 and join me in welcoming to Burlington for month this afternoon, no other than the Reverend Al-Sharp. As we come together to remember the late summarize leader, let me ask you what kind of world do we want to live in? And how do we make this happen? Do we want to live in a world that is characterized by peace, justice, and equity? In order to have a world that is characterized by peace, we must have a world that is characterized by justice, and by justice, we must have a world that is with listeners from all here today. I welcome Senator Senator John Trace, representing Senator Lady, state, federal, and city officials, distinguished ladies and gentlemen. It is my great honor to welcome to Burlington Mr. Al-Sharp. Today is a special day as he joins us in this celebration. Every year, we honor community members who dedicate their lives to the service of others. I will now invite Mr. Hal Colston, followed by Ken Pound, to read the citations. If Dr. Wanda Heddingbrandt will present the first award. It is the most segregated time of the week in America. Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King could be here today. He would be proud of this community. Evelyn Kwanza has made an impact throughout Vermont as an engaging, dynamic performer, and much sought after vocal teacher. She has displayed her talents in a variety of venues and genres. Raised in Oklahoma, Evelyn has done extensive research and performance of art songs by African American women composers. She recorded some of these pieces on her recording, The African American Woman and the Art Song, 1999. Evelyn is an adjunct member of the University of Vermont Music Department and a member of the new Alpha Missionary Baptist Church in Burlington, where she directs the children's choir. She is the assistant music director of the popular Andrew Gospel Fest program held annually at the Flynn Theater. Evelyn has honored Dr. King's legacy in many ways that she has served this community with her musical talents and humanitarianism. She devotes her time to the church and its children by teaching them many of the traditional songs that honor African American heritage, as well as mentoring and coaching the young and old for success. She and her husband, Mota Saint Kwanza, are the perfect team as they collaborate with their leadership and commitment to King's legacy. Mota Saint Kwanza is a copy editor with the Burlington Free Press, and he is also deacon in the new Alpha Missionary Baptist Church. Deacon Mote, as he is known, works extremely hard to fulfill the commitment to the church by showing compassion and dignity. He remembers King's dreams by addressing the illicit society in our community. He volunteers within the church to give back to the community with his involvement with food drives and basket donations. Deacon Mote is always altruistic in his efforts. He is the kind of individual that we should be honoring as we commemorate the life of Dr. King. As he and Evelyn go about their daily lives, we are most grateful that they keep truth and justice at the center of all that they do. And I'm pleased to introduce you to our Senator, Senator Bernice Adams. I think we have seen him. He has long been a champion of civil and human rights as a student at the University of Chicago. He was active in coal, Congress of Racial Equality, and has been committed to racial and social justice ever since. As a mayor of our great city of Burlington, among many initiatives, he reached out to other cities and other nations and established the sister city program, first with Yaroslav and the former Soviet Union, and then with Puerto Cabezas, a municipality which is at the center of the indigenous mosquito population in Nicaragua. As a member of the United States House of Representatives, he worked closely with the Congressional White Caucus, and he was a founder of the Progressive Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus, which brought together members of the Black Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus, and supporters of the labor and social justice. As a member of the United States Senate, he serves on the Health and Education Committee, and has been a tireless advocate of increasing funding for Head Start and Pell Grades, which enable students from low and modest income families to attend college. Senator Bernice Adams has a deep understanding of Dr. King and his message of peace and justice. A year ago, Senator Sanders stated, let us never forget that Dr. King was not only a leader in the anti-segregation efforts of the 1950s and 1960s, but he was also a leader in the anti-war movement and the fight for economic and social justice for all the world. He understood that when people stand together for a bright future, there is no force on earth which can stop them. Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to present the senator from our great state of Vermont, Bernie Sanders. It helps to say, sure, people, this will not be an eight-hour speech. Thank Patrick Brown, you know, for years and years with the musicians. Thank you very much, we appreciate that. Thank all those who made this award possible. It means a great deal to me, because in my view, Martin Luther King Jr. was the outstanding political and moral voice of my lifetime, and I think one of the great heroes of our entire country. Because he received that award, it means a great deal to me tonight, and the media comments on Martin Luther King Jr. What they will focus on, and certainly that is appropriate, is the leadership role that he played in the 50s and in the 60s in any discourage and segregation in this country. And we all know what his epic was about. We know that at least some of our life in the United States is a mess. There were places in this country where African-Americans went to segregated schools, segregated restaurants. They were the first five and the last hired segregation was rampant. And Martin Luther King Jr. and many others put their lives on the line, some lost their lives, in order to end that horrible period in American history. But I think it is also important to understand that Martin Luther King Jr. was not just a great African-American leader. He was a great American leader who happened to be black. He understood and he said many, many times in his life that when we break down the walls of segregation and we want black children to be able to go to any school, then you go to any college that you go to. Then anyone go to any restaurant will live in any house, in any neighborhood they want to. It doesn't mean much if that young person can't afford to go to that college. We think back to why everybody loved him. He was an American hero and you check it out by many. Because they said, Dr. King, you're doing okay when you speak about civil rights, about economics, and the disgrace that so many people, not just Hispanics, Native Americans, can't find a job. We got to change the economy so that all the corporate media said to him, they said to step it out of your place, mister, don't talk about economic justice. There's other Christian leadership council. Stop coming in. Big money guys said, we don't want you talking about that. And then Dr. King did something in their lives even worse. You know what he did? He said, I have, if I talk about nonviolence and if I talk about a world of justice, I have not to talk about the war in Vietnam. Got to do that. Well, children in America, go home. It was like he wasn't on the front pages of the papers anymore. He was pushed to the back. So how do we honor Dr. Martin Luther King? Well, we honor that memory by understanding that this man was a revolutionary. That this man had extraordinary courage and ultimately lost his life as a result for standing on for a different type of world. So today, when we know that 16% of our people are unemployed or unruly, let us remember what King would have said. Jobs for all people and 50 million Americans have no health insurance, what he would have said. Health cap for all Americans. Is we continue that struggle until that day is long. Thank you all very much. Despite being in the program and I would just say Reverend Sharpton, your accomplishments are too great and your honors too numerous. That I can only sum it up in two words. I'll shout. I was then happy to be here today this afternoon and I'm very honored to have been part of presenting an award to Senator Sanders. Let me say that I know a lot of elected officials and there's none that served in the United States in any capacity today that I have more respect for than I do Senator Sanders. I got to Burlington Airport that there was a controversial speaker Patrick had today, so I want to get out of here. In 1968, the New York Division of SCLC Operation Breakfasting for under a year, I had been a boy freedom in the Pentecostal Church. In April 1968, I was approaching my 14th birthday. I was directed to Reverend William Jones who headed New York and Reverend Jesse Jackson who headed National. And I remember like it was yesterday, the television program Island Side was on. It's down in Ravenberg and they interrupted the program to say that Dr. Martin Luther King had been killed in Memphis. And though I had met him a couple of times, though I was a recent part of his nationalization, I couldn't understand why my mother cried so uncontrolled. And we could not in any way comfort her. It was like a very close friend of our family had died. And my mother said to me, you would have had to be born in Alabama like me and have the indigility of riding in the back of buses or being thirsty and being denied going to a water fountain. Or being denied a couple of calls to understand what Dr. King meant. As I grew older and I never left the movement, I did begin to understand what he meant. And I understood it more by what Senator Sanders said because when I came 18 years of age all of my friends went to Vietnam. Because I was a minister, I was given a lower classification. And I lost friends on award and Martin Luther King gave more funding and support to go against. You must remember that Dr. King fought against racial segregation, but he also fought against the political segregation. And the political segregation is that you are only supposed to stay in your spot if you deal with women's rights to stay there. If you deal with right-right stating, don't come out of your spot. And it is really outrageous to think that someone that would bring down the walls of southern apartheid would also agree to segregate his human rights activity. The reason that is important today is as I grew and developed, I realized that you cannot fight for your rights without fighting for everyone's rights. To be followed, you've got to not only deal with the continued racial institutional inequities, but you've got to deal with gender bias, you've got to deal with bias against immigrants, you've got to deal with bias against gays and lesbians. We start losing support. I can't tell you the kind of people that got angry with me for going to Arizona last year, March of Immigration Rights, or my fellow clergyman that said, how dare you talk about gays and lesbians when you cannot open the door of freedom and shut it after you walk through. That's a king great, was that he understood that you cannot limit justice and the quest for freedom, and you cannot be intoxicated by those that would praise you and pat you on the back. One of the things that I became very close with Mrs. King and work hand in hand with his son on the third, the organization I mean National Action Network, one of the things that was always very interesting to me is that when Dr. King came out against the wall, as Senator Sanders correctly said, not only did he lose funding and friends, it was even the northern eastern establishment meeting that vilified it, New York Times. I'm not talking about the Birmingham, whatever their paper was. The New York Times, the northeastern establishment. And Mrs. King said to me, one of the reasons they took such offense was as long as we were fighting bigots down, as long as we were fighting the Archimonde, it was all right. But don't challenge us here. Don't raise the competition here because we all are great and progressive when we are addressing the sins that are falling, rather than the ones that are right at home that we have a comfortable level in law. And you can't celebrate Dr. King without addressing what is going to make you uncomfortable. Dr. King once said that the source bottle is called to make the comfortable uncomfortable and make the uncomfortable comfortable. And that may mean that you're going to lose friends, that may mean you're going to take stand that others don't agree, that may even mean you've got to talk eight hours in the U.S. Senate. First of all, you have to decide at some point in your life, what is the purpose of your life. And you must gauge everything by that purpose. The reason many of us never achieve what we want is we never figure out what we want. You can't arrive without a destination. When I leave here the next few minutes, hit the bridge and airport, we will know in whatever length of time whether we arrive. But if I were to leave here and say let's just hang out two or three hours, Patrick, I couldn't get upset that we didn't get anywhere because we weren't headed anywhere. Most of us never sit down and say what is my life's purpose. And we go through whatever falls our lives and try to get comfortable but we never define what our life is. Dr. King did. I can tell you the hardest job of a creature is to preach the funeral of an irrelevant person. The front row's crying and carrying on. And we're supposed to get up and hallucinate in life a few minutes. And you're coming out of that cemetery. And very well known honest, I will not give his name. Pull me over and say Reverend Al, I said yes. He said I was very touched by your unity. I said thank you. He said no, it really moved. I said well thank you. He said if I die first, I want you to do a unity for me just like that. Well you might have to give me something to work with. Who we are and why we are. Mrs. King told the story of how in the middle of the month, Bumbley was boycott the breakdown segregation. They were harassed all night one night with phone calls threatening me alive. Dr. King got up and got a cup of coffee and sat in the kitchen. He began meditating and praying and he came to the edge of himself and had decided that he was at the end of his wish. But it was that night that he made the decision that this was the purpose for which I was born. And he committed himself to himself and his God and he could fight that battle. And no Nobel Prize and no honorary degree and no time magazine man of the year made him forget who and what he was. Which is why with all of that he died fighting the war that we had no business engaging in and meeting a poor people's campaign of blacks and Latinos and women and Chicanos in the Washington. Challenging a president who had been friendly with him. Lyndon Johnson was not a person that was bad or mean to Dr. King. They were friends that worked together to get the city votes on civil rights. But Dr. King put who he was and his mission above all of that. And if we're going to celebrate King Dave the first thing you need to do is define what it is you are doing. Who are you and where do you fit in? Because many of us compromise based on we want the comfort again of maintaining relationships and popularities and access. But none of that will matter two minutes after you leave this earth. There's a reason why 42 years after his death the world remembers him because he never compromised himself for whoever held a temporary office or wrote a check that would bounce in the bank of the route. Because of Dr. King. Who would have ever thought when John Lewis and Jose Williams were leading that march across the Edmund Pennis Bridge in Selma, Alabama to get the Voting Rights Act and they were beaten by Alabama State Troopers and Dr. King came and finished that march to Montgomery and that drama led to the Voting Rights Act. Who would have thought 65 we have today an African-American president and an African-American attorney general who would have thought with family behavior was the first we made and we have made great strides but we still are not where we need to go because today even with all of that we still have inequality in education in the criminal justice system in the economy. We still have the widest gap between the wealthy and the poor. Those that are talking about Dr. King's dream have realized never believed in the dream and don't know what the dream was. It was not just a racial dream. It was a dream for economic equity and fairness. It was a dream for fairness to everyone. As long as 50 million Americans don't have health care you'd not fulfill King's dream. As long as we have the top 100% of this country with vulgar wealth and the body wondering how they want to get to the next meal that's not Dr. King's dream. Don't go through your part of the dream and get up and get dressed and act like you had the whole night dream. This dream is on the same commitment and the same self-denial that brought us to where we've made this progress is what we need today to finish the journey. Not because a lot of the turbulence is gone. It doesn't mean we've arrived but I flew in this afternoon from Washington, D.C. going back to Washington. You fly sometimes. Some of the sirens make sure they're tripled up. You hit a cloud in turbulence. Blame troubles another. Then you go on and you get smooth air. You don't get up and get off the plane because you've got turbulence. You still wait on the plane to descend and safely land and safely pull up to the gate. Too many want to get off in a minute because we don't have the riots and we don't have the back of the bus. That's the turbulence. That doesn't mean we've arrived yet. We're not as exploited and oppressive as the others. Just as Dr. King and that generation fought Jim Crow, we must be prepared to fight a son, James Crow Jr. Esquire. He's more refined. Don't believe that he has the right to render all of us to the camps that he doesn't make or she doesn't make us and that they enjoy it so much while the rest of us so little. Those are the ones that now with state deficits, rather than talk about the greed of the corporate elite want to demonize working class people and how do they want to bring the deficits down to clear war on the Union? The problem is the state federal employees come to problems. Let me get this right. During the years of the tax breaks and the right-wing reign, they had a party. We wouldn't invite them to the party. We couldn't go to the party. Now the time has come in for the party and you want us to pay for it. We're fighting for absolute employees that they're not demonized. And the answer is not to keep engaging in war. Can't go from Vietnam to Afghanistan and hang up Dr. King's picture. We must be consistent and we must honor this man by honoring him for what he stood for and what he was but also doing it in the spirit that he did. Dr. King preached nonviolence and he preached peace and he did it knowing every day of his life could have been the last thing. And unless this country and this world embraces them we will always continue to see the madness that we saw last weekend in Arizona. We are debating on how and what motivated somebody rather than the reality that we have gotten to the point where people could kill a 90-year-old girl and we're sitting around trying to rationalize and finger point rather than understand there's something going wrong that all of us need to examine ourselves and all of us need to see how could we in a civilized society have children where they're in danger to go here in Congress. In my growing in the movement the early 90s there was a racial killing in Brooklyn, New York Benson there was a young black male named Yusuf Hawkins was killed because they said he shouldn't be in the neighborhood and we went and marched in that neighborhood we protested the killing and that 21st week a young white male ran out in the crowd and stabbed me in my chest leading the march and I remember as I laid in that hospital upset mad I came in terms with the family if I remember the walls of a student of Dr. King I had to get by my own brothers and the hardest thing I had ever done was I went to the court when that young man was on trial and asked the judge to give him leaves the judge said that's a noble act but he gave him nine years of care and it wasn't enough I wouldn't visit him in jail but it wasn't enough there because a couple years later they were protesting a merchant in Hawkins he victimized someone that we'd all thrown in at night and they came to me and said this man shouldn't do this job this man should do this in our community we know this gentleman I said you're right and I got on the radio and said we're going to go down and march and I mentioned this man's race we marched and that is when it had burned himself up and it was going up and I had to say you know I was wrong no I didn't tell the man it burned no the man didn't even like me it was two and a half months later but even to bring the poisonous issue of his race up is wrong and what I say to the goals of public life after Arizona is we've got to be big enough to say that even if the specifics don't lead to me we can't continue in any indirect way to add to the poison and then act as though once we put poison in the system then if somebody drinks the water somewhere else it's not our fault we've all got to be big enough to say we must become the change of your secret so my message to you is that you want me to choose your own who you are what you will do leave here today saying this is what I will do to continue that struggle and second have the faith to know that you don't fight because you will win you fight because it's right in the world never knew what you were going to win but they knew they were right and when you have to calculate a fact if you only take on a fight based on your calculus that you're going to win or make some advantage then you have to take a tomorrow's thing and you have to struggle with courage courage is when you don't know what the outcome will be but you know in your soul you can't remain silent and still while something must be done that's courage that's what Dr. King had I close by saying as I said earlier in my statement Mark III and I have become close worked down for the years together I will never give one night when you were flying into a city and as the branch was descending and we were circling and I looked that far and I said you know Mark III this is going to sound strange to you but your father won he said wonder what do you mean I said in the end he won I know that sounds strange he was killed before his 40th birthday and that's what he was never knew any of his four children married had children went to college never beautiful widow never lived to see some of the things he fought for coming to fruition but he still won because history has a way of confirming victory even if you don't live long enough to see what's the pictures of your father being dragged down the courthouse steps in Alabama under arrest as he was fighting the civil rights of women and gunmen he said yeah I said do you realize that actually Monday in January that courthouse is closed the church can't come to work the church has to stay home the plaintiff can't open up that courthouse is closed on your father's birthday the seventh day of school he couldn't go to in Atlanta it's closed kids stay home teachers can't teach to celebrate his birthday in the end those that despise you have to honor you for you not submitting and surrendering to them at this office on the banks of the Potomac River there are three memorials there's a memorial to A. Lincoln there's a memorial to Thomas Jefferson there's a memorial to Gerald Washington on August 28th the anniversary of Dr. King's Iberdreams speech they will open the forth memorial to a man that never held office and never knew what it was to set the legislative chain for the man who discovered who he was and never turned back because one man or woman with a determined mind can change the world and we will honor Dr. King but the biggest honor will be those of us in every village and hamlet of this country that figured out our part of making the dream come true facing our local Bill Collins and our local New York Times and say no matter what I'm going to stand for something so when it's over they can say I want not because I outran somebody but because I stood for something and rational overpower might King's right the office of the university is not but it bends toward freedom and then they ridicule those of us that seem out of step but one day when this country has closed the wealth gap and we don't have to see the names of wealth recipients and when we have health care for everyone and when every child can go to school one day we may be named in our graves we can smile and know like Dr. King we want because we would not frame this fact so thank you Ladies and gentlemen Reverend Sharpton for that very moving message has not been here for a long time The Abundant's Life will talk for about 5 minutes our Governor will be there and I look forward to seeing a lot of people there as we leave today I want to thank you I want you to reflect on the message left to us here by Reverend Al Sharpton and in this absence let's give him a round of applause