The reason I tell you all of this is because my activities here in Chicago taught me a very important lesson. And that is that whether it is the struggle is against racism, or sexism, or homophobia, or corporate greed, or environmental devastation, or war and militarism or religious bigotry - real change never takes place from the top on down. It always takes place from the bottom on up when people, at the grassroots level, stand up and fight back. That's a lesson I learned in Chicago, and a lesson I've never forgotten.
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Have we made progress in civil rights in this country since the early 1960s when I lived here? No question about it. Do we still have a very long way to go to end the institutional racism which permeates almost every aspect of our society? Absolutely.
Two years ago we turned on our televisions and saw Nazis marching in Charlottesville. Nazis marching in the streets of the United States.
We have, in recent years, seen a major spike in hate crimes - against blacks, and Muslims, and Jews, and Latinos and other minorities.
And, over the last number of years, we have seen a terrible level of police violence against unarmed people in the minority community: Laquan McDonald, Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Jessica Hernandez, Tamir Rice, Jonathan Ferrell, Oscar Grant, Antonio Zambrano-Montes and others. People of color killed by the police who should be alive today.
We know that African-Americans are twice as likely to be arrested, and almost four times as likely to experience physical force in an encounter with the police.
Today, black men are sentenced to 19 percent more jail time for committing the exact same crime as white men, and African Americans are jailed at more than 5 times the rate of whites.
All of this and more is why we are finally going to bring about real criminal justice reform in this country. We are going to end the international embarrassment of having more people in jail than any other country on earth. Instead of spending $80 billion a year on jails and incarceration, we are going to invest in jobs and education for our young people. No more private prisons and detention centers. No more profiteering from locking people up. No more "war on drugs." No more keeping people in jail because they're too poor to afford cash bail.
Real police department reform. The world must get out, led by the federal government, that lethal force is he last resort, not the first.
And by the way, when we talk about criminal justice reform, we're going to change a system in which tens of thousands of Americans every year get criminal records for possessing marijuana, but not one major Wall Street executive went to jail for destroying our economy in 2008 as a result of their greed, recklessness and illegal behavior. No. They didn't go to jail. They got a trillion-dollar bailout.
Our campaign is about fundamentally ending the disparity of wealth and power in this country. But as we do that, we must speak out against the disparity within the disparity.
Today, the average black family has one-tenth the wealth of the average white family.
Today, the infant mortality rate in black communities is more than double the rate for white communities, and the death rates from cancer and almost every other disease is far higher for blacks. Black women are three and a half times more likely to die from pregnancy than white women.
Today, Flint, Michigan is still without new pipes for clean water, and there are 3,000 other Flint, Michigans across the country -- neighborhoods with lead rates that were double those of Flint during the height of its crisis.
Today redlining prevents black owned businesses from getting loans, and predatory lending results in higher interest rates in the African American community.
Whether it is a broken criminal justice system, or massive disparities in the availability of financial services, or health disparities, or environmental disparities, or educational disparities - our job is, and we will, to create a nation in which all people are treated equally. That is what we must do, and that is what we will do.
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