Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[Benjamin Todd Jealous] ]We are in a time of great peril and great possibility when
history can go two ways at once, and there is a need for young people to decide that
they're going to push things in the right direction. This summer will be the 50th anniversary
of Freedom Summer, when young people across the country came to the South to really focus
on pushing our country forward, and making sure that all of us could vote, and here we
are a half-century later and we find voting rights in the crosshairs once again.
[Student] "What do you consider good traits of a leader or an advocate?" [Jealous] At the end of the
day, a leader has to be able to feed their troops and lead them to victory. Each generation
is born with the same capacity for change. The question is: do we provide the inspiration,
the leadership, and the space for young people to get involved? I don't believe in fighting
the good fight, I believe in winning the good fight. I have always made it my responsibility
as an organizer to both explain to people what I think we can win, and therefore what
we can't win, how we're going to win, and then to make sure that we win. And that's
often what motivates and inspires people, and convinces them to join you. If you look
at any great movement in the history of this country, you can predict its future by simply
looking at the position of young people in that movement. We've got to get young people
up front. They will bring the energy, they will bring the drive, but they also bring
the longevity. [Student] "How did you deal with race relations in your undergraduate
or even now, helping college students, helping to bridge the gap between different issues
that happen between Blacks and W hites, caucasians and Hispanics?" [Jealous] This is, sort of,
year one if you will, of the last 30 years in our country of whites being a majority.
That change is expected to happen somewhere in 2042, 2043. I might situate the the conversation
not in the present, but but in the future. It's easier for people talk about the future,
than the present. And just simply say, you know, have a series of conversations about
2043, what do we want to be three decades from now? Ultimately the conversation that
needs to be had is one about how, how similar we are. We talk about people like Nelson Mandela,
who we're still mourning, great warrior-saint. Doctor King, Rosa Parks, Shirley Chisholm,
what all these folks have in common is that they decided to lead. But the secret is that
there's really no secret to leadership, other than you have to choose. The other thing about
them, what they have in common is that when we talk about them during this time of year,
we tend to put them on pedestals so high that we discourage young people from believing
that they can achieve what they achieved in terms of leadership. My grandmother is 97 years
old, she carries with her the wisdom of at least 200 years, the hundred years she's lived,
and the hundred years of stories that were handed down to her in her childhood. When
I'm really wrestling with something I go to my grandmother's table, and I just put my
burden down on it, and I said "Grandma, what happened? You said that we were the children
of the Dream. That you, and Doctor King, and our parents, and so many others had broken
the gates open, that you had gotten rid of Jim Crow". She said, "Baby, it's sad but it's
simple. We got what we fought for, but we lost what we had." We got the right to be
a police office, we lost the right to live in safe communities. We outlawed segregation,
and we got resegregation, even greater in some places, than before. Frederick Douglass
told all of us, "Power concedes nothing without demand." And we have no demands more important
right now than securing our right to vote, tackling mass incarceration, and making sure
that every young person who wants a job can find one, which often leads us right into
our schools. I remember what my grandfather used to always say, he was a quiet man, but
one of the things he would repeat was, "Son, don't let the perfect get in the way of the
good." Please don't bring me a perfect plan for anything, cause there ain't no perfect
plan. If you pick that battle that you are willing to win, you are willing to devote
your life to, you will usually win in the end, simply because you have the greater will.
You were willing to fight until the end. There's no secret to leadership. There is just, at
the end of the day, the question of whether or not you're willing to choose.
A production of the University of Rochester. Please visit us online, and subscribe to our channel for more videos.