NCRC President and CEO Jesse Van Tol sits down with National Urban League President Marc Morial to discuss the current political environment.
Speakers:
Jesse Van Tol, President and CEO, NCRC
Marc Morial, President, National Urban League
Transcript:
NCRC video transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. They are lightly edited for style and clarity.
Van Tol
Marc, I feel like a lot of conversations I’m in these days start with sort of the heavy sigh You get through the well, how are you doing?
Morial
Still standing,
Van Tol
Still standing, still here. Marc, we’ve had a lot of conversation at the Just Economy Conference about how simultaneously we’re in a moment that many people would describe as unprecedented, and yet so too, in the history of the struggle for civil rights, for economic justice, there have been a great many hard moments. People have gotten beaten for their beliefs. And that, in a way, the forces of systemic racism have never gone away. Become more subtle under the surface, the struggle has always been there. How do you understand the current moment? What’s your take on how we got to where we are today?
Morial
First of all, good afternoon to all and Jesse, thank you for your leadership. Jesse deserves a round of applause, doesn’t he? Jesse, let me kind of frame it the way I see it and the way I’ve been talking about it. 70 years ago, 70 almost 71 years ago, nine members of the United States Supreme Court, I might add, nine white men, all born in the 1800s unanimously agreed that segregation, the American system of apartheid, was unconstitutional, and the issued the Brown versus the Board of Education of Topeka Kansas decision. It set off and accelerated a flurry of transformative moves in this country, which I think was triggered in some respects by this country’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II and Rosa Parks and the Little Rock Nine and the four little girls in Birmingham and the March on Washington, the assassination of Medgar Evers, the assassination of President Kennedy, Civil Rights Act, passed the Voting Rights Act, the war on poverty programs, the Fair Housing Act, created in a window of less than 15 years the most transformative time in bending the arc towards justice in American history.
Everything we use, all the tools, whether it’s the Community Reinvestment Act or the CFPB or the EEOC or the Department of Education or the programs of the Department of the Housing and Urban Development, every tool that we use today, in many respects, was birthed from a seed to a sapling, or from a sapling to a mighty oak in that time-period. And we this generation right here in 2025 have been and our communities have been beneficiaries of that. So it’s disheartening. It’s angering. In some ways, it’s not even believable that tools and things that made America better, stronger, more prosperous and yes, great are being systemically undone.
We’ve got to look at it in that framework.This is an effort to undo the gains of civil rights by redefining the role of the federal government in American society. We’ve got to understand the big picture, to understand everything we have to deal with whether it is layoffs of hard-working career federal employees, or executive orders which marginalize the role of the legislative branch, or attacks on colleges and universities, pressure tactics being used on businesses who want to be a part of a more just economy. Those are the things that are manifested, but the bigger picture is an effort to redefine. and I think we’ve got to understand that moment. So I look at it at that moment, and so it’s a testing moment. We will not be comfortable. We will be called to act constructively and powerfully with our heads and our hearts.
Van Tol
How do you think about the balance? I mean, you lead a national organization, you’ve run a major city, but you’ve also been part of the backbone of the movement. I mean when I think about where the Civil Rights Movement went. We created these laws. We had this transformative moment driven by a movement, and then we said, to work right? You get the right to vote. It’s one thing to have the right to vote, but to have the money to buy lunch at the lunch counter. You know, our organizations, the field that we built, people set about working on those issues, investing in community, building the infrastructure. But are the tools that we have used to do that are they the tools that we need for the present moment? And how do you balance that preservation of what we have achieved with the fact that it’s all under threat now?
Morial
This work that we all do cast us as orchestra conductors. The orchestra conductor has to calibrate all sections of the orchestra – the string section, the percussion section, the horn section. If it’s a band, you got vocals, we have to be like an orchestra conductor. We’re calibrating all the time and sometimes and much of the conversation, do we need new tools, or do we need to maximize existing tools? The Bill of Rights and the Constitution and the system of democracy built into it tools of resistance and tools of promotion. The First Amendment, the right of freedom of speech, which also includes freedom of association, the ability to build voluntary organizations like NCRC or the Urban League so that people could use their voices collectively. The freedom of assembly, the right for people to meet and organize without fear of retribution or arrest. These have been tools – the right to vote and participate in the political process, the right to impact through the First Amendment’s quote, ‘right to petition government for the redress of grievances.’ All of these tools we’ve almost got to dust off the good old constitution, dust it off and ask ourselves, what does that mean today, in a democracy? What does that mean? How do we maximize those tools, with the powers of technology, with the power of media, with the power of our collective will. We got to utilize the tools that we have and maximize the tools that we have. The last election, many people stayed home. 5 million, less than 2020. They didn’t even use a basic tool. It’s free.
You can’t use Tiktok, IG or Facebook without a phone, which costs and internet service that cost, but you can walk down to the polling place and vote for free. So existing tools. We’ve got our need. We need a renaissance in the use of tools and how these tools maximize in the 21st Century.
Van Tol
You know, Marc, yeah, absolutely. In every crisis, there’s an opportunity, right and you and I, before the election, we were in a conversation about, how do we produce a lot more housing for the country? How do we tackle some of these fundamental problems, the problem of affordable housing, the problem of really the crisis of opportunity that exists for our communities? How do we, how do we take a bigger bite out of these things? And it strikes me, you know, the challenge, of course, in a crisis is there’s opportunity, but it’s so much, so much work and energy and effort goes into overcoming the crisis that the opportunity moment can be lost. What do you see as the opportunities within this moment to really think about big problems in a different way and still move the agenda forward?
Morial
So let’s talk, and I’m glad you referenced housing. Let’s talk about housing. Painful for me to go back to my beloved hometown three years ago, go to Los Angeles, come here to Washington, DC, and see all the unhoused people. I look at it and I’m asking myself, what I’m seeing, something that never disappeared, but had abated, revive and resuscitate itself.
There’s a conversation, and there’s been a conversation in this country over the last several years about inflation. Sometimes I wonder, have all these erudite commentators, these loud-talking politicians, these economic do-it-alls, know-it-alls ever taken a look at the Consumer Price Index and understood that about a third, 25% of a third are related to housing expenses. And if you want to know why we’ve had an inflation problem, it’s the increased cost of housing. Go look at 2000 and look at 2025 and look at median rents in any major American city. And what it will show you is that those median rents have increased far greater than the rate of inflation.
We’ve got a housing problem in the country of affordability. It’s exacerbated by supply. It’s exacerbated by NIMBY. It’s exacerbated by the lack of sufficient investments in affordable and workforce housing. So where’s the opportunity? I’ve been a proponent for years of a transition of the GSEs in a way that unlocks all that money for a Housing Trust Fund to build affordable and workforce housing in the country. President Biden had a robust – Jesse, you and I worked on it, and a lot of us worked on it, the National Housing collaborative – a robust component in his first build back better to put several $100 billion in the construction of new housing. We were going to do more down payment assistance work. We were going to do more homebuyer education and housing counseling work.
And it really got blocked by two people, the man from West Virginia and a lady from Arizona, because it was a bill that could have passed with 51 votes by reconciliation. They said no, and that entire proposal went down the tubes. It got revived as the quote, unquote Inflation Reduction Act, but there was no significant investment in housing. We need to understand where politics got in the way and who whose politics got in the way. Now we’re here with the 47th President having to make a choice that we try to find some working way on the GSEs only because, in my view, we want to a lot unlock several $100 billion for a Housing Trust Fund or do we wait until the political situation gets better? No easy out. An interest rate reduction may help some, but it’s not going to fix the problem. We’ve got to invest in housing that people can afford, both rental and homeownership on a large scale.
I love space, but I’m not going to Mars. I love space but guess what? You’ll never see me near a SpaceX capsule. The point I’m making is we have to make investing in housing a higher priority. We’re invest investments in all kinds of things that you can make a case are important, but nothing is more important than where a mother and our children lay their head at night. Nothing is more important than your or my aging relatives, having a place where the heat works, or having a place where they don’t have to run from the roaches and the crickets and the rats. Nothing is more basic. I think it’s a human right. It’s a human right. It’s a 21st Century human right, and we’ve got to talk about it and not be afraid to talk about it in those terms, because we have a crisis. We’ve not built sufficient housing. We’ve not invested enough in tools that work. So for example, suppose we took the Section 8 housing voucher program, and we made everyone who meets the economic criteria eligible for it. Suppose we allowed people and as a pilot program to do this, to take it to not only rent but also towards mortgage payments. We’ve got to reimagine public policy.
And let me just say this. We got to take a page out of this 2025 plan, which is a pile of rubbish and a pile of garbage. And we need our own vision document. We need a 2050 plan. We need a 2050 plan
Van Tol
Marc, I spoke yesterday just about the importance of dreaming bigger and setting big goals. You know, there’s a reason. Dr King wrote a speech about a dream, not a nightmare. And I think too often in our spaces, we get consumed with the problem statement because, well, how do you articulate to a funder why your work is important? It’s the problem statement. We get consumed with the reaction to what is happening that is bad, and we forget to project and to cast vision. We forget to articulate our dreams as big enough, as you just said, we need that 2050 document. We need to demonstrate and show. What are those things that are big and important that we can make progress on? As you said, how do we do a better job of that? I mean, not just what are the things, but how do we build that conversation in a way that resonates with people, that they hear it, that they’re motivated, that they say, sign me up, because the messenger can be as important as as as the policy too.
Unknown Speaker 17:49
You know, in my observation, and it’s a very good question, very good sort of comment, is we need to try to see if we can embrace and build the American north star of the 21st Century, so the American north star for the 21st Century, in my own thinking and view, is, how can we build a multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-religious, multi-gender American economy that is great for everyone. How can we build that? We’ve got to have a North Star vision, because we have to build in a changing world, a nation that’s based on some basic values that we share. If we don’t share where we worship, and we don’t share ethnicity, culture, gender. That’s okay, because the American experiment in pluralism has been about that from the very beginning, we’ve got to have a North Star in terms of what our vision is. And we’ve also got to call the question as to why a nation with a GDP of nearly $25 trillion should have anyone suffering in poverty at all. It just doesn’t make sense to me that we could go from a $5 trillion economy in 1980 to a 20, $25 trillion economy in 2025, yet the poverty rate has barely moved.
But what has moved is the number of people with significant wealth. What has certainly moved is the number of people with enormous wealth in this country. But what has not moved is the relative poverty rate. The other thing that has not moved is the relative racial wealth and income gaps. Black people, and this is true for Latinos to a great extent, are like a caboose on the economic train. Train speeds up, things get a little better, but relative to the engine, it’s still a caboose far behind all the box cars. These are really fundamental American questions. Why? Because between 1945 and 1975 that ethos was flipped on its head. Every single quintile of the American economy saw their fortunes rise. It was the post World War II impact of New Deal programs. It was Johnson’s Great Society. It was civil rights, but undergirding it was a generation of people who said, this country must change. This country must change. They led the resistance to the war in Vietnam. They were on the front line of the civil rights movement. They worked to get 18-year-olds the right to vote. They were behind the effort to get the Equal Rights Amendment passed through Congress, which, of course, did not occur. But the point is, is that there was a people’s movement that challenged the status quo in a very profound way. Now those of us in this room are the beneficiaries of all of that, the beneficiaries. We benefited from that in a very significant way. And now the question is, will we allow on our watch, it to be marginalized, fractured, friddled, spayed, neutered or eliminated? We’ve got to ask that question, and I believe firmly that overwhelming majorities of the American people, overwhelming majorities of the American people, embrace this vision, embrace this notion, embrace this idea. And we have to be active in local community, and we have to let people know it’s not a partisan thing. It’s not a thing that is based on racial dynamics or racial division alone. We’ve got to build an America that accommodates prosperity for all, and that’s what we have to do or American democracy will continue to be feeble, and weakened along the way. We have got to understand this moment, and it’s hard for us as generations that have ridden a wave of tremendous success have seen improvements in quality of life, to fathom that all that we rely On and we thought that they were permanent features of the American system are now being weakened. We will not know, for example, what impact tariffs have on our economy for another six months to 18 months. We will not know already there are people calling the Social Security Administration whose calls are not answered. We won’t know whether the student loan program, which is being transferred to some other agency, is going to fall into disrepair and mismanagement. We don’t know the impact of the moves that we are seeing yet today, but our instincts and our gut tell us it’s not going to be a good story. So we we do have to both resist, but we also, Jesse to your point, we have to embrace a bigger vision about what the nation is going to be. What do we want 2050 to look like? What kind of communities do we want to have America is always been an experiment, and it remains an experiment, but it’s our experiment, and we want to make it work.
Van Tol
Marc, on a more personal note, and then I’m going to wrap us to conclude with thoughts on a call to action, but on a more personal note, I think so many people are struggling in this moment, really, with this question of what is to be done. The moment can feel very isolating. There’s a lot of fear anxiety, not just about the country as a whole, but personally about the potential ramifications of taking action for your organization, for yourself, for your family. What sort of gives you energy, what keeps you ticking? And I say this, I have a confession, a quick story. I called Marc the other day, and I think Marc accidentally switched the phone call he was on to, you know, you know when you hit the button. So I called Mark. He picks up, but he’s midstream talking. And I thought, oh my, Marc’s in a meeting. He’s walking out the door. He picked up to let me know, you know, I’m gonna, I’m gonna step out, but hang on, just a second, because, because you’ve done that before, we’ve done that before. And so I’m just quiet, you know, I’m just listening and after a few seconds, I realize, now Marc doesn’t realize that he just switched his phone call. And so I was like, well, I should say something, or I should hang up. But then I was like, Wow, man, Mark is dropping some nuggets of wisdom here. I’m just going to take I’m just going to take a few notes.
So for 30 seconds I just listened. I said, you know, I probably Mark’s now really invested in this conversation he doesn’t know he’s having with me. I should probably just just hang up. But truly, Mark, I mean you when I see you. I mean those nuggets of wisdom, that feeling of being constantly on, the go, go, go, the respond to the moment. Where do you get your energy from to keep doing this work, to step up and stand up as you always have.
Morial
Truly the most energizing thing is being in rooms like this,to see those of you who are intent and intense about the things that we’re talking about today that’s energizing to me. Some people, it’s tiring. It’s energizing to me. I get my hope from young people. I have three of my own and a legion of nieces and nephews. Most of them are between in their late teens to probably their late 30s, but then they’re all of the other young people I get an opportunity to come into contact with, whether it’s my frequent visits to college campuses, the National Urban League Young Professionals and the like. I get energy from young people. Young people get, you know, it’s a right of, it’s a right of our culture, where we always point the finger at young people, because we got the fingers pointed at us, right? And the energy of the youth, I get a lot from the energy and the innocence, to some extent of young people, but I also get hope from the wisdom of elders. Tthe people like my dear mother, who just passed last fall, Hazel Dukes, the civil rights leader in New York, from speaking to them and listening to stories and seeing their gaining their encouragement. I get energy from the young and the old, because those who are seasoned have seen a lot and to see them continue to have hope and fight. Young people are just the engine of change, always the engine of change, and I think all of us, organizationally, we’re working at the National Urban League now on an initiative I’ve been working on, I’ve been trying to get off the ground for years. I couldn’t get the right resources to do it. And it’s going to be a college leaders summit that we want to do every year. So I want to bring in a multi-racial group of young people to talk about issues like a just economy, like technology, civil rights, housing, and I mean young people, and give them an opportunity to sit at the table and control the conversation, not be at the Table, listening to others, but being the conversation. So we’ve got to gain. We’ve also got to, I think in this moment reach back. You realize that if you are 35 years old or younger, you probably went through 12 years of school and never took civics or American government. You never learned about the Bill of Rights of the Constitution. There was a snap poll at Times Square a few years back. They went out and they asked people name the three branches of government. One person said, well, federal, state and local,
Van Tol
Tiktok, IG and
Morial
Somebody said, curly, Larry and Mo. But many people couldn’t even grasp what they were. But here’s a kicker: Name one supreme court justice who you admire? The winner by, not unanimous, but by majority, decision was none other than Judge Judy. Thank you.
So that’s the kind of civics we know. We have to reintroduce American democracy back into the classroom. You know, there’s no more Schoolhouse Rock. There’s no more of that on we have got to reintroduce it, because truly, we have a generation that may be technologically intelligent and constitutionally illiterate, and it is why, when you talk about, is democracy being is democracy on fire? Is democracy in peril? Is democracy under attack? Sometimes people might say, What do you mean? I don’t really have an instinct about this. So if there’s an appeal to all of you, it is an appeal to invest in the next generation. It doesn’t have to be a program. It doesn’t have to be sophisticated. Bring them into your space. Bring them into your organizational space. Let them observe what you do, hear what they have to say. We’ve got to do so much more of that in this time. It’s not enough to talk to them on Twitter or IG it’s not enough to talk to them on Tiktok. So I’ll just offer that as a close I think you’ll also gain great inspiration, and you also gain great knowledge, because young people are fountains of information and fountains of insight, and we have got to invest in them.
Van Tol
Think we’ll close it there. That’s as good a call to action as any. Thank you so much, Marc.
Morial
Hey Jesse, thank you very much, and thank you all keep doing what you’re doing. Thank you. Applause.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
