Booker Campaign Press Release - Cory Booker Closing Statement at the MSNBC Debate in Atlanta

Booker in Closing Statement: "We Need To Mobilize A New American Movement"

Newark, NJ — In case you missed it, on the debate stage tonight, Cory Booker delivered an impassioned closing statement. Watch his remarks here and see below for a transcript.

"I have not yet qualified for the December stage, I need your help to do that. If you believe in my voice and that I should be up here, please go to CoryBooker.com, please help.

"I had a closing statement prepared, but I saw in the audience during the break, a man named John Lewis. Perhaps it's interesting and important for me to mention why I'm so grateful to him. I've been calling in this whole election for our need to fight and fight the right way by bringing people together, to create transformative change, not just be Donald Trump - that's the floor, we need to go to the ceiling, we need to go to the mountaintop.

"I am literally here on this stage right now because 50 years ago, there was a lawyer on a couch who changed his life, changed his mind to get up and start representing families, one of them mine, who were discriminated against - the house I grew up in is because of that lawyer's activity. When I asked him why, why he did what he did, he told me that on March 7, 1965, he was watching a movie called Judgment at Nuremberg on TV, and they interrupted that movie to show a bridge in Alabama called the Edmund Pettus Bridge. And there he saw John Lewis and other marchers who were beaten viciously by Alabama state troopers.

"We all owe a debt that we cannot repay, we all drink deeply from wells of freedom and liberty that we did not dig. This is the moment in America, where we need a leader that can inspire us to get up and fight again, that we have truly a moral moment in America, like it was back in 1965.

"If you give me a chance to lead, I will cause what John Lewis says is good trouble. I will challenge us. I will ask more from you than any other president has ever asked before because we need to mobilize a new American movement. Keep you on this stage, keep me on this race, it is time we fight and fight together, please go to corybooker.com."