Bishop TD Jakes - Honoring BlackHistoryMonth Bishop TD Jakes Commemorates Dr Martin Luther King Jr - Potter's Touch

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:13):
When we think of doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. We
often forget that he was a preacher. He said so
many times that he just wanted to be a great pastor,
and he ended up being a pastor to the world
during his lifetime, and he's still pastoring us during this time,
and so we would certainly have speaking with us today

(00:37):
a preacher. In fact, he's one of the greatest preachers
in our time. Both Time Magazine and CNN called him
America's best preacher. I'm speaking of none other than Bishop
td Jakes. Were honored to have this pastor and this preacher,

(00:58):
Bishop td Jakes. He's a charismatic leader, a visionary, provocative thinker,
best selling author, filmmaker, and entrepreneur who serves as senior
pastor of The Potter's House, a global humanitarian organization and
thirty thousand plus members strong that is located in Dallas, Texas.

(01:19):
Many of you know him from Woman Thou Loose, Megafest,
and the international pastors and leaderships, but most of us
know him as a profound preacher who rightly divides the
Word of truth. We are honored and blessed to have
this man of God speak to us in this hour,

(01:42):
what thus saith the Lord.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
I want to take this time to thank the King
Center for the tremendous honor of being invited to participate
on this momentous occasion, and to doctor Bernice King in particular.
I'm deeply honored to lynn voice along with the myriad
of people who have gathered their expertise, their experience, their academia,

(02:06):
and their life skills to interject the ideas of where
we can go from here and to support the overall
theme of the beloved community. Doctor King talks about the
beloved community because he understands how important it is that
we see ourselves as a beloved community. And in spite

(02:27):
of the fact that we are a beloved community, we
have issues in that community, like you have issues in
a family, like you have issues in a company or business.
But that does not negate the fact that we are
committed one toward another. His understanding of the beloved community,
it's what we want to talk to you about it today.

(02:47):
My thoughts are along the themes of not one of us,
but all of us. And when I begin to meditate
over what I would say to this hospice viewing audience,
my mind went back and reflected on First Samuel, chapter seventeen,
verse twenty nine, when David has meandered down to the

(03:10):
battlefield to bring lunch to his brethren who are engaged
in a battle. David, the shepherd boy, who has no
experience in taking on fights, once he is confronted with
the mammoth opposition of Goliath standing in front of him,
becomes so compelled and so convicted by the challenges that

(03:33):
besought his community that he decided to take on the
fight that others had already been fighting in. And he
says in that particular verse, what have I now done?
Is there not a cause? David is saying that it
was not his career mindedness that drove him. He was

(03:54):
cause driven by profession. Up until this point he had
been a shepherd boy. But then he had gone from
being a shepherd boy and use the expertise and experience
of being a common fellow, a young boy on the
outskirts of the community, somebody who had not been revered
or respected, but yet challenged by a call and determined

(04:17):
to respond to a cause. He makes a decision not
because he's interested in a career, but because he understands
the magnitude of the challenge that is set before him today.
The shepherd boy that killed the first giant later learned
that it would take a coalition to kill the rest

(04:37):
of the giants. And when I think of that, I
think of Doctor King, and I think of Jesus Christ,
for example, who understood that he did so many things
over the course of his life, but in order to
take it to the next level, he had to impart
the embodiment of what was in him into the Twelve

(04:58):
Disciples and ultimately in the Church. In the same way,
we must understand, my brothers and sisters, amid so many
many years of people asking who is the next MLK,
I would suggest to you that there will probably never
ever be another Doctor Martin Luther King. There will likely

(05:20):
never be a voice that penetrates and pierces the darkness
of racism and division, of hatred and malice and envy
and strife with as much finesse and technique as he
used during that time. We must understand, however, that the
cause does not stop with the end of the man,
but it multiplies, as it did with David, down to

(05:43):
the next dimension, where we begin to understand that it.

Speaker 3 (05:46):
Is not one of us. But it is in fact.

Speaker 2 (05:49):
All of us that are called to respond to face
the challenges of our time with the same veracity, and
the same intensity and the same fervience of spirit. We
must continue on not as though we had cloned him,
and not as though we might imitate him, but each
to his own position, that we might posture ourselves to

(06:11):
understand that collectively we embody the vision, the ideals, the goals,
and yes, even the adversity that is associated with the
dreamer who dared to have such a dream against such
great opposing ideologies. When we think about the beloved community,

(06:34):
we are drawn immediately to the word community, which causes
our eye to fall to the word unity. In order
to have a strong community, we must have a strong
semblance of unity. I'm not sure that we will ever
see the emergence of one individual who can embody the
full breadth and depth of the initiation that was set

(06:57):
by Doctor King. But the breath his wisdom, coupled with
the intellect and charisma, is not manufactured by the whims
of men. It is rather by the mandate of God
and purpose, And as David would say, it is controlled
by the cause. The slogan has been said that when

(07:18):
the student is ready, the teacher will appear. That is
to say, when the challenge comes up, the designated individuals
will come forth at that particular time to respond to
the opposition that is before us. Now, opposition is a
strange thing. We would like to think that opposition is

(07:39):
always fair, that it is coequal, that a heavyweight doesn't
fight a lightweight, that a lightweight doesn't fight a heavyweight.
But David reminds us that we serve a God who
will call us to do things where the odds seem insurmountable,
where the challenges seemed daunting, where the people we seek

(08:01):
to persuade seemed deafened to our cry and our petition,
And yet we must have a commitment down in the
innermost parts and recesses of our souls, to rise to
the challenge that is setting for us. It was the
roaring of the giant that instigated the action of David.

(08:22):
With no background in killing giants and no background in
swords and shields, he still took on the challenge with
the little that he had, understanding that he could get
the job done because God was with him, and because
if God is for us, who then can be against us.

(08:44):
I want you to understand today that this is no
small challenge. Today we've had periods of great accomplishment. We
cannot negate that we've come a long ways from where
we started from. I grew up with colored water fountains
and the extra bathroom. I remember vividly my father going
to the back door of restaurants to get food that

(09:07):
we could only eat in the car. I remember vividly
back in the sixties having to travel at night trying
to avoid being noticed, so that we could move from
the hills of West Virginia to the red clay of
Alabama without being stopped, without being harassed, without being challenged.
And I would love to be able to say that

(09:27):
those days are gone, and there have been periods and
moments along the way that we had to celebrate. That
they are certainly much much much better than they were
when I was a child. But the recent headlines said
are so pervasive in our times today, remind us that
the giant is not dead. He may have been sleep

(09:48):
but he is not gone. The giants said confront us
today seem almost as large as the giant, said confronted
doctor K. But the bigger they come, the harder they fall.
There are many giants that stalk our beloved community, that
threaten our unity, that threatened the integrity of our unity,

(10:13):
and symbolance of corrosiveness seems to be so pervasive in
our times, and even young people are not exempt from
feeling the threat that they too can be enlisted into
a war that they didn't even ask to be in.
But we find ourselves in, We find ourselves drafted into
a conflict that we did not pick for ourselves. But

(10:35):
as David so eloquently said, is they're not a cause.
While most and many are going to school seeking a career,
there are some amongst us that seek a cause that
distracts us from the focus of our ambition, our own career,
and even those who are ambitious often have to lay

(10:56):
their ambition aside and respond to the daunting, taunting, flaunting
parade of the giants, The parade themselves against us in
this hour, in this time, assuming that they would prevail
against us. But if we stand united, and if we
stand together, and if we stand connected, and if we

(11:18):
stand committed, we can get things together. We can get
things done, and we can get things moving, and we
can get things paramount that we could not do on
our own. Doctor King asked a question in one of
his books, where where do we go from here? That
is to say, he had done those things that he

(11:40):
was sent to do, had accomplished those challenges that were
before him, but he understood that the job was not
finished with one person alone. It is not one of us.
It will take all of us. And once we settle
in on the fact in the next generation, like David,
that he cannot do it alone, that we are we
all have a responsibility collectively to become involved in some

(12:06):
aspect of bringing about a chain that causes our community
to be more beloved. It seems audacious to make a
statement about a beloved community in the midst of the
violence that we see in the midst of armud Arbrary,
in the midst of so many pervasive images before us,

(12:27):
in the midst of George Floyd. It seems kind of
odd to talk about a beloved community. The community doesn't
seem so beloved right now, with the galing on the
White House, and the tauntings and the killings, and the
murders and the burnings and the riots.

Speaker 3 (12:43):
It does not seem like.

Speaker 2 (12:45):
A beloved community, but like most families, facing a challenge.
If we keep on working, we will work until we
work it out. One of the giants that I seen
before us when you talk about where do we go
from here? One of the giants that's facing us as
home ownership. A recent article in The Washington Post said

(13:07):
in the first quarter of twenty twenty, forty four percent
of Black families own their homes, compared with seventy three
percent seventy three point seven to be exact of white families,
according to the Census Bureau. So we're lagging way behind
when it comes to home ownership. We're not asking to

(13:29):
own a home so that we can be flamboyant, impressive
or keep up with the Joneses. We understand that the
acquisition of wealth begins with home ownership. We understand that
many of us can't go forward because we're house poor.
We understand that many of us have been paying rent
for years and unable to move to the height that
we hope to go to because we are shackled down

(13:51):
with something that gains no equity and moves us no
closer to where we're.

Speaker 3 (13:56):
Trying to go.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
The gap, though, is wider cities with just twenty five
percent of black families owning a home, say, for example,
in places like Minneapolis, compared with seventy six percent of whites,
which is the widest gap in the United States cities
with more than one million residents. A study of the

(14:21):
Red Fan real estate brokerage has found these issues are
daunting before us, because whereas I would like to be
talking about owning your own business, I have to digress
and talk about owning your own house, because you can
own your own business until you learn how to own
your own house. We've got a lot of work to

(14:43):
do if we're going to see the change that we need,
if we're going to be able to raise our children
in places that they could really call their own, if
we're going to be able to gather and garner the
strength to be able to send them to the schools
that they need to go to, to receive the training
that they need to get, and most importantly, to just
be in an environment where they can be safe and secure.

Speaker 3 (15:06):
That we must.

Speaker 2 (15:07):
Bring down the giant that taunts us, that says it
is possible in America for a white child to grow
up in a home that his mother and father owns,
but it is much more difficult for a black child
to be able to achieve that lofty goal. In reality,
that is a giant that we've got to bring down,

(15:28):
not one of us, but all of us. Not one
person marching down the street with the bullhorn, but all
of us, not necessarily even with the bullhorn, but in
the boardrooms, in the courtrooms, in the council, in the
banking industry, we have got to challenge the acquisition of
wealth gathering because most of what we're facing today, most

(15:51):
of the tasks that we're facing today, is a result
of not having the equity that we need in order
to move forward in the way that we ought to
be able to move forward. When you start talking about giants,
I brought up homes first, because you've got to have
peace in your home if you don't have it anywhere else.

(16:12):
You've got to have solidarity in your house if you
don't have it anywhere else. But don't get me wrong,
and don't get this twisted. Home ownership is not the
only giant that we face in twenty twenty one. The
reality is one of the other giants that's confronting us
today is mental health. Recent studies have discussed that the

(16:36):
DNA of the grandchildren of the Holocaust survivors were affected
in such a way that their grandchildren's DNA have been
rearranged and altered by the trauma of their grandparents. While
a lot of research was done about Holocaust survivors, little
was done with the descendants of slaves. But the trauma

(16:58):
is still the same. When you start talking about mental health,
you cannot ignore what the last four years and the
last year in particular, has done to the African American community.
How can we not be traumatized when the giant has
come in at snatch three hundred and seventy five thousand

(17:19):
dead from COVID nineteen, disproportionately affecting black and brown families
in America. It is not just for the three hundred
and seventy five thousand that we mourn, but it is
for their sons and for their daughters and wives and
husband and I myself. My phone has been ringing off
the hook with people weeping because they could not say

(17:42):
goodbye to their mother or their father, or they couldn't
be with their loved one at a time of crisis.
Parked in parking lots, in hospitals, facetiming people as they
left this world. The collateral damage over the time that
we live in is insurmountable. Now, I'm not suggesting to

(18:02):
you that we alone have this pain any differently than
our white counterparts, but we are far less likely to
get the help that we need than our white counterparts.
If you are not mentally healthy, then it does you
no good to be physically healthy. We need strong minds
to fight against the challenges of our times, and there

(18:24):
is a giant roaring against us right now like never
before that suggests to us that we just have to
suck it up and swallow it down and keep on
going as if nothing is hurting us. I'm talking a
moment about black pain and how real it is, and
how true it is, and how untreated it is, and

(18:45):
how ignored it is. When you start talking about mental health,
we've got to attack it from every way possible, from
therapy to clinicians to churches to every avenue.

Speaker 3 (19:00):
Of our society.

Speaker 2 (19:01):
Has got to stand up against this giant and begin
to throw the kinds of rocks.

Speaker 3 (19:06):
That bring it down.

Speaker 2 (19:08):
You cannot bring crime down until you deal with mental health.

Speaker 3 (19:13):
You cannot continue to shoot people who.

Speaker 2 (19:15):
Are actually sick, and they need medicine, they need injections.
They don't need to be shot down. But the reality
is nobody is speaking up for those people today, and
it is long overdue, my brothers and sisters, that we
have some element of real change, pervasive change, gully washing change,
first squenching change that rectifies the atrocities of our past.

(19:40):
And the cry goes out, who will speak for us
and who will go and work for us?

Speaker 3 (19:46):
But the answer comes back, my brothers and my sisters.

Speaker 2 (19:50):
We must move beyond or waiting on the next school
and understand that it is not one of us, but
it is in fact all of us. Not one of
us can be derelict of our responsibilities and jump on
social media and attack somebody else from not doing their part,
because you must realize that we will not get there,

(20:13):
not to the place that doctor King saw. We will
not get there where black children and white children and
brown children can join the hands and sing free and last,
free and last, thank God Almighty, I'm free in last.
We will not get there, not with one of us.
But if it takes all of us, it can be done.

(20:35):
I'm concerned about the giant of criminal justice and criminal
justice reform. I'm concerned not only because of the tragic
murder of George Floyd Force forcing America to have to
look at its inequities, the inequities that have gone unchecked
in our criminal justice system, where criminal justice is executed

(20:57):
on the sidewalk rather than the court room. But it
is not just limited to the sidewalk vigilante type justice
of which we are all falling prey to, where flashing
lights intimidate us, where we wonder and take a second thought,
is it safe to go jogging or not? Where we
lay in our own beds and wonder can we be

(21:20):
safe in our own beds and in our own houses.
Where black women are being targeted more readily underrepresented, nobody
fighting for them, It's time for change. What it didn't
show is that in the back room of the courtrooms
there are plea bargainings that contribute to the incarceration of

(21:41):
black and brown people in epic proportions. And though the
numbers have gotten better, they're still not where they ought
to be. And I, for one, will not rest until
better turns to best. I will not rest until suns
return back to their families and daughters are returned back

(22:04):
to their mother's eye. For one will not rest until
I see our families come together and be able to
unite with our peering through bars in order to be
connected together. This is a giant that we cannot afford.
But the song writer said, giants do come, but the
bigger they come, the harder they fall. What does it

(22:26):
take to bring down a giant? The question is a
paramount importance in a time like this, when America is
so volatile and things are so crazy, what will it
take to bring about the justice reform.

Speaker 3 (22:41):
That we need. Do we just need the.

Speaker 2 (22:45):
Congressional Black Caucus, We absolutely need them. Do we need
the NAACP, We absolutely need them. Do we need the
Action Network? We absolutely need them. But it will not
be one of us, No, no, no, it will take
all of us. The criminal justice system has so many tentacles,

(23:05):
so much history. The reality is a war on crime
turned out to be the war on us, the war
on our sons, the war on our daughters. That's why
we have got to breach this conversation and continue to
talk about it, whether it is popular or not. I'm
glad to see that there are some changes. I'm glad

(23:27):
to see that there's some bipartisan support for some real
change in the criminal justice reform. But I cannot wait
on Washington to bring about a change. So why I
started our program, our Texas Offenders re Entry Initiative, because
I cannot wait on Washington to save our sons, our daughters,

(23:47):
our cousins, our brothers, and our sisters. I'm happy to
announce that thirty thousand formerly incarcerated inmates have gone through
our program that was designed to assist them with job opportunity,
to get them ready for job readiness, to help them
with anger management, to have their records expund so that

(24:07):
they have a fighting chance and a place to stay.
If you get out of prison and you can't get
a place to stay and nobody can hire you, there's
no place to go but back in. In order to
reduce the rate of recidivism, somebody has got to fight
this giant so that once you get out, you can
stay out. We do gd programs and overall life skills

(24:28):
and all the things and whatever it takes to help them,
but thirty thousand is just a drop in the bucket
compared to the thousands of men and women that they're
incarcerated behind prison walls right now, and in the middle
of a pandemic no less, where we who are free
have retreated.

Speaker 3 (24:46):
Back into our homes, have come at our face with.

Speaker 2 (24:49):
A mass are questioning ourselves about whether to go to
a restaurant or too a movie. Can you imagine what
it would be like to be incarcerated where you have
no options at all? And the giants are getting together
and holding hands, the giant of health normalities and the
giant of economic normality, that the giant of criminal justice

(25:12):
are holding hands. Let's talk just a little bit about
economic opportunities. Let's talk about the fact that the typical
black household earns a fraction of white households just fifty
nine cents for every dollar. Let's talk about the fact
that the gap between black and white annual household incomes

(25:32):
is about twenty nine thousand dollars per year.

Speaker 3 (25:35):
That's not the income, that's the gap.

Speaker 2 (25:39):
Black Americans are over twice as likely to live in
poverty as white Americans. This are not just concerned Black people.
This ought to concern all people. If we're going to
be the beloved community, we cannot just get excited when
the stats are referring to us Black children are three
times the slack to live in poverty as white children.

(26:03):
How can you go to school and come out effectively
when you're hungry?

Speaker 3 (26:08):
How can you go to school and learn and.

Speaker 2 (26:12):
Be at your best when you have not been fed
for days at a time. How can you compete with
kids and do homework while while they are doing their homework,
you are struggling trying to find something to eat. The
median wealth of Black families is seventeen thousand dollars, is
less than one tenth of that of white families in

(26:36):
America of one hundred and seventy one thousand dollars. It's
a giant but it's got to come down. The change
will require all of us working together. Recently, we had
the privilege to host the first black female doctor, Yolanda Peers,
to hold position of the magnitude that she does for

(26:58):
Howard University dean over their School of Divinity. And while
she was speaking for us, she one of the questions
that came in and asked her what does social justice
look like? And she told the story that stayed with us.
She answered a question in a very unpredictable way. I

(27:21):
thought she would talk about bullhorns and picket signs. I
thought she would talk about social media and tweeting and texting,
but instead she told us about when she was in college,
having been raised by a bunch of church mothers. They
came up to the college on the bus to check
on her, and after having lunch with her and they

(27:42):
were getting ready to depart, the old church mothers did
like church mothers do and reached over inside of a
little tavern that she had and pulled out a handkerchief
with a roll of money in it and handed it
to her and said, little girl, keep on going, and
keep on And as she began to talk about those

(28:02):
old church mothers and that handkerchief, I could almost see
my grandmother had one just like it, all rolled up
with dollars and quarters and everything in it, and handed
it to her. She said, that's what social justice looks like. Again,
I want to remind you it's not one of us,
it's all of us. That is the beloved community. One

(28:27):
person helping another. The beloved community is seeing somebody hungry
and giving them something to eat. The beloved community is
daring to care for people who are trying to pull
themselves up and turn themselves around and fight the good
fight of faith and endeava to do something of significance

(28:47):
with their lives. The beloved community answers the question, I
am I my brother's keeper. The beloved community understands that
we are interconnected in such a way that we can
afford to become isolated. Nor can we allow the voices
around us to intimidate to the point that we lose
the sense that we have and it ain't responsibility to

(29:12):
care about not only what's going on in our world,
but what's going on in the world. When elected officials
and corporate leaders join forces with community activists and faith leaders,
we can defeat the lingering giants that remain fighting us
down to this present moment. Or, as President Barack Obama

(29:35):
so eloquently coined the phrase, together we can. And it
is the unity of our community that the enemy fights
the most. He does not want us to be connected.
He would rather us be corrosive. He would rather us
be accusatory, He would rather us be suspicious, he would

(29:55):
rather us be intimidated. He would rather us self destruct.
But all, oh, not this time, not this time, because
we understand it is not one of us. It is,
in fact all of us. The beloved community is illustrated
best in the Bible by four healthy men who took
on a task they didn't have to take on because

(30:19):
one man was sick of pausing. There could have walked
past him and left him, but they decided instead that
they would lift the weight collectively of the one man.
And so the Bible says that they hoisted the man
up on their shoulders and began to carry him to
the place where he could be healed. Our problem is

(30:40):
not having enough unity. We are working in silos, we
are not working together. But if we ever get together,
if we ever joined our forces together, if elected officials
ever start talking to faith leaders and faith leaders start
talking to see CEOs, start talking to activists together, we

(31:03):
could change this thing. If we haven't began to understand
that it's not one of us, but all of us.
We could change this thing if we ever begin to
understand that it's not one of us, so we don't
have to be crabs in a barrel, this one pulling
that one down, this one tearing the other one down,
fighting to be the one. I'm the man. No, you're

(31:25):
the man. No, she's the one. No, she's one.

Speaker 3 (31:28):
No, it's not one of us.

Speaker 2 (31:31):
Instead, instead, my brothers and sisters, it is not one
of us, it is all of us. But David got
ready to kill the second giant. He thought he would
run out there and do what he did before, only
to find out that this time it was going to
take something beyond him to get the job done. That

(31:53):
the collective reasoning of all of those who had been
influenced by him became the embodiment of his dream and
his ideas.

Speaker 3 (32:02):
And suddenly he began to.

Speaker 2 (32:03):
Realize that he was more valuable coaching than he was fighting.
That the strategy had changed from one boy with a
bag full of rocks to a team of people collectively
working together to bring about a change that we could
not do by ourselves.

Speaker 3 (32:24):
If we try to kill the giant by ourselves.

Speaker 2 (32:28):
We will not survive because the strategy has changed. No,
there will never be a doctor Martin Luther King. That
sound still rings in my head, the sound of that
voice that arrested America, that stood the nation on his ear,
that shook the apartheid in South Africa, that changed the

(32:50):
circumstances in Sela, Alabama, the challenge Montgomery and money off
in Memphis, the voices that stood up against it. There
were never be another Doctor Martin Luther King, who filled
Washington with thousands upon thousands, if not millions, of people
of color back at the time that we had to

(33:10):
ride the greyhound bus and come upon trains to get together.

Speaker 3 (33:14):
There may not ever be another one like that one.
But that's okay, because it is not it is not
one of us, it will take hold of us.

Speaker 2 (33:32):
And so on this momentous occasion, as we celebrate and
commemorate and memorialize and appreciate the significance of this particular individual, Dr.
Martin Luther King, Junior, who stood out from the rest,
who blind side of America, who stopped his foot and

(33:52):
the whole world shook. As we stand in pride and
recognize that if there had not been a Doctor King,
there would never be a TD. Jakes, there would never
be a Beyonce, there would never be an Oprah Winfrey,
there would never be any of us whose names you
might recognize if it had not been for that boy
with that bag of rocks that stood up and dared

(34:15):
to think that he could get it done and do
it without violence. He deserves our respect, He deserves our accolades.
He deserves that we emulate the understanding that perpetuated an idea.

Speaker 3 (34:32):
Against the climate of the times with such power.

Speaker 2 (34:37):
That he in fact did Chain's well. And I know
you're not happy with where it is right now, but
it's trust me, is better than it was. And I
know that we are not there yet, but we're further
than we used to be. And like Paul, I count
not myself to apprehend. But this one thing I knew,
I'm forgetting that which is behind and reaching to the

(35:00):
which is before, understanding that I cannot reach without you,
that it is not enough to reach up if I
don't reach out, that it is not enough to reach
up if I don't reach out. And so as I
stand here behind this sacred death privilege, with this divine assignment,

(35:23):
I make myself your servant at your disposal, understanding that
the servant who brought the lunch ended of the one
who killed the giant. And we cannot lead until we
learn how to serve. And we cannot go forward as
long as we have a private agenda, and we cannot

(35:44):
get there as long as we become trolls of each
other's destiny. Critiques and critics of each other rather than
understanding than in order to have a loved community, we
must have a common unit. We must focus on what
unites us rather than fight about what divides us. I

(36:08):
want to assure you because we have come to a
tough season, and there's no doubt it has been a
dog night. And it is a truth that we have
stood in the rain too long, and we have been
drenched by bad news. We have had to fight off
a virus we couldn't even see. We've had to deal
with the fires in California. We've had to deal with

(36:32):
the floods in Alabama and Mississippi. We've had to deal
with the coronavirus. We've had to withstand the loss of
jobs and the loss of friends, and grandmamas and big
mamas are all gone. But I want you to know
the storms don't last always. And I want you to
understand the trouble when I last always. And I want

(36:56):
you to understand that injustice when I last always. And
I want you to understand that right to them when
I last always. And I want you to understand the
pomedy when I last always, and sickness when I last always.

Speaker 3 (37:15):
There is a cure.

Speaker 2 (37:17):
There is the bomb in Yilliad, there is a fountain
filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel's face and sentence. Plunge
beneath that flood and lose all they're guilty stains? Can
America lose its guilty stains? Yes, the stain can be

(37:40):
purged out of our illustrious flag. It can be washed away,
It can be taken down, It can be rearranged. But
in order to scrub this stain out, it cannot be
done by one of us. It is not, it is

(38:01):
absolutely not one of us, my brothers and sisters. It
will take all of us. So, since we have survived
the tumosous swims of twenty twenty, since we have survived
the attack on our statistics and endured the hardships of

(38:25):
the pandemic, and since we have survived the atrocities of
the killings and unjust murders, and since we have survived
what we have done to ourselves. Inasmuch as we have
survived against all odds, what will we do with another year?

(38:45):
Will we just sit back and complain? Will we murmur
one against another? Will we divide until the house is shattered?
Or will we find the common thing that brings about
the unity that establishes the community. But doctor Martin Luther

(39:08):
King would call the beloved community. If we are to
become the beloved community, it will not be because one
person alone was committed. It will not be one of us.

(39:29):
It in fact, will be all of us.

Speaker 3 (39:35):
God bless you, and may Heaven smile upon you.

Speaker 2 (39:39):
I need you.

Speaker 3 (39:42):
And you need me, and together we become the beloved Community.