"Civil Rights: America's Unfinished Business"

It's a great privilege to be here with all of you in the Texas Civil Rights Project and to join in honoring Bernie and Audre Rapoport and Ross Byrd for their commitment to equal justice.

I commend the very impressive work of the Texas Civil Rights Project on these issues that are so vital to our nation C especially the ongoing battles for full voting rights and the rights of the disabled, and the equally important battles against racism and bigotry and police brutality. I care deeply about these issues as well, and I feel very much at home here with our brothers and sisters of the Texas Civil Rights Project.

It's also a special honor to come back to Austin. I still have many warm and wonderful memories of the Boston-Austin axis in the early 1960s under my brother, and all that those years meant for progress on civil rights. A century before, Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg had pledged Aa new birth of freedom for all our people. In a very real sense, those years in the 1960s were in fact a new birth of freedom for the great cause we share, the cause of full civil rights for every American.

That dream will never die. Civil rights is still the unfinished business of our nation.

In the past 40 years, our country has made great progress in guaranteeing fairness and opportunity. Laws enacted because of many of you in this room and many others in the civil rights movement have brought greater equality for racial and ethnic minorities. Gone are the days when a President or Attorney General had to call in U.S. Marshals, so that minority students could enroll in a university. People with disabilities have new opportunities to fully participate in our society. The workplace is far more open to women in ways that were barely imagined four decades ago. Glass ceilings are all but shattered everywhere. Women and girls have far greater opportunities in the classroom and on the playing field. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the enactment of Title IX in 1972 and the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1991 C all have brought extra-ordinary advances in civil rights and have made our nation a stronger, fairer, and better land.

Yet our progress, gratifying as it is, should not blind us to the challenges that still exist. The landmark national laws of the past four decades laid a solid foundation, but their presence on the statute books is far from enough. The true challenge is to see that the promise of these laws is fulfilled.

As a nation, we are at a new crossroad in this new century. One path leads forward toward the principles and ideals we hold most dear, toward the America we hope and expect to be.

The other path leads backward. Not back to the days of segregated lunch counters perhaps, but to a place where inequality and lack of opportunity for some in our society will have the same devastating effects as a`separate but equal did half a century ago.

We must not choose the wrong path. The stakes could not be higher. The struggle for civil rights is for a society that works for all of us, not just for the wealthy and well-connected, or those who had a leg up along the way, or those who look the other way when their own needs are met. The ideals of civil rights are the same ideals that have made this country great B the principles of liberty and justice for all. And when we say all, we mean all. Civil rights matter to all of us, regardless of background, regardless of race, regardless even of political party.

Above all, as the war on terrorism goes on, we must never forget that this America that we love and honor and defend is not America unless it is a beacon of freedom, democracy and hope for peoples throughout the world.

How could President Bush have allowed that light to dim so fast? How could we possibly have squandered all the support we won from the world of nations in the weeks after the tragedy of September 11th? How could we have gone to war in Iraq in a way that has so alienated so many other countries, and is only breeding more terrorists to attack us? It is enough to make the Statue of Liberty weep.

Here at home, on the issue of civil rights, we know we must do more to shore up our current laws, so that we do not lose ground won in past battles.

Sadly, even as we address these challenges, basic civil rights are being quietly chipped away, as opponents of these rights constantly try to pull us onto the wrong path. Recent court decisions have undermined core civil rights laws in ways Congress never intended. In several recent cases, federal courts and even the Supreme Court have fundamentally misunderstood Congress=s intent in passing some of our most important civil rights laws.

A quiet erosion is taking place in the age discrimination laws, and real people are suffering. I think of women like Patricia Garrett, a breast cancer survivor who was demoted after working seventeen years for the University of Alabama. She has lost the right to seek damages in court under the Americans with Disabilities Act, because the Supreme Court did not think Congress intended to apply the law to state agencies.

Workers over 40 are being fired from their state jobs or demoted because they are too old, yet they have no effective remedy. In one recent case, a supervisor in a state nature center fired a hard-working employee because of his age. The supervisor told the jury that AIn a forest, you have to cut down the old, big trees, so the little trees underneath can grow. Those were his words.

Think about that. The employee in the case had been fired at the age of 48. He had no remedy in federal court, even though Congress passed the Age Discrimination in Employment Act to prevent precisely that kind of abuse. We enacted the law so that older workers could be judged by their ability, not their age. State police officers, nurses in state hospitals, and countless other men and women in state agencies deserve the same right to be free from age discrimination as other workers.

Further examples demonstrate the abuse. Victims of massive bigotry can no longer bring suit under certain regulations implementing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Bonnie Sanders and Rose Townsend have no remedy for racial discrimination in their low-income minority community in New Jersey. The residents suffer exceptionally high rates of asthma and respiratory illnesses there, because of the large number of contaminated waste sites unfairly dumped on their small community.

What about Latino children trapped in heavily minority schools that are grossly underfunded compared to other schools? What about Latino communities that lack equal access to health care because of language barriers? They cannot ask the courts to enforce regulations under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibit such discrimination.

In addition to overcoming these setbacks in the enforcement of existing civil rights law, we must act as well to extend these laws to other victims of bigotry. It is long past time to prohibit job discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and to expand the existing federal hate crimes law to include hate crimes based on this flagrant form of prejudice. The Supreme Court's welcome decision this year in Lawrence v. Texas laid the groundwork for new progress in the ongoing battle for gay and lesbian rights, and it is time for Congress to do its part.

Decisions that undermine existing protections, and the failure to enact needed new protections undermine the fundamental role of the Texas Civil Rights Project and many others dedicated to advancing our cause. All of our civil rights laws depend heavily on private law suits for their full enforcement. No government at any level has the resources to end the myriad violations of civil rights laws. The private bar and public interest lawyers are indispensable in the life of the law, and they are especially so in civil rights.

Nothing is more likely to prevent discrimination than the knowledge that a violator will be held accountable in court. Without laws that allow everyday people to obtain relief in court for civil rights abuses, and without good lawyers to represent them, victims of discrimination will find more and more often that their rights have no remedy, and that result is unacceptable in any society that calls itself fair.

We also know we must do more in the area of voting rights, to achieve the full political participation of all our citizens and end the shameful partisan tactics now so widely used to discourage some from voting. It is essential to be vigilant in protecting the right of every citizen to vote. As we look toward the upcoming Presidential election and so many other elections throughout the nation, we must not repeat the mistakes of the last election. No one should be denied the vote because of antique voting practices and equipment. No Latino voters should be unlawfully turned away at the ballot box because they need language assistance. No African Americans should be denied the vote because of cynical efforts to purge the voter rolls or prevent them from voting in other ways. No one in any state should lose the right to vote in all but name, because party officials gerrymandered election districts to make the outcome of the election a foregone conclusion.

We also know we must enact fairer immigration law to legalize undocumented workers and end their cruel exploitation. We need to reaffirm our nation's commitment to family unity, create good legal pathways for the entry of needed immigrant workers, and guarantee humane treatment to all immigrants.

Today, an estimated eight million immigrants live in the United States without legal documents. Others risk their lives to cross our borders to seek better lives here for their families and themselves. They live in constant fear of deportation and are easy targets of abuse by unscrupulous employers. The presence of the large and indispensable but illegal workforce we now have is a national embarrassment. It makes a mockery of sensible economic policy and fair immigration laws.

The most reasonable way to meet this challenge is to reform these laws in a way that is fair to immigrant workers and their families, and fair to employers, too.

What we need is an earned legalization program for undocumented workers. Hard-working, long-term immigrants who contribute to the growth and prosperity of our nation should be able to end their twilight existence and obtain full legal status in the United States.

We must also make our immigration laws more humane through a visa system that allows rapid reunification of families, so that no parents or children will have to endure years of separation. We also need a fair temporary worker program, so that immigrants can come here for temporary work, without risking danger and even death in crossing our borders.

We also know we have to deal more effectively with the festering issue of racial discrimination in our criminal justice system. The incarceration rate of people of color for non-violent offenses is unconscionably high. Equally unconscionable is the use by law enforcement of racial and ethnic profiling of African-Americans, Latinos, immigrants, Muslims and Arab-Americans.

Criminal justice is a civil rights issue. Ensuring fairness and equal treatment in criminal trials is a responsibility of each of us. When persons are charged with crime, it should not matter whether they are rich or poor, male or female, or what their ethnic background is. One of the most basic principles of our democracy is that when a person goes on trial for a crime, the only thing that matters is guilt or innocence. But all too often that is not the case, because the system is too often biased against defendants for reasons that no fair system should tolerate. The abuse is most flagrant in capital cases, but many other defendants are abused as well. How can anyone call such a biased system a system of justice?

When he served as Attorney General, my brother Robert Kennedy said, "the poor man charged with crime has no lobby. We need look no further than Tulia, Texas to know that those words still ring true today.

In 1999, more than ten percent of Tulia's African American population was arrested in a supposed drug sting by a lone undercover narcotics officer. Although most of the residents caught up in the raid were African-American, some were Latino, and a few were white. All of them were poor. Most of them were convicted and jailed C although the arrests had produced no guns, no drugs, and no cash to support the charge of an illegal drug ring. The only evidence against many of these victims was the word of one man, the undercover agent who arrested them. At the time of the arrests, he had been officially suspended for charges of theft and misconduct in a previous law enforcement position, but was still functioning undercover.

As we know now, and as would have been obvious if those arrested had received the fair trial and effective legal representation guaranteed under the Constitution, the story of the Tulia drug ring was a pure fabrication. The accused were innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted. Freddie Brookins, Jr., a husband and father of two, was sentenced to 20 years. Joseph Moore, a 57-year-old farmer, received a 99 year sentence. The term a miscarriage of justice doesn't even begin to describe the terrible wrongs committed here, and the tragic experience has been a constant nightmare for those wrongfully accused and their families.

But greater even than the devastating personal impact on the individual victims is the failure of our legal system. What happened to the justice part of our criminal justice system? Where were the checks and balances that guarantee the innocent are not convicted? Why did juries time and again convict the defendants on such flimsy evidence? How could a judge allow it? What happened to the right to a fair trial and effective assistance of counsel?

The answers are all too clear. We are still a long way from our ideal of equal justice in the criminal justice system.

At the national level, we know that our multi-billion dollar federal correctional system often isn't correcting anything. The United States now locks away more than two million people in its prisons and jails. One and a half million children in the nation have a parent behind bars. 630,000 inmates are released from prison each year B 1,700 every day. Within three years, 63 percent of these persons are rearrested for a felony or serious misdemeanor.

No one can look at these data and say that current policies on mass incarceration are working. The criminal justice system is failing all of us, at enormous cost to public safety and to the integrity of our families and communities. It is time to accept the fact that we cannot jail our way to safety.

To break the vicious cycle of crime, punishment, and recidivism, we need major reforms at both the state and the federal level. We need to drastically revise or even eliminate mandatory minimum sentences, which Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy recently castigated as Aunwise and unjust.

We need to stop prisons from becoming breeding grounds for recidivists. That means improving security, offering effective support for prison education, and giving help to prisoners with mental illness.

We also need coordinated efforts by law enforcement agencies and community groups to give released prisoners a helping hand. The vast majority of them will use that help to become productive members of the community. We know that these reforms will light the way to a fairer and safer future. The question is whether elected officials are wise enough to reject partisan appeals and Alock-em-up@ sound bites for long enough to see the light.

Complacency in the face of all these challenges is a luxury that the nation can=t afford. Leaving behind some of us now will harm all of us later. Living up to our ideals B equal opportunity and equal justice will benefit us all by making America stronger as a free society.

So I say again : we must be vigilant, not complacent. Next month marks the 75th Anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther King. Next year marks the 40th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- and the 50th Anniversary of the Supreme Court's historic decision that in so many ways redefined America and launched this new era of opportunity, Brown v. Board of Education. As we look forward to these milestones, there is still much, much work to be done. It will not be easy, because it is never easy. But all our history teaches us that the struggle for civil rights is never, never, never in vain.

That's why I'm so honored to be here this evening. The work of the Texas Civil Rights Project is as important today as it has ever been. As Dr. King said so eloquently after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964:

Many people felt that after the passage of the civil rights bill, we had accomplished everything. We didn't have anything else to do and we would miraculously move into a new era of freedom.

But when we opened our eyes, we came to see that the civil rights bill, as marvelous as it is, is only the beginning of a new day and not the end of a journey.

If this bill is not implemented in all of its dimensions, it will mean nothing, and all of its eloquent words will be as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. We must take this bill and lift it from thin paper to thick action, and go all out, all over this nation, to implement it.

That's what is needed most from each of us in the weeks and months and years ahead. Yes, we have come a long way. But to achieve the dream, to fulfill the high ideals on which our nation was founded, all of us must go all out.

Failure is not an option.

Thank you all very much.