Tim Kaine spoke at the National Urban League Conference in Baltimore today, where he highlighted his long career as a civil rights attorney and advocate, while reminding his audience of the stark difference between the two campaigns, and the history of Trump’s racist business practices.
“Around the time my father-in-law desegregated Virginia’s schools,” Kaine said, “the Justice Department had filed suit after Donald Trump and his father were refusing to rent apartments to African-Americans. It was one of the largest federal cases of its kind at the time.”
(Side note: “The Hillary Clinton campaign accepted our invitation and sent their vice-presidential nominee, Tim Kaine,” Morial said, stressing the organization’s unsuccessful bipartisan entreaties. “The Donald Trump campaign, who we spoke with and corresponded with a number of times, declined our invitation.”)
In his remarks, Kaine spoke about his early career as a civil rights attorney, noting that housing discrimination cases were "the heart" of his legal career. "So this is real personal to me," he said.
"I learned when I started to practice civil rights that anybody who is a person of color, frankly anybody who has been a religious minority, you kind of have to learn the ways of the majority as a survival instinct," Kaine said. "You have to learn kind of in order to survive the ways of the majority. So often those of us in the majority, we are not forced to learn the ways of anybody else. And we can insulate or wall ourselves off, even without intending to. We have to force ourselves out of our comfort zone to learn about the realities of all the beautiful parts of this wonderful American tapestry."
Kaine focused on continuing civil rights issues that affect black communities--housing discrimination but also criminal justice reform, as well as the critical importance of acknowledging and correcting whitewashed history.
Citing his work with the Congressional Black Caucus to have the first arrival of slaves at Jamestown commemorated (as the first arrivals of the English and the Spanish have been), Kaine shouted out to #BlackLivesMatter:
"If English lives in history matter, if Spanish lives in history matter, then African-American lives in history ought to matter to us too. African-American history matters because black lives matter."
Video
.@timkaine: "African-American history matters because black lives matter." pic.twitter.com/...
— POLITICO (@politico) August 4, 2016
I’ve been so impressed with Tim Kaine the more I hear from him and the more I learn about him. Furthermore, not that it needed confirming, but bringing him on board as her running mate says so much about Hillary’s brilliant sense of judgement.