Delaney Tarr: 'Because we are coming after you', address to lawmakers - 2018

28 February 2018, Tallahassee, Florida, USA

This movement, this movement created by students, led by students is based in emotion. It is based in passion and it is based in pain...

The only reason that we’ve gotten so far is because we are not afraid of losing money. We are not afraid of getting re-elected or not getting re-elected. We have nothing to lose. The only thing we have to gain at this point is our safety…

I am not a “crisis actor”—I am not going of these pre-written speeches given to me by another person...

We are not here to be patted on the back. We are not here to be told we are doing so much because we know what we’re doing and we’re doing it for a reason. We’re doing it so our legislators, so that our lawmakers will make a change, so that they will take us seriously, so that they will not dismiss us any longer, so they won’t reschedule, so they won’t push us in another room as they dance around our questions. Because we came here prepared and we’re going to come to every single meeting with every single legislator—prepared. We know what we want. We want gun reform. We want common sense gun laws. We want stronger mental health checks and background checks to work in conjunction. We want a better age limit. We want privatized selling to be completely reformed so that you can’t just walk into a building with $130 and work out with an AR-15...

We want change and we know how to get that change...We’re going to keep moving forward because we don’t have a choice.

The people in office have failed us and if they continue to fail us, then they will no longer be in office because we will soon be given the ability to vote—and we will vote them out. And the people around us will vote them out. They must do right by us or they will lose their jobs. And we have brought that up to them time and time again...

We’ve had enough of ‘thoughts and prayers.’ We’ve had enough of ‘We’re in your consideration, we’re going think about it, and we’re going to tell you how we feel because we support you so much.’ Because we know that is not true. Because if you supported us, you would have made a change long ago and you would be making changes now...

So this is to every lawmaker out there. No longer can you take money from the NRA. No longer can you fly under the radar doing whatever it is that you want to do. Because we are coming after you. We are coming after every single one of you and we are demanding that you take action and demanding that you make a change. Thank you.

J.B. Priestley: 'We've known them and laughed at them, these fussy little steamers', broadcast after Dunkirk - 1940

5 June 1940, BBC radio broadcast, London, United Kingdom

Here at Dunkirk is another English epic. And to my mind what was most characteristically English about it - so typical of us, so absurd and yet so grand and gallant that you hardly know whether to laugh or cry when you read about them - was the part played in the difficult and dangerous embarkation - not by the warships magnificent though they were - but by the little pleasure steamers. We've known them and laughed at them, these fussy little steamers, all of our lives. We have called them 'the shilling sicks'. We have watched them load and unload their crowds of holiday passengers - the gents full of high spirits and bottled beer, the ladies eating pork pies, the children sticky with peppermint rock. Sometimes they only went as far as the
next seaside resort. But the boldest of them might manage a Channel crossing to let everybody have a glimpse of Bologne. They were usually paddle steamers, making a great deal more fuss with all their churning than they made speed; and they were not proud for they let you see their works going round.

They liked to call themselves 'Queens' and 'Belles'; and even if they were new, there was always something old-fashioned, a Dickens touch, a mid-Victorian air about them. They seemed to belong to the same ridiculous holiday world as pierrots and piers, sand castle ham-
and-egg teas, palmists, automatic machines, and crowded, sweating promenades. But they were called out of that world - and let it be noted they were called out in good time and good order. Yes, these 'Brighton Belles' and 'Brighton Queens' left that innocent foolish world of theirs - to sail into the inferno, to defy bombs, shells, magnetic mines, torpedoes, machine-gun-fire - to rescue our soldiers.

Some of them, alas, will never return. Among those paddle steamers that will never return was one that I knew well, for it was the pride of our ferry service to the Isle of Wight, none other than the good ship 'Gracie Fields'. I tell you, we were proud of the 'Gracie Fields', for she was the glittering queen of our local line, and instead of taking an hour over her voyage, used to do it, churning like mad, in forty five minutes. And now never again will we board her at Cowes and go down into her dining saloon for a fine breakfast of bacon and eggs. She has paddled and churned away - for ever. But now - look - this little steamer,like all her brave and battered
sisters is immortal. She'll go sailing proudly down the years in the epic of Dunkirk.

And our grandchildren, when they learn how we began this War by snatching glory out of defeat, and then swept on to victory, may also learn how the little holiday steamers made an excursion to hell and came back glorious.

Fred Rogers (aka Mr Rogers): 'I give an expression of care every day to each child', US Senate Commerce Committee - 1969

1 May 1969, Congress, Washington DC, USA

President Nixon was proposing to decimate funding for PBS and public television and Mr Rogers, who became a media legend over the decades that followed, pleaded for funding to be maintained.

Senator Pastore: Alright Rogers, you've got the floor.

Mr. Rogers: Senator Pastore, this is a philosophical statement and would take about ten minutes to read, so I'll not do that. One of the first things that a child learns in a healthy family is trust, and I trust what you have said that you will read this. It's very important to me. I care deeply about children.

Senator Pastore: Will it make you happy if you read it?

Mr. Rogers: I'd just like to talk about it, if it's alright. My first children's program was on WQED fifteen years ago, and its budget was $30. Now, with the help of the Sears-Roebuck Foundation and National Educational Television, as well as all of the affiliated stations -- each station pays to show our program. It's a unique kind of funding in educational television. With this help, now our program has a budget of $6000. It may sound like quite a difference, but $6000 pays for less than two minutes of cartoons. Two minutes of animated, what I sometimes say, bombardment. I'm very much concerned, as I know you are, about what's being delivered to our children in this country. And I've worked in the field of child development for six years now, trying to understand the inner needs of children. We deal with such things as -- as the inner drama of childhood. We don't have to bop somebody over the head to...make drama on the screen. We deal with such things as getting a haircut, or the feelings about brothers and sisters, and the kind of anger that arises in simple family situations. And we speak to it constructively.

Senator Pastore: How long of a program is it?

Mr. Rogers: It's a half hour every day. Most channels schedule it in the noontime as well as in the evening. WETA here has scheduled it in the late afternoon.

Senator Pastore: Could we get a copy of this so that we can see it? Maybe not today, but I'd like to see the program.

Mr. Rogers: I'd like very much for you to see it.

Senator Pastore: I'd like to see the program itself, or any one of them.

Mr. Rogers: We made a hundred programs for EEN, the Eastern Educational Network, and then when the money ran out, people in Boston and Pittsburgh and Chicago all came to the fore and said we've got to have more of this neighborhood expression of care. And this is what -- This is what I give. I give an expression of care every day to each child, to help him realize that he is unique. I end the program by saying, "You've made this day a special day, by just your being you. There's no person in the whole world like you, and I like you, just the way you are." And I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health. I think that it's much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger -- much more dramatic than showing something of gunfire. I'm constantly concerned about what our children are seeing, and for 15 years I have tried in this country and Canada, to present what I feel is a meaningful expression of care.

Senator Pastore: Do you narrate it?

Mr. Rogers: I'm the host, yes. And I do all the puppets and I write all the music, and I write all the scripts --

Senator Pastore: Well, I'm supposed to be a pretty tough guy, and this is the first time I've had goose bumps for the last two days.

Mr. Rogers: Well, I'm grateful, not only for your goose bumps, but for your interest in -- in our kind of communication. Could I tell you the words of one of the songs, which I feel is very important?

Senator Pastore: Yes.

Mr. Rogers: This has to do with that good feeling of control which I feel that children need to know is there. And it starts out, "What do you do with the mad that you feel?" And that first line came straight from a child. I work with children doing puppets in -- in very personal communication with small groups:

What do you do with the mad that you feel? When you feel so mad you could bite. When the whole wide world seems oh so wrong, and nothing you do seems very right. What do you do? Do you punch a bag? Do you pound some clay or some dough? Do you round up friends for a game of tag or see how fast you go? It's great to be able to stop when you've planned the thing that's wrong. And be able to do something else instead -- and think this song --

'I can stop when I want to. Can stop when I wish. Can stop, stop, stop anytime....And what a good feeling to feel like this! And know that the feeling is really mine. Know that there's something deep inside that helps us become what we can. For a girl can be someday a lady, and a boy can be someday a man.'

Senator Pastore: I think it's wonderful. I think it's wonderful. Looks like you just earned the 20 million dollars.

Andrew Pollack: 'We, as a country failed our children', guns discussion with President Trump, post Parkland School Shooting - 2018

22 February 2018, White House, Washington DC, USA

We’re here because my daughter has no voice. She was murdered last week, and she was taken from us. Shot nine times on the third floor.

We, as a country, failed our children. This shouldn’t happen. We go to the airport — I can’t get on a plane with a bottle of water. But we leave it — some animal can walk into a school and shoot our children. It’s just not right, and we need to come together as a country and work on what’s important, and that’s protecting our children in the schools. That’s the only thing that matters right now. Everyone has to come together and not think about different laws. We need to come together, as a country — not different parties — and figure out how we protect the schools. It’s simple. It’s not difficult.

We protect airports. We protect concerts, stadiums, embassies, the Department of Education that I walked in today that has a security guard in the elevator. How do you think that makes me feel? In the elevator, they got a security guard.

I’m very angry that this happened, because it keeps happening. 9/11 happened once, and they fixed everything. How many schools, how many children have to get shot? It stops here with this administration and me. I’m not going to sleep until it’s fixed.

And, Mr. President, we’re going to fix it, because I’m going to fix it. I’m not going to rest. And look it, my boys need to live with this. I want to see everyone — you guys look at this. Me, I’m a man, but to see your children go through this, bury their sister.

So that’s why I’m keep saying this, because I want it to sink in, not forget about this. We can’t forget about it. All these school shootings, it doesn’t make sense. Fix it. It should have been one school shooting, and we should have fixed it. And I’m pissed, because my daughter I’m not going to see again. She’s not here. She’s not here. She’s in North Lauderdale, at — whatever it is — King David Cemetery. That’s where I go to see my kid now. And it stops if we all work together and come up with the right idea. And it’s school safety. It’s not about gun laws right now; that’s another fight, another battle. Let’s fix the schools, and then you guys can battle it out, whatever you want.

But we need our children safe. Monday, tomorrow, whatever day it is, your kids are going to go to school. You think everyone’s kids are safe? I didn’t think it was going to happen to me. If I knew that, I would have been at the school every day if I knew it was that dangerous.

It’s enough. Let’s get together and work with the president and fix the schools. That’s it.  No other discussions. Security, whatever we have to do — get the right people, the consultants. These are our commodities. I’m never going to see my kid again. I want you all to know that. Never, ever will I see my kid. That’s how — I want it to sink in. It’s eternity. My beautiful daughter, I’m never going to see again.

And it’s simple. It’s not — we could fix — this is my son Huck, who has to deal with this too. You have something to say, son?

Samuel Getachew: 'When did America fall so in love with the sound of gunshots?', Fourth of July poem, “Arms” - 2018

Dear @realDonaldTrump,

"When did America fall so in love with the sounds of gunshots?"

-Samuel G., 15 years old #PresidentsDay2018 pic.twitter.com/WUnxa45HJx

— EighteenX18 (@EighteenX18) February 19, 2018

19 Februrary 2018 (uploaded to Twitter @EighteenX18) USA

This amazing 15 year old poet is Samuel Getachew. He is on Twitter @samuel_sgd

After Philando Castilles murderer was acquitted of all charges, I thought a lot about how he told officers he was permitted to carry a handgun

I thought a lot about the second amendment, how it doesn’t seem to apply to everyone

How a black man with a gun is a threat

But a white man with a gun is a patriot.

Or how a black child playing with a toy gun in a park is thug

But a white man with an AK47 strapped to his belt in a grocery store is a patriot

 Or how a black woman firing a warning shot to her abuser is a danger to society

But a white man with a gun showing up to the memorial  of a victim of police brutality is a patriot

Or how a black child with some skittles is one of those asssholes that always gets away.

But a white man with a gun following a 17 year old around in his gated community is still a patriot

Still has the right to stand his ground

And I think that too often we forget that Trayvon Martin wasn’t killed by the police,

Just by a white man with a gun on neighbourhood watch who fancied himself God for the evening

Thought he’d decide who lived, and who died that day

I find it fascinating

How the right to bear arms comes second only to free speech, but is eleven amendments above outlawing slavery.

I wonder when we got our priorities so out of order.

And as I sat at home on the Fourth of July

And listened to the sound of fireworks go on for hours.

I wondered to myself.

When did America fall so in love with the sound of gunshots?

That she wanted to hear them on her birthday.

Billy Graham: 'A Christian is a person who has made a personal connection with Jesus Christ', The Full Christian Life, Madison Sqaure Garden - 1957

August 1957, Madison Square Garden, New York City, New York, USA

This transcript is similar in many respects but does not match famous footage above. It was delivered as part of the same series of sermons on 21 October 1958 in Charlotte.

Tonight I want to talk on "How To Live The Christian Life." I want you to turn with me to Acts, the 11th chapter, and the 26th verse, the latter part of it: "And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch."

The word "Christians" was given to the early disciples as a name in derision, which was "Christ's ones," "Christ-followers," "Christ-ites." I remember when Dr. Ham was here in Charlotte a few years ago, about twenty-some years ago, they called the people who went to his meetings "Ham-ites." I do not know what they will call the people who come to our meetings; maybe they will be "Graham crackers." But that was the type of title that was given to the early church.

Dr. Kenneth Goodman[?], pastor of the Methodist church, is with us. He has been in Chicago, and he will tell you that the word "Methodist" was given as a name in derision to the early people two hundred years ago who were meeting in England during and after the ministry of John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield. They were called Methodists; that is, they had a special method in Bible study and in prayer and in meeting together. Little groups all over England began to meet together, and that was the beginning of the great Methodist church.

So the early disciples also had a name. They had a tag, and their tag was "Christian." They were Christ's followers, followers of Christ. Tonight I think most of us here know how to become a Christian. You know that to become a Christian, an encounter with Christ must take place, but so many do not know how to live the Christian life.

There was a girl who heard one of Beethoven's sonatas. She had a strong desire to learn to play. She had real latent musical talent, but she didn't practice her piano. She never struggled with the five-finger exercises and scales, and years later her neighbors had to listen to her murder Beethoven. Now she wanted to play Beethoven, she wanted to be a musician; but she was not willing to practice.

Now just to want to live the Christian life is not enough. You must learn how to live the Christian life. Attention must be given to the methods, the techniques, and the practice. We have been urged to live the Christian life, but sometimes we have not been told how to live the Christian life. We have not been told the means, the methods, and the words.

Now, first of all, what is a Christian? What does it mean to be a Christian? Is it a person who is born in a Christian home? No. I could be born in a garage, but that does not make me an automobile. You can be born in a Christian home and have fine Christian parents, but that does not make you a Christian. You cannot inherit Christianity.

You say, "Well, Billy, a person who lives by the Golden Rule--isn't that a Christian?" Not necessarily. A Christian is a person in whom Christ dwells. Now I know people in the Buddhist religion who live just as high an ethical life as the average Christian. In fact, Buddha had a very high system of ethics. A Christian is more than a person who is living up to a system of ethics. A Christian is a person more than living a good moral life. A Christian is a person in whom Christ dwells. A Christian is a person who has had an encounter with the living Christ.

Three things must have taken place for you to become a Christian. First, you have made a choice. You have chosen to give your life to Christ rather than to self. You are serving Christ rather than self. Self no longer controls your life, but Christ controls your life. That is a choice which you deliberately made. It was a volitional choice. You were convicted by the Holy Spirit of sin. You recognized that you were a sinner. You came to Christ and said, "I am going to trust the Christ who died on the cross for my sins. I am going to trust Him for my salvation." You made a deliberate choice. You chose Christ instead of the world. You chose light instead of darkness. You chose righteousness instead of sin. You chose Christ instead of self. And Christ, by the Holy Spirit, now lives in your life.

Now that was a choice you made. It might have been an unconscious choice, or it might have been a dramatic choice such as the apostle Paul made on the road to Damascus [see Acts 9:1-18]. Perhaps it was a moment when you woke up in a cold sweat, you recognized that you were a sinner, you got on your knees and called upon God in your room to have mercy upon you. It might have been at a meeting like this that you came to Christ. It might have been when you were reading a book sometime; and you stopped and said, "I need to give my life to Christ." Whenever and under whatever conditions it came, be sure that it has come, because to be a Christian means that you make a choice.

Secondly, a change must take place in the way you live. "Old things . . . [pass] away; behold, all things . . . become new" [2 Corinthians 5:17]. When you give your life to Christ, you change your way of living. You cannot live the same old life. You cannot go on being controlled by the lusts and desires of this life. You cannot go on living for the flesh. You cannot go on living for the world. You cannot go on letting materialism and secularism control your thinking and your way of living. You now live for Christ. You now live in the fellowship of the church.

Christ is uppermost in your thinking. You are spending time in prayer. You are reading your Bible faithfully. You are witnessing for Christ in every way you know. You are gracious and courteous and kind and, above all, you love your neighbor as yourself. That is the fulfillment of the whole law--to love God with all our hearts, and our neighbors as ourselves. [See Matthew 22:36-40 and Romans 13:9,10.]

Thirdly, you have accepted Christ's challenge. Christ said, "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, . . . take up his cross, and follow me" [Matthew 16:24]. Christ said, "If you are going to follow me, you have to go back to your business, back to your office, back to the high school campus, back to your home, and take your stand with me no matter what it costs." They may laugh, they may sneer, they may not understand. You may stand out like a sore thumb. But you absolutely refuse to cheat, to lie, to be immoral, even if it costs you your life.

I talked to a man in San Francisco a few weeks ago. And he said, "Billy, I'm an outstanding businessman in this city. If I give my life to Christ, I'll have to go to the penitentiary. Because," he said, "I'll have to confess the things which I have done wrong. I'll have to make restitution." I said, "All right, you've got to choose. You've got to accept the challenge of Christ, no matter what it costs." It costs something. You have to turn loose from those things that are wrong in your life. He will help you tomorrow morning when you go to face the old gang. Yes, a choice must be made. And I want to ask you tonight, have you made that choice? Has a change taken place in your life? Have you accepted Christ's challenge to follow Him, no matter what it costs?

Well, how do we live the Christian life? Paderewski one day said, "If I am inactive in my practicing one day, I notice it. If I am inactive two days, my family notices it. And if I am inactive three days, the public notices it."

Now the Christian life is just not being saved from hell. It is just not redemption and forgiveness--that certainly is essential, and that is a part of it--but the Christian life is a way of life. It is a way of living here and now. It is a new way, a revolutionary way, a dynamic way; life with a new dimension, life with a thrill and a joy.

Your conscience is free, your sins are forgiven. There is the assurance that if you die you will go to heaven. But there is also a challenge, a flag to follow, a master, a controller, a way of life that is brand-new. That is the Christian life, but the average Christian I know today is making a miserable failure of the Christian life. You are up one day, down the next. One day you are on top of the world; the next day you are down in the dumps. The devil has got you down, and some of you are down all the time. You have failed so miserably in your Christian life that you now think it is the normal Christian experience. Don't you?

You get up on a Sunday morning, and you have so little spiritual strength that you can hardly make it to church. Now if it were a movie, you would be right there. If it were a football game, I don't care how it rains or snows, you would be right there. But let a little bad weather come up, and you can hardly make it to church. The devil has you defeated, discouraged, and despondent. And you think that is the Christian life. You have an idea that you are living the normal Christian life, if that is the way you are living.

The Christian life is a life of fruit-bearing [see John 15:8]. The Holy Spirit gives us supernatural power to bear supernatural fruit. "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering," etc. [see Galatians 5:22,23]. The Christian should be bearing fruit. Jesus said, "By their fruits ye shall know them" [Matthew 7:20].

If I see a man who cannot forgive his brother, who resents something against him, and holds grudges and malice, I know that man is not bearing the fruit of the Spirit. Because with the fruit of the Spirit we are to forgive, we are to love.

If I see a man who has prejudice, I know that he is not bearing the fruit of the Spirit. If I see a man who does not have peace in his soul, who is tense and nervous, who cannot trust God for anything, worried all the time, that man is not bearing the fruit of the Spirit. If I see a man who has no joy, with nothing of the joy of the Lord springing up in his soul, I know that he is not bearing fruit. He is not living the Christian life, because the Christian life is to be one of fruit-bearing. And the fruit is love and peace and joy and patience, longsuffering.

We are to be patient. Maybe your wife does come down in the morning with her hair up in those pins, or whatever they are; and you get impatient. I don't blame you, but you are to be patient. Abe Lincoln once said, "I have learned to accept the faults of my friends." We are to be patient with the frailties and weakness of others because we ourselves are so imperfect.

The first thing in living the Christian life is to learn the secret of prayer. I am going to spend the whole evening on this subject tomorrow evening. The disciples came to Christ and said what? "Teach us to"--what?--"pray!" "Teach us to pray" [see Luke 11:1].

Now you have to learn to pray. Did you know that? You have to learn how to walk. We learn how to ride a bicycle. You have to learn to pray. We learn from Christ and from the Holy Spirit within us. Romans 8:26, "Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession[s] for us with groanings which cannot be uttered."

I do not believe that anyone can live the Christian life without first and foremost spending time every day in prayer. If you don't spend some time each day in prayer, the rest of the day will be wrong. The decisions of the day will be wrong, business will go wrong, everything will go wrong.

I wonder how long it has been since you have spent half an hour in prayer. You say, "Well, Billy, I wouldn't know what to say to the Lord for a half hour." All right, you pray for fifteen minutes, and then listen to God for fifteen minutes. Spend time in prayer. And, listen, you will never have a successful prayer life unless you have a definite time and place.

Some people say, "Well, I only pray when I feel like it." When you say that you don't feel like praying, that is when you need to pray the most, and no praying is a matter of the will. Even if you don't feel like it, it is good to close your door and then you pray to God. You can pray all day long. As the Bible says, "Praying without ceasing" [see 1 Thessalonians 5:17]. As Frank Laubach said, "Send little dart prayers to the Lord."

You say you don't know how to pray, especially to avoid vain repetition. You can begin to read the Scripture and you will come to a part that speaks to you; and you say, "O Lord," and you find yourself praying. You can use the Psalms. You can read five Psalms a day, and that will take you through the book of Psalms every month. You can read one chapter of Proverbs a day, and that will take you through Proverbs once a month. Proverbs teaches you how to get along with your fellowman, and the book of Psalms teaches you how to get along with God. The book of Psalms teaches you how to worship God. Read five Psalms, one chapter of Proverbs. You read them through every month and after awhile they begin to saturate you and fill you, and it becomes exciting and thrilling. You find yourself praying.

I take a Psalm, like the 37th Psalm, and get on my knees and pray it out loud. Just read it out loud. That will help you to pray. Then you can take a hymnbook. Take some of the great hymns and read them as prayers, because many of them were actually prayers. Or take a book of prayer where prayers are written out. It will help you to pray. It will express the inward needs of your heart. There are many ways of prayer. You have praise, thanksgiving, confession, intercession, and petition.

Suppose tonight you give your life to Christ. All right, at first you will not know how to pray. You might be like my little baby. My little baby is now seven months old, and he is just beginning to say "Mama." And he says "Mama" more than he does "Dada," and I don't like it. I tried to teach him all morning how to say "Dada." He can't say it. He doesn't see enough of me to know that he has a daddy, I guess. But we are so thrilled that he can say "Mama." But if, twenty years from now, he were looking at his mother and saying "Mama," we would take him to a doctor. There are a lot of you that are twenty years old in the Lord. You have been a Christian for twenty years, and you are still saying "Dada." You go to a prayer meeting, and the minister asks everyone to say a verse around. And they come to John 3:16 and somebody says it, and the next person says, "Oh, they have got my verse." That is all you have learned. You are still a child. You are still a baby. You haven't learned to pray.

Like the little boy. He prayed to the Lord and then he said, "That's all for tonight, Lord. Here are the headlines again." And he gave a little brief summary of what he had said.

Then the second thing is reading the Bible. Read the Scriptures every day. Now we don't worship the Bible. We don't take the Bible as a fetish and worship it. We worship the God of the Bible, the Christ of the Bible. The Bible is God's inspired holy Word. God has spoken through His Word, so we read it. And Job said, "I have esteemed the words of his mouth more than [any] necessary food" [23:12]. Do you esteem the words of God more than your necessary food? I do not believe that anybody can be a successful Christian who is not daily reading and studying the Bible. Start, maybe, with the gospel of John. Read it four or five times through. Then when you come to a part of the Bible that you especially like, take your pen or your red pencil and mark under it. Then if you have a question, put a question mark there and read that over and over and try to understand. Get a little Bible commentary to help. Go ask your minister what it means, until you know the book of John, until you know every chapter in it. Why, you lawyers, if you didn't know a case any better than you know the Bible, you would flop every time you went in the courtroom. If you doctors sitting here tonight didn't know any more about medicine and surgery than you know about the Bible, what would happen? Suppose a doctor would go in to perform an operation on me; and he would say, "Now, let's see. Well, I don't know which one of these tools here to use." Well, I would jump off the operating table.

I suggest you get a modern translation. There is a very good one you can get down at the bookstore now, a brand-new one. It's called The Amplified New Testament. I like it better than any. Because, you see, the New Testament was written originally in Greek; and what we have in the King James is a 300-year-old translation in a language we no longer speak. Get a modern translation. You can get Phillips now in a whole book. Study the Scriptures. Read the Scriptures.

"Thy word have I hid in [my] heart, that I might not sin against thee" [Psalm 119:11]. Memorize the passages in the Bible. Take one verse, and here is all you can remember. You can only memorize--even the smartest people that I have ever met--not more than two or three verses a week. Because, you see, anyone can memorize a chapter and say it, but then they forget it a month later. To be truly memorizing, you must memorize it so you can remember it ten years from now.

With everyone who comes forward to receive Christ, we start them on a little Scripture memory program. Because we believe that if we can get a few Scriptures hidden in our hearts, it helps us in living the Christian life. You cannot live it without studying and reading the Bible. Make the Bible central. You should have family devotions in your home where you read a passage of Scripture. You ought to look forward to your Bible reading just like you do the television, or just like you do the newspaper.

Thirdly, have a disciplined life. Jesus taught that to live the Christian life takes discipline, renunciation, and sometimes hardship. There are a number of verbs in the Bible that are used to describe the Christian life. We are told that we are to "fight" [1 Timothy 6:12], "wrestle" [Ephesians 6:12]. We are to "run" [Hebrews 12:1], we are to "work" [Philippians 2:12], we are to "suffer" [1 Timothy 4:10], we are to "resist" [James 4:7], we are to agonize, we are to "put to death" [Galatians 5:24, TEV]. All of these are verbs regarding the Christian life, and we must work at it.

When you got married, you courted your wife awhile and then you one day popped the question to her, "Will you marry me?" She said, "Yes." But you are still not married, are you? The marriage ceremony must take place. Some of you have decided here tonight that you want to be a Christian, that you want to live the Christian life. You have decided that. You have been proposed to by Christ. He is the heavenly Bridegroom; you are the bride-to-be. He says, "Will you be mine?" You say, "Well, I would like to be. I think I will." Then comes the day when you get married. That is done publicly before some witnesses. And when you stand there together to get married, the minister asks, "Will you have this man to be your husband?" You don't stand there and say, "Well, I like him. He's a fine man." You can say, "Well, I love him." That's not enough. You've got to say, "I do," publicly. After you say, "I do," why, listen, that's just the beginning.

I have an uncle here tonight, Uncle Tom Black. I remember three days before I was to get married he came over to my house and said, "Billy, have you really thought about this business of getting married?" I had. "Yes, sir, Uncle Tom, I have." He said, "Well, you know, it is going to make a lot of changes in your life." By the time he finished, I was not so sure whether I wanted to get married or not. I began to realize for the first time that after I said, "I do," that was only the beginning.

Those of you who come forward to give your life to Christ--that is only the beginning. It is a lifetime of problems, troubles, and difficulties. But you are meeting them with the help of Christ and the Holy Spirit who lives in your heart. It takes discipline. Any marriage that is successful takes much. It takes give-and-take. You have to work at it. You have to face your problems realistically.

And so it is in the Christian life. You have to discipline yourself. We are to discipline our minds so that we keep our minds on Christ, and Christ is first in our thinking. "Thou [will] keep him in perfect peace, whose mind [has] stayed on thee" [Isaiah 26:3]. "Whatsoever things are true, honest, just, pure, of good report, think on these things" [see Philippians 4:8]. Our mind is not to be wandering around and thinking about something else. Our mind, our subconsciousness, is to be on Christ. That takes discipline.

Then our tongue--this little bit of muscle in our mouth that causes so much trouble, that splits churches, and divides homes, and ruins lives, and damns characters, and slanders people--these tongues now are to be disciplined. We speak only that which blesses. We never talk about our friends behind their backs. The Bible says that "every idle word that [they] shall speak, they shall give [an] account thereof in the day of judgment" [Matthew 12:36]. "Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth" [Psalm 141:3]. Our tongues are now to be under the control of the Holy Spirit.

Then we are to redeem the time, the Bible says [see Ephesians 5:16]. In other words, plan each day; because, you see, these little minutes that God gives you are actually little diamonds. They are little jewels. Suppose tonight you had a carat diamond. Would you pay as little attention to a full carat diamond as you pay to the minutes that are passing in your life that can never be recalled? Now you take this day, this October day, 1958. You have lived it, and you can never repeat it. If I were you, when you get up in the morning, I would plan this day very carefully because every day and every moment will be called into account. I would budget my time. I would discipline my time. I would certainly put down time for Bible reading and prayer, and witnessing for Christ and church work.

Then our bodies. The Bible says the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you [see 1 Corinthians 3:16]. Our Lord said, "Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth" [Matthew 5:5]. What does a "meek" man mean? A meek man is not a little, dried-up effeminate fellow talking in a high-pitched voice with soft hands. Here is a meek man: The word "meek" carries with it the idea of a wild horse; and those who break a wild horse. In other words, here is a man filled with tremendous potential abilities which are in the wrong direction. I take him and train him and discipline him, and he takes all of his energy and all of his power and uses it for the glory of God.

That is especially true of young people in the realm of strength. Let me say to you, young people, that if you are not willing to live a clean, wholesome, Christian life in the realm of sex, then everything else I tell you might as well be forgotten. As Dr. Stanley Jones said, if you lose the sex battle, you've lost the battle of life. Because, you see, sex is a tremendous energy that God gives to every man and woman. And when that is dedicated to Jesus Christ, it becomes a mighty power and a mighty dynamo within you to live the Christian life.

I am convinced that a dynamic Christian life cannot be lived unless there is self-control within and without marriage at this point. If you are unfaithful--and I want to tell you something. I have received more letters in the city of Charlotte about this sin than any city that I've ever been to, except New York City. I believe that this is one of the greatest sins that is seething underneath this city. Unless you are willing to come out from among that sort of thing and live a clean life under God, it is doubtful if you can be a Christian, much less try to live the Christian life. He will help you and give you strength and power when you face the temptations of everyday life.

Discipline your body. Don't take narcotics into your body unless by a doctor's prescription for illness. Don't take alcohol into your body. That damns your body, ruins your testimony. If, on a business occasion, you go to a cocktail party, go, take tomato juice, orange juice. They will respect you.

I know a man in New York City that has become president of one of the biggest corporations in this country. He has got an office right here in Charlotte. And he got his job because the board of that company chose him since, when he went to a cocktail party, he always drank orange juice. They said, "We drink, but that is the kind of man we want as president of our company."

Live a clean life. Even your business associates secretly will admire you and wish they had the strength and ability to do what you are doing. And you can't do it with your own strength, but Christ can do it through you, and in you, through the Holy Spirit that lives within.

Fifth, get into the church. I do not believe in Robinson Crusoe Christian fellowship. And Christian fellowship is not optional; Christian fellowship is essential. Christ said that He was the vine and that we are the branches [see John 15:5]. He said that we are living stones built together [see 1 Peter 2:5], members of the body of Christ knit together [see 1 Corinthians 12:12]. The Bible says all of us are important in the church.

You may think that you are totally unimportant, but the Bible likens us as to members of the body. Some of us are an eye, some a toe, some a finger, some a hand, some are noses, some are ears. Why, even my fingernails are essential. I bite them off sometimes, but they are essential. That is the reason the Scripture teaches that when even the least member of the body of Christ is hurt, it hurts the whole body. Christ is the head; we are the body. [See 1 Corinthians 12:14-27.]

Do you know one of the great problems here in Charlotte? We have thousands of people who have moved here from other sections of the country, and they are not affiliated with a church yet. You have left your church membership somewhere else, and you have little or no church responsibility. That is the reason our homes are breaking up, and that is the reason we have so much trouble. Get into the church! Center your life in the church.

You say, "Well, Billy, I look around at the church and there are so many hypocrites in the church. The church is this, the church is that. And I don't like this church, and I don't like that church." Listen, you will never find a perfect church. I have seen one group come out from another group and say, "We have the perfect church." It is not long before they are split up, and they are going over there to form another "perfect" church.

Many preachers have quit preaching the Gospel altogether and have become theological bloodhounds, going around sniffing the trail of other Christians to see if they can detect any error here, there, or anywhere. That's not God's way. Get into the church and witness for Christ within and through the church. Express yourself in the church. And, oh, how wonderful it is to come together on that glorious morning when communion is taken--the most precious, meaningful hour of the week when Christians gather at the table of the Lord--and tell the Lord once again, "We love you." There is the peak of Christian worship. The peak of expression is not an evangelistic campaign like this; it is the moment of communion when we gather round the table of the Lord and express our love to Him. We take of the juice, or the wine, and we remember His blood that was shed for us on the cross. We partake of the bread, and we remember the body that was broken for us, and we worship Him. That is the moment when He is closest.

I want to ask you tonight: Are you living the Christian life? Are you living a victorious, happy Christian life? You can't do it by yourself. You can't do it with your own strength. You can only do it as the Holy Spirit fills you. And that is the reason why the apostle Paul said, "Be ye filled of the Holy Spirit" [see Ephesians 5:18]. Are you filled with the Spirit tonight? Are you filled to overflowing?

We need to remember that we cannot live the Christian life without His power and presence within us. We must give Him His rightful place, and He must fill us and control us to overflowing. Are you living the Christian life?

I want to ask you, however, are you sure that you have really met Christ? There are thousands of people in the church who, in my opinion, have never really encountered Christ. You have never really started living the Christian life. I am going to ask you to begin tonight. Start following Him and serving Him, and witnessing for Him. I am going to ask you to do that by getting up out of your seats and coming and standing here quietly. And this is the moment you come to Christ and say, "I do."

Alfonso Calderon: 'We will not be discouraged. We will not falter. We will not stop this movement', Testimony to Florida lawmakers about gun reform - 2018

21 February 2018, Tallahassee, Florida, USA

First and foremost, I''d just like to thank everybody for giving us this platform. And Senator Rayder, from Parkland, who came here.

If there's one thing I want everyone to remember here today about this, is we're just kids! I know myself, I'm only sixteen, I'm a junior in high school. Most of my worries are, what show am I going to watch at 6pm, when do I do my homework, how do I fit in rehearsals for theatre.

I know for my other colleagues it's sports, or maybe film

But everybody needs to remember, we are just children.

A lot of people think that that disqualifies us from even having an opinion on this sort of matter. As if because we've been through a traumatic experience, that we don't know what we're talking about that we're speaking irrationally.

And I want everyone to remember, that is not the case. We, more than anybody else, understand the violence that comes through certain guns. We more than anybody else understand what it feels like to lose somebody. We more than anybody else understand what if's like to have a beautiful community like Parkland, and have it taken away from us by the media, and by everybody else, and by Nikolas Cruz, who just ruined its image.

Parkland is a beautiful, safe town. And it's now ruined.

I know personally, I'm going to live there for a pretty long time, and it's not going to be the same. It's always going to be, 'oh, I'm so sorry to hear that you're from Parkland'.

I want everybody to remember, we are just kids. I'm sorry, it's difficult to talk about this sort of thing, because not even more than a week ago, I was worried about a math test, I was worries about having a school show for he children in the elementary school, just a road down.

The way people today have greeted us, or not greeted us, is acknowledged by Ryan.

We aren't being taken seriously enough. Now I personally don't know the steps that we're going to havewe're going to take, but once we figure that out, we're going to take them, and you better believe, we're gong to take them as soon as possible.

Because, although we are just kids, we understand.

We know. We are old enough to understand financial responsibilities. We’re old enough to understand why a senator cares about reelection or not. We are old enough to understand why someone might want to discredit us for their own political purposes, but we will not be silenced.

It has gone on long enough that we… Just because we are kids, we are not allowed to understand.

But trust me, I understand.

I was in a closet, locked, for four hours with people who I would consider almost family, crying and weeping on me, begging for their lives. I understand what it’s like to text my parents, “Good-bye. I might never, ever get to see you again. I love you.” I understand what it’s like to fear for your life, and I don’t think we should ever be discredited because of that.

I don’t think we should ever be silenced because we are just children.

I feel that that is powerful, and it is one of the only reasons this movement is where it is right now. I am extremely, extremely angry and sad. And I don’t know if I’m going to be traumatized because of this. I don’t know if I’m gonna have faith in my state and local government anymore, because what I saw today was discouraging. But I want everybody here today to know we will not be discouraged. We will not falter. We will not stop this movement, because this is more than just us.

This is everybody in America. This is for every single kid who fears for their life. This is more than Parkland. This is more than Florida. This is more than the United States. This is something serious. This is about human lives. Please, I beg, and I demand that every single person in power who has the ability to change the fear that kids feel going back to school, that they do something.

Because I want everybody to know: I’m supposed to be going back to school — back to school in less than a week, and I’m not ready. I don’t think anybody here is ready. I don’t think anybody here is ready to go back to class and just have an empty seat, and you know that that empty seat is because — ’cause someone’s — 'cause someone’s dead, because somebody lost their lives. And I don’t know how I’m gonna cope with it. I’ve spoken to grief counselors, but grief counselors can only do so much. What we need is action. And we need it now, more than ever, because people are losing their lives, and it is still not being taken seriously.

I don’t know what it’s gonna take. I don’t know what it’s gonna take to get some people to realize, this is more than just reelections. This is more than just political gain. This is more than conspiracy theories and people trying to disqualify us from even having an opinion.

This matters to me more than anything else in my entire life, and I want everybody to know: I personally, I’m prepared to drop out of school. I am prepared to not worry about anything else besides this, because change might not come today. .

It might not come tomorrow. It might not even come March 24th when we March for our lives down in Washington. But it’s going to happen, and it’s going to happen before — in my lifetime because I will fight every single day — and I know everyone here will fight for the rest of their lives — to see sensible gun laws in this country and so that kids don’t have to fear going back to school. Thank you.

Viola Davis: 'I've stolen for food. I've jumped in huge garbage bins with maggots for food', Variety's Power of Women luncheon - 2014

10 October 2014, Beverly Wilshire Hotel, Hollywood, Los Angeles, USA

You know they say that you're never too old to have a happy childhood. And although my childhood was filled with many happy memories, it was also spent in abject poverty. I was one of the 17 million kids in this country who didn't know where the next meal was coming from. And I did everything to get food. I've stolen for food. I've jumped in huge garbage bins with maggots for food. I have befriended people in the neighborhood who I knew had mothers who cooked three meals a day for food. And I sacrificed a childhood for food and grew up in immense shame.

And the word that I would like to eradicate today is unspeakable. Because I think everything should be spoken. I think everybody's testimony should be spoken. I think everybody's shame should be spoken. And the stain that is on this country is that one out of every five children in this country are living in households that are food poor. And of all the elementary school teachers out there they say that three out of five of the kids in their class, come to school hungry in the richest country in the world.

Amy Schumer: 'I am not who I sleep with. I am not my weight. I am not my mother. I am myself', Gloria Awards - 2014

1 May 2014, New York City, New York, USA

This event was put on by the Ms Foundation for Gloria Steinem's 80th birthday. The themes were confidence.

Here I go, and if it doesn't go well, please just don't blog about it.

Right before I left for college, I was running my high school. Feel it. I knew where to park, I knew where to get the best chicken-cutlet sandwich, I knew which custodians had pot. People knew me. They liked me. I was an athlete and a good friend. I felt pretty, I felt funny, I felt sane. Then I got to college in Maryland. My school was voted number one ... for the hottest freshman girls in Playboy that year. And not because of me. All of a sudden, being witty and charismatic didn't mean shit. Day after day, I could feel the confidence drain from my body. I was not what these guys wanted. They wanted thinner, blonder, dumber ... My sassy one-liners were only working on the cafeteria employees, who I was visiting all too frequently, tacking on not the Freshman 15, but the 30, in record-breaking time, which led my mother to make comments over winter break like, "You look healthy!" I was getting no male attention, and I'm embarrassed to say, it was killing me.

But one guy paid me some attention — Matt. Matt was six feet tall, he looked like a grown-up von Trapp child, and he was five years older than me. What?! An older boy, paying attention to me? I must be okay. Uff. I made him laugh in our bio lab, and I could tell a couple times that we had a vibe. He was a super senior, which is a sexy way of saying "should have graduated, but needed an extra year." He barely spoke, which was perfect for all the projecting I had planned for him. We grew up in the same town, and getting attention from him felt like success. When I would see him on campus, my heart would race, and I would smile as he passed. I'd look in the mirror and see all the blood rise to my face. I'd spend time analyzing the interaction, and planning my outfit for the next time I saw him. I wanted him to call. He never called. But then finally, he called.

It was 8 a.m., my dorm room phone rang. "Amy, wassup? It's Matt. Come over." Holy shit! This is it, I thought. He woke up thinking about me! He realized we're meant to start a life together! Let's just stop all this pretending that we weren't free just to love one another! I wondered, would we raise our kids in the town we both grew up in, or has he taken a liking to Baltimore? I don't care. I'll settle wherever he's most comfortable. Will he want to raise our kids Jewish? Who cares? I shaved my legs in the sink, I splashed some water under my armpits, and my randomly assigned Albanian roommate stared at me from under her sheets as I rushed around our shitty dorm room. I ran right over to his place, ready for our day together. What would we do? It's still early enough, maybe we're going fishing? Or maybe his mom's in town, and he wanted me to join them for breakfast. Knock-knock. Is he going to carry me over the threshold? I bet he's fixing his hair and telling his mom, "Be cool, this may be the one!" I'll be very sweet with her, but assert myself, so she doesn't think she's completely in charge of all the holiday dinners we're going to plan together. I'll call her by her first name, too, so she knows she can't mess with me. "Rita! I'm going to make the green bean casserole this year, and that's that!" Knock-knock. Ring ring. Where is he?

Finally, the door opens. It's Matt, but not really. He's there, but not really. His face is kind of distorted, and his eyes seem like he can't focus on me. He's actually trying to see me from the side, like a shark. "Hey!" he yells, too loud, and gives me a hug, too hard. He's fucking wasted. I'm not the first person he thought of that morning. I'm the last person he called that night. I wonder, how many girls didn't answer before he got to fat freshman me? Am I in his phone as Schumer? Probably. But I was here, and I wanted to be held and touched and felt desired, despite everything. I wanted to be with him. I imagined us on campus together, holding hands, proving, "Look! I am lovable! And this cool older guy likes me!" I can't be the troll doll I'm afraid I've become.

He put on some music, and we got in bed. As that sexy maneuver where the guy pushes you on the bed, you know, like, "I'm taking the wheel on this one. Now I'm going to blow your mind," which is almost never followed up with anything. He smelled like skunk microwaved with cheeseburgers, which I planned on finding and eating in the bathroom, as soon as he was asleep. We tried kissing. His 9 a.m. shadow was scratching my face — I knew it'd look like I had fruit-punch mouth for days after. His alcohol-swollen mouth, I felt like I was being tongued by someone who had just been given Novocain. I felt faceless, and nameless. I was just a warm body, and I was freezing cold. His fingers poked inside me like they had lost their keys in there. And then came the sex, and I use that word very loosely. His penis was so soft, it felt like one of those de-stress things that slips from your hand? So he was pushing aggressively into my thigh, and during this failed penetration, I looked around the room to try and distract myself or God willing, disassociate. What's on the wall? A Scarface poster, of course. Mandatory. Anything else? That's it? This Irish-Catholic son of bank teller who played JV soccer and did Mathletes feels the most connection with a Cuban refugee drug lord. The place looked like it was decorated by an overeager set designer who took the note "temporary and without substance" too far.

He started to go down on me. That's ambitious, I think. Is it still considered getting head if the guy falls asleep every three seconds and moves his tongue like an elderly person eating their last oatmeal? Chelsea? Is it? Yes? It is. I want to scream for myself, "Get out of here, Amy. You are beautiful, you are smart, and worth more than this. This is not where you stay." I feel like Fantine and Cosette and every fucking sad French woman from Les Miz. And whoever that cat was who sang "Memories," what was that musical? Suze Orman just goes, "Cats." The only wetness between my legs is from his drool, because he's now sleeping and snoring into me. I sigh, I hear my own heartbreak, I fight back my own tears, and then I notice a change in the music. Is this just a bagpipe solo? I shake him awake. "Matt, what is this? The Braveheart soundtrack? Can you put something else on, please?" He wakes up grumpily, falls to the floor, and crawls. I look at his exposed butt crack, a dark, unkempt abyss that I was falling into. I felt paralyzed. His asshole is a canyon, and this was my 127 Hours. I might chew my arm off.

I could feel I was losing myself to this girl in this bed. He stood up and put a new CD on. "Darling, you send me, I know you send me, honest, you do ..." I'm thinking, "What is this?" He crawled back into bed, and tried to mash at this point his third ball into my vagina. On his fourth thrust, he gave up and fell asleep on my breast. His head was heavy and his breath was so sour, I had to turn my head so my eyes didn't water. But they were watering anyway, because of this song. Who is this? This is so beautiful. I've never heard these songs before. They're gutting me. The score attached to our morning couldn't have been more off. His sloppy, tentative lovemaking was certainly not in the spirit of William Wallace. And now the most beautiful love songs I've ever heard play out as this man-boy laid in my arms, after diminishing me to a last-minute booty call. I listened to the songs and I cried. I was looking down at myself from the ceiling fan. What happened to this girl? How did she get here? I felt the fan on my skin and I went, "Oh, wait! I am this girl! We got to get me out of here!" I became my own fairy godmother. I waited until the last perfect note floated out, and escaped from under him and out the door. I never heard from Matt again, but felt only grateful for being introduced to my new self, a girl who got her value from within her. I'm also grateful to Matt for introducing me to my love Sam Cooke, who I'm still with today.

Now I feel strong and beautiful. I walk proudly down the streets of Manhattan. The people I love, love me. I make the funniest people in the country laugh, and they are my friends. I am a great friend and an even better sister. I have fought my way through harsh criticism and death threats for speaking my mind. I am alive, like the strong women in this room before me. I am a hot-blooded fighter and I am fearless. But I did morning radio last week, and a DJ asked, "Have you gained weight? You seem chunkier to me. You should strike while the iron is hot, Amy." And it's all gone. In an instant, it's all stripped away. I wrote an article for Men's Health and was so proud, until I saw instead of using my photo, they used one of a 16-year-old model wearing a clown nose, to show that she's hilarious. But those are my words. What about who I am, and what I have to say? I can be reduced to that lost college freshman so quickly sometimes, I want to quit. Not performing, but being a woman altogether. I want to throw my hands in the air, after reading a mean Twitter comment, and say, "All right! You got it. You figured me out. I'm not pretty. I'm not thin. I do not deserve to use my voice. I'll start wearing a burqa and start waiting tables at a pancake house. All my self-worth is based on what you can see." But then I think, Fuck that. I am not laying in that freshman year bed anymore ever again. I am a woman with thoughts and questions and shit to say. I say if I'm beautiful. I say if I'm strong. You will not determine my story — I will. I will speak and share and fuck and love and I will never apologize to the frightened millions who resent that they never had it in them to do it. I stand here and I am amazing, for you. Not because of you. I am not who I sleep with. I am not my weight. I am not my mother. I am myself. And I am all of you, and I thank you

Gabourey Sidibe: 'This is what I deal with every time someone takes a picture of me', Gloria awards

1 May 2014, Gloria Awards, Ms. Foundation for Women, Cipriani 42nd Street, New York, USA

I'm so excited to be here. Really, really excited. Okay, I'll get to it. Hi. One of the first things people usually ask me is, "Gabourey, how are you so confident?" I hate that. I always wonder if that's the first thing they ask Rihanna when they meet her. "RiRi! How are you so confident?" Nope. No. No. But me? They ask me with that same incredulous disbelief every single time. "You seem so confident! How is that?"
 
When I was ten years, in the fifth grade, my teacher, Miss Lowe had announced that my class would be having a holiday party right before the Christmas break. She asked if we all could all bring snacks or soda or juice to the class party. She also said we had the option of cooking something, if we like. I was so excited. I immediately decided that I would make gingerbread cookies, and that everyone would love them. I told my mom my plan, and I asked her for money to go buy the ingredients. She thought I should just buy store-bought cookies, but I told her, "Those cookies didn't have enough love in them!" I had to make the cookies. So I bought the mix, and I bought cookie cutters in the shape of Christmas trees and bells, and I made a practice batch of cookies that went horribly wrong. Good thing they were a practice batch. They were awful. And then the night before the party, I made another batch of cookies. And they were also awful, but they looked a lot better. I carefully put the cookies in a Ziplock bag, so I could take them to school the next day. When I got to school that morning, I could not wait until that party. And I was so proud of those cookies, and all the effort I put into making them, I started to think that maybe I wouldn't just be the first woman black President — maybe I would also be a celebrity chef! I mean, why limit myself?
 
The party was set to take place during the last hour of school, and I waited excitedly for it all day long. Finally, it was party time. My teacher asked what everyone brought, and I proudly announced that I had baked cookies for the class. I think I felt prouder knowing that everyone else just bought stuff. I was the only one who made anything, because clearly, I'm a little more clever than anyone else. So as the party starts up, I walk around the class, proudly offering cookies to everyone. No one took a cookie. No one. No one except Nicholas, who was the first person I offered one to. But after a few of our other classmates set him straight, he actually caught up with me as I walked around the class, and gave the cookie back. I walked around the class trying to hand out cookies to my class, until I ended up back at my desk with the same amount of cookies that I started with. I sat at my desk alone, eating those gross gingerbread cookies that took hours to make, all by myself. I put chocolate chips in them, that's why they were gross. I wasn't surprised. I just forgot for a moment that my entire class hated me. I had zero friends from the fourth grade to the sixth grade. Who the hell was I baking cookies for? I really got so excited to bake that I had forgotten that everyone hated my guts. Why didn't they like me? I was fat, yes. I had darker skin and weird hair, yes. But the truth is, this isn't a story about bulling, or color, or weight. They hated me because... I was an asshole!
 
Yep. I was a bossy, bossy asshole. See, remember when I said that I thought I was more clever than everyone else? Well, I did! And I told them that — every single day! Those kids couldn't get a word in edgewise, without me cutting them off to remind them that I was smarter, funnier, and all around wittier than them. I was always sarcastic — I called it my birth defect. And let's face it, kids don't get sarcasm. They don't appreciate it. They never knew what I was talking about. And when they would say, "Wait... huh?" I would say, "My God, Alicia, read a book!" I know. I spoke differently than them, I just did. I sounded more like a Valley Girl than a Brooklyn girl. My classmates always asked me if I was adopted by white people. I'd say, "No. Both my parents went to college." I know that was rude, but I'm still really proud of that. To be fair, in my neighborhood, not everyone's parents had the opportunity to go to college. Most of my classmates' parents were teens when they had them. My parents had me at age 30. My father was born in Senegal. His father was the mayor of the capital city, Dakar, and my dad often took my brother and I back home with him to visit Africa, while most of my classmates had never stepped out of the Lower East Side. My mother was a teacher in high school, that's why I went there, but my mom also had a voice, so when I was nine, she quit her teaching job to go sing in the subway. She actually made more money as a singer for tips than she made as a teacher! I know! And she was quickly becoming the underground version of Whitney Houston. She was the strongest, smartest, and most talented person I had ever known. Even today, I don't want to grow up to be anyone as much as I want to grow up to be her. I know!
 
The point is, I was a snob. I thought I was better than the kids in my class, and I let them know it. That's why they didn't like me. I think the reason I thought so highly of myself all the time was because no one else ever did. I figured out I was smart because my mother would yell at my older brother. She'd say, "Your little sister is going to pass you in school. You're going to get left behind and she's going to graduate before you." But she never said to me, "You are smart." What she did say was, "You are too fat." I got the message that I wasn't pretty, and I probably wasn't normal, but I was smart! Why wouldn't they just say that? "You're smart." It's actually not that hard. My dad would yell at my brother, "Gabourey does her homework by herself! Why can't you?" But he never said to me, "Good job." What he did say was, "You need to lose weight so I can be proud of you." I know. So I got made fun of at school, I got made fun of at home too, my older brother hated me, my dad just didn't understand me, and my mom, who had been a fat girl at my age herself, understood me perfectly ... but she berated me because she was so afraid of what she knew was to come for me. So I never felt safe when I was at home. And my response was always to eat more, because nothing says, "You hurt my feelings. Fuck you!" like eating a delicious cookie. Cookies never hurt me.
 
"Gabourey, how are you so confident?" It's not easy. It's hard to get dressed up for award shows and red carpets when I know I will be made fun of because of my weight. There's always a big chance if I wear purple, I will be compared to Barney. If I wear white, a frozen turkey. And if I wear red, that pitcher of Kool-Aid that says, "Oh, yeah!" Twitter will blow up with nasty comments about how the recent earthquake was caused by me running to a hot dog cart or something.  And "Diet or Die?" [She gives the finger to that]  This is what I deal with every time I put on a dress. This is what I deal with every time someone takes a picture of me. Sometimes when I'm being interviewed by a fashion reporter, I can see it in her eyes, "How is she getting away with this? Why is she so confident? How does she deal with that body? Oh my God, I'm going to catch fat!"
 
What I would say, is my mom moved my brother and I to my aunt's house. Her name is Dorothy Pitman Hughes, she is a feminist, an activist, and a lifelong friend of Gloria Steinem. Every day, I had to get up and go to school where everyone made fun of me, and I had to go home to where everyone made fun of me. Every day was hard to get going, no matter which direction I went. And on my way out of the house, I found strength. In the morning on the way out to the world, I passed by a portrait of my aunt and Gloria together. Side by side they stood, one with long beautiful hair and one with the most beautiful, round, Afro hair I had ever seen, both with their fists held high in the air. Powerful. Confident. And every day as I would leave the house... I would give that photo a fist right back. And I'd march off into battle. [She starts crying] I didn't know that I was being inspired then. On my way home, I'd walk back up those stairs, I'd give that photo the fist again, and continue my march back in for more battle. [She pulls a tissue from her cleavage and dabs her eyes] That's what boobs are for! I didn't know I was being inspired then, but I was. If they could feel like that, maybe I could! I just wanted to look that cool. But it made me feel that strong.
 
So, okay, we're back in fifth grade, and I just had been rejected by 28 kids in a row. And I was sitting alone at my desk, with an empty Ziplock bag, crumbs in my lap, and I was at this great party that I had waited for all week. I waited all week for this party that I wasn't invited to. And for some reason I got up, I sat on my desk, and I partied my ass off. I laughed loudly when something funny happened. And when Miss Lowe put on music, I was one of the first ones to get up and dance. I joined the limbo, and ate chips, and drank soda, and I enjoyed myself, even though no one wanted me there. You know why? I told you — I was an asshole! I wanted that party! And what I want trumps what 28 people want me to do, especially when what they want me to do is leave. I had a great time. I did. And if I somehow ruined my classmates' good time, then that's on them. "How are you so confident?" "I'm an asshole!" Okay? It's my good time, and my good life, despite what you think of me. I live my life, because I dare. I dare to show up when everyone else might hide their faces and hide their bodies in shame. I show up because I'm an asshole, and I want to have a good time. And my mother and my father love me. They wanted the best life for me, and they didn't know how to verbalize it. And I get it. I really do. They were better parents to me than they had themselves. I'm grateful to them, and to my fifth grade class, because if they hadn't made me cry, I wouldn't be able to cry on cue now. [Dabs tears] If I hadn't been told I was garbage, I wouldn't have learned how to show people I'm talented. And if everyone had always laughed at my jokes, I wouldn't have figured out how to be so funny. If they hadn't told me I was ugly, I never would have searched for my beauty. And if they hadn't tried to break me down, I wouldn't know that I'm unbreakable. [Dabs tears] So when you ask me how I'm so confident, I know what you're really asking me: how could someone like me be confident? Go ask Rihanna, asshole!

Chimamanda Adichie: 'We should all be feminists', TEDx Euston - 2012

1 December 2012, TEDx Euston, London, UK

So I would like to start by telling you about one of my greatest friends, Okoloma Maduewesi. Okoloma lived on my street and looked after me like a big brother. If I liked a boy, I would ask Okoloma's opinion. Okoloma died in the notorious Sosoliso plane crash in Nigeria in December of 2005. Almost exactly seven years ago. Okoloma was a person I could argue with, laugh with and truly talk to. He was also the first person to call me a feminist.

I was about fourteen, we were at his house, arguing. Both of us bristling with half bit knowledge from books that we had read. I don't remember what this particular argument was about, but I remember that as I argued and argued, Okoloma looked at me and said, "You know, you're a feminist." It was not a compliment.

(Laughter)

I could tell from his tone, the same tone that you would use to say something like, "You're a supporter of terrorism."

(Laughter)

I did not know exactly what this word "feminist" meant, and I did not want Okoloma to know that I did not know. So I brushed it aside, and I continued to argue. And the first thing I planned to do when I got home was to look up the word "feminist" in the dictionary.

Now fast forward to some years later, I wrote a novel about a man who among other things beats his wife and whose story doesn't end very well. While I was promoting the novel in Nigeria, a journalist, a nice, well-meaning man, told me he wanted to advise me. And for the Nigerians here, I'm sure we're all familiar with how quick our people are to give unsolicited advice. He told me that people were saying that my novel was feminist and his advice to me -- and he was shaking his head sadly as he spoke -- was that I should never call myself a feminist because feminists are women who are unhappy because they cannot find husbands.

(Laughter)

So I decided to call myself "a happy feminist." Then an academic, a Nigerian woman told me that feminism was not our culture and that feminism wasn't African, and that I was calling myself a feminist because I had been corrupted by "Western books." Which amused me, because a lot of my early readings were decidedly unfeminist. I think I must have read every single Mills & Boon romance published before I was sixteen. And each time I tried to read those books called "the feminist classics," I'd get bored, and I really struggled to finish them. But anyway, since feminism was un-African, I decided that I would now call myself "a happy African feminist." At some point I was a happy African feminist who does not hate men and who likes lip gloss and who wears high heels for herself but not for men.

(Laughter)

Of course a lot of this was tongue-in-cheek, but that word feminist is so heavy with baggage, negative baggage. You hate men, you hate bras, you hate African culture, that sort of thing.

Now here's a story from my childhood. When I was in primary school, my teacher said at the beginning of term that she would give the class a test and whoever got the highest score would be the class monitor. Now, class monitor was a big deal. If you were a class monitor, you got to write down the names of noisemakers --

(Laughter)

which was having enough power of its own. But my teacher would also give you a cane to hold in your hand while you walk around and patrol the class for noisemakers. Now, of course you were not actually allowed to use the cane. But it was an exciting prospect for the nine-year-old me. I very much wanted to be the class monitor. And I got the highest score on the test. Then, to my surprise, my teacher said that the monitor had to be a boy. She had forgotten to make that clear earlier because she assumed it was ... obvious.

(Laughter)

A boy had the second highest score on the test, and he would be monitor. Now, what was even more interesting about this is that the boy was a sweet, gentle soul who had no interest in patrolling the class with the cane, while I was full of ambition to do so. But I was female and he was male, and so he became the class monitor. And I've never forgotten that incident.

I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is just as obvious to everyone else. Now, take my dear friend Louis for example. Louis is a brilliant, progressive man, and we would have conversations and he would tell me, "I don't know what you mean by things being different or harder for women. Maybe in the past, but not now." And I didn't understand how Louis could not see what seems so self-evident. Then one evening, in Lagos, Louis and I went out with friends. And for people here who are not familiar with Lagos, there's that wonderful Lagos' fixture, the sprinkling of energetic men who hang around outside establishments and very dramatically "help" you park your car. I was impressed with the particular theatrics of the man who found us a parking spot that evening. And so as we were leaving, I decided to leave him a tip. I opened my bag, put my hand inside my bag, brought out my money that I had earned from doing my work, and I gave it to the man. And he, this man who was very grateful and very happy, took the money from me, looked across at Louis and said, "Thank you, sir!"

(Laughter)

Louis looked at me, surprised, and asked, "Why is he thanking me? I didn't give him the money." Then I saw realization dawn on Louis' face. The man believed that whatever money I had had ultimately come from Louis. Because Louis is a man.

Men and women are different. We have different hormones, we have different sexual organs, we have different biological abilities. Women can have babies, men can't. At least not yet.

(Laughter)

Men have testosterone and are in general physically stronger than women. There's slightly more women than men in the world, about 52 percent of the world's population is female. But most of the positions of power and prestige are occupied by men. The late Kenyan Nobel Peace laureate, Wangari Maathai, put it simply and well when she said: "The higher you go, the fewer women there are." In the recent US elections we kept hearing of the Lilly Ledbetter law, and if we go beyond the nicely alliterative name of that law, it was really about a man and a woman doing the same job, being equally qualified, and the man being paid more because he's a man.

So in the literal way, men rule the world, and this made sense a thousand years ago because human beings lived then in a world in which physical strength was the most important attribute for survival. The physically stronger person was more likely to lead, and men, in general, are physically stronger. Of course there are many exceptions.

(Laughter)

But today we live in a vastly different world. The person more likely to lead is not the physically stronger person; it is the more creative person, the more intelligent person, the more innovative person, and there are no hormones for those attributes. A man is as likely as a woman to be intelligent, to be creative, to be innovative. We have evolved; but it seems to me that our ideas of gender had not evolved.

Some weeks ago, I walked into a lobby of one of the best Nigerian hotels. I thought about naming the hotel, but I thought I probably shouldn't. And a guard at the entrance stopped me and asked me annoying questions, because their automatic assumption is that a Nigerian female walking into a hotel alone is a sex worker. And by the way, why do these hotels focus on the ostensible supply rather than the demand for sex workers? In Lagos I cannot go alone into many "reputable" bars and clubs. They just don't let you in if you're a woman alone, you have to be accompanied by a man. Each time I walk into a Nigerian restaurant with a man, the waiter greets the man and ignores me. The waiters are products --

(Laughter)

At this some women felt like, "Yes! I thought that!" The waiters are products of a society that has taught them that men are more important than women. And I know that waiters don't intend any harm. But it's one thing to know intellectually and quite another to feel it emotionally. Each time they ignore me, I feel invisible. I feel upset. I want to tell them that I am just as human as the man, that I'm just as worthy of acknowledgment. These are little things, but sometimes it's the little things that sting the most.

And not long ago, I wrote an article about what it means to be young and female in Lagos, and the printers told me, "It was so angry." Of course it was angry!

(Laughter)

I am angry. Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change; but, in addition to being angry, I'm also hopeful. Because I believe deeply in the ability of human beings to make and remake themselves for the better.

Gender matters everywhere in the world, but I want to focus on Nigeria and on Africa in general, because it is where I know, and because it is where my heart is. And I would like today to ask that we begin to dream about and plan for a different world, a fairer world, a world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves. And this is how to start: we must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently. We do a great disservice to boys on how we raise them; we stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way, masculinity becomes this hard, small cage and we put boys inside the cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear. We teach boys to be afraid of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves, because they have to be, in Nigerian speak, "hard man!" In secondary school, a boy and a girl, both of them teenagers, both of them with the same amount of pocket money, would go out and then the boy would be expected always to pay, to prove his masculinity. And yet we wonder why boys are more likely to steal money from their parents.

What if both boys and girls were raised not to link masculinity with money? What if the attitude was not "the boy has to pay" but rather "whoever has more should pay?" Now, of course because of that historical advantage, it is mostly men who will have more today, but if we start raising children differently, then in fifty years, in a hundred years, boys will no longer have the pressure of having to prove this masculinity. But by far the worst thing we do to males, by making them feel that they have to be hard, is that we leave them with very fragile egos. The more "hard man" the man feels compelled to be, the weaker his ego is. And then we do a much greater disservice to girls because we raise them to cater to the fragile egos of men. We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller, we say to girls, "You can have ambition, but not too much."

(Laughter)

"You should aim to be successful, but not too successful, otherwise you would threaten the man." If you are the breadwinner in your relationship with a man, you have to pretend that you're not, especially in public, otherwise you will emasculate him.

But what if we question the premise itself? Why should a woman's success be a threat to a man? What if we decide to simply dispose of that word, and I don't think there's an English word I dislike more than "emasculation." A Nigerian acquaintance once asked me if I was worried that men would be intimidated by me. I was not worried at all. In fact, it had not occurred to me to be worried because a man who would be intimidated by me is exactly the kind of man I would have no interest in.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

But still I was really struck by this. Because I'm female, I'm expected to aspire to marriage; I'm expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. A marriage can be a good thing; it can be a source of joy and love and mutual support. But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don't teach boys the same?

I know a woman who decided to sell her house because she didn't want to intimidate a man who might marry her. I know an unmarried woman in Nigeria who, when she goes to conferences, wears a wedding ring because according to her, she wants the other participants in the conference to "give her respect." I know young women who are under so much pressure from family, from friends, even from work to get married, and they're pushed to make terrible choices. A woman at a certain age who is unmarried, our society teaches her to see it as a deep, personal failure. And a man at a certain age who is unmarried, we just think he hasn't come around to making his pick.

(Laughter)

It's easy for us to say, "Oh, but women can just say no to all of this." But the reality is more difficult and more complex. We're all social beings. We internalize ideas from our socialization. Even the language we use in talking about marriage and relationships illustrates this. The language of marriage is often the language of ownership rather than the language of partnership. We use the word "respect" to mean something a woman shows a man but often not something a man shows a woman.

Both men and women in Nigeria will say -- this is an expression I'm very amused by -- "I did it for peace in my marriage." Now, when men say it, it is usually about something that they should not be doing anyway.

(Laughter)

Sometimes they say it to their friends, it's something to say to their friends in a kind of fondly exasperated way, you know, something that ultimately proves how masculine they are, how needed, how loved. "Oh, my wife said I can't go to the club every night, so for peace in my marriage, I do it only on weekends."

(Laughter)

Now, when a woman says, "I did it for peace in my marriage," she's usually talking about giving up a job, a dream, a career. We teach females that in relationships, compromise is what women do. We raise girls to see each other as competitors -- not for jobs or for accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are. If we have sons, we don't mind knowing about our sons' girlfriends. But our daughters' boyfriends? God forbid.

(Laughter)

But of course when the time is right, we expect those girls to bring back the perfect man to be their husbands. We police girls, we praise girls for virginity, but we don't praise boys for virginity, and it's always made me wonder how exactly this is supposed to work out because ...

(Laughter)

(Applause)

I mean, the loss of virginity is usually a process that involves ...

Recently a young woman was gang raped in a university in Nigeria, I think some of us know about that. And the response of many young Nigerians, both male and female, was something along the lines of this: "Yes, rape is wrong. But what is a girl doing in a room with four boys?" Now, if we can forget the horrible inhumanity of that response, these Nigerians have been raised to think of women as inherently guilty, and they have been raised to expect so little of men that the idea of men as savage beings without any control is somehow acceptable. We teach girls shame. "Close your legs." "Cover yourself." We make them feel as though by being born female they're already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who cannot see they have desire. They grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think, and they grow up -- and this is the worst thing we did to girls -- they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form.

(Applause)

I know a woman who hates domestic work, she just hates it, but she pretends that she likes it, because she's been taught that to be "good wife material" she has to be -- to use that Nigerian word -- very "homely." And then she got married, and after a while her husband's family began to complain that she had changed.

(Laughter)

Actually, she had not changed, she just got tired of pretending.

The problem with gender, is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are.

Now imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn't have the weight of gender expectations. Boys and girls are undeniably different biologically, but socialization exaggerates the differences and then it becomes a self-fulfilling process. Now, take cooking for example. Today women in general are more likely to do the housework than men, the cooking and cleaning. But why is that? Is it because women are born with a cooking gene?

(Laughter)

Or because over years they have been socialized to see cooking as their role? Actually, I was going to say that maybe women are born with a cooking gene, until I remember that the majority of the famous cooks in the world, whom we give the fancy title of "chefs," are men.

I used to look up to my grandmother who was a brilliant, brilliant woman, and wonder how she would have been if she had the same opportunities as men when she was growing up.

Now today, there are many more opportunities for women than there were during my grandmother's time because of changes in policy, changes in law, all of which are very important. But what matters even more is our attitude, our mindset, what we believe and what we value about gender. What if in raising children we focus on ability instead of gender? What if in raising children we focus on interest instead of gender?

I know a family who have a son and a daughter, both of whom are brilliant at school, who are wonderful, lovely children. When the boy is hungry, the parents say to the girl, "Go and cook Indomie noodles for your brother."

(Laughter)

Now, the daughter doesn't particularly like to cook Indomie noodles, but she's a girl, and so she has to. Now, what if the parents, from the beginning, taught both the boy and the girl to cook Indomie? Cooking, by the way, is a very useful skill for boys to have. I've never thought it made sense to leave such a crucial thing, the ability to nourish oneself --

(Laughter)

in the hands of others.

(Applause)

I know a woman who has the same degree and the same job as her husband. When they get back from work, she does most of the housework, which I think is true for many marriages. But what struck me about them was that whenever her husband changed the baby's diaper, she said "thank you" to him. Now, what if she saw this as perfectly normal and natural that he should, in fact, care for his child?

(Laughter)

I'm trying to unlearn many of the lessons of gender that I internalized when I was growing up. But I sometimes still feel very vulnerable in the face of gender expectations. The first time I taught a writing class in graduate school, I was worried. I wasn't worried about the material I would teach because I was well-prepared, and I was going to teach what I enjoy teaching. Instead, I was worried about what to wear. I wanted to be taken seriously. I knew that because I was female I will automatically have to prove my worth. And I was worried that if I looked too feminine, I would not be taken seriously. I really wanted to wear my shiny lip gloss and my girly skirt, but I decided not to. Instead, I wore a very serious, very manly and very ugly suit.

(Laughter)

Because the sad truth is that when it comes to appearance we start off with men as the standard, as the norm. If a man is getting ready for a business meeting, he doesn't worry about looking too masculine and therefore not being taken for granted. If a woman has to get ready for business meeting, she has to worry about looking too feminine and what it says and whether or not she will be taken seriously.

I wish I had not worn that ugly suit that day. I've actually banished it from my closet, by the way. Had I then the confidence that I have now to be myself, my students would have benefited even more from my teaching, because I would have been more comfortable and more fully and more truly myself. I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femaleness and for my femininity.

(Applause)

And I want to be respected in all of my femaleness because I deserve to be. Gender is not an easy conversation to have. For both men and women, to bring up gender is sometimes to encounter almost immediate resistance. I can imagine some people here are actually thinking, "Women too do sef." Some of the men here might be thinking, "OK, all of this is interesting, but I don't think like that." And that is part of the problem.

That many men do not actively think about gender or notice gender is part of the problem of gender. That many men, say, like my friend Louis, that everything is fine now. And that many men do nothing to change it. If you are a man and you walk into a restaurant with a woman and the waiter greets only you, does it occur to you to ask the waiter, "Why haven't you greeted her?" Because gender can be --

(Laughter)

Actually, we may repose part of a longer version of this talk. So, because gender can be a very uncomfortable conversation to have, there are very easy ways to close it, to close the conversation. So some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how, you know, female apes bow down to male apes and that sort of thing. But the point is we're not apes.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

Apes also live on trees and have earthworms for breakfast, and we don't. Some people will say, "Well, poor men also have a hard time." And this is true. But that is not what this --

(Laughter)

But this is not what this conversation is about. Gender and class are different forms of oppression. I actually learned quite a bit about systems of oppression and how they can be blind to one another by talking to black men.

I was once talking to a black man about gender and he said to me, "Why do you have to say 'my experience as a woman'? Why can't it be 'your experience as a human being'?" Now, this was the same man who would often talk about his experience as a black man.

Gender matters. Men and women experience the world differently. Gender colors the way we experience the world. But we can change that.

Some people will say, "Oh, but women have the real power, bottom power." And for non-Nigerians, bottom power is an expression which I suppose means something like a woman who uses her sexuality to get favors from men. But bottom power is not power at all. Bottom power means that a woman simply has a good root to tap into, from time to time -- somebody else's power. And then, of course, we have to wonder what happens when that somebody else is in a bad mood, or sick or impotent.

(Laughter)

Some people will say that a woman being subordinate to a man is our culture. But culture is constantly changing. I have beautiful twin nieces who are fifteen and live in Lagos. If they had been born a hundred years ago they would have been taken away and killed. Because it was our culture, it was our culture to kill twins.

So what is the point of culture? I mean there's the decorative, the dancing ... but also, culture really is about preservation and continuity of a people. In my family, I am the child who is most interested in the story of who we are, in our traditions, in the knowledge about ancestral lands. My brothers are not as interested as I am. But I cannot participate, I cannot go to umunna meetings, I cannot have a say. Because I'm female. Culture does not make people, people make culture. So if it is in fact true --

(Applause)

So if it is in fact true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we must make it our culture.

I think very often of my dear friend, Okoloma Maduewesi. May he and all the others who passed away in that Sosoliso crash continue to rest in peace. He will always be remembered by those of us who loved him. And he was right that day many years ago when he called me a feminist.

I am a feminist. And when I looked up the word in the dictionary that day, this is what it said: "Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes." My great grandmother, from the stories I've heard, was a feminist. She ran away from the house of the man she did not want to marry and ended up marrying the man of her choice. She refused, she protested, she spoke up whenever she felt she was being deprived of access, of land, that sort of thing.

My great grandmother did not know that word "feminist," but it doesn't mean that she wasn't one. More of us should reclaim that word. My own definition of feminist is: "A feminist is a man or a woman who says --

(Laughter)

(Applause)

A feminist is a man or a woman who says, "Yes, there's a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it. We must do better." The best feminist I know is my brother Kene. He's also a kind, good-looking, lovely man, and he's very masculine.

Thank you.

(Applause)

This speech was based on the book of the same title. Available here.

Anita Hill: 'Judge Thomas began to use work situations to discuss sex', Testimony to Senate Judiciary Committee - 1991

11 October 1991, Washington DC, USA

In 1991, Anita Hill publicly accused then Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment in the early 1980s. He was appointed to the Bench.

Mr. Chairman, Senator Thurmond, members of the committee. My name is Anita F. Hill, and I am a professor of law at the University of Oklahoma. I was born on a farm in Okmulgee County, Oklahoma, in 1956. I am the youngest of 13 children.

I had my early education in Okmulgee County. My father, Albert Hill, is a farmer in that area. My mother's name is Irma Hill. She is also a farmer and a housewife.

My childhood was one of a lot of hard work and not much money, but it was one of solid family affection as represented by my parents. I was reared in a religious atmosphere in the Baptist faith, and I have been a member of the Antioch Baptist Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, since 1983. It is a very warm part of my life at the present time.

For my undergraduate work, I went to Oklahoma State University and graduated from there in 1977. . . .I graduated from the university with academic honors and proceeded to the Yale Law School, where I received my J. D. degree in 1980.

Upon graduation from law school, I became a practicing lawyer with the Washington, D. C., firm of Wald, Hardraker & Ross. In 1981, I was introduced to now-Judge Thomas by a mutual friend.

Judge Thomas told me that he was anticipating a political appointment, and he asked if I would be interested in working with him.

He was in fact appointed as assistant secretary of Education for civil rights. After he was, after he had taken that post, he asked if I would become his assistant, and I accepted that position.

In my early period there, I had two major projects. The first was an article I wrote for Judge Thomas' signature on the education of minority students. The second was the organization of a seminar on high risk students, which was abandoned because Judge Thomas transferred to the EEOC, where he became the chairman of that office.

During this period at the Department of Education my working relationship with Judge Thomas was positive. I had a good deal of responsibility and independence. I thought he respected my work and that he trusted my judgment.

After approximately three months of working there, he asked me to go out socially with him. What happened next, and telling the world about it, are the two most difficult things-experiences of my life.

It is only after a great deal of agonizing consideration and sleepless nights that I am able to talk of these unpleasant matters to anyone but my close friends.

I declined the invitation to go out socially with him and explained to him that I thought it would jeopardize at -what at the time I considered to be a very good working relationship. I had a normal social life with other men outside the office. I believed then, as now, that having a social relationship with a person who was supervising my work would be ill-advised. I was very uncomfortable with the idea and told him so.

I thought that by saying no and explaining my reasons, my employer would abandon his social suggestions. However, to my regret, in the following few weeks, he continued to ask me out on several occasions.

He pressed me to justify my reasons for saying no to him. These incidents took place in his office or mine. They were in the form of private conversations, which not-would not have been overheard by anyone else.

My working relationship became even more strained when Judge Thomas began to use work situations to discuss sex. On these occasions he would call me into his office for reports on education issues and projects, or he might suggest that because of the time pressures of his schedule we go to lunch to a government cafeteria.

After a brief discussions of work, he would turn the conversation to a discussion of sexual matters. His conversations were very vivid. He spoke about acts that he had seen in pornographic films involving such matters as women having sex with animals and films showing group sex or rape scenes.

He talked about pornographic materials depicting individuals with large penises or large breasts involving various sex acts. On several occasions, Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess.

Because I was extremely uncomfortable talking about sex with him at all, and particularly in such a graphic way, I told him that I did not want to talk about this subject. I would also try to change the subject to education matters or to non-sexual personal matters, such as his background or his beliefs.

My efforts to change the subject were rarely successful.

Throughout the period of these conversations, he also from time to time asked me for social engagements. My reaction to these conversations was to avoid them by eliminating opportunities for us to engage in extended conversations.

This was difficult because, at the time, I was his only assistant at the Office of Education-or Office for Civil Rights. During the latter part of my time at the Department of Education, the social pressures, and any conversation of his offensive behavior, ended. I began both to believe and hope that our working relationship could be a proper, cordial and professional one.

When Judge Thomas was made chair of the EEOC, I needed to face the question of whether to go with him. I was asked to do so, and I did.

The work itself was interesting, and at the time it appeared that the sexual overtures which had so troubled me had ended.

I also faced the realistic fact that I had no alternative job. While I might have gone back to private practice, perhaps in my old firm or at another, I was dedicated to civil rights work, and my first choice was to be in that field. Moreover, at that time, the Department of Education itself was a dubious venture. President Reagan was seeking to abolish the entire department.

For my first months at the EEOC where I continued to be an assistant to Judge Thomas, there were no sexual conversations or overtures. However, during the fall and winter of 1982, these began again. The comments were random and ranged from pressing me about why I didn't go out with him to remarks about my personal appearance. I remember his saying that some day I would have to tell him the real reason that I wouldn't go out with him.

He began to show displeasure in his tone and voice and his demeanor and his continued pressure for an explanation. He commented on what I was wearing in terms of whether it made me more or less sexually attractive. The incidents occurred in his inner office at the EEOC.

One of the oddest episodes I remember was an occasion in which Thomas was drinking a Coke in his office. He got up from the table at which we were working, went over to his desk to get the Coke, looked at the can and asked, "Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?"

On other occasions, he referred to the size of his own penis as being larger than normal, and he also spoke on some occasions of the pleasures he had given to women with oral sex. At this point, late 1982, I began to feel severe stress on the job. I began to be concerned that Clarence Thomas might take out his anger with me by degrading me or not giving me important assignments. I also thought that he might find an excuse for dismissing me. In January of 1983, I began looking for another job. I was handicapped because I feared that if he found out, he might make it difficult for me to find other employment, and I might be dismissed from the job I had. Another factor that made my search more difficult was that there was a period-this was during a period-of a hiring freeze in the government.

In February 1983 I was hospitalized for five days on an emergency basis for acute stomach pain, which I attributed to stress on the job. Once out of the hospital I became more committed to find other employment and sought further to minimize my contact with Thomas. This became easier when Allison Duncan became office director, because most of my work was then funneled through her, and I had contact with Clarence Thomas mostly in staff meetings.

In the spring of 1983, and opportunity to teach at Oral Roberts University opened up. I participated in a seminar, taught an afternoon session in a seminar at Oral Roberts University. The dean of the university saw me teaching and inquired as to whether I would be interested in further pursuing a career in teaching beginning at Oral Roberts University. I agreed to take the job, in large part because of my desire to escape the pressures I felt at the EEOC due to Judge Thomas.

When I informed him that I was leaving in July, I recall that his response was that now I would no longer have an excuse for not going out with him. I told him that I still preferred not to do so. At some time after that meeting, he asked if he could take me to dinner at the end of the term. When I declined, he assured me that the dinner was a professional courtesy only and not a social invitation. I reluctantly agreed to accept that invitation but only if it was at the very end of a working day.

On, as I recall, the last day of my employment at the EEOC in the summer of 1983, I did have dinner with Clarence Thomas . We went directly from work to a restaurant near the office. We talked about the work I had done, both at Education and at the EEOC. He told me that he was pleased with all of it except for an article and speech that I had done for him while we were at the Office for Civil Rights. Finally he made a comment that I will vividly remember. He said that if I ever told anyone of his behavior that it would ruin his career. This was not an apology, nor was it an explanation. That was his last remark about the possibility of our going out or reference to his behavior.

In July of 1983 I left the Washington, D. C. area, and I've had minimal contacts with Judge Clarence Thomas since. I am of course aware from the press that some questions have been raised about conversations I had with Judge Clarence Thomas after I left the EEOC. From 1983 until today, I have seen Judge Thomas only twice. On one occasion I needed to get a reference from him, and on another, he made a public appearance in Tulsa. On one occasion he called me at home, and we had an inconsequential conversation. On one occasion he called me without reaching me, and I returned the call without reaching him, and nothing came of it.

I have, on at least three occasions, been asked to act as a conduit to him for others. I knew his secretary, Diane Holt. We had worked together at both EEOC and Education. There were occasions on which I spoke to her, and on some of the these occasions, undoubtedly, I passed on some casual comment to then-Chairman Thomas.

There were a series of calls in the first three months of 1985 occasioned by a group in Tulsa, which wished to have a civil rights conference. They wanted Judge Thomas to be the speaker and enlisted my assistance for this purpose. I did call in January and February , to no effect, and finally suggested to the person directly involved, Susan Cahall, that she put the matter into her own hands and call directly. She did so in March of 1985.

In connection with that March invitation, Miss Cahall wanted conference materials for the seminar, and some research was needed. I was asked to try to get the information and did attempt to do so. There was another call about the possible conference in July of 1985.

In August of 1987 I was in Washington D.C., and I did call Diane Holt. In the course of his conversation, she asked me how long I was going to be in town, and I told her. It is recorded in the message as August 15. It was in fact August 20. She told me about Judge Thomas' marriage, and I did say congratulate him.

It is only after a great deal of agonizing consideration that I am able to talk of these unpleasant matters to anyone except my closest friends, as I've said before. These last few days have been very trying and very hard for me, and it hasn't just been the last few days this week.

It has actually been over a month now that I have been under the strain of this issue.

Telling the world is the most difficult experience of my life, but it is very close to having to live through the experience that occasioned this meeting. I may have used poor judgment early on in my relationship with this issue. I was aware, however, that telling at any point in my career could adversely affect my future career, and I did not want early on, to burn all the bridges to the EEOC.

As I said, I may have used poor judgment. Perhaps I should have taken angry or even militant steps, both when I was in the agency or after I left it. But I must confess to the world that the course that I took seemed the better, as well as the easier, approach.

I declined any comment to newspapers, but later, when Senate staff asked me about these matters, I felt I had a duty to report. I have no personal vendetta against Clarence Thomas . I seek only to provide the committee with information which it may regard as relevant .

It would have been more comfortable to remain silent. It took no initiative to inform anyone-I took no initiative to inform anyone. But when I asked by a representative of this committee to report my experience, I felt that I had to tell the truth. I could not keep silent.

Coretta Scott King: 'I would like to share with you some notes taken from my husband's pockets upon his death', 10 Commandments on Vietnam, Central Park rally - 1968

27 April 1968, Central Park, New York City, USA

This speech was delivered just three weeks after her husband. Dr King's. assassination. She stood in his place for the speaking engagement.

My dear friends of peace and freedom:

I come to New York today with a strong feeling that my dearly beloved husband, who was snatched suddenly from our midst slightly more than three weeks ago now, would have wanted me to be present today.

Though my heart is heavy with grief from having suffered an irreparable personal loss, my faith in the redemptive will of God is stronger today than ever before.

As many of you probably know my husband had accepted an invitation to speak to you today and had he been here, I am sure he would have lifted your hearts and spirits to new levels of understanding in his customary fashion.

I would like to share with you some notes taken from my husband's pockets upon his death. He carried these scraps of paper upon which he scribbled notes for his many speeches.

Among these notes was one set which he never delivered. Perhaps they were his early thoughts for the message he was to give to you today. I am sure he would have developed and delivered them in his usual eloquent and inspired fashion. I simply read them to you as he recorded them. And I quote, "Ten Commandments on Vietnam"; 

1.  Thou shalt not believe in a military victory. 

2.  Thou shall not believe in a political victory.

3.  Thou shall not believe that they, the Vietnamese love us. 

4.  Thou shall not believe that the Saigon government has the support of the people.

5.  Thou shall not believe that the majority of the South Vietnamese look upon the Vietcong as terrorists.

6.  Thou shalt not believe the figures of killed enemies or killed Americans. 

7.  Thou shall not believe that the generals know best. 

8.  Thou shalt not believe that the enemy's victory means communism. 

9.  Thou shall not believe that the world supports the United States. 

10. Thou shall not kill. 

These are Martin Luther King's ten commandments on Vietnam.

You who have worked with and loved my husband so much, you who have kept alive the burning issue of war in the American conscience, you who will not be deluded by talk of peace, but who press on in the knowledge that the work of peacemaking must continue until the last gun is silent.

I come to you in my grief only because you keep alive the work and dreams for which my husband gave his life. My husband arrived somewhere to his strength and inspiration from the love of all people who shared his dream, that I too now come hoping you might strengthen me for the lonely road ahead.

It was on April 4th, 1967 that my husband gave his major address against the war in Vietnam. On April 4th, 1968 he was assassinated. I remember how he agonized over the grave misunderstanding which took place as a result of his position on the Vietnam war.

His motives were questioned. His credentials were challenged and his loyalty to this nation maligned. Now, one year later we see almost unbelievable results coming from all of our united efforts.

Had we then suggested the possibility of two peace candidates as front-runners for the presidency of the United States, our sanity certainly would have been questioned. Yet I need not trace for you how many of our hopes have been realized in these 12 short months. Never in the history of this nation have the people been so forceful in reversing the policy of our government in regard to war. We are indeed on the threshold of a new day for the peacemakers.

But just as conscientious action has reversed the tide of public opinion and government policy, we must now turn our attention and the sole force of the movement of people of good will to the problems of the poor here at home.

My husband always saw the problem of racism and poverty here at home and militarism abroad as two sides of the same coin. In fact, it is even very clear that our policy at home is to try to solve social problems through military means just as we have done abroad.

The interrelatedness of domestic and foreign affairs is no longer questioned. The bombs we drop on the people of Vietnam continue to explode at home with all of their devastating potential. And so I would invite you to join us in Washington in our effort to enable the poor people of this nation to enjoy a fair share of America's blessing.

There is no reason why a nation as rich as ours should be blighted by poverty, disease, and illiteracy. It is plain that we don't care about our poor people except to exploit them as cheap labor and victimize them through excessive rents and consumer prices.

Our Congress passes laws which subsidize corporation farms, oil companies, airlines, and houses for suburbia. But when they turn their attention to the poor, they suddenly become concerned about balancing the budget and cut back on the funds for Head Start, Medicare, and mental health appropriations.

The most tragic of these cuts is the welfare section to the Social Security amendment, which freezes federal funds for millions of needy children, who are desperately poor but who do not receive public assistance. It forces mothers to leave their children and accept work or training, leaving their children to grow up in the streets as tomorrow's social problems. This law must be repealed, and I encourage you to join welfare mothers on May 12th, Mother's Day and call upon Congress to establish a guaranteed annual income, instead of these racist and archaic measures, these measures which dehumanize God's children and create more social problems than they solve.

We will be marching toward Washington soon.  On Thursday, May 2nd we will return to Memphis to begin where my husband was slain and kick off his Poor People's campaign.

We will be marching toward Washington to demand that America share its abundant life with all its citizens. We should arrive in Washington by May 17th. I invite you to support the purposes of this march and to join us in Washington on May 30th for the Memorial Day weekend.

I would now like to address myself to the women. The woman power of this nation can be the power which makes us whole and heals the rotten community, now so shattered by war and poverty and racism. I have great faith in the power of women who will dedicate themselves whole-heartedly to the task of remaking our society.

I believe that the women of this nation and of the world are the best and last hope for a world of peace and brotherhood. This challenge is simply but profoundly stated in the words of one of the greatest black poets, the late Langston Hughes. He called the poem "Mother to Son," but it speaks to the sons and the daughters of this generation and those yet unborn. It speaks of the determination and the indestructible spirit of a black people who refuse to be conquered. This spirit must somehow be imbued in the hearts and souls of women and their sons everywhere.

Listen to this black mother as she counsels her son in all her ungrammatical profundity:

Well, son, I'll tell you:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor --
Bare.
But all the time
I'se been a-climbin' on,
And reachin' landin's,
And turnin' corners,
And sometimes goin' in the dark
Where there ain't been no light.
So boy,
Don't you set down on the steps
'Cause you finds it's kinder hard.
Don't you stop now --
For I'se still goin', honey,
I'se still climbin',
And life for me ain't been no crystal stair. 

With this determination, with this faith, we will be able to create new homes, new communities, new cities, a new nation. Yea, a new world, which we desperately need!

Preeminent MLK historian Dr Clayborne Carson, the man chosen by Coretta Scott King as the founding director of the Dr Martin Luther King Centre for Education and Research, spoke about Coretta’s life and anti Vietnam credentials in this episode of the podcast.



Josephine Baker: 'When you scream, friends, I know you will be heard', March on Washington - 1963

28 August 1963, Washington DC, USA

Friends and family…you know I have lived a long time and I have come a long way.  And you must know now that what I did, I did originally for myself.  Then later, as these things began happening to me, I wondered if they were happening to you, and then I knew they must be.  And I knew that you had no way to defend yourselves, as I had.

And as I continued to do the things I did, and to say the things I said, they began to beat me.  Not beat me, mind you, with a club—but you know, I have seen that done too—but they beat me with their pens, with their writings.  And friends, that is much worse.

When I was a child and they burned me out of my home, I was frightened and I ran away.    Eventually I ran far away.  It was to a place called France.  Many of you have been there, and many have not.  But I must tell you, ladies and gentlemen, in that country I never feared.  It was like a fairyland place.

And I need not tell you that wonderful things happened to me there.  Now I know that all you children don’t know who Josephine Baker is, but you ask Grandma and Grandpa and they will tell you.  You know what they will say.  “Why, she was a devil.”  And you know something…why, they are right.  I was too.  I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America too.

But I must tell you, when I was young in Paris, strange things happened to me.  And these things had never happened to me before.  When I left St. Louis a long time ago, the conductor directed me to the last car.  And you all know what that means.

But when I ran away, yes, when I ran away to another country, I didn’t have to do that.  I could go into any restaurant I wanted to, and I could drink water anyplace I wanted to, and I didn’t have to go to a colored toilet either, and I have to tell you it was nice, and I got used to it, and I liked it, and I wasn’t afraid anymore that someone would shout at me and say, “Nigger, go to the end of the line.”  But you know, I rarely ever used that word.  You also know that it has been shouted at me many times.

So over there, far away, I was happy, and because I was happy I had some success, and you know that too.

Then after a long time, I came to America to be in a great show for Mr. Ziegfeld, and you know Josephine was happy.  You know that.  Because I wanted to tell everyone in my country about myself.  I wanted to let everyone know that I made good, and you know too that that is only natural.

But on that great big beautiful ship, I had a bad experience.  A very important star was to sit with me for dinner, and at the last moment I discovered she didn’t want to eat with a colored woman.  I can tell you it was some blow.

And I won’t bother to mention her name, because it is not important, and anyway, now she is dead.

And when I got to New York way back then, I had other blows—when they would not let me check into the good hotels because I was colored, or eat in certain restaurants.  And then I went to Atlanta, and it was a horror to me.  And I said to myself, My God, I am Josephine, and if they do this to me, what do they do to the other people in America?

You know, friends, that I do not lie to you when I tell you I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents.  And much more. But I cold not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad.  And when I get mad, you know that I open my big mouth.  And then look out, ‘cause when Josephine opens her mouth, they hear it all over the world.

So I did open my mouth, and you know I did scream, and when I demanded what I was supposed to have and what I was entitled to, they still would not give it to me.  

So then they thought they could smear me, and the best way to do that was to call me a communist.  And you know, too, what that meant.  Those were dreaded words in those days, and I want to tell you also that I was hounded by the government agencies in America, and there was never one ounce of proof that I was a communist.  But they were mad.  They were mad because I told the truth.  And the truth was that all I wanted was a cup of coffee.  But I wanted that cup of coffee where I wanted to drink it, and I had the money to pay for it, so why shouldn’t I have it where I wanted it?

Friends and brothers and sisters, that is how it went.  And when I screamed loud enough, they started to open that door just a little bit, and we all started to be able to squeeze through it.  Not just the colored people, but the others as well, the other minorities too, the Orientals, and the Mexicans, and the Indians, both those here in the United States and those from India.

Now I am not going to stand in front of all of you today and take credit for what is happening now.  I cannot do that.  But I want to take credit for telling you how to do the same thing, and when you scream, friends, I know you will be heard.  And you will be heard now.

But you young people must do one thing, and I know you have heard this story a thousand times from your mothers and fathers, like I did from my mama.  I didn’t take her advice.  But I accomplished the same in another fashion.  You must get an education.  You must go to school, and you must learn to protect yourself.  And you must learn to protect yourself with the pen, and not the gun.  Then you can answer them, and I can tell you—and I don’t want to sound corny—but friends, the pen really is mightier than the sword.

I am not a young woman now, friends.  My life is behind me.  There is not too much fire burning inside me.  And before it goes out, I want you to use what is left to light that fire in you.  So that you can carry on, and so that you can do those things that I have done.  Then, when my fires have burned out, and I go where we all go someday, I can be happy.

You know I have always taken the rocky path.  I never took the easy one, but as I get older, and as I knew I had the power and the strength, I took that rocky path, and I tried to smooth it out a little.  I wanted to make it easier for you.  I want you to have a chance at what I had.  But I do not want you to have to run away to get it.  And mothers and fathers, if it is too late for you, think of your children.  Make it safe here so they do mot have to run away, for I want for you and your children what I had.  

Ladies and gentlemen, my friends and family, I have just been handed a little note, as you probably say.  It is an invitation to visit the President of the United States in his home, the White House.  

I am greatly honored.  But I must tell you that a colored woman—or, as you say it here in America, a black woman—is not going there. It is a woman.  It is Josephine Baker.

This is a great honor for me.  Someday I want you children out there to have that great honor too.  And we know that that time is not someday.  We know that that time is now.  

I thank you, and may god bless you.  And may He continue to bless you long after I am gone. 

Ida B. Wells. 'Why is mob murder permitted by a Christian nation?', 'Lynching Our National Crime', National Negro Conference - 1909

31 May 1909, New York City, New York, USA

Ida B. Wells was the most famous anti lynching advocate of her time. She started in the 1890s, often a lone voice, and the cause took hold with the establishment of the NAACP around the time of this speech.

The lynching record for a quarter of a century merits the thoughtful study of the American people. It presents three salient facts: First, lynching is color-line murder. Second, crimes against women is the excuse, not the cause. Third, it is a national crime and requires a national remedy. Proof that lynching follows the color line is to be found in the statistics which have been kept for the past twenty-five years. During the few years preceding this period and while frontier law existed, the executions showed a majority of white victims. Later, however, as law courts and authorized judiciary extended into the far West, lynch law rapidly abated, and its white victims became few and far between.  Just as the lynch-law regime came to a close in the West, a new mob movement started in the South.

This was wholly political, its purpose being to suppress the colored vote by intimidation and murder. Thousands of assassins banded together under the name of Ku Klux Klans, “Midnight Raiders,” “Knights of the Golden Circle,” et cetera, et cetera, spread a reign of terror, by beating, shooting and killing colored in a few years, the purpose was accomplished, and the black vote was supressed. But mob murder continued. From 1882, in which year fifty-two were lynched, down to the present, lynching has been along the color line. Mob murder increased yearly until in 1892 more than two hundred victims were lynched and statistics show tht 3,284 men, women and children have been put to death in this quarter of a century. During the last ten years from 1899 to 1908 inclusive the number lynched was 959. Of this number 102 were white, while the colored victims numbered 857. No other nation, civilized or savage, burns its criminals; only under that Stars and Stripes is the human holocaust possible. Twenty-eight human beings burned at the stake, one of them a woman and two of them children, is the awful indictment against American civilization—the gruesome tribute which the nation pays to the color line.

Why is mob murder permitted by a Christian nation? What is the cause of this awful slaughter? This question is answered almost daily— always the same shameless falsehood that “Negroes are lynched to protect womanhood.” Standing before a Chautauqua assemblage, John Temple Graves, at once champion of lynching and apologist for lynchers, said: “The mob stands today as the most potential bulwark between the women of the South and such a carnival of crime as would infuriate the world and precipitate the annihilation of the Negro race.” This is the never-varying answer of lynchers and their apologists. All know that it is untrue. The cowardly lyncher revels in murder, then seeks to shield himself from public execration by claiming devotion to woman. But truth is mighty and the lynching record disc1oses the hypocrisy of the lyncher as well as his crime.

The Springfield, Illinois, mob rioted for two days, the militia of the entire state was called out, two men were lynched, hundreds of people driven from their homes, all because a white woman said a Negro assaulted her. A mad mob went to the jail, tried to lynch the victim of her charge and, not being able to find him, proceeded to pillage and burn the town and to lynch two innocent men. Later, after the police had found that the woman’s charge was false, she published a retraction, the indictment was dismissed and the intended victim discharged. But the lynched victims were dead. Hundreds were homeless and Illinois was disgraced.

As a final and complete refutation of the charge that lynching is occasioned by crimes against women, a partial record of lynchings is cited; 285 persons were lynched for causes as follows: Unknown cause, 92; no cause, 10; race prejudice, 49; miscegenation, 7; informing, 12; making threats, 11; keeping saloon, 3; practicing fraud, 5; practicing voodooism, 1; refusing evidence, 2; political causes, 5; disputing, 1; disobeying quarantine regulations, 2; slapping a child, 1; turning state’s evidence, 3; protecting a Negro, 1; to prevent giving evidence, 1; knowledge of larceny, 1; writing letter to white woman, 1; asking white woman to marry; 1; jilting girl, 1; having smallpox, 1; concealing criminal, 2; threatening political exposure, 1; self- defense, 6; cruelty; 1; insulting language to woman, 5; quarreling with white man, 2; colonizing Negroes, 1; throwing stones, 1; quarreling, 1; gambling, 1.

Is there a remedy, or will the nation confess that it cannot protect its protectors at home as well as abroad? Various remedies have been suggested to abolish the lynching infamy, but year after year, the butchery of men, women and children continues in spite of plea and protest. Education is suggested as a preventive, but it is as grave a crime to murder an ignorant man as it is a scholar. True, few educated men have been lynched, but the hue and cry once started stops at no bounds, as was clearly shown by the lynchings in Atlanta, and in Springfield, Illinois.

Agitation, though helpful, will not alone stop the crime. Year after year statistics are published, meetings are held, resolutions are adopted and yet lynchings go on. Public sentiment does measurably decrease the sway of mob law, but the irresponsible bloodthirsty criminals who swept through the streets of Springfield, beating an inoffensive law-abiding citizen to death in one part of the town, and in another torturing and shooting to death a man who for threescore years had made a reputation for honesty; integrity and sobriety, had raised a family and had accumulated property; were not deterred from their heinous crimes by either education or agitation.

The only certain remedy is an appeal to law. Lawbreakers must be made to know that human life is sacred and that every citizen of this country is first a citizen of the United States and secondly a citizen of the state in which he belongs. This nation must assert itself and protect its federal citizenship at home as well as abroad. The strong arm of the government must reach across state lines whenever unbridled lawlessness defies state laws and must give to the individual under the Stars and Stripes the same measure of protection it gives to him when he travels in foreign lands.

Federal protection of American citizenship is the remedy for lynching. Foreigners are rarely lynched in America. If, by mistake, one is lynched, the national government quickly pays the damages. The recent agitation in California against the Japanese compelled this nation to recognize that federal power must yet assert itself to protect the nation from the treason of sovereign states. Thousands of American citizens have been put to death and no President has yet raised his hand in effective protest, but a simple insult to a native of Japan was quite sufficient to stir the government at Washington to prevent the threatened wrong. If the government has power to protect a foreigner from insult, certainly it has power to save a citizen’s life.

The practical remedy has been more than once suggested in Congress. Senator Gallinger, of New Hampshire, in a resolution introduced in Congress called for an investigation “with the view of ascertaining whether there is a remedy for lynching which Congress may apply.” The Senate Committee has under consideration a bill drawn by A. E. Pillsbury, formerly Attorney General of Massachusetts, providing for federal prosecution of lynchers in cases where the state fails to protect citizens or foreigners. Both of these resolutions indicate that the attention of the nation has been called to this phase of the lynching question.

As a final word, it would be a beginning in the right direction if this conference can see its way clear to establish a bureau for the investigation and publication of the details of every lynching, so that the public could know that an influential body of citizens has made it a duty to give the widest publicity to the facts in each case; that it will make an effort to secure expressions of opinion all over the country against lynching for the sake of the country’s fair name; and lastly, but by no means least, to try to influence the daily papers of the country to refuse to become accessory to mobs either before or after the fact.

Several of the greatest riots and most brutal burnt offerings of the mobs have been suggested and incited by the daily papers of the offending community. If the newspaper which suggests lynching in its accounts of an alleged crime, could be held legally as well as morally responsible for reporting that “threats of lynching were heard”; or, “it is feared that if the guilty one is caught, he will be lynched”; or, “there were cries of ‘lynch him,’ and the only reason the threat was not carried out was because no leader appeared,” a long step toward a remedy will have been taken.

In a multitude of counsel there is wisdom. Upon the grave question presented by the slaughter of innocent men, women and children there should be an honest, courageous conference of patriotic, law-abiding citizens anxious to punish crime promptly, impartially and by due process of law, also to make life, liberty and property secure against mob rule.

Time was when lynching appeared to be sectional, but now it is national—a blight upon our nation, mocking our laws and disgracing our Christianity. “With malice toward none but with charity for all” let us undertake the work of making the “law of the land” effective and supreme upon every foot of American soil—a shield to the innocent; and to the guilty, punishment swift and sure.

Steve Kerr: 'it's disgusting', response to Parkland mass shooting - 2018

15 February 2018, Portland, Oregon, USA

Well, nothing has been done.

It doesn't seem to matter to our government that children are being shot to death day after day in schools.

It doesn't seem to matter that people are being shot at a concert, in a movie theater.

It's not enough, apparently, to move our leadership, our government, the people running this country to actually do anything. That's demoralizing.

But we can do something about it. We can vote people in who actually have the courage to protect peoples’ lives and not just bow down to the NRA because they finance their campaign for them.

So, hopefully, we will find enough people to vote good people with courage to actually help our citizens remain safe and focus on the real safety issues and not building some stupid wall for billions of dollars that has nothing to do with our safety, but actually protecting us from what truly is dangerous -- which is maniacs with semi-automatic weapons (who) are just slaughtering our children.

It's disgusting.

Emma Gonzalez: 'We call BS!, student rally post Parkland mass shooting - 20188

18 February 2018, Parkland, Florida, USA

We haven't already had a moment of silence in the House of Representatives, so I would like to have another one. Thank you.

Every single person up here today, all these people should be home grieving. But instead we are up here standing together because if all our government and President can do is send thoughts and prayers, then it's time for victims to be the change that we need to see. Since the time of the Founding Fathers and since they added the Second Amendment to the Constitution, our guns have developed at a rate that leaves me dizzy. The guns have changed but our laws have not.

We certainly do not understand why it should be harder to make plans with friends on weekends than to buy an automatic or semi-automatic weapon. In Florida, to buy a gun you do not need a permit, you do not need a gun license, and once you buy it you do not need to register it. You do not need a permit to carry a concealed rifle or shotgun. You can buy as many guns as you want at one time.

I read something very powerful to me today. It was from the point of view of a teacher. And I quote: When adults tell me I have the right to own a gun, all I can hear is my right to own a gun outweighs your student's right to live. All I hear is mine, mine, mine, mine.

Instead of worrying about our AP Gov chapter 16 test, we have to be studying our notes to make sure that our arguments based on politics and political history are watertight. The students at this school have been having debates on guns for what feels like our entire lives. AP Gov had about three debates this year. Some discussions on the subject even occurred during the shooting while students were hiding in the closets. The people involved right now, those who were there, those posting, those tweeting, those doing interviews and talking to people, are being listened to for what feels like the very first time on this topic that has come up over 1,000 times in the past four years alone.

I found out today there's a website shootingtracker.com. Nothing in the title suggests that it is exclusively tracking the USA's shootings and yet does it need to address that? Because Australia had one mass shooting in 1999 in Port Arthur (and after the) massacre introduced gun safety, and it hasn't had one since. Japan has never had a mass shooting. Canada has had three and the UK had one and they both introduced gun control and yet here we are, with websites dedicated to reporting these tragedies so that they can be formulated into statistics for your convenience.

I watched an interview this morning and noticed that one of the questions was, do you think your children will have to go through other school shooter drills? And our response is that our neighbors will not have to go through other school shooter drills. When we've had our say with the government -- and maybe the adults have gotten used to saying 'it is what it is,' but if us students have learned anything, it's that if you don't study, you will fail. And in this case if you actively do nothing, people continually end up dead, so it's time to start doing something.

We are going to be the kids you read about in textbooks. Not because we're going to be another statistic about mass shooting in America, but because, just as David said, we are going to be the last mass shooting. Just like Tinker v. Des Moines, we are going to change the law. That's going to be Marjory Stoneman Douglas in that textbook and it's going to be due to the tireless effort of the school board, the faculty members, the family members and most of all the students. The students who are dead, the students still in the hospital, the student now suffering PTSD, the students who had panic attacks during the vigil because the helicopters would not leave us alone, hovering over the school for 24 hours a day.

There is one tweet I would like to call attention to. So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled for bad and erratic behavior. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities again and again. We did, time and time again. Since he was in middle school, it was no surprise to anyone who knew him to hear that he was the shooter. Those talking about how we should have not ostracized him, you didn't know this kid. OK, we did. We know that they are claiming mental health issues, and I am not a psychologist, but we need to pay attention to the fact that this was not just a mental health issue. He would not have harmed that many students with a knife.

And how about we stop blaming the victims for something that was the student's fault, the fault of the people who let him buy the guns in the first place, those at the gun shows, the people who encouraged him to buy accessories for his guns to make them fully automatic, the people who didn't take them away from him when they knew he expressed homicidal tendencies, and I am not talking about the FBI. I'm talking about the people he lived with. I'm talking about the neighbors who saw him outside holding guns.

If the President wants to come up to me and tell me to my face that it was a terrible tragedy and how it should never have happened and maintain telling us how nothing is going to be done about it, I'm going to happily ask him how much money he received from the National Rifle Association.

You want to know something? It doesn't matter, because I already know. Thirty million dollars. And divided by the number of gunshot victims in the United States in the one and one-half months in 2018 alone, that comes out to being $5,800. Is that how much these people are worth to you, Trump? If you don't do anything to prevent this from continuing to occur, that number of gunshot victims will go up and the number that they are worth will go down. And we will be worthless to you.

To every politician who is taking donations from the NRA, shame on you.

Crowd chants, shame on you.

If your money was as threatened as us, would your first thought be, how is this going to reflect on my campaign? Which should I choose? Or would you choose us, and if you answered us, will you act like it for once? You know what would be a good way to act like it? I have an example of how to not act like it. In February of 2017, one year ago, President Trump repealed an Obama-era regulation that would have made it easier to block the sale of firearms to people with certain mental illnesses.

From the interactions that I had with the shooter before the shooting and from the information that I currently know about him, I don't really know if he was mentally ill. I wrote this before I heard what Delaney said. Delaney said he was diagnosed. I don't need a psychologist and I don't need to be a psychologist to know that repealing that regulation was a really dumb idea.

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa was the sole sponsor on this bill that stops the FBI from performing background checks on people adjudicated to be mentally ill and now he's stating for the record, 'Well, it's a shame the FBI isn't doing background checks on these mentally ill people.' Well, duh. You took that opportunity away last year.

The people in the government who were voted into power are lying to us. And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and our parents to call BS.Companies trying to make caricatures of the teenagers these days, saying that all we are self-involved and trend-obsessed and they hush us into submission when our message doesn't reach the ears of the nation, we are prepared to call BS. Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have been done to prevent this, we call BS. They say tougher guns laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS. They say no laws could have prevented the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS. That us kids don't know what we're talking about, that we're too young to understand how the government works. We call BS.

If you agree, register to vote. Contact your local congresspeople. Give them a piece of your mind.

(Crowd chants) Throw them out.

Lori Alhadeff: 'President Trump, please do something!' mother of Alyssa Alhadeff, Parkland school shooting - 2018

15 February, 2017, Parkland, Florida, USA

How? How do we allow a gunman to come into our children’s school?

How do they get through security? What security is there? There’s no metal detectors!

The gunman - a crazy person, just walks into the school, knocks down the window of my child’s door, and starts shooting, shooting her. And killing her!

President Trump, you say, what can you do?

You can stop the guns from getting into these children’s hands.

Put metal detectors at every entrance to the schools.

What can you do! You can do a lot!

This is not fair to our families that our children go to school and have to get killed!

I just spent the last two hours putting the burial arrangements for my daughter’s funeral, who’s 14.

President Trump, please do something!

Action, now!

These kids need safety now!

Michael Sheen: 'But first of all – by God, believe in something', Hay Festival - 2015

2 March 2015, St David's Day, Port Talbot, Wales, United Kingdom

In 1945 Aneurin Bevan said: ‘We have been the dreamers, we have been the sufferers, and now, we are the builders.’ And my God, how they built. And what they built. Every bit as much a wonder of the world as any architectural marvel, or any natural miracle … The National Health Service. A truly monumental vision. The result of true representation. Of real advocacy. A symbol of equality, of fairness, and of compassion.

The nation that swept the postwar Labour government into power was made up of people who had faced the horrors and the hardships of the second world war. And had bound together as one community to overcome them. They had been sustained and inspired by their feeling of comradeship, and their sense of responsibility for their fellow man and woman. Compelled to help those in need and those struggling in the face of hardship.

These were the experiences that shaped them, and this was the vision of life that the welfare state was born out of. Faced with an enemy that sought only to divide, the National Health Service strove for unity. Where they traded in fear-mongering, and blame, and exploitation of the vulnerable, the NHS represented compassion, and generosity, and acceptance. Where they slavered with voracious self-interest, the NHS symbolised courageous self-sacrifice for the good of all.

In his book In Place of Fear, Bevan said: ‘The collective principle asserts that no society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.’

‘No society can legitimately call itself civilised’: now that begs the question, what sort of society do we want to be? What is our vision for ourselves? What are the qualities and the principles that we aspire towards, and choose to defend?

Because it is a choice. Do we want to be a society that is fractured, divided, disconnected? Do we want to be a society that is suspicious and mistrustful of its own people? A society that is exploitative, that sees people as commodities, as numbers. Mere instruments of profit, to be used while they have use, drained of whatever they can offer, and when they are seen as no longer useful, just abandoned, cut adrift. Preferably unseen and never again heard from.

Or … or … do we want to be a society where each person is recognised? Where all are equal in worth and value. And where that value is not purely a monetary one. A society that is supportive, that is inclusive and compassionate. Where it is acknowledged that not all can prosper. Where those who are most vulnerable, most in need of help, are not seen as lazy, or scrounging, or robbing the rest of us for whatever they can get. Where we … we do not turn our backs on those facing hard times. We do not abandon them or exploit their weakness. Because they are us. If not now, then at some point, and inevitably, they are us.

We are not afraid to acknowledge that we can be ailing, that we can find ourselves weak, that we can be infirm, and that we all at some point need help. We don’t shy away from this hard truth, we embrace it. Because in that way, together, we are always strong. We leave no one behind. We only say we’ve crossed the finish line when the last of us does. Because no one is alone. And there is such a thing as society.

This is what I believe to be Aneurin Bevan’s vision of a living tapestry of a mixed community, as he said.

At a time now, when people mistrust politicians as being too professional, too disconnected, no longer representing the voice of the people they have been elected to serve but more likely to represent the voice of wherever the money is. No longer standing for anything meaningful, or inspired by strongly held beliefs.

At a time like this a man like Aneurin Bevan seems like a mythical creature. Like a unicorn perhaps. Or perhaps more fittingly, a dragon. He didn’t care what the polls were saying. He didn’t worry about his PR, or what the current popular trends might be. His vision was long term. It was far-reaching, visionary in its scope and revolutionary in its effects. He had cast iron integrity and a raging passion.

This was a man who had no fear in standing up for what he believed in. And he made no bones about how he felt. This was a man who publicly stated: ‘No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical, or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep, burning hatred for the Tory party.’

In today’s political climate, where politicians are careful, tentative, scared of saying what they feel for fear of alienating a part of the electorate; where under the excuse of trying to appear electable, all parties drift into a morass of bland neutrality; and the real deals, the real values we suspect, are kept behind closed doors – is it any wonder that people feel there is very little to choose between? Bevan said: ‘We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down.’

So when people are too scared to say what they really mean, when they’re too careful to speak from their hearts, when integrity is too much of a risk, it’s no surprise that people feel disengaged with politics.

There is never an excuse to not speak up for what you think is right. You must stand up for what you believe. But first of all – by God, believe in something.

Because there are plenty out there who believe in grabbing as much as they can for themselves. Constantly sniffing around for markets to exploit, for weakness to expose. They won’t say it, of course – they’re too smart for that.

No one says they want to get rid of the NHS. Everyone praises it, across all parties. It is about as powerful a symbol of goodness that we have, so it would be too dangerous not to. But for decades now, there has nevertheless been a systematic undermining of its core values.

This is beyond party politics. The Labour government arguably did as much damage to the NHS as any Tory or coalition-led one.

This is about who we want to be as a nation, and what we believe is worth fighting for. Too many people have given too much, and fought too hard, for us to give away what they achieved and to be left with so very little.

To those across the whole party political spectrum, and to anyone in any position of power or authority, I ask you to search your heart, and look at who and what you serve.

To those who have discarded all principles, save that of profit before all else; to those who have turned their backs on the very idea of a truly democratic society, and aligned themselves to nothing but self-interest; to those who have betrayed the vision of equality, and justice, and compassion for all – that vision that provided the crucible from which came forth the National Health Service – I say to you, as Aneurin Bevan said in Trafalgar Square in 1956: you have besmirched the name of Britain; you have made us ashamed of the things of which formerly we were proud; you have offended against every principle of decency and there is only way in which you can even begin to restore your tarnished reputation. Get out. Get out! Get ... out!

Catherine Quinlan: 'So take a second and save your life', The End of Time, RMIT Speechwriting Task - 2017

23 October 2017, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

Catherine is part of the professional writing and editing course at RMIT. This was a speechwriting exercise for end of year presentation. One of the supervisors sent it to Speakola as an outstanding piece. .

There’s no time like the present.

There is no time like the present because now is all we have. So if you want to change, NOW is the time. 

As Aristotle said, ‘now does not coexist with any other moment. It does not even inhabit itself, but annuls itself the moment it comes to be.’

In other words, time is a succession of nows.

But even the word succession is problematic because it implies that one moment follows another in a line,  a temporal line.

The passing of time, second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour is merely a convention.  It is based on an economic imperative that declares: ‘There is no time to waste because time is money.’

And time is money; but only if we buy into the current economic theory that drives our society. In economics speak, time decay even has a formula:

“Time decay is the ratio of change in an option’s price to the decrease in time to expiration.”

No wonder we are driven: everything we love and value – including ourselves – is supposedly losing value over time.

The word success is even a measure of time? Since the word success originates from the Latin word succedere – to come close after.

One thing leads to another. A single rain drop on the window is not capable of sustaining itself apart from the rain.

But, by this definition, we are all harnessed to time and on and on the treadmill turns.

The renowned economic theorist John Maynard Keynes wrote in the 1930s

‘that in future people would have more leisure time because of mechanisation and compound interest’.

But where is this extra time?  It is illusory – based on projections from the past to future and bypassing the present, a mechanism that doesn’t bring us joy or make us more productive.

We use phrases like: 'time poor', 'time is not my own' and 'stealing time' because we believe that time is a scarce commodity and moments need to be stolen in order to preserve some of it for ourselves.  

We relate to the character of the White Rabbit from Alice In Wonderland when he runs past saying: “I’m late, I’m late, I’m late” .

But paradoxically, when Alice asks the White Rabbit:“How long is forever?” He replies: “Sometimes just one second.”

So take a second and save your life.

It would be truly tragic if, in reality, we were simply propelled from what was to what will be with nothing in between.

But this time-poor existence is a choice.

So why are we choosing to live apart from the one place we naturally abide –  the here and now. What T.S Elliot called ‘The still point of a turning world’.

If we lived on the constant point of creation, ‘in my beginning is my end’ we would view life’s vicissitudes with equanimity.

We wouldn’t be crippled by fear and far from being unproductive, we would always be on the cusp of discovery.

Rumi, the 13th century Sunni poet wrote:

‘You were born with wings why prefer to crawl through life?’

Telling people to strive for an indefinite future is robbing them of their inheritance. 

Everything we need is here now.

There is time enough in one grain of sand in the hourglass.

When are we intending to marvel at the majesty of a swooping bird or the brilliance of the sunset?

Tomorrow or next week?

Oh, but there isn’t time.  Tempus Fugit. Time Flies.

Another writer who used the conundrum of time in his writings was Oscar Wilde. ‘If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.’

Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of Great Britain during World War Two, unravels time and refashions it into a pattern that will bring comfort to the people of England during this the darkest hours of the war.

“Now this is not the end.
It is not even the beginning of the end.
But it is, perhaps,
the end of the beginning.”

Rather than being indefinitely afraid, the people of England now had a space in which to breath and go about their daily lives. The only thing that had changed was their concept of time.

I would like to leave you with the words of another renowned philosopher, Pooh Bear:

“What day is it?” asked Pooh.
“It’s today,” squeaked Piglet.
“My favourite day,” said Pooh.