Congressional Black Caucus

Floor Speech

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Mr. AL GREEN of Texas. I thank you very much for the opportunity to speak. I do want your constituents to know that you have been an awesome Congressperson from the awesome Eighth District. And if they are as proud of you as I am, you shall have an opportunity to continue to serve them. I wish you much success in Congress.

I would like to thank the President of the United States of America for his comments on this issue of Blacks--especially Black males--in America. I believe that the President understands that although the arc of the moral universe is long, it bends toward justice. But it doesn't bend toward justice without some assistance. It doesn't have the kinetic energy to do so without some help from mortals. I think the President went a long way toward bending the arc of the moral universe toward justice with his comments as they relate to the plight of African American males. I'm grateful and I'm thankful.

With reference to the Trayvon Martin trial, we live in a world where it's not enough for things to be right. They must also look right. And it doesn't look right when a 17-year-old boy leaves home to go to the store, and on his way back home, unarmed, encounters a person with a firearm, is killed--and it is done so with impunity. It may be right, but it does not look right. And because it doesn't look right, we have to understand that although you can have a fair trial, you may not have justice as the outcome.

I believe that this trial was fair to Mr. Zimmerman. I don't believe it was fair to Trayvon Martin. And I don't believe that we can say that this was a just decision.

Now there are people who would differ with me and say that you shouldn't say this. Many of these same people would say that O.J. Simpson had a fair trial but that he didn't get a just verdict from that court. And the same people who don't want me--us--to protest, you have to understand that if it was right for the farmers to come here in their tractors and protest the conditions related to farming, then it's right for me to protest. If it was right for the veterans after World War I to come up here and set up a tent city in protest, it's right for me to protest. If it was right for the Tea Party to come to Congress and stand along the way across from one building to another and protest, then it's right for me to protest. And by the way, I think it was right for them to come to Congress to protest. I support their right to protest.

If you think it's wrong for me to protest, then you've got to change the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. We have the right. We must exercise the right because an injustice has taken place.

Because time is short, and there is at least one other speaker, I want to mention this as my closing remark. There's something bigger than Trayvon Martin and Mr. Zimmerman that's taking place in this country, indeed, in the world. There is something bigger than us as individuals and individual cases.

J. Patrick Kinney has appropriately put this together. He has a poem styled ``The Cold Within'' that addresses something that we have to confront--this coldness that's so pervasive. This is his poem:

Six humans trapped by happenstance
in bleak and bitter cold.
Each one possessed a stick of wood,
or so the story's told.
Their dying fire in need of logs,
the first man held his back
for of the faces round the fire
he noticed one was Black.
The next man looking 'cross the way
saw one not of his church
and couldn't bring himself to give
the fire his stick of birch.
The third one sat in tattered clothes.
He gave his coat a hitch.
Why should his log be put to use
to warm the idle rich?
The rich man just sat back and thought
of the wealth he had in store
and how to keep what he had earned
from the lazy shiftless poor.
The Black man's face bespoke revenge
as the fire passed from his sight.
For all he saw in his stick of wood
was a chance to spite the White.
The last man of this forlorn group
did nought except for gain.
Giving only to those who gave
was how he played the game.
Their logs held tight in death's still hands
was proof of human sin.
They didn't die from the cold without,
they died from the cold within.

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