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OUR VOICES WILL NOT BE SILENCED

by JESSE L. JACKSON

WE CAME in search of a new focus: A new vision. The national vision is blurred. We must find a better way.

We came as a coalition of church and labor, multi-ethnic, poor and concerned people; a coalition that is born of necessity and desperation. Our action was a signal of a spring and summer offensive for social change and social justice. We came here from as far away as Alaska to touch the conscience of the nation.

As we marched from the White House to the Capitol, many cities were marching concurrently with us. Our protest for jobs, peace and justice will continue to grow. The prevailing order has conspired and shifted to dangerous reactionary and inhumane conservatism. We will march in targeted districts: We will have job and hunger hearings in targeted districts. We will have voter registration in targeted districts. Eighty congressional districts have 15 percent or more black voters. We will lobby in targeted districts. We will engage in selective patronage boycotts against corporations that refuse affirmative action programs. We will struggle to survive and we will prevail, because we have strategic weapons-the vote, consumer dollars, marching feet and made-up minds. There is agony in the land, but there is also power in a made-up mind.

We came determined to make the Black, the Hispanic, the poor and the rejected visible. We gathered to redress our grievances against government and private industry policies that are adversely affecting the masses of our people.

There are anxiety and fear throughout the land. People are turning upon themselves, trying to escape the reality of a living nightmare. Some are turning against their neighbors (homicide); some are turning against themselves (suicide); others are slowly dying in prisons and on street corners from assassinated dreams and a future ranging from reduced options to no options. People are victims of both government policies and the reactionary interpretation of laws that make it more likely that they will be victims of welfare and in-
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The above is adapted from the text of a speech delivered by the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson at the May 17, 1980, demonstration in Washington, D.C., for "Jobs, Peace and Justice," mounted by a coalition of civil rights, labor and religious groups. Rev. Jackson is National President of P.U.S.H. (People United to Save Humanity).

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