GATES: We've seen a lot of books recently that basically can be characterized as being nostalgic about the good old days of segregation, the forties, the fifties. And even my own memoir is very nostalgic about that period. Do you think that our people really are better off today than they were 20-30 years ago?

JACKSON: Of course we're better off. When the children of Israel were in this journey from Egypt to Canaan, they had a comfort zone in Egypt because they'd been there 400 years. Their certain familiar patterns of behavior and life was fairly predictable. Work hard and not get paid, and adjust to reasonable abuse, and go to temple and synagogue, and die, and live in that cycle. And so Moses said at some point: We can not just engage in social service and religious maintenance. We must make a dash toward a new public policy. We must go toward Canaan, the land of liberation. And all And it took him a long time to convince people to leave the comfort zone of slavery and take the responsibilities of becoming free people. When Dred Scott made a dash off the plantation, that was not a group exodus . That was a guy

GATES: That's right.

JACKSON: --who dashed to freedom. And so Moses led this group. And between Egypt and Canaan, they complain. Say, "Out here in this wilderness, see, this is tough out here. We don't have any pharaoh to look over us. We don't have any kind of a social support of our square meals every day. And here we are out here on our own, and got to think this stuff through. At least back in Egypt we could eat. At least we knew each other. At least there was a comfort zone back there." So it's not unlike people who are in a journey to freedom, to have these nostalgic moments looking back at some comfort zone within the context of slavery.

But I submit to you, I would not trade our opportunities today and our challenges today for yesterday. Yesterday when we had I grew up in Greenville. I never saw a black policeman in my entire life, or a black fireman, or blacks selling clothes on downtown Main Street. I could not go to Furman University. I grew up on University Ridge. I could not go to Clemson, the University of South Carolina. I mean, good old days?

Had to go to the back of the bus. A sign above the driver's head read, "Colored seat from the rear, whites seat from the front. Those who violate will be punished by law." Good old Good old days? No black school board members? Never a black school superintendent? Not one black judge? Good old days? Give me a break!

Let us think about today's challenges and today's opportunities. We cannot go forward looking backwards. We must accept these challenges. And today, oh, when we have the power We freed Haiti. We couldn't have done that in the good old days....We freed South Africa. We could not have done that in the good old days. Oh, the good old days, we couldn't play professional basketball.

GATES: Right.

JACKSON: We did not dominate the sport. Now we must go from on the field to management and ownership. Those are today's challenges. When you look at today's opportunities as compared to yesterday's opportunities, we must go forward.

GATES: I think your move to Wall Street is crucial.... Scholars identify the causes of poverty as being both structural and behavioral. And you've been quite eloquent about the structural causes of poverty and structural solutions for those causes. What about the behavioral problems-- the problems within the black community that we need to address, ourselves?

JACKSON: Well, people who are victims of structural equality do have predictable behavior patterns. People who recycle despair are different than people who recycle hope. People who look forward to a minimal job or subsistence have a different dream cap than those who inherit wealth. And so yeah, there are patterns of behavior in this cycle that are that are painful. If you were in Chicago on a given day, look by the United Center where Michael Jordan plays basketball, and went to the south side, where the White Sox play baseball, or and you went to Cook County Jail to the west, between these three mountains In every city I visit, I see a new ball new ballpark and a new jail. Your town, there's a new glamour flama jail downtown and a new ballpark or a new Boston Gardens.

Now, between those three institutions used to be International Harvester and Spiegels, and used to be Stockyard Inns, and there was massive urban industry during that time. Do you follow me so far? In those cases, the parents had jobs, created a tax base. The youth had first class education. Now, in the absence of jobs, parents on subsistence, tax base down, schools falling down, and the number one growth industry for our students happen to be jails. In that cycle, therefore, of joblessness for parents and second class schools and poverty abounding, there are predictable patterns of behavior, because they have they live in dream deficits. They have dream caps. That's why the walls must come down.

I led a group of superintendents on a tour not long ago. Went to a place called Glenbrook South about 30 minutes to the north. In that school, Dr. Gates, they have 40 janitors, $24,000 to $40,000 a year. That's why the school is basically clean. They have people hired to keep it clean. Teachers' pay, average, $65,000 plus benefits. That's why they have a stable teaching force. You have people with Ph.D.'s teaching there because they make more money than some of you who are teaching in college, for example.

In that school they had high-tech math computer labs, so they would connect slow learners with high tech computers, let the computer be extensions of the brain. Or in the library, behind every stall was a computer. Or if you will, a Olympic-size swimming pool. And that gym connected with a field house. I mean, the school is the school-industrial complex. In the papers, they advertise "home for sale, near Glenbrook North or South .

Contrast that. Come to the inner city, 30 miles to the south. In the schools are teachers paid about one-third less. Many of them are not computer-ready. If they wire them, they got to go through asbestos and lead paint. And they have not wired them. A teacher turnover sometime of 30 percent. Dropout rate, 60 percent. Not one with a swimming pool. By the way, that school had 85 paid coaches on their payroll, for example.

So you got youth who are in computer-ready schools, and students in schools where the plaster's falling. At the end of 12 years, they take an exam. One goes out the roof. One goes to the floor. That is savage structural inequality, according to Jonathan Kozol, and he is right.

And so while Mr. Clinton says we want higher goals, we agree. High expectations, we agree. But democracy does not guarantee that all of us can dunk the ball. It guarantees all those can have the right to dribble. It assumes an even floor, an even playing field. And today, that even playing field is not there. And therefore, equal funding for public education, whether the government closes the gap, whoever, the gap must be closed, because equal opportunity will tend to lead to better and more equal results. Lack of equal opportunity leads to more predictable downward results. There's nothing wrong with our genes and nature. There's something basic about an assumption of equality of opportunity that, in fact, does not exist.

GATES: Do you think, in your heart of hearts, that we can make corporate capitalism sufficiently humane to accommodate the structural inequality in this country?

JACKSON: Well you can have bias in socialism. You can have inhumanity in socialism. You can have racist socialism. You can have fascist socialism. And so at the end of the day, you may live in capitalism or socialism, but your own private ethical values determine what you do with your wealth. Do you have enough vision to re-invest in the flower that you are , so we can continue to grow? That would be a good thing. That's why incentives for capital re-investment are important. Bill Cosby and Camille made a lot of money. They put $20 million in Spellman . A sense of humanity. Willy Gary down in Florida, a very poverty-stricken kid who went to Shaw University, and that's the only school that would accept him. North Carolina Central, went to law school, went back to school at 40. He did well, began to make money. He gave $10 million to Shaw and bailed Shaw out. And so these are capitalists, but their sense of humanity determines the priorities that they have in the economic system.

It's not fair to say, it seems to me, that a given economic system can make you more humane, or just being humane without a way to generate capital will make you stable and secure. There's always that dynamic, it seems to me, between the individual and whatever system one finds herself in.

GATES: Reverend Jackson, Maulana Karenga says that the issue facing black people in America today is not economics, but how to recover our position as the country's moral vanguard. Do you agree with that? And if so, what do we do about it?

JACKSON: I think what Dr. Karenga's saying is that our greatest strength historically has not been our numbers, our dollars, or our guns, but the rightness of our cause. Rosa Parks, when she refused to go to the back of the bus, she did not have a gun. Or she did not have a Ph.D. degree. She was mostly morally right. The rightness of her cause She was not arrested for being vulgar, or for fighting somebody on the bus, or when they immediately checked her record, they checked her quote, unquote , "her moral worthiness". If she had been, a prostitute a dope dealer or something, they would have used that to rationalize why she shouldn't have had a right to sit on the front of the bus. But it's her sense of holiness and moral rightness became a weapon. The students who marched to end the apartheid laws were mostly morally right. While we used in some cases demonstrations as a tactic, or boycotts as a tactic, what drew the world's attention to us, we were mostly morally right. Apartheid was wrong.

I remember Dr. King getting the Nobel Peace Prize, and President Johnson gave him a White House reception, and said how great he was, and all that. Dr. King said, "Thank you very much, but our people deserve the right to vote." And Lyndon Johnson said, "Dr. King, you know I like you. I like you very much. The fact is, I know what you're going to say, that I have all these powers, that I can I can push a red button, I can stop and start wars. But I can't grant you the right to vote. I just can't do it unilaterally. Bad news: I can't, and Congress won't. So you can't have the right to vote." That's what the President told Dr. King.

We went from there to Selma. Those who withstood the billy clubs and the cattle prods, whose blood represented a kind of crucifixion, it was the purity of their blood and the rightness of our cause. We did not get the right to vote because we shouted out or because we cursed it out. We were mostly morally right. So this weapon of morality is critical. That's why, when people are killed or jailed Mandela's power is mostly the moral rightness of his cause. He didn't shoot his way out of jail. It was the rightness of his cause.

And so I think Dr. Karenga is right. And so I say to the young generation who are now engaging in such self-destructive behavior, in some sense symbolized by the death of Tupac, the death of Notorious Big is that there are some lifestyles that are now being embraced that are not morally sound. They're not good. They are not healthy.

There's a story in the Bible of a man who hung around the graveyard. He slept in the graveyard. That's abnormal behavior, to hang around tombstones and to hang around the bones of dead people, and then to attack other people who would come to visit their relatives' remains in the graveyards. Said, "What's your name?" Said, "Just call me legion. I'm just out here hanging around.

When you begin to call yourself "nigger with an attitude" and call yourself "notorious" and call yourself "bitch" and "whore", that's a level of demeaned degeneracy. That's a kind of surrender. That's not moral authority. And so somehow the tradition of Malcolm saying, "I once was lost but now I'm found," of Dr. King saying, "Walk in dignity and not ride in shame," of Du Bois affirming the greatness of our humanity, that tradition must be embraced again.

These two young men who were killed, were not obscure. They were very well known. They were not poor. They were millionaires. They were not killed, it seemed, by whites, but rather by other blacks. So it seems that lifestyle is why they are dead, not because race or poverty or obscurity.

If they could somehow manage the energy that they have and that talent, and use that to begin to demand laptop computers, demand equal funding for public education, demand our share of access to Wall Street, demand our share of justice and a and a budget for African development and Caribbean development, demand an end to access to guns and violence and drugs, there are great things of our time.

Demand that young men who make babies raise them, and that we have a sense of stable families. These are the morally sound agenda items of our time. If our generation of youth embraced those issues Dr. Karenga, I think, is essentially right the morality of our cause will give us moral authority and strength and delivery and victory.

GATES: What happened to the powerful liberal coalition that was behind the political successes of the Civil RIghts movement back in the 60's - can we get it back again?

JACKSON: That coalition has saved Affirmative Action. That coalition sent Aristide back to Haiti. That coalition gained Mandela's freedom in South Africa. That coalition led to a new Middle East policy. And so in a broad stroke, that basic progressive coalition which is allied strongly with labor and working place people may take on different forms.

I thought one of the things that was missed by the media in my campaign for the Presidency-- in Iowa in 1988, a state about 98 percent white, I got more votes than Vice-President Gore or Babbitt in Iowa, because those basic farmers and workers are and urban blacks, our agendas converged. I got more votes than Gore or Babbitt in New Hampshire. I beat them in the South. I beat them in New York City. And I can't think of a big city in the country, whether LA or New York or Chicago or where it was not that coalition that won those positions.

So again I say, we must not be quick to despair. We really look around. While there are some new economic dynamics with the globalization of the economy and out-sourcing corporations and wealth poverty polarization, there's a lot to be hopeful for. Maybe the biggest adjustment we must make now We have spent so much time on a black/white vertical analysis, there's not been enough focus on a vertical "have/have not" coalition. We do not want to discuss race much in the country. We want to discuss class even less. Because somehow to discuss classism suggests that we're challenging the very heart of our of our system, of our way of life.

But I submit to you that a coalition will emerge, demanding jobs with security, demanding equal protection under the law, demanding equal opportunity, demanding equal access, demanding fair share. Those are the basic imperatives of the of the American dream.