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As president, I will also restore respect for tribal sovereignty throughout the executive branch, and I will reopen the doors of the White House itself to the first Americans.
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We understand the struggles of our Native American brothers and sisters. And in addition to the health-care crisis facing tribes, we also know that poverty is rising in America. And nowhere is it worse than on our reservations.
To ensure that your voice is heard on these and other vital issues, I will appoint Native Americans to key positions in the White House and throughout my administration.
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And I will do my part to bring more diversity into the media.
KERRY: Right now, people of color make up 32 percent of the nation's population but only 13 percent of daily newspaper staffs.
And people of color represent only a tiny fraction of the numbers of editors, anchors and executives at our nation's premiere news organizations. Right now, only 4.2 percent of radio stations and 1.5 percent of television stations are owned by minorities.
I look around at all the talent in this room and I say to the management of these organizations, "We can do better, and we should."
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As president, I will expand opportunities for people in the media by appointing FCC commissioners committed to enforcing equal employment and ensuring that small, minority-owned broadcasters are not consolidated into extinction.
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Thirty-nine years ago tomorrow, when Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, he said, quote, "Every American citizen must have an equal right to vote. Yet, the harsh fact is that in many places in this country, men and women are kept from voting simply because they are Negroes," closed quotes.
My friends, the harsh fact now is that in the last election, more than 1 million African-Americans were disenfranchised in one of the most tainted elections in our history. We can do better, and we have to.
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We have to see to it that in November, every vote counts and every vote is counted.
And along with shared opportunity, we have to also demand shared responsibility. All of us, from the president in the White House to the people in their homes and schools and workplaces, have to be responsible for our actions. And we owe it to all the people who follow the law to hold accountable those who don't.
That begins with having a president who tells the truth to the American people.
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It means staying vigilant to ensure that every American company plays by the rules and does right by its workers and customers.
And it means giving young people alternatives to gangs and gang violence by first sending them a strong message that the violence must stop, and if it doesn't, police and prosecutors will hold them accountable, period.
KERRY: But second, by sending young people a strong, clear message that there is another path. And if they're willing to take that path, we are going to be there with them, with job training, with job opportunities, with drug treatment, with after-school programs, with the things that adults should do for children in a civilized society.
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Shared responsibility, shared opportunity -- that's how we're really going to make America stronger and bring real hope and real help and real opportunity to Americans.
So I want to thank you for doing your part every single day. No one in public life doesn't have some complaint at some time about the fourth estate. But your persistent vigilance makes us all better, and it makes you the watch men and women on the walls of liberty.
I believe this is the most important election of our lifetime. Everything is at stake: jobs, health care, children, America's role in the world, the character of our country.
Your role in the next months is as important as at any point in our shared history. Your questioning, your demands for honest answers, your reporting on our progress, your holding us accountable for our promises are indispensable as a force in moving America forward.
Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to measure me by my results, not just my rhetoric, by my actions, not just by my words. Results do matter.
And let's not forget as a model for that the role that so many of your brothers and sisters in the media have played in exposing historic wrongs, lifting up communities of color and building one America.
Where would we be today if it weren't for the stirring images of the civil rights movement that were captured for Life magazine by the camera of Gordon Parks or the searing wartime photojournalism of Nick Ut?
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Where would we be without the pioneering word pictures that were painted by Ruben Salazar for El Paso Herald Post and Los Angeles Times?
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Where would we be without Carole Simpson, Frank Del Oma (ph), Bernard Shaw, Ed Bradley or Max Robinson?
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Where would we be without the famed Native American historian and journalist Arthur Caswell Parker, founder, American Indian magazine, or Ignacio Lozano, founder of La Opinion?
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Where would we be today with UNITY 2004 and all of you?
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KERRY: So, above all, today...
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... I thank you for all that you have done, but I thank you for all that you will do to help us become an America we were truly meant to be, the America whose best days are yet to come.
Thank you. God bless you all.
And I'm happy to answer your questions.
Thank you.
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My pleasure to answer questions. I don't know what the order is, but I'm yours.
QUESTION: Thank you, Senator Kerry, for that message.
We're pleased that you've agreed to stick around and answer some questions, so we'll go right to them.
The entertainer Bill Cosby recently caused quite a stir when he commented on some of the perpetual problems plaguing the low-income African-American population. He suggested that black people should stop blaming others and, instead, take responsibility for their economic status, their high rate of incarceration and their educational shortcomings.
Who do you think is most responsible for these dire conditions and for fixing them, government or the people who live in these communities? And why?
KERRY: I think all of us are responsible, all of us.
I understand exactly where Bill is coming from in his comment. It may be excessively exclusive in the breadth of it, in the sense that it sort of targets just the responsibility side, but that's an important side.
But let's be honest with each other, ladies and gentlemen. If you have a school system that depends on the property tax, and you have a community that doesn't have any property tax base, and it's dependent on the largess of either state or federal assistance, but the great ethic of the politics of our nation is no tax -- no available resources because it's more important to give a tax cut to people earning more than $200,000 a year, we got a problem. And that is exactly the problem that we face today.
KERRY: I've been in those schools, and so have many of you. I remember going into the Jeremiah Burke School in Boston, which is largely African-American, some Hispanic, but almost all people of color.
And I was shocked when I went into that school. It was a number of years ago, now. But there weren't enough lockers. The library was half open. The kids had a tiny little gymnasium for all of this incredible youthful energy to work its way out.
And the teachers didn't have materials to put in front of the kids. I talked to the teachers and the teachers tell me, "Senator, we reach into our pocket, and we spend $1,500, $2,000 from our meager pay just to put materials in front of these kids." That's wrong.
And those school doors would shut at 1:30 and 2 in the afternoon because they couldn't pay the custodians to be able to keep the doors open so the kids had a place to be and to be safe.
And then when they go out in the streets, how many of them get the access to a boys' club or girls' club or a YMCA or YWCA or take part in Big Brother or Big Sister or YouthBuild or AmeriCorps or any of the other efforts? Because all of those are struggling for resources.
