You have to go through life with
more than just passion for change; you need a strategy. I’ll repeat that. I
want you to have passion, but you have to have a strategy. Not just awareness,
but action. Not just hashtags, but votes.
You see, change requires more than
righteous anger. It requires a program, and it requires organizing. At the 1964
Democratic Convention, Fannie Lou Hamer — all five-feet-four-inches tall — gave
a fiery speech on the national stage. But then she went back home to
Mississippi and organized cotton pickers. And she didn’t have the tools and
technology where you can whip up a movement in minutes. She had to go door to
door. And I’m so proud of the new guard of black civil rights leaders who
understand this. It’s thanks in large part to the activism of young people like
many of you, from Black Twitter to Black Lives Matter, that America’s eyes have
been opened — white, black, Democrat, Republican — to the real problems, for
example, in our criminal justice system.
But to bring about structural
change, lasting change, awareness is not enough. It requires changes in law,
changes in custom. If you care about mass incarceration, let me ask you: How
are you pressuring members of Congress to pass the criminal justice reform bill
now pending before them? (Applause.) If you care about better policing, do you
know who your district attorney is? Do you know who your state’s attorney
general is? Do you know the difference? Do you know who appoints the police
chief and who writes the police training manual? Find out who they are, what
their responsibilities are. Mobilize the community, present them with a plan,
work with them to bring about change, hold them accountable if they do not
deliver. Passion is vital, but you’ve got to have a strategy.
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