I am thrilled to see so many people eager to join in dialogue about where we as a nation find ourselves in this drive towards freedom. Seems particularly fitting that we would have this conversation today, the day after our nation caused its daily business to pay tribute to reverend Martin Luther king jr. s life and his legacy and it seems fitting that we would have this conversation the day after our nations first black president was sworn in for his second term. Now i know much of the nation has already moved on and president obamas soaring rhetoric about the promise of america life, liberty, justice and equality for all has already been forgotten by many and i know that many, many people in america will not think of dr. King again until his holiday rolls around again next year. But i would like for us to pause tonight and think more deeply about the meaning of dr. Kings life and his legacy and what it has to teach us about our nations president. I think particularly important for us to do that given that this year marks the 50th anniversary of the march on washington, 50 years have passed , 50 years have passed since kings voice soared over the washington monument, declaring his dream. I have a dream, a dream deeplyrooted in the american dream. Yesterday while i was watching president obamas and not grow address i heard echoes of kings speech, i have a dream. When i turned off my Television Set i spent a few minutes reflecting on the question, are all of us, all of us truly welcome to share in this dream come the same during during that dr. Came dream to . Most americans im sure can recite portions of. Your kings i have a dream speech. Its an extraordinary and familiar speech. Ive grown accustomed to hearing eclipse of his speech played over and over, recycled over and over on the radio every january. The favorite quotes in the favorite lines and now that i have schoolage children i see how king has explained them in classrooms. When i was in Elementary School there was no Martin Luther king day. There was discussion of his heroism in classrooms that when my children came home from school just the other day they told me all they have learned in school about kings courage. He was the man who stood up to bullies, men who believe that children of all colors and walks of life ought to be able to hold hands and be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. He was willing to die so that all of us could live his dream. I find myself conflicted as i listened to my children. Back to me what they have heard in school about this man who believed in kindness, forgiveness and justice and compassion for all and i say yes, all of that is true, all of that is true but i feel an easy and i know that something has been lost in the translation. That sense of disorientation was crystallized for me recently when i read vincent hardings insightful book, Martin Luther king, the inconvenient hero. Dr. Harding was one of kings closest friends and advisers marching with him countless times and living around the corner from kings family in atlanta. It appears as if the price for the First National holiday honoring a black man is the developing of a massive case of National Amnesia concerning who that black man really was. I would suggest that we americans have chosen amnesia rather than continue kings painful and charted and often disrupted struggle towards a more Perfect Union end quote. He says as if we are determined to hold our new hero captive to the powerful. Back of his life that culminated in the magnificent march on washington in 1963, refusing to allow him to break out beyond the stunning eloquence of his eye have a dream speech dr. Harding writes quote we would like to forget that it was not the weaver weaver of gentle someday dreams of freedom who was shot down on a balcony in memphis memphis tennessee and quote. He was by 1968 a different even more courageous man, and man ahead of his time. I can see clearly now that on days like yesterday we rarely honor the man who died. No, we honor that sunny cheery version of him. We honor the man who gave the soaring speech about black and white schoolchildren, a man who dreamed that integration was a dream. Who is king five years later in 1968 . Who was that man killed on a motel balcony, the man who was marching with sanitation workers and demanding economic justice, not mere civil rights . The man who would come to believe after the civil rights bill had already been passed, after the civil rights victories had already been one that our biggest battle, the most important battle still lies ahead and that nothing, nothing short of a radical restructuring of our society held any hope for making the dream and promise of america a reality for all. King explained to her reporter in 1957 quote for years i labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of a society, a little change here, a little change there. Now i feel quite differently. I think youve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values. Frustrated by white resistance to addressing it in any meaningful way, the ghettos in failing schools, the structural joblessness and crippling poverty, king told his staff that the southern christian Leadership Conference quote the dispossessed, the poor poor both white and neither lived in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of their fellow citizens but against the structures through which society is refusing to lift the load of poverty. So what would king think of us today, of the world we have created in his absence . With the believe that the nonviolent revolution had already been one, had even begun , the revolution of values that he prayed for . Would would the a he if he could see yesterday believe that we now share his dreams, that we are now traveling the road he was marching . 50 years later have we caught up with king yet . Are we finally on the path that he was traveling in 1963, 1968 . Back in 1969 while blood still stains the motel balcony where dr. King was murdered, a poem was written honoring his life and reflect on his death. The poem was written back when king had only just begun the process of being transformed in our collective consciousness from a troublesome dangerous black figure to a national hero. It was written way back when the memory of kings assassination will was still fresh and still spilling among those who loved him. That ban in 1969 the poet Carl Wendell Hines jr. Had this poem reflecting on kings death. He wrote, now that he is safely dead, let us praise him, build monuments to his glory saying osama to his name. Dead men make such convenient heroes. They cannot rise to challenge the images we would fashion from their lives and besides it is easier to build monuments than to build a better world, so now that he is safely dead, we would ease consciousness and teach our children that he was a great man , knowing that the cause for which he lived his still a cause and a dream for which he died is still a dream, a dead mans dream. Now that he is safely dead, Martin Luther king jr. Is safely dead. Is it true . Is he safely dead today and its his dreams safely dead . I know many people in this room would say no, no, no. Dr. Kings dream his spirit is still so much alive amongst all of us and its thriving right here in this room. And what better evidence could there be of this then that we as a nation all pause to pay tribute to his dream. Just yesterday a National Federal holiday, think about that, National Federal holiday for Martin Luther king, jr. The man who was once deemed a threat to National Security by the fbi, radical troublemaker. Is it not obvious that we as a nation have finally caught up with king . Do you may not be living his dream but havent we shared his dream . We are better evidence could there be than we just reelected our nations first black president something that was unimaginable in 1963 or 1968. What better evidence could there be than that beautiful multiracial multiethnic gathering on the mall in washington d. C. That we witnessed just yesterday and was broadcast around the world . Clearly we must be living the dream, right . It has been said by numerous philosophers and theologians that any society, and a civilization must be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable members and its citizens. King would no doubt agree with that sentiment and in considering how we fare in that regard i find myself thinking of people like susan burton, people who have cycled in and out of our nations prison system in the era of mass incarceration in his postking come postcivil rights era, time when our prison population is more than quintupled and millions of people, overwhelmingly poor people of color, have been permanently locked up are locked out, stripped of the very civil and human rights dr. King and so many others risked their lives for and died for. I think of whose son was killed by a Police Cruiser bearing down her street in los angeles ran over by a girl boy. She received no apology, no real of knowledge meant of her loss and she fell into a deep, deep depression wracked with grief and she ultimately became a tick it to cocaine. Now if she had been wealthy, if she had even been solidly middleclass with a good job and a Good Health Care plan, she undoubtedly would have qualified for many many hours of therapy and counseling. She likely would have qualified for very good legal prescription drugs that would help her cope with her severe depression and grief. But no, things were different for her. Impoverished, living in now a, she became addicted to crackcocaine and thus began her odyssey of wing in and out of prison for 15 years, 15 years. Every time prosecutors said just take the deal. We will give you three years rather than eight. This time we will give you five years rather than 12. This time, this time we will cut you a break. Just take the deal and we will give you two years rather than 10. One plea deal after another, never offered drug treatment, only shown to her prison cell. Every time she was released and pushed out on the streets unable to find work, no housing, often sleeping on the streets, cycling in and out of our prison system for 15 years until by no small miracle she was granted access to a private drug treatment facility. She got clean and was given a job. She decided she was going to dedicate the rest of her life to ensuring that no other woman would have to go through what she went through and she began by going down to skid row in los angeles and meeting women, prisoners as they would get off the prison bus on skid row, get off the bus hearing nothing but a Cardboard Box carrying their belongings with little or no money turned out on the streets. She would say to these women who are strangers to her, just come home with me. You can sleep on my couch. He can sleep on my floor. You dont have to turn to the streets. I will take care of you. Ill give you food and ill give you a safe place. Just come home with me to susan burton now runs five safe homes for women in los angeles when they are released from prison. Her organization is called the new way of life help finding jobs housing and helping to reunite women with their families and beyond that she is organizing formerly incarcerated people to demand the restoration of their basic civil and human rights. Clearly, clearly susan has caught up to king but what about the rest of us . What i have to say on this point the popular. It is not the sunni chervil message that is expected on the day after we an odd. For the second time our nations first black president. But i believe it to be the truth and it implicates me and it implicates everyone in this room , and the truth is this. We have allowed a human rights nightmare to occur on our watch. In the year since dr. Kings death a fast new system of racial and social control has emerged from the ashes of slavery and jim crow, system of mass incarceration at that no doubt has dr. King turning in his grave today. The mass incarceration of poor people of color in the United States is tantamount to a new caste like system on the shuttles are young people from decrepit underfunded schools to brandnew hightech prisons. It is a system that will locks overwhelmingly poor people of color into a permanent secondclass status nearly as effectively as earlier social control. Some idea of the moral equivalent of jim crow. Now i am always eager to admit that there was a time when i rejected this kind of talk out of hand. There was a time when i rejected comparisons between mass incarceration in slavery and mass incarceration and jim crow believing that those kinds of claims and comparisons were exaggerations or distortions or hyperbole. That there was a time when i thought the people who made those kinds of claims and those kinds of comparisons were actually doing more harm than good to reform our criminal Justice System and achieve greater racial equality in the United States. But what a difference a decade makes. For after years of working with those civil rights lawyers and advocates representing victims of racial profiling and Police Brutality and investigating patterns of Drug Law Enforcement in poor communities of color and attempting to assist people live in release from prison, reentered into a society that had never shown much use for them in the first place i had a series of experiences that began what i now call my awakening. It began to awaken to a racial reality that is just so obvious to me now. That what seems odd in retrospect is that i could have been aligned to it for so long. They write in the introduction to my book the new jim crow what has changed since the collapse of jim crowe has less to do the with the basic structure of our society than the language we use to justify it, then the error of colorblindness thats no longer socially permissible to use faith explicitly as a justification for discrimination, exclusion and social contempt. So we dont. Rather than rely on race we use our criminal Justice System to label people of color criminals and then engages all the practices that we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals and nearly all the ways which was once legal to discriminate against africanamericans. Went to her label the fell in the old form of discrimination employment discrimination housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote exclusion from jury service is suddenly legal. The criminal you have scarcely more rights and arguably less respect than a black man living in alabama at the height of jim crow. We have not ended racial caste in america, we have merely redesigned them. Now for those who might think thats overstating the case consider this. There are more africanamerican adults under correctional control today in prison or jail on probation or parole then were enslaved in 1850 a decade before the civil war began. As of 2004, more black men were disenfranchised than in 1870 when the 15th of men was ratified with simply denying the right to vote on the basis of race by the 15th amendment prohibited all laws explicitly denying the right to vote on the basis of race but during the jim crow era poll taxes and literacy tests circumvented the 15th amendment and operated to deny africanamericans a chance to vote. Today in many states disenfranchisement laws of congress would poll taxes and literacy tests ultimately could not. This doesnt affect just some small segment of the Africanamerican Community there to the contrary many large urban areas today more than half of working age africanamerican men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalize discrimination for the rest of their lives. In fact in some cities like chicago, baltimore, philadelphia , the list could go on, in some cities the statistics are far worse. Effective as reported in chicago that if you take into account prisoners, if you actually count prisoner says people and keep in mind that prisoners are excluded from poverty statistics and unemployment data. Thats masking the severity of racial inequality in the United States but if you actually count prisoners as people in the chicago area nearly 80 of working age africanamerican men have criminal records that are subject to legalize discrimination for the rest of their lives. These men are part of the growing caste, not class, caste a group of people defined largely by race relegated to a permanent secondclass status by law. Now i find today when i tell people that i now believe that mass incarceration is like a new jim crow, a new caste like System People react in complete disbelief. They say how can you say that . How can you say that . Are criminal Justice System is of crime control and that lack folks would just stop running around committing so many crimes they would have to move worry about being locked up and stripped of their civil and human rights. Therein lies the greatest myth about mass incarceration namely that is driven by crime and crime rates. Its not true, its just not true. Our prison population quintupled in the space of 30 years. We have gone from a prison population of about 300,000 to an incarcerated population now of over 2 million. We have the highest rate of incarceration in the world and highly repressive regimes like russia or china or iran. Again this cant be explained simply by crime or crime rates. No, no. During that same period of time that are incarceration rates increased exponentially crime rates fluctuated, went up come way down went back up again and went down again and today as bad as crime rates are in many parts of the country nastily crime rates are at historical lows. But incarceration rates have consistently soared. Most criminologists and sociologists will acknowledge that crime rates in incarceration rates in the United States have moved independently of one another. Incarceration rates especially black incarceration rates have soared regardless of when the crime is going up or down in any Given Community or the nation as a whole. So what explains the sudden explosion in inca