if you think about the civil rights movement, what we were able to do was get Jim Crow out of three very distinct arenas in the country: First, there was public accommodations; second, there was voting rights and access to the political structures of the country; and third, and not well known, access to the national party structure itself — that is, to the Democratic Party. And that was Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 convention of the Democratic Party. And remember, Kennedy had been assassinated. Johnson had been moved into the presidency, but he hadn’t been nominated yet, right? And so, we won those struggles, but what we didn’t win was getting Jim Crow out of education, right? And that was actually the subtext of the right to vote.

We have erased segregation in those areas of national life to which Federal authority clearly extends. So doing in this, my friends, we have neither sought nor claimed partisan credit, and all such actions are nothing more -- nothing less than the rendering of justice. And we have always been aware of this great truth: the final battle against intolerance is to be fought -- not in the chambers of any legislature -- but in the hearts of men.

Back home, the United States is engaged in another kind of war. It's a battle over segregation. In 1964, President Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, signed into law the Civil Rights Act, which ended segregation in public places and prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Not everyone is happy about it. Some white people cross to the other side of the street when they see me. Some white soldiers I know, too.

Institutionalized white supremacy in the United States and South Africa ended when the costs of maintaining it became too high to bear by white supremacists in both countries. It was only after the costs became high that people and rulers in both countries opted to end the institutionalized basis of white supremacy.

The old order of segregation is gradually passing away. To put it figuratively and in Biblical language, we've broken loose from the Egypt of slavery, and we have moved through the wilderness of racial segregation, and now we stand on the border of the promised land of integration. There can be no gainsaying of the fact that the system of segregation is on its deathbed today, and the only thing uncertain about it is how costly the South will make the funeral. This reveals that we've come a long, long way since 1896.

Regimes of racial segregation were not disestablished because of the work of leaders and presidents and legislators but rather because of the fact that ordinary people adopted a critical stance in the way in which they perceived their relationship to reality. Social realities that may have appeared inalterable, impenetrable, came to be viewed as malleable and transformable; and people learned how to imagine what it might mean to live in a world that was not so exclusively governed by the principle of white supremacy. This collective consciousness emerged within the context of social struggles.

Negro rule under unscrupulous adventurers had been finally put an end to in the South, and the natural, inevitable ascendancy of the whites, the responsible class, established.

This is the last disgusting death-rattle of a corrupt and outworn system which is a blot on the history of this people. Since the civil war, in which the southern states were conquered, against all historical logic and sound sense, the American people have been in a condition of political and popular decay. In that war, it was not the Southern States, but the American people themselves who were conquered. In this spurious blossoming of economic progress and power politics, America has ever since been drawn deeper into the mire of progressive self-destruction. The beginnings of a great new social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed by that war, and with them also the embryo of a future truly great America that would not have been ruled by a corrupt caste of tradesmen, but by a real Herren-class that would have swept away all the falsities of liberty and equality.

At the end of the Civil War, the "Slave Power" had been destroyed, free-labor Republicanism was triumphant, and the freed slave was poised on the verge of assuming an equal place in American society with every other citizen. Fifteen years later, the one-time slaveholders were back in control of the South, free-labor Republicanism was coping with the first stresses of mass industrialization in its own Northern backyard, and the freedmen were consigned to an economic peonage that offered little practical improvement on enslavement. It began to seem that a great opportunity had been bobbled away.

Apartheid? We had defeated apartheid. We had finally perfected a method of making love even without making contact, utilizing empty space like two telepathic media exchanging telegraphic messages through sexual airways.

The end of apartheid was a gradual thing. Concessions were made here and there, some laws were repealed, others simply weren’t enforced.

The U.S., for example, has made huge strides in racial equality and racial justice since 1940, but to listen to some Wokesters you’d think that racism now is as bad as—or even worse than—the days of Jim Crow. Wokesters claim that it’s just gone underground and has a different form. This, to me, is a ludicrous belief, refuted by tons of evidence.

[I]t seems to me that this past century has accomplished two Civil Rights movements. First, the right for blacks and Hispanics and people from all different nationalities to take their place in the middle of society and that has been achieved at great cost. It is a tremendous struggle in America, but now we think nothing of walking into an office and finding that a black person is the president of the company instead of a janitor cleaning the hallways. And then we learned that the talent that blacks and Hispanics have, always had, their intelligence, dedication and willingness to work is no less than anybody else. They have been able to persevere and finally I think we have really overcome tremendous amounts of prejudice, not only in the United States, but throughout the world. The second great Civil Rights movement was equality for women. It started at the end of the last century. Women finally got to vote. We've gotten all the way to the point now where women aren't expected to stay home and just be mothers and it's okay to be a single parent and it's okay to go out and pursue your ambition and your dreams. And that's been a very important breakthrough because there are so many areas where women are more talented and have more to offer than men do. And now we are beginning to see everybody working side by side in society and in the workplace. But, there remains one HUGE minority that is still terribly discriminated against. And that population is the disabled population. And that comprises 1/5 of the world's population. In the United States, for example, we have 54 million disabled people and the thing that's very difficult is when blacks and Hispanics and women were fighting for equal rights there was a level of discomfort. But nothing approaching what happens when "normal" people look at the disabled and are uncomfortable. That is a prejudice that they MUST overcome because we're not in a position to always look our very best or to feel our very best, or to be pleasing to the eye because we have suffered terrible debilitating diseases and injuries. But what's happening now is the kind of discrimination that is so bad and I want to tell you that it exceeds any prejudice that ever occurred before in the previous civil rights movements.

I will recall with fulfilment that the representatives of the aspirations of our people did not only repeal laws that were inconsistent with our Constitution, but passed laws which not only freed our people from the shackles of apartheid, but also restored the dignity of the downtrodden and empowered the vulnerable