WATCH: Rep. Mfume speaks in Smithsonian oversight hearing

[00:00:00]Chairman. Thank you very much. I only have 5 minutes, so I'm going to try to make the most out of it by making some very clear points.

[00:00:09]Black people across this country are outraged at what is happening now with these efforts to do away with the African American Museum and all of the Smithsonian. They are outraged because they've lived too many years, been through too many struggles, suffered too many bruises and clearly have very, very, very little to show for that sojourn here in this country. I want to be real clear about this.

[00:00:37]If you erase it, we will replace it. It's that damn simple.

[00:00:43]We don't seem to learn. If anything, we should be looking at history to learn. and to make sure that we are taking advantage of what we've learned. You know it was Abraham Lincoln in 1848.

[00:00:58]who addressed his countrymen in Edwardsville, Illinois, and he said, and I quote, When you have succeeded, in dehumanizing the Negro.

[00:01:09]When you have put him down and made it but for him to be. But as the beast of the field. when you have extinguished his soul in this world, and placed him where the ray of hope is blown out, as in the darkness of the damned. Are you quite sure? he asked, that the demon you have roused will not one day turn and renew.

[00:01:36]He said, what constitutes the bulwark of our freedom and our independence.

[00:01:41]It is not, said Lincoln, our crown in battlements. It is not our armies and our navies. It is not our bristling sea coast. For all those things are not our alliance against tyranny, because they can all be turned against us without having made us weaker for the struggle.

[00:02:00]Our alliance, he said, as Americans is in the love of liberty which God has planted deep within all of us, regardless of how we look and where we come from. He said, our reliance is in the spirit of freedom. which prides itself as the heritage of all men in all lands everywhere. And then he admonished, destroy that spirit.

[00:02:26]And you would have planted the seeds of despotism at your own doorstep.

[00:02:31]Ignore, he said the chains of human bondage, and you prepare one day for your own limbs to wear them. A custom, he said, to trample on the rights of other people, and you would have lost the creative genius of your own American independence, and as such will become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.

[00:02:58]Sound familiar History taught us and still teaches us that we can't keep making the same mistakes. So I know this is a big discussion about a lot of aspects about the museum. But I'm here as a black man who grew up in segregation who wasn't allowed to go certain places, who drank from a water fountain that said colored, who found his mother and his father unable to do anything other than basic day work. And if the for no one else, if for them and their spirit and all the other nameless and faceless black men in this country and black women who made their bodies bridges that some of us could get to the university that some of us could get to a good job that some of us could get to the United States if for no other reason. I want this to go out loud and clear, and I'm not speaking just on behalf of myself. I know that I speak on behalf of so many people who are not here today. We will not let you destroy that museum. No matter how long it takes, how many battles are required, how much effort is needed. We will not allow that to happen. unless you find a way to kill all of us and walk over our bodies to change history. That history is too sacred. It is too precious, and it will not be erased because, as I said, if you attempt to erase it, we will continue to replace it over and over and over again. I yelled back, Mr. Chairman