Oh my. Oh my. Oh my. I'm fired up. How about you? I mean, when you listen to Boise Kimber and you listen to Marshall Hatch and you listen to Christian Mitchell, I can't do anything except jump up and want to speak to you.
Thank you all very much. Thank you all for being here. Please sit. Please sit. Thank you so much to Christian. Good afternoon. Thank you to Reverend Blackman. Thank you for having us here at the Evening Star Missionary Baptist Church.
I really am in awe of the community that you've built here and that all of you are building all across this city, all across the state, and all across this nation. Now, I especially want to acknowledge those of you who traveled from so far away to be with us today here. All of you work where doctrine meets activism, and that is so crucial in this moment.
You understand that it falls to all of you and to all of us to lift up the least of us. Inequality must be fought. We have to fight poverty. We have to make sure that every American can get a quality education and has the dignity of work that pays a household wage, no less.
Now, leadership has never been more important than right now when our national government is falling down on the job. Yeah. All right.
Now, I want to give a special shout out to a gentleman who could not be here this morning, but has become a good friend of mine. That's Yousef Jackson, who wasn't able to join us. But I also want to thank Dr. Janette Wilson.
She is here on his behalf. And I think I speak for all of us when I say it is good to know that Rainbow Push is in great hands.
Now, it's hard to think that this is our first general election since the Reverend Jesse Jackson was called home. For so many of us, his moral compass was a beacon of light. He was a living icon.
Now, I can only imagine what Reverend Jackson would be saying as we enter these final weeks of this vital moment in electoral history. I know what he would say now that I think about it. Keep hope alive, because democracy is all about hope.
It takes hope to register to vote. It takes hope to take the affirmative act to vote. It takes hope to vote for people who we know will make things better than they are today.
It takes hope. And I'm brimming with hope. I am an optimist. And I'm an optimist because change can happen if we work for it.
I know that because my mother was an activist in the 60s and 70s when it was hard. And she made her advocacy a family activity. She used to take me to marches and to host meetings well in our own home.
And then she'd sit us down. I was a little kid. She'd sit us all down at the kitchen table to stuff envelopes with flyers and send them to people in the neighborhoods, and we knew those people would benefit from the causes and candidates that she supported.
I was the youngest of three kids, so I got the worst job at the kitchen table, just so you know, right? I was the one that they had at the end, right? My brother would fold, my sister would stuff and write the addresses on the envelopes. I had to lick the stamps and the envelopes so my tongue would stick to the top of my mouth by the end, you know. But that's the job of the youngest.
I was seven, eight, nine, ten years old. For any young people in the room, by the way, today, we didn't have TikTok or Instagram back then. So mail was like social media with a lot fewer trolls, you know, but that's what we did.
I wish, honestly, I wish I had had more time with my mother. She was a widow at that point in my life when I was young. She was a widow who struggled with alcoholism for as far back as I can remember. And that disease ended up taking her life when she was just 49 years old and when I was 17.
Still, I remember her as this unstoppable force because, yeah, she was an alcoholic, but she was, you know, you know how it is when you're addicted to something — on the wagon, off the wagon, it's a struggle. It's a real struggle. But when she was well, boy, was she special.
She was, and she still is my hero. And in the 17 years that I knew her, she managed to pass along a lifetime of lessons. The biggest one was that we have an obligation as human beings to protect each other, to stand together in solidarity with our neighbors, especially when the siege comes.
That's when we need each other, for voting rights, for women's rights, for civil rights. She taught me that our job is to stand in the breach and stand up for myself, but also for strangers when they're being wronged. That's our job.
And the best way for me to honor my mother in this terrible moment in the history of this country is to be a fighter. I'm honored to be in this fight with all of you because you all are fighters, too.
Now, I carried my mother's pursuit of justice into my very first job in politics. Now I want to tell you about that. I was an advance man. You know what that is? Someone who travels with the candidate. I was an advance man for a Democratic candidate named Terry Sanford who ran for United States Senate in North Carolina. This is in the mid-80s.
Terry Sanford had an uncommon political trajectory. He was 69 years old when I worked for him. But back in the 1950s, when southern Democrat tended to mean segregationist Democrat, he was unusual. He was an early believer in the New South. He was a white southern Democrat who believed in the fight for civil rights.
Yeah, hard to believe. And he was an ally of John F. Kennedy in 1960. And when Terry Sanford ran for governor in 1960, he ran against a guy named Beverly Lake Sr. He was a racist who said he'd rather shut down the public schools than allow black children in them.
Sanford, the civil rights advocate, won that election in 1960. And then as governor from 1961 to 1965, Terry Sanford steadily worked to release his beloved North Carolina from the cruel grips of Jim Crow.
A white southern Democrat. He was the first southern governor, the very first one, to desegregate the public schools. He hired and he appointed black professionals to positions in state government. And then he sent his own kids to a public integrated school.
He directed the state highway patrol to protect the Freedom Riders from segregationist violence when they came to North Carolina.
And those things didn't leave Terry Sanford especially popular with a whole lot of white voters by the time he was finished being governor in 1965. Sanford knew he was sacrificing his political career. He knew it when he was doing it, but he did it anyway because he knew it was the right thing to do.
Fast forward 21 years. I was just a kid who got hired to join a campaign for this 69-year-old US Senate candidate named Terry Sanford. And by 1986, people had already begun to see him in a different light. The things once seen as radical back in the early 1960s had begun to look visionary.
So when people call me radical for believing that we ought to make sure that workers ought to have a living wage, that we ought to well make sure that every kid gets a great education regardless of their zip code and where they live, that we need to invest in communities that were systemically left behind — that's right.
And that we shouldn't let ICE terrorize our neighbors. When people tell me that's radical, I remember that history is long. Yeah.
The Sanford campaign way back when showed me that there was a place in politics for people who believed that doing what was right mattered more than doing what was popular.
Yeah, through the fights to right the wrongs of the past and the victories that were won, my faith — just watching all of that, being a very small part of it as I was young — my faith in our great republic got cemented.
That's why when you, the people of Illinois, made me governor of this great state, I got to work. Now, in Deuteronomy chapter 16, verse 20.
Should I start over? God says, 'Justice, justice shall you pursue.' All right. In Illinois, that's exactly what we've been doing. Yeah.
Economic justice, social justice, racial justice. More work to do. But we nearly doubled the minimum wage to $15 an hour, giving 1.4 million Illinoisans a raise.
We created a child tax credit to give working families a tax cut — just a little bit of a break, up to $600 a year. We raised state spending on minority-owned small businesses to 30%.
We passed — this is one of my favorites — we passed universal paid leave because life's most precious moments happen outside of business hours, and everyone deserves a little time off.
We made historic investments in early childhood education because, well, every kid — and I mean every kid — should get preschool. Yeah, every kid. 11,000 more kids are getting a high-quality preschool education because of the work we've done.
We took on a crisis that's been allowed to fester for far too long. In Illinois, the black maternal mortality rate was more than twice the national average. In close partnership with our great current Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton, who's going to be an amazing United States Senator.
Together with her, I enacted the birth equity initiative. Because of that law, we broke ground on the first birth center serving black women on the south side of Chicago earlier this year, and more to come.
And when Trump and his MAGA henchmen put voting rights in their crosshairs, Illinois again showed that there's another way. We took Donald Trump to court. We stopped his illegal effort to squash mail-in voting.
And today, Illinois is one of the only states in the nation to offer mail-in voting to every eligible voter. No excuse needed.
We became one of just a handful of states to make Election Day a state holiday so everyone can get to the polls. And then we added polling locations, because it shouldn't be hard to get to a polling location.
And we opened them weeks early. And as of today, there are polling locations open all across all 50 wards of Chicago.
And this year, I enacted a new law that helps high schoolers get registered to vote. And we named it in honor of Chicago's best. It's called the Reverend Jesse Jackson Youth Voter Empowerment Act.
But while we've made it easier to vote in Illinois, that's not enough. We still need to stop the assault on voting rights, and Washington finally passed the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
Donald Trump told his hatchet men in red states to redraw the congressional maps to eliminate black and Hispanic congressional districts. It's disgraceful. And as long as I am your governor, I will never let that happen in Illinois.
Over the course of American history, our state has sent more black congressmen to Washington than any other state. We hold the record here. And by the way, we're about to well send not our first, but our second black woman to the US Senate when we elect Juliana. It's a legacy we all ought to be proud of.
Now, we have the freedom that we have today because generations of civil rights and voting rights activists like Jesse Jackson, Fred Hampton, Ida B. Wells, and so many others planted seeds of justice, never quite knowing at the time whether they would be around for the harvest.
The best parts of our nation are the fruits of their labor. Some of them knew it before they died, some of them didn't. But we are a living testament to the work that they did. We owe it to them to keep planting those seeds, and we need to keep hope alive.
I think especially when it comes to politics that we've gotten into a bad habit — a bad habit, all of y'all — of spending so much time fretting about what could go wrong that we've forgotten to imagine what could go right. Yeah.
Now, I'm running for re-election because I believe that things can go right. If you work a full-time job, you ought to make enough money with that one job to put food on your table, to see a doctor when you're sick, to live in a dignified home, to save for retirement, and to take a vacation every once in a while. We can and we ought to make that happen.
That work lies ahead. And when it comes to civil rights and voting rights and standing up to a wannabe dictator, sending federal agents to snatch anyone with dark skin or an accent off the street, for the sake of our children's future, we must be sure that Illinois remains a beacon of freedom.
That's why when you've seen me stand up to ICE, when you've seen me stand up to Donald Trump, it's because our future is at stake. Our children's future is at stake. We have to be the beacon of freedom here — the land of Lincoln, the land that elected Barack Obama as our first black president.
And by the way, we can continue our work and beat the extremists who are trying to whitewash the truth of slavery and black history in our schools and libraries. That's why I banned book bans in the land of Lincoln.
And we can move past the so-called leaders who shout things like, 'Get out of this country,' whenever someone disagrees with them. You've heard them do that. Especially when that someone happens to be a person of color that they're yelling at. Because being a racist doesn't make you edgy. It just makes you a racist.
With Election Day just 15 days away, it is time to embrace optimism and imagination and faith. And it's time to believe that things can be better and we can make them so. So I don't think we should give in to the dread when our ancestors refused to do that.
Remember, we are here to keep hope alive and then actualize our dreams. So I am inviting all of you to join me in an act of hope and march with me to the polls at the Dr. Martin Luther King Center.
Let's march for freedom. Let's march for equality. Let's march for the ancestors who brought us to this day, for the people who shed blood for all of our right to vote. Yeah.
My only question for all of you is: with 15 days to go to fight for justice, are you ready for the fight? Are you ready for the fight? Let's go get them, everybody. Thank you all very much. Thank you for being here.
