretary Labor nominee. Let’s get her confirmed.

But Obama cannot do it by himself. You know? Ultimately, he can only sign whatever comes to his desk. The administration can propose different legislative issues but unless you can get it on the desk, he can’t sign it. And so it’s up to us. We have got to do this. And we have sort of been mesmerized and told that we don’t have power. And so that people don’t realize that they have it within their own reach to make these things happen.

The Right Wing, on the other hand, is very organized. You’ve all heard all the attacks on immigrants throughout this, you know, last election cycle. They became the enemy. And, of course, gay marriage is a big enemy, right? You know, according to them? And so they use the immigrants, they use the feminists, you know, right to choose, right to POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 21 abortion; they use the immigrants as the targets. And so people get distracted. But we’ve got a responsibility.

Because that’s the other thing: we have power, but we’ve got to be responsible. And we’ve got to take our responsibility seriously, and we’ve got to be the ones that advocate. I want to just follow up on one point that Marian mentioned. In the San Joaquin Valley, where I’m doing my community organizing now since I left the farmworkers union, in that valley there, where all our food comes from that I mentioned earlier, there has been only one university built since 1965. But there have been 16 prisons — 16 prisons.

Now a young person coming out of high school, you can be a correctional officer at a very good salary. To become a teacher, you’ve got to go to college, right? And you’ve got to get debt, whatever, just to become a teacher. So right now a young person can get more money being a correctional officer in a prison than they can if they go into teaching.

And when we think in terms of our populations, the Latino population which is growing very big, and the African-American population, you know, we are going to be the majority in California. We’re already going to be the majority minority. And when we think that our children are not being educated that is a very big menace for our society.

And so I think we’ve really got to look and see where our tax dollars are going. We should be outraged. If we were in a foreign country, we would be out in the streets right now, you know, following up and demanding the change. And what are they doing with our tax dollars? Where are our tax dollars going? They’re not going where we need them, especially to education, and to create jobs — to create jobs.

The only reason that young people get into problems … Okay, you’ve got two parents that are working just to put the food on the table and to pay exorbitant rents, because the POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 22 rents have gone up so high. Well, what are the kids going to do? They’re by themselves. When they’re by themselves, what do they do? They get into trouble, because we don’t even have recreational centers for the kids where they gather in a healthy way like they did at your parents’ home or like they did at my mother’s place. We were the youth center, you know? All the kids gathered there. Kids don’t have a safe place to gather. And then they’ve got all of the drugs that are always being offered to them. And if the kids have a low self-esteem to begin with, they become very vulnerable, easy targets for the drugs. And then, interesting thing I’ve always thought, you can’t get in any cigars from Cuba to the United States, right? But, hey, you can get all the heroin and cocaine into this country, even from Afghanistan, which is under our control. It’s an occupied country. And then -- what did they say? -- ninety percent of all of the heroin that’s coming into the country … So you know, we have to raise some serious questions and also go to the places. And, I guess, on the east coast, you’re all a lot luckier because you get better information from Mr. Herbert’s columns, The New York Times, and from Amy Goodman (Saint Amy, I call her, Amy Goodman, “Democracy Now!”) and, you know, The Progressive, The Atlantic, and some of these -- Nation Magazine.

But so many of our citizens don’t even know where to get the accurate information, you know? Because if they listen to the regular media, you know, to get the local crime report about the chases and who’s robbing, who’s killing, etc., and they don’t really go to the business section where you have the real crime that is happening in our country.

BOB HERBERT: Well, you know, you guys became our heroes because you were out there and fired up that energy, got people together, stoked the outrage and made constructive solutions possible through organization, through community organizing and putting pressure on those in power. Who is supposed to lead that effort now? Because I completely agree: you can’t leave it to President Obama or any President, or you can’t POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 23 leave it to the politicians. But how do you begin to get that energy flowing? When you say that, “We need to do it,” who specifically needs to do it and what can they do?

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: Well, we’ve had this miraculous election. And this really is a moment of great hope. And when I think of all those people who came to Washington and we had not a single arrest. It really was a celebration of unity in the community. It was a willingness to talk about change and that same kind of energy now. And I hope that their Organizing America campaign will begin to bring some of that into achieving and putting meat on the bones of hope, because it’s what we need to do. So I hope that all of that citizen enthusiasm (inaudible). But a lot of us are now engaged in collaborating on campaigns to end poverty by 2010. I want to end poverty a lot earlier. I want it. We have a very clear agenda. We’re trying to get healthcare for every child this year. I do hope that we will get healthcare for everybody. Universal healthcare is long overdue.

And we got the CHIP bill signed last week, but that is not children’s health reform. That was last year’s unfinished Bush business. We need to get all 9 million children in the House and every pregnant woman covered, and all children having the same comprehensive benefit package. And we’re trying to organize and mobilize a campaign to say, “Finish this job this year.” And we are working with college students all over the country, with women, with people … I think we need to just set out strategic goals and really reach out to folk. And I am particularly glad or eager to engage the faith community. We’ve got 350,000 congregations of faith with hundreds of millions people. And if just ten or twenty percent of them decided when they have their prayer meetings or their bible study meetings that they’re going to pray in action and send some calls and emails after prayer meeting each week … You know, if your senators and congressmen heard from ten people every week saying, “Do healthcare for all children,” or “Do something about Child Tax Credits,” they would think a revolution would be going on. POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 24

And it would be going on. And so there’s so much that we can do. And that’s one reason I wrote this book, to say each of us -- as neighbors, as teachers, as preachers, as ordinary citizens -- can do what those ordinary people of grace did a long time ago. And now the young people, who are ready to serve, they’re looking for structures for advocacy and for people to call them together. And that’s our job as adults, is to help them get the capacity and to give them the training and the skills to take us to this next stage. And it’s happening. It’s out there. And the issue is just not losing this marvelous movement to move forward. So I’m hopeful.

BOB HERBERT: Okay. Now you mentioned, obviously, labor. If ever there was a need for workers to be better represented, it’s absolutely now. I mean, the bottom is falling out of the employment picture. And yet labor is still having its problems. You mentioned Hilda Solis; her nomination has not gone forward yet. We don’t know what’s going to happen with card check, but I think that that’s going to be an incredibly tough fight. I read in the paper today that UNITE HERE might, in fact, be splitting apart. They’ve got an enormous labor union. They’ve got great internal problems.

DOLORES HUERTA: I think you mean SEIU. [Service Employees International Union]

BOB HERBERT: Hm?

DOLORES HUERTA: SEIU that you meant?

BOB HERBERT: No, I’m talking about UNITE HERE.

DOLORES HUERTA: Wow. POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 25

BOB HERBERT: So what I want to know is how does labor begin to get its act together? Because it seems to me like this is a fantastic opportunity for the labor movement. But I worry about it being another opportunity missed.

DOLORES HUERTA: Well, I think we can’t just depend on the labor leaders, so to speak. When we think of all of the people in our country, the majority of us are workers, right? I mean, the majority of our population is working people. And I think working people have to realize that this is their issue. This idea that people can form their own labor organization like a labor union and to make it easier to do that, that they need take it on as a personal issue. And we shouldn’t think, “Okay, I have to wait for somebody to come and tell me to do it.” We know what we need to do. I think once we get the information, like the information that Marian’s given us -- we know that $20 billion dollars of the bailout money was spent by some of these bankers, right, to make themselves more comfortable in their offices, etc. I mean, that’s enough to get anybody enraged, to make us angry.

I’m going to give an example. On May the 1st of 2006, there were millions of people in the United States of America marching for immigrants’ rights. I mean, I’m sure many of you saw that on television. And just in every little town throughout the country it was the largest march I think on one issue in our country, that big march for immigrants’ rights. Who organized it? You know, people organized it in their own communities. So I think that we don’t have to wait for someone to tell us, “This is what we need to do,” that we need to send an email or send a phone call to our senator/congressman. And we want to make it easier for people to organize into a union. Let’s do that on our own. You know, many people when Obama was running for president, they left their schools or jobs, whatever, to go out there and do that volunteer work for Obama. POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 26

Okay, well, we’re at that next level right now that we’ve got to get out there and we’ve got to do that advocacy. Because we know that the Heritage Foundation, the right-to- work organizations, which are the ones that are against labor unions, they are getting their people to send in emails and telegrams, right. They know what to do. I think we should know what to do also. We don’t have to wait for somebody to call us and say, “Do this.” We need to get the information and then just act on it as individuals. It’s wonderful that we can do through organization, but if we don’t happen to have that organization or pick up the phone and call somebody, and say, “What’s your position on this?.” We know that if we’re for social justice, that we’re for ending poverty, that we’re for working people, then we know what to do. Pick up that phone, make that phone call, send that email, send that postcard to your congressman, to your senator and say, “You’ve got to support Obama’s plan for the stimulus, support labor unions to have the right to organize.”

And it’s kind of interesting too, you know, we’re talking about … I think we need to have a task force and to start looking at the economies of other countries. You know, when we talk about socialist counties, for instance, people think, “Oh, Cuba.” Well, hey, I don’t know about Cuba, but I do know that everybody in Cuba has healthcare, right? They might not have stuff. They may not have paper goods. But, hey, they have healthcare, national healthcare. A little tiny country that has an economic boycott can give all of its citizens healthcare and free education. So we should be able to do that. But then there’re other countries we can look at. Like look at the Scandinavian countries. Let’s start examining our economic system. When we look back to our history in the United States and what’s happening today, happened before. And it happened before that and it happened before that. Well, you know, they say a repetition, when you keep doing the same thing, it’s a definition of insanity, right. POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 27

So we have like an economic insanity in our country. And I think that we need to look at other economic models of other countries where Switzerland and Norway and some of the Scandinavian countries where they do have national healthcare. Another interesting thing that I heard recently is that we are the only developed country in the world that doesn’t own their own natural resources, that we have private companies that run our national resources, right. What’s up with that? You know, so I think we have to ask some questions. Like we criticize Hugo Chavez a lot, but he had a strange idea this man. He thought that the oil in Venezuela belonged to the people of Venezuela. So I think we have to start asking some big questions and start demanding because it is our money. It’s our tax dollars that are paying for our system, and that we are getting ripped off and that are money is not going where it needs to go: to our schools and to erase poverty and for education and for healthcare, that it’s going into the pockets of the very, very wealthy that don’t need the money. [applause]

BOB HERBERT: If you’re looking for faintheartedness, it is not on the stage this afternoon. I wanted to give two examples of the tough fight that anybody faces when you talk about social justice. One is now, and I’m going to ask you about that. And one is about 20 years ago, and I’ll ask you about that. The one now has to do with the fight over the stimulus package. And you mentioned the intensity of the opposition to a lot of the things that would be helpful to working people and to poor people and also some of the mean-spiritedness that accompanies that opposition. So could you just talk a little bit about what progressives are up against in trying to move forward a little bit?

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: Well, I mean, it’s very clear that we’re not going to have this wonderful bipartisanship that we had hoped, that they don’t seem to get it, that they brought us to our economic knees through all these massive tax cuts. They’re trying to get more. I never get over just the plain old greed and the lack of a common caring about community and how we can’t seem to come up with the concept of enough. I mean, POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 28

I don’t begrudge anybody their first, even second billion if children have enough to eat and they have a place to sleep. But here we are in the middle of this extraordinary suffering and with the whole thing is about to collapse, and they’re going off taking their perks. And they just put $115 billion dollars, the AMT -- the Alternative Minimum Tax, which is about $17 billion dollars, is going to help people mostly between $105 and $1,000 dollars a year. And they usually fix that every year. But you don’t do that by cutting Head Start children or by cutting Medicaid for unemployed people. I mean, good gracious, there’s just no sense of balance. And we’ve just got to pay attention to the substance of what’s there. And we’ve got to really raise a ruckus. And I do hope that people will be outraged that they are cutting the most basic things for people at a time when they are losing their jobs and losing their health coverage. But if we don’t raise that voice -- because it’s very clear now this is not going to be an easy fight, nothing ever is.

And I just often tell the story that I’d heard someone tell me about Asa Randolph going to the White House to visit Franklin Roosevelt to tell him about -- this is when he talking and threatening the first March on Washington -- and he talked about the horror of job discrimination, the lack of jobs for the black community and the need to deal with that and to have better education. And President Franklin Roosevelt, who’s said to have listened very carefully and as he finished, he said, “Phil, I agree with absolutely everything you said. Now you go out and make me do it.”

There are no friends in politics. You know, who makes the noise is who pushes it along. And too often we on our progressive side -- though again, look at what we did in this campaign -- tend to just think things are just going too happen. It’s not going to. And if we want this young man and the newcomers to be the great leaders that we want them to be and they want to be, it’s going to take all of us making that noise and picking up that phone and challenging people. And it just makes all the difference in the world. POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 29

So we just have to come together. And I just think we have to organize women and grandmothers and grandfathers. I tell you, my grandchildren radicalized me all over again. I just think that grandmothers and children need to get out in the streets. We need new theatre if necessary, but need to embarrass those who continue to take more from those who have the least to give to those who need the least. And so our voice must howl. And so democracy is simply not a spectator sport. And so we’re going to all have to find time. And we cannot lose this first big battle of this new leader. So I just can’t encourage you enough to pick up that phone over the next three or four days and to call to Senator Collins and say, “I’m sure you didn’t really mean to take away Head Start. And I’m sure you’re not going to threaten to vote against this package if you get the child tax credit from the House side.” But we need to let them hear from us. It’s our responsibility. And we can turn this around. But this package is a good one, the House package. And it does the most for the poor than anything we’ve had in several decades. And we do not want to let this moment pass without every effort on the part of all of us. So we can make a difference, but it’s going to be hard.

BOB HERBERT: Yeah, talk about raising a ruckus, I’m surprised to hear that you were raising a ruckus in 1988 in San Francisco, I think it was. It was a peaceful rising a ruckus, but it was a peaceful protest. And just tell us what happened.

DOLORES HUERTA: Well, actually, George Bush’s father, the first Bush, had had a press conference saying there was nothing wrong with poisons, with pesticides that our government was taking care of us. In the meantime, many of the farmworker children had been dying; our cancer rate for the farmworker kids was like 1,200 percent above the norm. And so many of these children were dying and their parents were dying of cancer. And these children were being born with deformities. And so we had started a grape boycott -- César was still with us, he was still alive -- to bring to the attention of the American public a lot of these economic poisons that are on our food and that consumers POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 30 are eating. And Bush had this press conference in Fresno, California, actually, and said, “There’s nothing wrong, nothing wrong with the poisons.” So he was in San Francisco at a fundraising dinner, and there was a big protest there in front of the St. Francis Hotel. That’s when Noriega was still the President of Panama, was still part of the CIA. And so, many people had big signs. The Republicans had “Bush/Quayle” signs, the demonstrators had Bush [Spanish] signs. That’s a ticket. There were many of the gay community out there and they were dressed in women’s clothes with signs that said, “Bush is a drag,” right? So anyway, I had just done passing out some leaflets saying, “Mr. Bush doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s never worked a day in his life. He doesn’t realize how farmworkers and consumers and children are being hurt by these poisons.” And then the police attacked the crowd, and I was beaten up very severely, almost died. But I think the whole idea, at least what we’re asking, is not only to send emails and the letters but go to the congressperson and the senator’s office, right, as a citizen. If they get a dozen delegations of people going over and saying, “We need you to vote on this package,” right, and if we can do this in every community, they will listen.

Because one thing that I have learned over all my 50-some years of advocacy and getting bills passed that nobody wanted, every letter that we sent actually represents about 20 people. And they know that, okay. And they cannot withstand the pressure of the voters. And when we don’t have the kind of money that the other side has, the one thing that they understand is pressure from citizens. So we’ve got to make that, put that on our agenda. I’m going to go just down to the senator’s office and talk to her, and say, “We need you to vote on this stimulus package.” Because if they get tons of mail … We defeated an anti-immigrant resolution in Bakersfield, California where there were all Republicans, one Democrat on the city council. And we thought for sure they were going to vote this thing through. This was so people who were undocumented couldn’t get public services, English-only in California, which is ridiculous; and the local police could help the ICE raids and all of these mass deportations that they’ve been doing, where so POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 31 many people have split, where they deport the parents because they’re not citizens and the kids are left behind, horrible things that are happening to our undocumented people. We were able to stop that resolution, that anti-immigrant resolution. We didn’t have the votes on the council, but we flooded them with so many postcards, so many letters and so many delegations from their district that they voted against it. So this is what we have to do. The people power, again it’s in our persons, and we just got to get out there and get busy. Because the President needs our help. And all of the poor people out there need help. And it’s up to us to take that responsibility to help them. But we can make it happen. That’s where “Yes We Can” came from, right? Yes we can.

BOB HERBERT: We’re going to go to questions in a second. I don’t want to embarrass you, but you said you were beaten up and it was severe. But tell us the extent of your injuries. I mean, you were really …

DOLORES HUERTA: Well, actually, I almost lost my life because I was bleeding internally. But when the policeman hit me and hit me from the back, he hit me so hard that my spleen exploded. They never found it. They just found little pieces of it. And he broke my ribs, right, and so I was disabled for quite a long time. But, as I say to people, there’s a saying in Spanish that says [Spanish], “There’s nothing so bad that something good doesn’t come out of it.” We filed a lawsuit against the San Francisco City Police. And so in the farmworkers movement, we never got wages. We worked for a stipend and ten dollars a weeks. But now because of my lawsuit, I get $2,000 a month till I die. So I can continue my organizing. I don’t have to worry about an income.

Because by organizing for my Foundation, basically what I do is I raise money to hire organizers, train them and send them into communities to get people together, to do the kind of advocacy that we’re talking about here today. And it’s turned out to be very, very successful. So I raise my money for my Foundation, but I don’t take any money from the POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 32

Foundation because I want to be involved in the political process going around with the politicians, right? And so I don’t want to jeopardize our non-profit. So something good did come out of my beating.

BOB HERBERT: Something good came out of it. Yes?

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: I guess I just want to reinforce. Social change is very possible, but it’s very hard. And this miracle of ending legal apartheid in this country came after the sacrifices, the beatings, the deaths of an extraordinary number of people. I was last week in Birmingham in the Sixteenth Avenue Baptist Church, and seeing Fred Shuttlesworth who … and the Birmingham Airport’s about to renamed for Fred Shuttlesworth. Who would have ever thought it? But you look at the sacrifices that were given and you remember that Dr King couldn’t get the adult community to stand up. But you look at what those children did in standing up to fire-hoses and to police dogs in order to … And they were the ones who broke the backbone of Bull Connor. And so the sacrifice is important.

And I was really very pleased when the President called on all of us to try to begin to sacrifice more and to share more. And it’s hard. And we’re going to all have to get out of our comfort zones. And we’re all going to have to give up something for the bigger good. And we show every young person now, we’ve trained maybe 1,500 people at Haley Farm. But everyone looks at the Birmingham Children’s March so they can see what children did when they were six and seven and ten years-old, and they can learn what college students did to bring about an end to apartheid. And the miracle was it was a small band of lawyers and a lot of poor parents, not a lot of them, who wanted a better life for their children, who went through the loss of their farms and their homes and got harassed and got shot at. We need to remember and say, “Thank you.” And we need to get out of our own comfort zones and be prepared to do whatever is necessary to turn our POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 33 country around. Because the cost of not doing so, the cost of our losing this moment of opportunity, not to bring every child and every human being in American into our house of plenty, would be just tragic. And I just hope that we will step up to the plate and do whatever we have to do to regain and reset our moral compass in America, and to prepare ourselves to lead in the new era, that we will do that. So I think that the ball is really in our court at this very magical moment. And I know we’re not going to lose it. [applause]

DOLORES HUERTA: We know that the civil rights struggle is not yet over. We still have to deal with the issues of racism and sexism and homophobia. But I think we’re on the way to that. But while I think our new movement has to be one of social justice, yes, but also of economic justice. Economic justice, we really have to learn. I always think, and it’s a little strange, that in this great powerful country of ours that economics is not required, right, as a subject in every school. Because if it were, then so many of our young people or even our adults wouldn’t be taken advantage of, say, through the credit companies and the kind of credit that they charge and the kind of interest rates that they charge. You know, back in the day, I guess when the kind of interest rates that we charge to people today would be called usury, right? And it would be illegal. I mean, I think the Catholic Church, at one point in time, was against that but not against a lot of other stuff, wrongly so.

But the thing is that I think we really need to find out how these systems work. Because when we think, “How could this have happened to us? We’re a democracy. How could we let our country be ripped off to the point that it is, so that we have created a system where we have all of these empty houses and all of these homeless people? You know, how did this happen to us? We’re supposed to be enlightened. We’re the most prosperous country, the richest country in the world. How could we let this happen to our populations? How could we let it be that we have so many people in prison and that we pass these laws where young people, if they hang together and they’re described as a POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 34 gang, that the whole group goes to prison if one person does something wrong.” There’re so many things that are going on that we’re unaware of because we’re not going to get it on the local news.

So we’ve got to become informed. It’s our responsibility to become informed. And it’s also our responsibility then to take actions. Once we know, then we’ve got to do something about it. We just can’t sit back, and say, “Oh, let Marian do it.” Right, you know? Or let the labor leaders do it, right? No, we’ve got to take action; we’ve got get informed, and we’ve got to start to get active. And we’ve got to do it now. We’re not going to have a second chance. We have a chance right now that we can make some major changes. Just like they said during the New Deal, during the last depression that we had, the big one -- we’ve had several others -- but Franklin Roosevelt put in so many issues, the social security system, right. So many of the things that we take for granted now were put in during that period of time. Well, we have another opportunity right now to help our President make that happen. But we’ve got to be there, and we’ve got to support him. And we know that our corporate media has been taken over and is so controlled. And so we’ve got to look for those resources and information that we need and then take the action that we need. And let’s not wait for somebody to call us up and tell us to do it. We know what we have to do. You know, we’ve just got to support our President. [applause]

BOB HERBERT: Thank you so much. You guys were marvelous, and I am not surprised. But we are now going to take questions from the audience. And I guess we’re starting right over here. Yes, sir?

QUESTION: Thank you all very much for a wonderful afternoon. I suspect that you are aware that you’re already preaching to the converted. I’ve been trained as a child and adolescent psychiatrist and have been concerned about not only the health issues, but the POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 35 lack of critical thinking skills that are being taught or not taught in all levels of education up through medical schools currently. When I think about the two most important things we have to provide for our kids, which are education and health, without both, nothing’s going to work really. As a physician, I work primarily with Medicaid patients. And what I’ve come to understand having done some lobbying at different times for different …

BOB HERBERT: We’ve got to get to a question.

QUESTION: Okay, is that we need to learn how to label what we’re doing so we can beat the other side’s one-liners at their own game. We have to learn to say that health is, industrially speaking, a benefit, that health lowers the cost of production, health diminishes absenteeism, health is essential to the security of this country, that it is the cornerstone … We all would all agree with that. How do you put that into a word, into a simple slogan?

BOB HERBERT: You make a good point. And we’ve seen it on display for the past several days. The Republicans have framed the stimulus package, I think, in unfair ways. How do you fight back and try and make these issues comprehensible and compelling to ordinary voters who are watching maybe just a few minutes on TV?

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: Well, I think we do try to come up with very crisp slogans. “Leave No Child Behind” was our crisp slogan. It got hijacked [simultaneous conversation]. We do try to get out, “You don’t have to like these children or other people’s children, but you need them if you’re going to have a strong economy.” And, “It costs a dollar. Every dollar you invest in immunization saves $17 dollars out the other end.” And when you do all the cost-effective things, it’s very hard to get coverage for solutions. POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 36

BOB HERBERT: It is hard, I agree.

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: It’s very hard to get coverage. But we’ve got to end up being very clear about what we’re trying to do and to put the best face on it and not lose the initiative to the other side. And we also need to be very careful. I mean, we should not have let some of those things get put into that house package. Because it only takes one-tenth of one percent or one or two bad apples that they will grab on and discredit the whole thing. And so I think that we’ve got to be very mindful, in this ten second society, how we try to get our message out in ten seconds. But we also just have to be very clear that we’re acting with the utmost integrity, that we can justify everything. Because what the Republicans did was take a few things, minor things, for a minor portion of this package and they wiped us out. So we’ve got to have pretty good discipline and be very strategic about it. But we need to control the framing, and we need to do a better job at it. But I agree with you.

BOB HERBERT: Speaking of slogans that were pretty good, “Yes We Can.” Where did that come from?

DOLORES HUERTA: Well, actually it came out of the farmworker movement. César was doing one of his 25-day …

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: ... stole from you … --

BOB HERBERT: Both of you guys were hijacked.

DOLORES HUERTA: Yeah, 1972, actually. César Chávez was doing a 25-day water only fast. POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 37

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: Oh, I remember that.

DOLORES HUERTA: He fasted in Arizona. And that was to prevent violence, where the farmworkers would not turn to violence and speaking to a group of the local Latino leaders, professionals, trying to get them to support what César was doing. And they said to me, “Oh, no, here in Arizona you can’t do that. In California, you can do all that stuff, but not in Arizona [Spanish] No we can’t, in Arizona.” And my response to them was kind of just spontaneous at that moment, I said, “No, yes we can. [Spanish].” Right, in Arizona. And so that was born. And so that became the farmworkers movement, that became our theme. And, by the way, Coretta Scott King was there with us when César did that fast in Arizona in 1972. That’s where it originated. But we’ve used that with the farmworkers a lot because, again, when you think about their helpless situation that they had and still have today, that really motivates them to know that they individually do have the power to make the changes.

BOB HERBERT: I love that story. Yes, sir? And everybody really is going to have keep it short so we can get to a number of these questions.

QUESTION: Thank you. During this program you’ve talked a lot about organizing and advocacy. And I was just wondering if you could each give us a brief lesson in community organizing? What were the lessons that Fred Ross and Saul Alinsky taught you? Or that Martin Luther King Jr. taught you? And sort of, us, as community leaders, what can we do to go back to our communities to be local organizers and truly organize the people power to take action?

BOB HERBERT: Love that question. [applause] POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 38

DOLORES HUERTA: Well, I think it’s quite simple. I mean, for like everybody here in this audience -- and this kind of also goes back to girl scouts, by the way. I think the girl scouts, they have like a little ratio that every leader has to get at least 20 girls, you know, to get involved. So if every one of us sitting here today will go out and organize 20 people, even ten people -- not only am I going to send an email or I’m going to send a postcard or that I’m going to get ten other people to do it, and my friends and my relatives and even children. You know, we have students here. Get everybody at your school right now to email to the senator, and say, “We need the stimulus package.” It means just bringing other people together and getting them to do it. Basically, that’s all that it is. And sure you’re not going to get everybody, but if you talk to 20 people, you’re going to get ten to 15 of them that will also participate.

So it’s basically just reaching out and getting people to join. We want to do a vigil maybe in front of the senator’s office or someone else, a congressperson, or do an interfaith service. You can have candlelights. It can all be very non-violent and a lot of fun, too. And especially bring the children out there. These are the children that are going to be affected if we don’t pass these laws, right? And call the press. You know, we can’t get the national press, but the local press is always looking for things to cover, the local press. I remember once my daughter called, she was looking for my grandson. And then I turned on the TV set, and there was my grandson in front of the Liberty Bell. And he had a big sign, “Free Mumia”. You know, that’s when they were going to do his trial, right? And so, you know, he found out that they were going to try to get him a new trial, and so he was out there in front of the Liberty Bell. And all the press was there. There was my grandson and three of his friends. So I think we should be having a press conference right now. And if you don’t have an organization, make one up. You know? It’s easy.

BOB HERBERT: Ms. Edelman. POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 39

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: Two of our fun things that is happening, and I really meant to empower children, and we need to pull children out on them much more. We have about 9,000 children who attend freedom schools. And every one has to engage in service, these children. And everyone has to engage in some civic activity. And there’s nothing like looking at a senator’s face when 2,000 children march into their office, and say, “Why did you vote against healthcare?” But my favorite scene of the last five years was having mothers and baby strollers go up the Congress to deal with the child welfare issue. And everybody said, “Oh, that’s not going to work. Babies and balloons, they’re not going to let them through security.” You should have seen those black women security guards helping those babies in. [applause] And we went to Tom DeLay’s office. And he got warned that these mother and strollers with balloons were coming down to see him. And he ran down the hall. We ran him out of the building. It was wonderful. And so I think we do need to try new theatre. Because if children start showing up, “Why did you vote against me? And why did you give only one of the three of us healthcare?,” it will make a difference. So we need new theatre. And we need to just not be afraid of being in their face.

DOLORES HUERTA: There’s a book by Naomi Klein called Give Me Liberty. I kind of recommend the book. It’s like a little handbook on organizing. It gives a lot of examples of the Civil Rights Movement. But the basic idea in her book is that America is not a place, America is an idea. It’s an idea of liberty, of people’s freedoms. And we have had our freedoms taken away little by little, little by little, to the point that we accept what has been taken way from us. And we’ve got to come back to be the real patriots of our country. And, boy, there’s no time like now to really say, you know, “We are going to fight for what our America is, which is for freedom and for liberty, for people’s free expression and especially the right to demonstrate,” right. We have got to bring our America back, and that’s what Obama is giving us that opportunity to do so. POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 40

BOB HERBERT: Yes, sir?

QUESTION: Philip Delano(?) from Hull. It’s a real honor to listen to you folks on that platform. You have some wonderful ideas and I like them all. However the one question that screams at me, since we are now mortgaging ourselves into the future with these multi-billion dollar plans, where’s the money coming from to do all these wonderful things you want to do? I agree they’re wonderful. But where is the money?

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: Well, sometimes you have to invest in order to have a long-term yield. And so we are trying to figure out how you can stimulate this economy, how you can get people spending money, how you can do so in a way that is also going to meet some very basic needs. And I guess I’m not an economist, but it’s very clear that we’re going to have to find a way to get us going again. And that’s going to require investment. And the issue is kind of how do you do that investment which is going to have the greatest bang for the buck? How do you really begin to make sure that those who are going to need it most and spend it most will get it most? Which is why what’s going on in the Congress right now is terribly important. Now, see, I often hear, “Where’s the money going to come from?” That is the biggest defense, “We don’t have the money.”

When we were trying to get all nine million children health insurance two years ago, did the cost argument — $70 billion dollars to cover every one of the nine million uninsured children and pregnant women — said how much cheaper it is to get prenatal care than to keep these low birth-weight babies in neonatal intensive care. You pay $80 or $90 dollars for a primary healthcare visit for asthma. You’re going save. In Houston, $7,500 dollars in emergency room care, and did the cost-effectiveness, and they said, “Well, we don’t have the money. Where’s the money going to come from?” And you’ve got to find a way POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 41 to pay. But didn’t you see where they found that $700 billion dollars so quickly? You see where they find the money for these tax cuts? And so one of the places that money is going to come from is stopping these tax cuts for the top one percent and not having them change the estate tax. We don’t have a money problem, we have a values and priorities problem. And so the question is where are you going to put the money? [applause]

And if we stop these wars where we’re spending how many billions every month? -- and reinvested that, if we took six months, seven months of the Iraqi war, we could lift every child out of poverty. So it’s about values and priorities and getting ourselves back. But we’ve got to somehow get out of this trough and then move in the right direction and not continue to have the kind of spending on those that keep widening this gulf between rich and poor. So it’s not money, it’s values and it’s priorities and it’s organizing.

DOLORES HUERTA: And I think the other thing is we’ve got to create jobs. We’ve got to create jobs for the people that are here right now so that we can then, in turn, they can start paying taxes. And we’ve also got to bring back jobs. We’ve got to bring back some of our production to our United States of America. And all of us are guilty of this because we want to buy cheap products. But then we’re putting our own people out of work. So we’ve got to kind of rethink in terms of we no longer have a manufacturing base because we’re allowing other countries … Our employers from here, our companies from here, our corporations are taking the jobs out of the country and then bringing them back to us, and then we’re buying the products. We’ve got to say, “Hey, wait a minute. I want to buy some products that are made here.” And I’m not saying that we shouldn’t help other countries develop, that is also our responsibility. But we really need to help them develop, not exploit the other countries, exploit their natural resources, really help them. Like in Latin America, the United States has a history. We’ve just gone in there and taken out their natural resources and then taking their people and taking the profits, and we don’t leave anything behind. So we also have to have a whole different vision in POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 42 terms of our foreign policy, to use the resources and skills that we have to lift countries out of poverty, not to just go in there and take out their natural resources, you know? We have to change the way that we think. [applause]

BOB HERBERT: Thank you. Yes, ma’am?

QUESTION: I think we, all of us in the audience, are incredibly blessed to have so many years of experience of fighting for social justice and saying what’s right and doing it all right up there on the stage. And it’s an honor for us to be in the room with you. And thank you, just thank you for being here all of you, including Mr. Herbert. For me, the hardest thing about Obama, who I absolutely support and think is the best thing that’s happened to us in my lifetime, is his call for moving beyond the struggles and controversies and tensions of the past. Now, I understand that it’s hard. But both of you would not be there if sometimes you hadn’t been rather difficult and perhaps even uncivil and angry, and also if you hadn’t named what was wrong, not only in the present but in the past. Because without naming what’s the matter, you can’t really move forward.

I’m wondering how you look at the way that we, in supporting Obama as President not as a radical, but as a President who got elected by more than half the people, how can we be that movement that says, “But yeah, some of those really stole the money from us and we want it back. Yes, welfare reform … ” I’m going, almost done. Welfare reform was a disaster for poor women. And one of the reasons we’ve got a problem now is we don’t have it along with unemployment and all these other cuts. And some people who are currently in Congress did that to us. How do we do what he says with opening our hands to the people with the fists that hit us already, how do we do that now without naming that other stuff and getting some of it back in the name of justice? So that’s my question for the both of you. POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 43

BOB HERBERT: Anybody want to take a crack at that?

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: We have to do that. I mean, we have to push. It’s about accountability; we need to help him be a great leader. But movements make great leaders. Dr. King understood that he was responding to the demands of the people and that he didn’t make the movement, it was the other way around. And so we have to be those Jo Ann Robinsons and we have to be those sit-in students. And we were always pushing Dr. King, and we were always pushing other folk. But this is the job of citizens. And political leaders have to try to figure out how you balance all of the needs of all the people all the time, which is why I could never ever work for government. Because children just need somebody who’s going to talk about children, what they need, and to be unreasonable, and to see that their needs are met. So that gets back to our citizens’ movement. And so stay tuned, but we’re going to all have to get out there to push him and push our Congress and to push everybody else to do what they have to do to be fair.

BOB HERBERT: We’re only going to be take two more very brief questions. Afterwards, Ms. Edelman is going to be signing her book, The Sea Is So Wide and My Boat Is So Small. And both of our guests, I’m sure, will stick around for a little while and be able to answer some of your questions personally. So, sir? And you have to keep it tight.

QUESTION: Thank you. The progressive issues that we’ve talked about today are important. They form an infrastructure for people to move forward. However, both of you spoke of values that your parents held that really kept your feet to the fire, same as my parents did for me in the ‘50s and ‘60s growing up in a middle-class white community. How do we get those values inculcated into poor communities whether they’re rural, urban or whatever, race is involved.? POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 44

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: We need them inculcated in poor and non-poor communities. We have thrown out the spiritual baby in the bathwater of American materialism. We need to challenge the cultural signals that glorify violence, that glorify the things Dr. King warned us about before, the triple evils that could bring us down. And that was excessive materialism, militarism, poverty and racism. And those ‘isms’ are still very much alive today. And children are treated as consumers, our value systems are based on extrinsic things rather than internal things. And so we really need to begin to talk about who we are as human beings. And one of those things that are most important is not what we have, it’s who we are. So we’ve got to get back, I think, some of our core spiritual values, not in any judgmental or whatever sense, but to let young people know that who they are inside is much more important than what goes on outside.

I always quote Walker Percy, who talked about teaching which is what my elders taught me. “You can get all A’s in life and still flunk life.” And so it’s not about the A’s and it’s not about the millions, it’s about services and sharing and building community. And we’ve lost that across race and class. And while I worry about all the underprivileged children don’t have their basic necessities of life, I worry about an awful lot of privileged children who are affected by “affluenza” and who are [applause] … So I think we need to either cutoff these video games and challenge the kinds of messages that they are bombarded with and try to reweave family rituals and community rituals and begin to teach them there’s another way. And so that’s our choir, I think, for the next decade.

DOLORES HUERTA: And I think that if we can get a lot of our school boards to not only have, say, Dr. King’s birthday celebrated but to do the service day. Give credits to students to go out and work with poor people in their community so they can see, like I learned going door to door, and you see the kind of poverty, and then you start questioning why people are poor and what poor people have to live and go through so that we can make this reconnection. Because I think of lot of people say, “We have gated POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 45 communities so that the poor can’t come into our areas where we live.” So we’ve got to kind of change that way of thinking and think of ourselves as a family not only just our neighborhood community, but all of us are one human family. I like to say, again, when I speak in public that we have to remember that we are one human family, we’re homo sapiens, right. And where does our human family begin? Africa, right?

Okay, so we’re all Africans. Okay, we can tell that to the KKK and the Aryan Nation, right, get over it, and the Minutemen, you know. We’re all Africans, we’re all one human family. And if we can remember that, then we know that we have this obligation to really care about each other and to help each other. And we need to teach that to our children because they are the ones that are going to be the future. And if we can say it at every high school, “You’ve got to go out there.”

And part of your education is an education of the heart. In the Spanish language, when you say [Spanish], it means somebody who is civil, somebody who’s got a social conscious, somebody that will help others. In the Spanish language, going to school is called being prepared [Spanish]. Education means how you care about your fellow human being. And those are the things that we have to start teaching our children -- that what happens to somebody down in the ghetto, in the ‘hood,’ is as important, is going to affect their life in one or the other. So you’ve got to be responsible also to help out and to help change the conditions. You know, we’re talking about things that we can do. Marches, marches are great because they communicate, and we can get a lot of people together in a very easy way in terms of making something happen.

BOB HERBERT: Yes ma’am?

QUESTION: Okay. Well, I’m going to have to stand on my toes a little bit. Anyway, as a proud citizen of the United States, I would just have one quick question to ask you. But POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 46 as a proud citizen of the United States, I would like to organize everybody in this room to go home today, get on your computer or get on your phone and email or call your congressman or senator, and please tell them not to take out what we need in the stimulus package to keep our children in a healthier environment.

BOB HERBERT: Thank you very much.

QUESTION: And I just wanted to ask one question?

BOB HERBERT: And quick.

QUESTION: Really quick. If you were in front of the Congress right now, what would you say to have them do what we need to do?

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: Accept the House package. [laughter]

QUESTION: I just wanted to stand up because we’re talking about being disruptive.

BOB HERBERT: We’re wrapping it up here.

QUESTION: I know, this is the absolute last question, and I will keep it very brief. But I also wanted to point out that almost all the air time was taken up with white men, to begin with, because they were quickest to the mike. So that was why I came back up because I’m like, “You know, these are the people who are my heroes who said stand up.” So my question for you is that I am responsible for a program that supports the next individuals who are leading the next social movements including a certain Jenna Edelman, Van Jones, Majora Carter. And what do you think they should learn? What do they need to know as the next national movement leaders of our time and current ones, POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 47 actually, many of them in order to have sustainable lives, keep their movements going? What would you like them to learn?

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: Well, I think they’ve learned a lot of it already. And I think this is a wonderful time to be alive again. How privileged we are to have seen the end of legal apartheid and now have this extraordinary opportunity to finish that job of economic justice and putting meat on the bones of hope. And I am so proud, because there’s another big transformation where we’ve got this new president who is 47 years- old. We have a huge generational transfer of leadership in almost all of our major institutions. The black church pulpits … We have down at Haley Farm what we call the Moses Mariam Joshua Deborah Generation and many beige and black pulpits. From Riverside, you’ve got a new young man who was in school together with my second child; Jonah was in school with the person who succeeded Jim Forbes at Riverside Ebenezer Baptist Church. You’ve got all these 30-somethings that are taking over. And I’ve been so moved by trying to find out who is the President’s chief advisor on A, B and C? I said, “Oh, my lord. They were in our playgroup.” So you have got a series of new leaders, many of whom do come having understood. Joan(?) Edelman was dragged through the shacks of Mississippi and met and knows about the Civil Rights Movement. They have studied that. And hopefully this Joshua generation, there’s nothing more important for our generation to do than to really make sure they know their history, that they know the sacrifice, that they know where this river has come from, so that they will know how to do it for everybody, that it’s not about them, and that they will know it’s about rebuilding community.

But we are very ahistorical people. And if we don’t know what the past has been, we’ll repeat those things. And I worry about this cradle to prison pipeline because it’s becoming the new American apartheid. And despite this wonderful change at the top, if we don’t know how it went backwards before, it will go backwards again. And so I am POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 48 excited about this new Joshua generation and Deborah generation, but we have to continue to build these intergenerational alliances and then make sure that our children know what their children’s parents -- I wear a Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth every day now. I took them out to just remember what would these women be doing and where would we be if they had not stuck up? And I guess I just want to end with a Sojourner from my point of view. Because we have big, big problems. And we are at a moment of trying to talk about big leaps, not incremental steps. We’ve got to get over some big chasms with these gaps between rich and poor and all these huge problems in our world. But we can all kind of do it. And I love Sojourner and Harriet Tubman, who were both illiterate but brilliant slave women, spoke out against second-class treatment of women as well as against slavery when it was an impossible task. But I would just leave you with Sojourner’s thing. One day she was speaking out against slavery, and I tell this story often, and she got heckled by an old white man in the audience, who said to her, “Oh, slave woman, don’t care any more about your anti-slavery talk than for an old flea bite.” And she said, “That’s all right, the Lord willing, I’m going to keep you scratching.” And while all of us like to be big dogs and we like to make big changes (and we have to) let’s just remember that enough fleas biting strategically can make the very biggest dog uncomfortable. And if we become these persistent fleas, and enough of us may knock some of us off, but the rest of us keep coming back, if you do that with your phone calls, with your marches, with your letters, with your complaints, you know, we’re going to move these big dogs of injustice away. And so I’ve seen the flea-core grow; we’ve made lots of progress. But now I think if each of us leaves this room, and says, “We’re going to be a flea for justice for the poor and for our country,” we can cause the next phase of this revolution to come about much, much sooner. But thank you for being so wonderful. [applause]

DOLORES HUERTA: Mine is a kind of a plea for all of us, is that whatever we do, let’s reach out to other people to integrate. And what I mean by that, especially people in POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 49 the minority community, because of our culture, sometimes I’ll get to these meetings and there’s no person of color in the room, and, well, “You know, they don’t come. We made an announcement, but they didn’t come.” Well, you know what? Because of our culture, you have to go reach out and bring them in, okay, reach out and bring them in. So I think that as we build our movement then we’ve got to make sure that we’re integrated, that we have an integrated movement, not only men and women, but also people of color because bring different experiences to the room. The other thing, in terms of my priorities, you heard about the Free Choice Act for labor unions, for working people so they can organize, I think that’s a priority; to get our Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, get her confirmed. She’s a great, great person. And I would ask for your support on that. And then, on a personal level, to push for legalization for all of the undocumented people that are here right now, because everybody was legalized at one time or the other in our country, right?

And then I want to end with a joke, too, okay? This is one of César’s sayings that we used to say to the farmworkers to tell them how they could have their power. And what César used to tell the workers is that you had a horseman that was going across the country. He was kind of a macho dude, kind of very arrogant, egotistical. And as he was riding on his horse, he had his old whip. And he saw a dog, and he hit the dog with the whip. And the dog went yelping away. And then he went down a little further, and then he saw a cow. And he hit the cow, and the cow went moo-mooing away. And then he was riding on his horse and he came up to a tree. And so he raised his whip, and he looked up. And there was a beehive. And he held up his whip, and he said, “I’d better not, they’re organized.” Okay? We have to get organized to make this happen. [applause]

BOB HERBERT: That’s it. You’ve been a great audience. Thank you so much. POVERTY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FACING THE NATION - KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUMS 02.08.09 PAGE 50

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