WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) delivered remarks at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration. This year’s theme was Justice Moving Forward. Brown honored Dr. King’s legacy and highlighted his continued efforts in the fight for racial justice, including the recent expansion of My Brother’s Keeper Ohio (MBK Ohio). Brown also delivered keynote remarks at the Dayton Unit NAACP’s celebration, and pre-recorded remarks during virtual celebrations in Columbus, Dayton, Springfield and Lorain.

My Brother’s Keeper was started by President Obama as a national initiative to address the opportunity gaps facing young men of color, and to ensure that all young people reach their full potential. The 13 MBK Ohio Chapters currently operating each have their own unique focus and provide weekly instruction and programming for students. Senator Brown’s office, in conjunction with Ohio State University, is collaborating to supplement this programming and provide enriching opportunities for students to gain exposure to various career opportunities as well as empowerment and advocacy tools.   

Brown hosted a news conference call last week and was joined by Marsha Mockabee, Co-Chair of the Greater Cleveland MBK program, and Kevin Clayton, Vice President of Diversity, Inclusion and Community Engagement for the Cleveland Cavaliers, as they announced their partnership to engage with northeast Ohio students and address the opportunity gap facing young men of color. Rev. Stanley Miller, Co-Chair of the Greater Cleveland MBK, also joined the call. And in October, Brown announced a new partnership with the Cincinnati Reds, the Cincinnati Museum Center, and MBK Ohio to provide new virtual programming for students.

More information on the MBK Ohio Program is available here.

Brown’s remarks, as prepared for delivery, can be read below:

Thank you to all the leaders here today. I want to particularly celebrate the power of Black women in Hamilton County – you are an example to the whole state.

Two weeks ago, over the course of 24 hours, we bore witness the best in our country, and the worst. Our Capitol – our citadel of democracy, as the President-elect called it – was sieged by domestic terrorists, grounded in white supremacy, at the urging of a racist commander-in-chief.

These people weaponized and brandished symbols of racial terror. They brought a noose to the grounds of the Capitol. They paraded confederate flags through the halls of the people’s house with impunity.

They trespassed, and looted, and vandalized. And we all saw how these white supremacists were met with a very different reaction than peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters calling for racial justice faced over the past year. Throughout our history, activists demanding civil rights and equality have faced suppression and violence. We all know – everyone here today knows – what would have happened if those rioters had been Black.

And for four years, far too many politicians – senators and congressmen, governors and state legislators, in Washington and Columbus and Lansing and Harrisburg – defended the racist president and his rhetoric. . . Or they remained silent. Ominously silent.

They’re facing a moment of reckoning. They cannot ignore what their words – or their silent acquiescence – has wrought. After the terrorist attack, I joined a wide chorus calling for the president’s impeachment, and I called for the Senate to expel the senate ringleaders who incited this violence.

And in an historic vote last week, the House voted to impeach the president – the most bipartisan vote for impeachment in American history, and the first ever second impeachment of a president.

The Senate now needs to do our job, and follow through and convict him, to send a clear message – not as members of any political parties, but as Americans – that justice will be served, and our democracy is worth defending.

Anyone who has been paying attention for the last four years – or 400 years – cannot be surprised by the violent insurrection.We’ve known who this president is all along. We remember his words after Charlottesville – that there were “very fine people on both sides.”

After the final votes for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were certified, in the early hours of the morning in the desecrated House Chamber, the Chaplain prayed:

“These tragedies have reminded us that words matter, and that the power of life and death is in the tongue.”

The power of life and death is in the tongue.

The man we honor today understood that. Dr. King moved mountains with his words. And the movement he led is alive in our time, carried on by people at this event, in Ohio, and all over the country.

I see it in the work so many Ohioans do in our communities: From the My Brother’s Keeper program, that we’re working to expand all over the state, to our work to restore Union Baptist Cemetery and all historic African American burial grounds. From the local efforts to move the Cincinnati police firing range out of Lincoln Heights, to the activists leading the movement to declare racism a public health crisis, and all the public health work that goes with that.

Because of Black voters, we are now going to have an opportunity to make more progress on all of these issues at the federal level. I’m going to become chair of the Senate Banking and Housing Committee – and we’re going to put the “housing” back in that title, and put racial and economic justice at the center of everything we do.

That’s all possible because of activists like you.

The same day seditionists and white supremacists stormed our capitol, a Black pastor and a Jewish man were declared the winners in Georgia’s Senate races.

That’s what gives me hope.

Reverend Warnock – the man who preached from Dr. King’s father’s pulpit – won. And in that moment, in Georgia, the hate coming from the White House lost.

Black voters have faced every suppression tactic we can imagine. But they organized. They voted for change in record numbers. And they heeded the words of Dr. King – that “progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability.”

It rolls in because we make it so.

We know our country holds within it both the capacity for terrible acts, like we saw in the halls of the capitol, and the capacity for tremendous love and humility and, in the words of John Lewis, good trouble.

Our charge is to bring out the best in our nation, rather than the worst.

Often the greatest progress comes out of the darkest of times. That must be our work this year – to heal this country, to overcome this pandemic, and to bring us closer to the Promised Land that Dr. King envisioned.

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