BLACK PEOPLE WAKE UP!! The time has come for us to collectively stand behind President Barack Obama who has called on African Americans to ‘stop complaining,’ ‘put on your marching shoes’ and follow him into the battle for jobs and opportunity. Speaking at the annual awards dinner of the Congressional Black Caucus in Washington last night, the President hit back at leaders who say he’s not doing enough to fight black unemployment which is at a 27-year high. Continue reading after the jump.
Addressing some 3,000 people at the dinner, Mr Obama said African-Americans need to have faith in the future – and understand the fight won’t be won if they’re not on his side.
‘It gets folks discouraged. I know. I listen to some of y’all,’ Mr Obama said before admitting: ‘I need your help.’
Indeed, during the speech, Mr Obama sounded like he was discussing his own embattled tenure.
‘The future rewards those who press on,’ he said. ‘I don’t have time to feel sorry for myself. I don’t have time to complain. I’m going to press on.’
The president will need black turnout to match its historic 2008 levels if he’s to have any chance of winning a second term.
He acknowledged blacks have suffered because of the recession, and are frustrated that the downturn is taking so long to reverse.
‘So many people are still hurting, so many people are barely hanging on and so many people in this city are fighting us every step of the way,’ Mr Obama said.
Referencing the civil rights struggle Mr Obama added that the fight for what is right is never easy.
‘Take off your bedroom slippers. Put on your marching shoes,’ he said, his voice rising as applause and cheers mounted.
‘Shake it off. Stop complaining. Stop grumbling. Stop crying. We are going to press on. We have work to do.’
Topping the to-do list, he said, is getting Congress to pass the jobs bill he sent to Capitol Hill two weeks ago.
The package of payroll tax cuts, business tax breaks and infrastructure spending will benefit 100,000 black-owned businesses and 20million African-American workers,’ he said.
Republicans have indicated they’re open to some of the tax measures – but oppose his means of paying for it: hiking taxes on top income-earners and big business.
Caucus leaders remain fiercely protective of the nation’s first African-American president, but in recent weeks they’ve been increasingly vocal in their discontent – especially over black joblessness.
‘If Bill Clinton had been in the White House and had failed to address this problem, we probably would be marching on the White House,’ caucus chairman, Rep Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri, recently told McClatchy Newspapers.
Like many Democratic lawmakers, caucus members were dismayed by Mr Obama’s concessions to the GOP during the summer’s talks on raising the government’s borrowing limit.
Mr Cleaver famously called the compromise deal a ‘sugar-coated Satan sandwich.’
But he also said his members are keeping their gripes in check because ‘nobody wants to do anything that would empower the people who hate the president.’
At the caucus dinner last year, Mr Obama implored African-Americans to get out the vote in the midterm elections because Republicans were preparing to ‘turn back the clock.’
What followed was a Democratic rout that Mr Obama acknowledged as a ‘shellacking.’
Where the black community turned out in droves to help elect him in 2008, there was a sharp drop-off two years later.
Some 65 per cent of eligible African-Americans voted in 2008, compared with a 2010 level that polls estimate at between 37 per cent and 40 per cent.
