Keeper of the Flame

ANNOUNCER: Funding for this program was provided in part by the Bloom Foundation.

♪♪ This program was also made possible through the generous support of the following... (Slow and steady piano chords) JACK HEALEY: Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

Where there's hatred, let me sow love.

Where there's a offence, let me bring pardon.

Where there's discord, let me bring union.

Where there is error, let me bring truth.

Where there is doubt, let me bring faith.

Where there is despair, let me bring hope and where there is darkness, let me bring your light.

Where there is sadness, let me bring joy.

Oh master, let me not seek as much to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that one receives.

It is in self-forgetting that one finds.

And it is in pardon that one is pardoned.

It is in dying that one is raised to eternal life.

REPORTER: Jack Healey is the man behind the scenes of the most ambitious, elaborate rock tour ever launched.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: Jack Healey, President of Amnesty USA.

REPORTER: From the Sting to Springsteen.

Some of the biggest names in music are about to begin a series of concerts for a cause.

REPORTER 2: An estimated 1 million people will be reached by the concert.

STING: My hope for this tour is that it will make amnesty more powerful in countries where human rights aren't given.

TRUDY HAYNES: This is not just a concert, it is a campaign for life with dignity.

TRACY CHAPMAN: We wouldn't be giving six weeks of our time and not getting paid if we didn't believe that this was hopefully going to affect some positive change.

LOU REED: Some of the records I've made, I would be rotting in jail for the last 10 years.

PETER GABRIEL: Amnesty is a real beacon of hope.

JACK: Our goals are simple to turn governmental promises into governmental guarantees, to take our own candles and turn them into flames and to take our voices and turn them into thunder.

(Piano music) JACK: I think music lifts us.

The artists have always been in front of us, the painters, the photographers, the musicians.

They've always been our leaders and we need to follow them.

Music is a democratic process because you hear the music and you make your own decision.

That's perfect democracy.

When you make your own decision about something, your own feeling and that lifts you because then you get strength in your own belief and your strength in your own sense of democracy.

That's what music does.

And so the best musicians who play to us lift us about something and you take that and you absorb that and you go do something with it.

I'm not your simple kind of normal do-gooder.

I'm a do-gooder with an attitude.

I'm a do-gooder with an edge.

I'm a do-gooder with a fight and with a memory, and I want to combat the bad people.

The fight is there for me.

JESSICA: Morning everyone.

Jack Healey... JACK: Morning.

JESSICA: Our visitor for today.

JACK: Particularly excited to be in the room that Jessie just took me from the founding of Social Security.

In my family my father was killed when I was two years old.

I'm the last of 11 children, so my mother raised us by herself and the four youngest of us got checks in the mail and that literally gave my mother the food money that it would take to keep the four young of us out of an orphanage.

So I'm particularly indebted to be in this place.

JACK: I grew up in a town where labor was highly regarded and so you have a work ethic like that.

I've always absorbed the work ethic of coming from Pittsburgh, that hard, gritty, keep going.

Get up every day and get to work no matter how you feel.

ELAINE MANNING: How are you darling?

Oh, don't you be nice, Jack.

We were blessed with good memories.

That's all there is to it.

JACK: I hope I keep on, on going.

ELAINE: Just keep the prayers going and the talking... You know Jack and I came from a big family with many hardships, but I have to say we.

Didn't feel it much.

No, we weren't allowed to feel about it because mom just didn't talk about it.

She just let it go and you moved it on and you moved it on and that's where it was.

So we all grew up loving each other.

JACK: I said to mom once... ELAINE: Survivors.

JACK: What am I getting for Christmas?

And she said, the roof over your head.

And I went out and looked at the roof trying to figure out how was that my Christmas gift?

ELAINE: Our dad was killed in an automobile accident when Jack was only two.

Mom was alone raising 11 children.

JACK: Yeah, that's what I remember.

ELAINE: She had the washing, shopping and everything to do in the house.

We just did our best.

And as the others came up, they did what they could.

Mom didn't know other than some insurance, how she was going to handle the 11 children and she was able to receive four checks.

JACK: We called it Frankie time.

We'd have to stand there and thank Franklin Delano Roosevelt for his contribution to our family, because our mother insisted.

We knew we got this check from the government.

We had that sense of fight in the family.

We had that sense of struggle.

And when my two older brothers were drafted into World War II, they came to her and said, you know mom, we don't have to be drafted.

You are allowed to stay out of the war to help your family.

And my mother said to him, oh no no no.

She said, you know Franklin Delano Roosevelt has saved us because my four youngest get checks every month.

That saved our family.

We're going to save him.

You're going to war.

(Reflective piano music continues) (laughter) BUSY MCLAUGHLIN: How the hell are you doing, buddy?

(Patting) BUSY: I went in the army in '55.

But you left... JACK: '53.

Right?

BUSY: But uh, you look the same except your hair's a little longer.

JACK: Yeah, I'm having a bad hair day.

But the thing I remember most about you really from all the experiences, whatever we have, right?

There was a coach and I think it had to be our sophomore year.

He tells the runner or somebody, or Busy, I don't know who it was, but Busy standing there and he says, you know if you keep your legs going like that, no one could stop you.

And Busy said, I'll stop you.

WOMAN: Of course he said that.

JACK: So the coach ran at him then Busy tackled him.

It was over, the argument was.

(chuckles) BUSY: I remember we were friends.

I remember we liked to shoot pool.

We liked to play cards.

We weren't the greasers, but we were a little different than the others.

You used to be the note carrier.

Weren't they love notes or something?

I thought the other day I must've liked it because I became a mailman.

I delivered letters for 37 years.

(laughs) JACK: Gave you... BUSY: Yeah!

(laughs) You started my career for me.

JACK: That's too damn funny.

We were around a lot of trouble.

There was a number of mobbed up families connected families.

Mike's teeth were knocked out.

My mother came to me and said, Jack, you have to go $300 for your brother's teeth.

I go see this big Irish cop.

He said, you're up against the mob.

He said you need the best lawyer in the city of Pittsburgh.

Now get out of here you little (deleted).

So I ask everybody, who's the best lawyer in the city of Pittsburgh?

Everybody said Maloney, Charlie Maloney.

Go to his door, go in there and get in the fight with the secretary, said I need an appointment.

I don't need an appointment.

Little did I know, he's behind me.

He says, I'll take that case.

But six months later, we're in court.

We walk in the mob's in the corridor, they look at Charlie, what the hell you doing here?

We're going to win this case.

Blah, blah, blah.

They hand us $300.

We all left together.

That's doing something without money or power.

It's just listening to what that cop said, Right?

That's what I learned.

That's the lesson of my life.

Do everything without power or money.

That's the lesson of life.

BUSY: I was always very proud of him, always.

He's a guy that made it good.

He did something with his life... uh, for mankind.

JACK: And I feel the same.

BUSY: Oh, I didn't do- I didn't do nothing Jack.

JACK: I consider you a friend.

I mean, we've been lifelong friends.

I feel that we believe in one another.

I loved your fight.

I love learning that.

I want to fight like that too.

It was a lesson for me.

I didn't ever forgot that.

BUSY: You had the guts to do it.

The rest of us didn't.

JACK: I'd failed everything in my sophomore year in high school.

I'd broken my jaw that fall playing football.

I was an 88 pound guard attacking the full back.

When I come back from a broken jaw to school, I was really about four to six weeks behind.

When I finished my sophomore year, every one of them failed me.

I had an F in every subject.

Even gym, my mother found that report card and that's the day she said to me, Jackie, you're either going to prison, military school, or the seminary, which would you like?

And I said, mom, I'll take the seminary.

I'll see what I can do.

(Reflective piano and violin music) CAROLYN JUST: So my dad and Jack met in the seminary.

My dad was having a very tough time with metaphysics.

My dad, I think turned to him and said, I really don't understand this.

I really don't know what I'm going to do.

And Jack like slowly turned to him and said, who gives a... and Yeah, I think that's how their friendship formed (laughs).

FRED JUST: It was a strange time.

It was very strange.

What I remember you two being a feisty, scrappy Irish person because you and I tangled a few times.

-Oh yeah.

JACK: And you put my head in the terrazzo.

(laughs) Most of the time, most of the monasteries are in silence, at least ours.

And so at breakfast we seldom if ever spoke.

There were six at a table three across from each other and opposite me was this Scottish kid from Canada.

I don't know what happened at breakfast, but I got fed up with him.

I just had enough of this crap.

Well, I flipped my bowl on him with the milk in it, just flipped it on him and before he could reach his bowl, I flipped that on him too and I thought, that's not enough.

I went around the table trying to hit him, boom.

You know?

These 40 monks were like... (laughs) one of the [unintelligible] moments in monastery history.

So I got sent to the psychiatrist to see whether I was sane or not.

I liked my time going to the psychiatrist.

I got a car to go over there and I could listen to music, which we didn't have in the monastery.

So I was very happy to go to the psychiatrist.

In a very short time, he said, "you're pretty normal."

I said, "yeah, I think so.

We Irish fight the Scots all- We've been fighting for 700 years."

but he would have me read C.S.

Lewis and I learned a lot on how you can read someone's.... who can lead you in a direction and open your mind up and move you forwardly.

And rather than listening to music on the way back, I would think about what was in that book.

I was grateful one for being normal and moving on to the priesthood, but two, I got a lot more intellectual.

You know, It's funny, a lot of people think the Catholic church is naive and stupid and all that kind of stuff.

Aristotle and St. Thomas and all that, that's some serious business.

That is St. Thomas Aquinas, the leading scholar of Catholicism because he was able to take Greek philosophy primarily Aristotle; and use Greek philosophy to explain Catholicism.

Essentially, it's a question of how do you, how do you create change?

That's the question.

FRED: I just felt when we were finally ordained.

We just sort of exploded on the scene and it was you, for me, that really got me involved in social justice.

(Church bells ringing) JACK: In 1962, I was luckily sent to Catholic University.

John Kennedy was President.

Pope John XXIII was our pope, a progressive Pope.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was heading towards what'd eventually be the March on Washington where he gave the great speech "I Have a Dream."

And on this campus, it's the first time in my life I ever ran into what I considered the intellectuals I wanted to hear.

The anti-war people, the people who wanted to feed the poor, the priest worker movement, Dorothy Day, who combined Catholicism with feeding the poor.

Rabbi Heschel, who was a leading intellectual at the time.

I remember he started his lecture with, if you want wisdom, you have to have curiosity.

I spent the next month trying to get curiosity.

I wanted to be wise.

I thought, that's the road I'm going to take curiosity.

I politically came alive.

My mind went from a small vision to a large vision.

You know, I think it was Yeats that said, "true education is the lighting of a fire, not the pouring in of information."

And that's what happened to me.

It lit me on fire.

Do you remember we walked to the March on Washington together?

("Woke Up This Morning and My Mind Stayed on Freedom" plays) JACK: The Southern Christian leadership under Dr. King came to Washington to set up that march, the famous march.

We would do things like go door to door, mobilize people, hand out pamphlets.

Our monastery were truly Franciscans.

They never gave us any money to get on the bus.

So we walked to and from and if you do it on a hot day, uh, you feel it.

(Singing continues) JACK: I think this is it.

The speeches were up there.

They had snipers up above.

Never seen that before.

The police up there.

There's a lot of great speeches that day.

John Lewis gave a great speech.

(Applause) FORMER REP. JOHN R. LEWIS: We march today for jobs and freedom.

Those who have said, be patient and wait.

We must say that we cannot be patient.

We do not want our freedom gradually, but we want to be free now.

In 1963, I was much younger, 23 years old, had all of my hair.

I had prepared a speech with the help of some of my colleagues and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Some people didn't like what I had proposed just there.

They thought it was too radical.

It told the story of what had been happening in South, that people had been arrested and jailed, beaten.

That people could not register to vote simply because of the color of their skin.

("We Shall Overcome" Plays) TV ANNOUNCER: 200,000 strong they marched in the largest demonstration for civil rights in the history of the United States.

JACK: And everybody really waited for Dr. King's speech.

We were just waiting for, you know, for it to happen and uh, sure enough, he gets up there and he explains it all through white kid and a black kid walking down the road in, you know, Georgia together, holding the hands.

I mean, it was phenomenally simple, but it was the greatest speech of that century.

I think.

In his simplicity, in the power of his simplicity of imagery it made the day, it...made it American or something.

I don't know how to say it, but he he dropped it into this ground here.

It isn't just a speech up there, but he dropped it into this ground of ours, this capital of ours.

He dropped that speech into the soil.

It sank into the soil that day.

It didn't leave with us.

It stayed in this soil here.

I thought it was easy.

Let's go do this.

You know, it was like a call to action without a call to action.

It was not there, but it was there.

It was like more of a rallying call in its silence than it was in its noise.

It was a rallying call.

Just let's be that simple and let's walk hand in hand together and what a day to be here.

You know?

(Pensive piano music) JACK: When you can find an imagery that solves a problem, that makes people feel good, that there is a solution and it's doable, that's what a great speaker does.

You present an image of the future, it doesn't scare you.

It solves the problem.

You know it ain't going to occur right away, but it's there... the answer's there and that's what he did with two little children walking.

You know, down a lane in Georgia, it was just totally, totally brilliant.

(Piano music continues and fades) JACK: When my mother passed, I had this feeling I was a nomad.

I was free to do whatever I wanted and I also discovered I wanted the bigger world, not the smaller world.

I felt I'd prayed enough from 13 to 30.

I wanted more activism in learning here at this university, the big world out there of civil rights, anti-war, how to help the poor.

You know, doing good in the world.

So I'm seen as kind of a maverick and I thought, if I'm going to be a maverick, I might as well go be one and be on my own and operate the way I want.

It was a time of change in the country and I thought I was part of that change as well.

(Phone ringing) MAN: It's just, I mean, aside from being uh, you know, hard work and going to a good cause, it's a lot of fun.

JACK: One of the ex priests who was staying with me said, "I got a call to go down.

There's some idea they have of walking around, I don't know, sounds like Boy Scouts or I don't know what it is.

I'm not going."

I said "I'll go."

So I take that opportunity.

I get down there, I get interviewed.

I got a job.

I was allowed to become director of Young World Development, which was the Freedom From Hunger Campaign of the Food Agriculture Organization.

JACK'S VOICE: Solicit responses from friends and relatives and business people that he knows and he gets them to pledge a per mile amount of money.

MICHELLE FOSTER: We would start organizing in like January for a May event.

We just planned it.

Every logistical detail from the walk route to the radio stations to publicizing it in the schools, to getting support from the local community.

The Chicago walks every year raised between a quarter of a million and a million dollars.

JACK'S VOICE: Those funds that were raised by you young people hiking 32 miles last year through about five different rainstorms.

It provided many jobs and much food for the American Indians, including those up in Neopit, Wisconsin.

(Crowd cheers) MICHELLE: Everything, everything was donated.

We made people give us things constantly.

The way that it worked with us was that we would say that 15 percent went to the Freedom from Hunger Foundation for operations.

42 and a half percent goes to international projects and 42 and half percent was destined to local projects.

I was 16 and 17 during the two years that I was involved with walks there and we all were.

We were high school kids.

We were high school kids.

JACK: Those 16 year old kids organized, spent the money, sent us the money and we trusted them with the money.

And we organized nationally, then locally and regionally, we put that together.

I had brilliant leadership among our young.

They were truly brilliant.

I mean in my career I've worked with young people my whole life.

They try to write you off when you're young and all that.

I never believed that.

I never believed that.

MICHELLE: We did raise funds for Appalachia, for Heifer International, for Fannie Lou Hamer's Freedom Farm.

JACK: She wanted to take the land and feed her people with good food.

MALE ANNOUNCER: Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer who's a sharecropper and a timekeeper on a plantation in Sunflower County.

She went to register to vote.

She was fired the same day.

She has since been beaten and shot at.

FANNIE LOU HAMER: On June the ninth, 1963 I had attended a voter registration workshop, was returning back to Mississippi and when I went to get in the car when the man told me I was under arrest.

JACK: She was destroyed practically in the jail cell.

She recuperated from that, was then invited to a Democratic convention.

MRS. HAMER: It's time for us to do something about that and we need your support, we need your vote.

We're sick and tired of being sick and tired.

JACK: Freedom of hunger... for us young, we adopted her as the chair of our movement and we had international walk day where we had 300 or 400 walks across the country and around the world.

She was our chair of that and we still stay together.

A lot of us still know one another.

FATHER JAMES GROPPI: We have tried every means possible to bring fair housing legislation to the city of Milwaukee and we're going to continue to march.

It's up to the government of this city and of this state to see to it that we can exercise our constitutional right of freedom of speech and we're going to exercise that regardless of what the danger, we'll die for that right.

JACK: Father Groppi was a priest in Milwaukee, was a militant priest.

Blacks in Milwaukee were not allowed to move into the suburbs and he discovered that and so he marched every night.

Every night, for 168 days straight.

FATHER GROPPI: You had those cameras all over the place and you had this news media all over the place and you reported every window that got broke, but last night you looked on television and no one saw those white bigots out there screaming, we want slaves and [deleted] go home and everything else.

I want to ask what was the reason for that?

I watched channel six.

I didn't see a thing and I understand Channel 12 had very little on.

That's white power.

In other words, it's a white man's press.

That's what it is.

JACK: I drove probably four or five of us would drive out to support Father Groppi.

Jim Groppi and I became friends in that process.

Groppi and I would drive down together.

Jim and I would spend time together.

We'd go visit Fannie Lou at the farm and she'd put us to work.

Groppi and I were having breakfast and we were up before Fannie Lou and her husband and we were walking out and there's two suits walking towards us, very uptight.

Of course we knew they were police with the way they looked, so she came out, they said uh, "Mrs. Hamer, there was some trouble last night.

We've heard there was a Molotov cocktail thrown at the house."

And we'd heard something but we didn't know what it was.

And she looked up at them and literally in a very calm, mellow voice, she said, "well, you know that was probably you.

Thank you."

Turned and went back in the house and that was awakening day for me.

That radicalized my mind that she really did believe that the FBI was part of the oppression in Mississippi.

It's one of those things where you're just- you're different, a little bit different after that.

You kind of got to get an awareness and once you get the awareness, you go do something about it.

The awareness by itself doesn't do a damn thing for anybody.

MALE REPORTER: Leading the march with Father Groppi was Negro comedian and civil rights activist, Dick Gregory.

DICK GREGORY: Any time any man can appoint himself to the level of seeing to it that the United States Constitution can only function 12 hours a day when it's light, I pay my income tax and I make my money at night.

Dick Gregory integrated the stage for Black comedians.

There was nobody ever that could break what he broke open.

DICK: I do not know why every government agency in this country bugs my phone, right?

The CIA, FBI, Army Intelligence, state of Illinois, City of Chicago.

I even got local peon sheriff deputies running around my bushes with tape recorders.

I said I've got the evidence.

He said, well, what is it?

I said, anytime a Black cat in America can owe Bell telephone $12,000 and they don't cut the phone off, it's tapped.

(Laughter and applause) REGINALD PETTY: Dick Gregory and I had talked in the sixties about social class because part of what we were concerned about was a lot of the Blacks and other people who had quote made it, we're not active with the civil rights activities.

DICK: I looked at Father Groppi you know in Milwaukee.

He marched on his mother's store cause she wouldn't let Black folks in.

On his mother's store!

Okay?

I looked at nuns and priests come all the way in from all over the world to march with Groppi on Saturday.

JACK: Fannie Lou Hamer, Groppi, and I were tight.

That's how I got close to Dick Gregory and started working with Dick as well.

In 1976, we did the cross country World Hunger Run.

Dick used me as the front man in D.C. Like if Dick was running from Los Angeles to San Bernardino, my job was to alert people, San Bernardino's churches that he was coming you know, trying to get a hold of the governor, the representative, and he would give a community speech.

DICK: I ran across the country to try to raise the consciousness of this country, particularly young people, to say that we not going to tolerate living in a world where millions of people gonna die for lack of food and millions of people gonna die for lack of thirst while we out watering our lawns and using fertilizer.

We use enough fertilizer on lawns this year to grow enough food to feed all of India for 10 years.

This is what it's all about.

DICK: When you stop and think about hunger, there's a feeling you hear.

Don't let be hunger for food, hunger for love, hunger for friendship, hunger to be liked.

That's hunger.

JACK: In that process, he calls me to recruit Muhammad Ali and I say, "Uh, Dick uh, he's fighting tonight.

You know, I can't get in there."

"Oh yes you can.

Why don't you go out there?"

Sure enough, I end up in front of Muhammad Ali, so I'm standing in front of Mr. Ali.

I don't know what to call him.

"Mr. Ali, uh, Dick Gregory asked me to come over here and uh, talk to you.

We're running across the United States for world hunger, but Dick's in New Mexico, we're not getting enough publicity and we need you to join us on this run."

Oh, I said, "but let me first understand this," he says.

"I'm going to pay my own way.

I'm going to be peeing blood and you want me to run in the desert with Dick Gregory for world hunger?"

"Yes, sir.

Yes, sir."

"Okay!"

ANNOUNCER: Round one, the action begins.

Ali in the white trunks, Young in the black.

JACK: I went to the fight.

I was ring side, but once they started fighting, I left.

It was too brutal for me.

It was, oh my God... fights 15 rounds.

He won.

Put the mic on him.

MUHAMMAD ALI: Hello to Dick Gregory, who's out there running to make the people conscious of starving people in the world.

He's running from Los Angeles to uh New York and I think that's a greater man than I am.

JACK: But Ali was a champion.

He's a real champion.

He believed in fighting world hunger and he'd show up and he did what he was supposed to do.

Really working with Dick Gregory was automatically working with celebrities because they loved Dick and they interacted with him regularly and I watched him and I learned how to work with celebrities and how to handle yourself, and I got used to that kind of company where you no longer see them as stars, but as fellow workers.

It changes your mentality that you're now one of them.

Not in the sense one of them that you're a superstar, but in the sense of the work is important to them, it's important to you.

You're on equal ground.

He gave me equal ground with celebrities that was very helpful and smart and I appreciate that from him.

DICK: He don't act like he's different.

Hmm?

What you see is what you get.

You know?

Now he can get mad.

He can get mad sometimes his juice runs out.

You know?

I see him out there in Hollywood.

Some of the big folks love him, you know?

And I know he's had an effect on them.

If I had to pick 10 people to run the whole planet, Jack would be one of 'em that I say, thank you universal God for bringing us together.

I say, thank you, Jack for the effect you had on me, change my heart.

JACK: Too many people rely on the brain.

I think people in the civil rights movement, like Dick, they go by their heart.

They know better than to move to the head.

The head is really not courageous.

The heart's courageous.

DICK: I'm sure today for the first time people all over the world know where I am.

(Crowd yells) DICK: Last month, didn't nobody know where I was, but a few select people.

You didn't even know where I was.

CROWD: That's right.

DICK: And I hope that you'll be aware that there's two jails, one that the establishment sends you to that you can break out of and one that the establishment puts you in that you can never break out of.

(Jazzy like music) JACK: I went to a meeting that Dick Gregory sent me to, and I realized at that that meeting, I wanted to go abroad because I talked about world hunger forever.

I think it was time to go experience it in the third world, and I drove this guy back to Peace Corps office and he said to me, "Jack, would you join us?"

And I say, "well, I don't want to be no damn bureaucrat, man, but I'll tell you this, if I can become a Peace Corps director in Lesotho, 'cause I knew where it was.

It was in the belly of apartheid beast of South Africa.

If I could do that, I'm onto that."

So I kind of mobilized some help.

Dick Gregory helped me.

John Lewis helped me, and you couldn't go into better credentials than that in the Carter years, and so I got the job.

REGINALD: When I first applied for Peace Corps, I got a letter.

I wish I had kept it.

I got a letter saying that Peace Corps couldn't accept me because my security clearance rejected.

I think Jack might've had got that same thing.

JUDITH: Hi!

JACK: Judith.

JUDITH: Yes.

Hi.

David, you won't believe who's here.

Jack Healey.

JACK: I want to put you in movies, Dave.

JUDITH: He's wants to put you in the movies.

You might get dressed.

[Laughs] Come on in, guys.

JACK: You look good enough for me, Dave.

DAVID LEVINE: Part of Carter's commitment was that Peace Corps would regain its independence.

Part of that involved Peace Corps reaching out for country directors to people who would never have passed the kind of political tests that existed before that.

Reg had been well known in the civil rights movement and then Jack was named the director in Lesotho.

So for the first time, in what I know of the history, there were directors in the Southern African region who were very politically conscious, very politically aware.

REGINALD: In South Africa, you had total separation, in terms of geography where people were living.

You had the Black area, you had an Asian area, and you had a mixed area.

At night, you got to be in your area, period, except for those the white areas that could live wherever they wanted to.

If you went to a Black area: you see poor, you see poverty.

MALE ANNOUNCER: Demonstrations against the South African government's strict apartheid policies flare into shocking violence.

At Sharpsville, an industrial township, thousands gather outside a police station in protest against new laws requiring every African to carry a pass at all times.

HENDRIK VERWOERD: Our policy is one which is called by an Afrikaans word "apartheid," and I'm afraid that has been misunderstood so often.

It could just as easily and perhaps much better be described as a policy of good neighborliness.

JACK: I flew into Johannesburg the day of Biko's funeral.

Don McHenry was there.

He had been to the funeral and I said to him, I said, "Don, what are these South Africans really like?"

And he's very much of a diplomat.

And he said to me, "Jack, they're crazy."

I thought, [deleted] just what I thought.

STEVE BIKO: We see a completely non-racial society.

We don't believe, for instance, in the so-called guarantees for minority rights because guaranteeing minority rights implies the recognition of portions of the community on a race basis.

We believe that in our country there shall be no minority, there shall be no majority.

There shall just be people, and those people will have uh, the same status before the law and they will have the same political rights before the law.

JACK: Stephen Biko is a brilliant young man and a philosopher really of Black consciousness, an equivalent of Malcolm X in a certain way.

The young people of South Africa, which is the primary people in the movement and on the streets and fighting the South Africans and getting killed, he wanted to raise their consciousness and Stephen Biko was picked up, beat to hell, thrown in the back of a truck and on the way to another jail, he died.

Because he was so young when he died, he symbolized all the young people really of South Africa.

When great leadership like Stephen Biko would show up or Nelson Mendela, they would either end up in jail or dead.

Right after I got there, probably within three, four months, we had a great nurse, Faith Merrick.

Um, she lived in a set of rondavel.

Rondavel was mud housing with thatched roofing.

Phyllis Naidoo lived in one of them and she was the political officer for the African National Congress in Lesotho.

Letter bombs are quite often put in any package and if you cut the cord, you lit up the bomb.

They were opening packages one day and they cut the string to open the package of clothes from East Germany and it blew.

Phyllis got shrapnel all up her back and she lost one ear.

And Faith was next door and she rallied and you know, called me immediately and said, "Jack, there's been an explosion up here."

And nobody wanted to go around them because they could do a two person strike like they do, boom, boom, and hit again.

So we went up there and just did all we could and they just loved that.

They'd just... they'd never seen anything like that before.

Chris Hani comes.

Chris Hani is the military leader of the African National Congress, and so we rallied helped one another from that day on for the next four years, I was within the heartbeat of the two most important people in the anti-apartheid movement, Phyllis Naidoo and Chris Hani.

FORMER REP. LEWIS: During those days, we were living in two different worlds, and we should have been doing much more, but I believe that the Peace Corps volunteers was carrying a message of hope, saying to the people in South Africa and other places, to stand up, speak up and speak out.

We are with you.

JACK: And one time they called me and said, we want you to go up to Sudan for a meeting.

I said, "oh, great.

Sure.

I've never been to Sudan.

I want to go there too."

So I fly up there, the hotel's packed, so they give me a room with John.

That's when we really kinda got to know one another.

I was a Peace Corps director.

I tell him what I was doing in Lesotho.

He was totally encouraged by all that.

He knew he'd protect me.

He said, "I'll look out for you.

You're doing great work."

And we became just, it just sealed the friendship.

JACK: Thanks, John.

FORMER REP. LEWIS: Did you get something to drink?

JACK: Yeah, I did.

FORMER REP. LEWIS: You, okay?

JACK: Thank you.

FORMER REP. LEWIS: Good.

JACK: Of course, it's an honor to sit with John Lewis.

He's our American constitution in real life.

I love your history, but I always wonder if someone was beating my head in the way they beat your head in.

How did you have the... the inner stuff, not to fight back, and to hold your philosophy of nonviolence?

How in the hell did you do that?

FORMER REP. LEWIS: Well, we grew to accept nonviolence as a way of life, as a way of living, and you become disciplined that you didn't want to do anything to hurt or to destroy the essence of the movement.

JACK: But where did you get the courage, the inner strength to hold to that in the battle?

You were able to hold it and keep it.

FORMER REP. LEWIS: Well, I think meeting Martin Luther King Jr., studying the life and teaching of Gandhi, meeting Rosa Parks and so many other people, you sorta... You can't... you just can't mess up.

You got to... JACK: God bless you for doing it, man.

FORMER REP. LEWIS: You got to be at home with yourself, so I'm not going to do anything to destroy this movement or to hurt this movement.

JACK: Yeah.

DAVID: Certain of the behaviors and the lack of understandings primarily of their white volunteers created a lot of problems for the volunteers of color.

Reg and Jack came to see me in my office at Peace Corps headquarters and asked whether uh there was any way that my office who was charged with evolving and testing new ideas and training and programming.

And so they asked if we would assist in developing a training program for all their volunteers that would raise the consciousness.

And I served as an advocate for the program, and I don't think Peace Corps had ever done anything quite like it.

REGINALD: Believe it or not, the fiscal office, the Peace Corps was in South Africa.

I remember the first time I went there, I sit down on a bench (toot toot toot) and he goes like this "you can't sit on a bench."

DAVID: Both Jack and Reg had their own sometimes bizarre, sometimes frightening experiences.

They were not talking abstractly about what can happen.

They were talking realistically about what had happened.

JACK: Some of my volunteers were white or Black.

They had to be trained on how to handle confrontation with an apartheid system that wanted to put the white kid in a hotel and the Black kid into a chicken coop.

We had to deal with that.

I did not want them to feel they couldn't handle the situation.

So I hired people who were A and C people who were communists to be able to explain how to handle themselves in that situation.

There was no one else to tell 'em.

REGINALD: Jack was constantly in trouble, being Biko and all them because Jack knew more of the folks than I did, and he was intentionally getting into trouble.

More stuff.

They hated Jack in D.C.

They said "my God Jack, now what?"

(chuckles) FORMER REP. LEWIS: Jack Healey had unbelievable energy, commitment and dedication.

He wanted to help... tame the world as Robert Kennedy would put it or make things better for humanity.

JACK: My fire was lit there in South Africa, applied for a job at Amnesty because I didn't want to be in Southern Africa with Reagan as president.

Before I went for the interview, David Saga, who was a lawyer from England, came to study the human rights abuses of Lesotho and make a report for Amnesty International.

And he put word out on the radio that he was there and he wanted to hear any story anybody wanted to tell.

The line of the Lesotho was long in that hotel to give testimony, and I realized these people in line are risking not only their life with Lesotho, but also South Africa, and they have the courage to do something for an organization they don't even know.

So I thought this Amnesty got to be really a great organization.

I became director of Amnesty in September of '81.

It was almost like a set of hippies working at a place with not much direction, without much force and not much extension into the community.

So I set out to change that as best I could, and one of the ways was music.

You know better than me.

In the human rights movement, mostly everybody sees you know the activists around the world that are getting tortured and killed as being older.

They aren't.

They're the kids.

So I used music to bring them in.

FORMER REP. LEWIS: Well, Jack, it's good that you mention music.

Music plays such a major role in the struggle here in America, but especially in the South, and I've said from time to time without music, the civil rights movement would've been like a bird without wings.

JACK: Absolutely.

FORMER REP. LEWIS: It created a sense of that we can do it.

We can help teach, maybe show people the way, but another generation would get us there.

(Rock music with steady beat) JESSICA NEUWIRTH: So Jack, I think now we just kind of take for granted music and human rights, millions of concerts all the time featuring various causes, and it might be interesting for people to hear a little bit about how hard it was inside the human rights movement and what kind of resistance you faced and how you see that having evolved.

JACK: There were a small group, we were 35,000 members.

I said, "we have to explode this.

America has to understand human rights."

The effort to convince Amnesty was when I got there, it was Leonard Bernstein and Yo-Yo Ma, but me growing up in Pittsburgh, I'd never heard of Yo-Yo Ma or Leonard Bernstein.

I'm a rock person.

So my sense was always to do rock.

IAN MARTIN: Initially, this was not an organization that necessarily took easily to new ideas.

Amnesty has always been different from other human rights organizations.

It was the inspiration of Peter Benenson, a British lawyer who had back in 1961, what seemed like almost the crazy idea that just ordinary people by writing letters and lobbying, harassing governments could actually affect their performance.

SURITA SANDOSHAM: The organization was built around reporting and data and accuracy and God forbid, objectivity, which you know, doesn't really exist, right?

When you look at the stuff around human rights, it's dry.

So Amnesty writes dry reports, they're written by lawyers and all they care about is sort of shaming the government.

JESSICA: You know you had your three prisoners of conscience and you would write letters for them, and so it was a very contained type of activity.

You'd meet once a month and talk about who wrote letters and who got letters back.

JACK: At that time, it was pretty sleepy and nobody really knew what Amnesty was doing, and I thought Amnesty was well built, brilliantly done in London.

I thought their research was tremendous, but it was too small and it didn't have any young people, and it's average age was above 40.

I wanted to alert the young people that everybody that I saw arrested was young and most of the ones being tortured and killed were young.

SURITA: What they don't think about is the people at the bottom, and if you actually galvanize them, you'll actually make change and Jack got that.

But the data, if it's not live for people, it's almost meaningless.

CHARLES FULWOOD: When you show genuine leadership, there are people who are invisible now, are silent now that will come to you and they'll help.

Not everybody is going to be Jack Healey and not everybody is going to be John Lewis.

You know, there are unusual people in the world, and those are the people that create an opening for ordinary people to be a part of making things change for the better.

JACK: The big, really big break came at a Boston meeting of Amnesty and I met Feryal Gharahi.

FERYAL GHARAHI: I'm um, by education, I'm a nuclear engineer and I'm also an attorney and um, I'm Iranian.

I was born in Iran and now I live in Washington D.C. JACK: She come out to me and she said, "uh, what's your job?"

And I started giving her normal nonsense.

She said, "No, it's not your job.

Your job is to get people out of jail.

You got to stop the torture.

You got to be really sure you're with us.

You're with the victims, you're with the losers of the world.

If you aren't, you shouldn't have this job.

You've got to quit, if you aren't."

It was like shocking to me that someone say that to me.

I had a pretty good consciousness, but she woke me up to the pain level of the world and she wanted me to lower the pain level of the world.

If I couldn't do that, I shouldn't have the job.

FERYAL: This is a truly a new dawn, a new day for the universality of human rights.

This is the entire international community saying that we will not stand for genocide.

We will not stand for concentration camps.

JACK: And I looked at, I had never seen someone that beautiful... to this day, oh my Lord, oh my Lord.

About a week later, I'm at Harvard.

I've never shown off with my voice and ability to speak.

I've never done that in my life.

I don't intend to.

But that night I did because I was hunting for a date.

It was Feryal.

I wanted to impress her and a lot of us would show off to make sure I got a date with Feryal, so and she did.

She had a deep sense of justice, a deep sense of the wanting to find the truth, that changed my life.

I was with someone who was better, kinder, smarter, more decent, more clever, more everything, and it was lovely to be with that.

Two things I did early on I think, was one to raise money, and I think the second one was to go out and see Bill Graham and see if I could recruit him.

MALE ANNOUNCER: Bill Graham has produced more than 7,000 rock concerts over the past 20 years.

He's considered the best.

BILL GRAHAM: We're going to kill everybody with kindness.

If that doesn't work, we're just going to kill 'em.

I came here, I was 11, I weighed 43 pounds.

I was pretty undernourished and to the young people in the Bronx, because I didn't speak English, I spoke French and German.

Um, to them I wasn't a Russian Jew, I spoke German if I was a Nazi.

JACK: He started kind of pushing me back and I said, "you come from the Holocaust and you don't understand human rights?

And he said "are you saying I'm emotionally disturbed?"

I said, "yeah, I think I am."

And you know, we really got into it after that.

I knew I had him because he only liked you if he could fight with you, I think.

He agreed with me that he would do a human rights tour with me, and he yelled at me, "you go get the talent, I'll do the show."

And I said, "Bill, that's a contract."

He said, "Yeah, you little son of a bitch.

Now get out of here.

That is a contract.

I know what a contract is."

The winter of '84, we got two tickets to a U2 show at Radio City.

So I go to the back of the show and literally in the last two seats in the place, at Radio City Hall, but it took me about five minutes to realize this is my band.

But on the backstage it showed a picture of Dr. King and then a picture of Chief Joseph, and these two are like the heroes of mine, as well as a lot of other people.

And I thought, how does this Irish band rally to our causes like that and other American bands don't, you know what I mean?

It like electrified me.

Why do these Irish boys know this?

About six to eight months later, Amnesty had a meeting in Finland, in one of our international meetings, and I saw that to get there, I had to stop somewhere, and I saw that it stopped in Dublin, so I thought, ah, this is my chance to go see U2.

As I got in, just inside, in that moment, Bono come over and I look up and I looked up at him and I thought, are you really Irish?

[chuckles] "Yeah, I think so," he said.

I wanted to shake him, so it did exactly what I wanted it to do.

It shook him, huh?

And he said, "what would you like?"

I said, "I'd like your band for two weeks, anywhere in the world."

He looked at me, he said, "okay," just like that.

From the time I went to the time I left, I had eight minutes.

I had U2 in eight minutes.

I had it in my pocket.

I called Bill at the Dublin Airport, and he said "you son of a bitch.

You did it.

You have no idea how well you did today."

So I hung up on him.

I was so happy.

That's how the tour came together.

Our core band was U2, U2 recruited Lou Reed, Peter Gabriel, and they were calling everybody.

Bono really went to work on the phone.

PETER GABRIEL: I got a call from Bono who was the hustler for the '86 Amnesty Tour, which went around America.

So I signed up for the Conspiracy of Hope Tour and then met Jack in the rehearsals.

He made a big impression on me.

'Cause he started talking and you knew Jack, the emotions are on the sleeve.

His passion is on the sleeve, and you know, I don't think still I've heard a more emotional, impressive speaker on this issue.

JACK: Governments like to use the word justice when it comes to those they see who violate the law, but when the peoples, particularly the suffering people of the earth talk about justice to government, about what they have done to them, then they want to speak not of justice, but of amnesty.

It is our job of the human rights movement to stand in front of government with the might of nothing but our pins, the might of our hearts, and stand up to them and say, no, no, no.

STING: We've been offered a lot of, a lot of money to reform this summer and play gigs, which I didn't feel was right, and we turned it all down.

And then when this idea came to me that we would play Amnesty, it just seemed right.

It would've taken a big thing to reunite The Police.

And we did that.

I mean, it was certainly a memorable tour for many reasons.

It had seriousness about it.

It also had an aspect of fun and sharing about it.

BONO: We find that egos are not a problem as long as everyone does what I say.

STING: No, no, no.

He's got that completely wrong actually.

It's what I say that goes.

PETER GABRIEL: One of the things I remember about Jack is he's never afraid of being controversial or outspoken, and I love that about him.

And when he got up at the gigs and delivered his piece, everyone in the hall in the arena or the stadium knew why we were there.

JACK: The first day in San Francisco, Bill walks up to me and gives me back a check for $25,000, which we'd given him as an advance.

That's the only money we gave him for this whole dang gone thing.

And he gives it back to me and he said, "I don't want this money."

Then he says, "you're on next.

And if you're not better than U2, you'll never see the stage again."

So I go up to the stage side, you know, stand there.

He leans over, "60 seconds Healey."

60 seconds.

Okay.

He said, "Kiss the mic."

Okay.

So I go out on the stage, I kissed the mic.

I didn't know he meant to get close to it.

I was so damn scared.

I really kissed the mic.

I mean, I really, really did kiss it.

Yeah, 'cause he told me to.

I was nervous.

You know, you're going to talk to 18,000 people in a rock and roll show for 60 seconds.

You know, I got to lift that stadium right with my voice.

JACK: Don't we want to end all killings, all torture, all political prisons.

Rise up, let it be known, will you rise up and let it be known.

MALE TV REPORTER: It started a little over a week ago in San Francisco, then rolled into Los Angeles, Denver, Atlanta, and Chicago.

Today, the musicians have come here for the final biggest concert of the tour.

(Rock electronic music) BONO: We have 18 very special guests with us tonight.

18 prisoners of conscience released because of Amnesty International.

(Music swells) MALE ANCHOR: The human rights group, Amnesty International doubled its American membership with its 1986 rock music tour of the USA.

BILL GRAHAM: People became involved with a cause that needed to be heard from and about in America that had been heard about throughout the world for years.

And finally the effect was felt in America.

JACK: I think the automatic connection between human rights and music, right?

They move to the universal power.

They move to the universals that make us all feel good.

That's what a song is about, really.

When guitar player's playing, they're trying to get the perfect note out of that damn thing.

And I think when they're trying to find that universal power, we human rights people are doing much the same.

We're trying to create a world without abuse.

We're trying to create a world that has universal power.

We're trying to get the perfect, not the guitar part, but we're trying to get a perfect world.

The governments behave and do what they're supposed to do.

When I first took over at Amnesty, I used to go to local chapters without telling 'em I was the new director.

A lot of 'em didn't...support the fight against the death penalty at all.

JESSICA: You were the executive director.

I think of Amnesty when they decided that the death penalty was the ultimate form of torture.

JACK: Our staff was very committed to the fight.

We didn't always have that support in the board.

MALE ANNOUNCER: Capital punishment is quite literally a life or death issue.

As such, it inspires very passionate disagreement.

Joining us now in the newsroom, two men with very different opinions on this very volatile subject.

JACK: Half this world is under 25.

The United States, which is you know one of the mega powers in the world, is saying to the world, we've got to kill our own children.

What kind of message is this to the world?

Really?

What kind of moral message is this?

JACK: The Conspiracy Hope was a conspiracy hope, it worked.

Magically.

So after it was over, I was quite tired.

Cause it took about a year to do that, but the tour had gone so well.

I took a vacation in south of France where Feryal was studying law and Justice Blackmun of the Supreme Court was one of her professors there.

Justice Blackmun says in the classroom that he personally was against the death penalty, but professionally, he was for it.

Feryal heard this.

She raised her hand, said, "sir, with all due respect.

A lot of governments say that a lot of people die.

How can you hold that position ethically?"

And it shook 'em.

The Supreme Court justice got shook.

So I met her after class and said, "I'd like, I'd like to talk to you about that issue.

Would you uh, my wife and I would like to invite you to supper."

And he said, "well, that'd be wonderful."

We essentially debated over supper and Feryal, of course, was in law.

So she, you know she did most of the debate.

You know, we were after him about it.

We wanted him to change.

And Justice Blackmun came back to the United States, retired from the Supreme Court on the very issue of removing the death penalty.

And he called it "the machinery of death" he called it, I think.

And he said, it should end.

We should stop the death penalty.

And on the way home that night, and Feryal turns to me and said, "Jack, you now with the Conspiracy Hope, you spoke to the Americans about human rights, I now want you to speak to the world.

And that is the beginning of the Human Rights Now Tour.

That's where that idea came from is from that conversation.

MALE REPORTER: 40 years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Amnesty International is launching a worldwide concert tour at Wembley Stadium tomorrow.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: I think that rock at its best, that's what it makes.

It makes freedom.

And as far as I can see, that's what Amnesty International does, and that's- that's why I'm here.

FEMALE ANNOUNCER: Bruce Springsteen, Peter Gabriel, Sting, Tracy Chapman and others are picking up where the first Amnesty International Rock Tour in 1986 ended.

PETER GABRIEL: The '88 tour was to promote the 40th anniversary of a universal Declaration of Human Rights.

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: The object is to make people everywhere conscious of the importance of human rights and freedoms.

JACK: Eleanor comes along in 1948, looks at the world, and what happened between the Nazis, you know, the Russians, the Americans.

Eleanor understood how the future should be seen and how to get there.

♪ Stand up for your rights ♪ JACK: Nobody knows it, but before every concert that we did around the world, all five musicians had to go out and sing.

"They Get Up, Stand Up" by Bob Marley every night before anybody was even in the stadium.

Just to honor Bob Marley's memory.

♪ Get up, stand up ♪ ♪ Stand up for your right ♪ ♪ Get up, stand up, don't give up the fight ♪ TRACY CHAPMAN: Is everybody satisfied with the way we've been ending it?

You know how... PETER GABRIEL: No, it'd be nice to get funky.

TRACY CHAPMAN: to get it real clean.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: Later tonight, if you want to do it loud, we can, you know, we can do that.

You know?

PETER GABRIEL: Seems good for it to go from us to the audience and then us moving back a bit and then come forward and build it up again.

And then... BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: Alright that's what we'll do.

We can do that tonight.

What should we do for the opening?

TRACY CHAPMAN: I think we should sing it in English.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: Yeah let's just... (laughter) JACK: Really, we tried to be as smart as we could on the tour to show at different levels, everything we were doing had to be associated with human rights.

JESSICA: It was the idea of highlighting prisoners of conscience who were actually in prison.

And that was a really fantastic idea.

'Cause it gave the artists something to really hang on to, and we wanted it to be real.

For the press conferences, for the artists, just for everyone.

STING: You know, before I was a... a rockstar, I was a school teacher.

I would recite a story about a guy in Nepal.

His name was Sita Ram Maskey.

Sita Ram Maskey was a school teacher like me who'd been uh, outspoken about the government and was put in jail.

Every city we went to, every country we went to, I would tell his story and eventually that filtered back to his country and he was freed.

Now that makes a point actually about publicity and how embarrassed regimes ought to be about the way they treat their citizens, so I was happy about that.

JESSICA: Veronica de Negri was a natural.

She had been working with Amnesty for a long time and she had such a horrendous story, um, but was such a strong survivor.

FEMALE TV ANNOUNCER: It's a familiar site in Chile this week.

On Tuesday, a teenage boy was killed in the street, an event that serves as an all too painful reminder to Veronica de Negri, whose own teenage son, Rodrigo Rojas, was slain in those same streets just two years ago.

VERONICA DE NEGRI: I'm lucky to be alive.

I'm still fighting for what they did to me because I was a political prisoner and I'm a survivor of... the government of a dictator.

We allow the government to keep committing these crimes against our children.

OPRAH WINFREY: When you say the word political prisoners, I think that's almost foreign to a lot of people.

JACK: It's the clothes you wear.

OPRAH WINFREY: Yes.

JACK: The synagogue, the church, the mosque where you go to pray.

PETER GABRIEL: There was a real feeling on those tours that this hadn't happened before in that way.

There'd be benefit concerts, but to take it out on the road and move it around the place, there was a sort of chaotic but passionate energy to the whole thing.

STING: Well, songs can be very powerful agents, but can you change a world with a song?

I would say probably not most of the time, but you can... plant a seed.

I have no way of changing the way General Pinochet behaves as a leader of the country, but I can affect his grandchildren and his grandchildren's friends, so they're the target, not the government.

PETER GABRIEL: I'd written a song about Steve Biko and that was effectively my calling card.

JESSICA: Every time he sang Biko, it was just like one of those tearjerkers for me.

PETER GABRIEL: The song was written for a brave man.

A man who wasn't afraid to speak up for the rights of his people, whatever the cost to himself.

For a man who was arrested, tortured, and killed in a jail in South Africa.

For Stephen Biko.

Back to Stephen Biko.

(Percussion starts) VERONICA: To me what was amazing is when we did the World Tour, how many people learn about the human rights.

IAN: I think that was one of the great...successes of the tour, the way that actually the performers were very effective and articulate champions of human rights.

♪ Oh Biko, Biko, because Biko ♪ ♪♪ PETER GABRIEL: It was probably the most important song I've put out in a lot of ways in the sense that it had impact way beyond what we were thinking at the time.

♪ The man is dead, the man is dead ♪ PETER GABRIEL: It did have this anthemic end and that was sort of intentionally done in the composition, just to try and connect people and get them geared up feeling that you can change things.

♪ Huh, huh, oh... ♪ Everyone!

♪ Huh, huh, oh... ♪ For all those still in jail in South Africa ♪ Huh, huh, ♪ JACK: I believe in extending out if you can, so that you can get your idea out and have the people understand it, not just go there and have a good time and leave with a couple of good ideas.

No, you want to build that branding so that they know what you do, why you do it, and how to do it, and they become part of your movement.

That has always been my idea.

♪ Oh... ♪ PETER GABRIEL: Quite a few people have come up to me afterwards and said, you know, that was a key moment for me deciding to get involved in human rights.

JACK: Half this world is under 25 and they're poor and they can't read, so you got to give 'em a newspaper they can read and really music is that newspaper.

We want 'em to read about human rights, know their rights and demand protection from their government.

SURITA: When Jack gets up, he's authentic.

He knows about the prisoners of conscience that he's talking about.

You know on these trips right he would actually tell their stories and these are not facts that are easy to talk.

These are women who have been tortured and they're standing right by him.

'Cause they trust him.

VERONICA: That's the reason we did good work is because you were there and you were understanding us and you were protecting us and you didn't accept [deleted].

BILL GRAHAM: When I get sick and tired of people saying, oh, the world is terrible, the streets are dirty, there are too many drugs, the wars, what else do you do?

Do you kvetch?

What else do you do?

If you have, if you have the ability to do something, do it.

If not, shut up.

JACK: When you put a world tour together, you got to find out not only will they allow you to come in, but also you got to be able to land your planes.

We wanted to play Chile because we wanted to topple Pinochet.

He'd been in there what, 16 years or something like that.

He dropped people in the river, tortured a lot of people, he killed Victor Jara and they said no, and that really, really aggravated me.

Bill and I re-looked at the map again um, and Chile is like next to Argentina, a great big long border, and so what we saw was this little town in Mendoza, in northern Argentina, so when we do the World Tour, we could drop our planes into Mendoza so that the Chileans could come across the border.

(Chilean "Cueca" dance music) STING: I became aware of the um, mothers of the disappeared, the families of the disappeared who were protesting in a very interesting way.

There's a traditional dance in um Chile called the "Cueca" and usually they dance with partners and they would gather outside of government buildings and dance the "Cueca" alone with an invisible partner.

That struck me as such a wonderful and poignant poetic image of women dancing with invisible partners because they were either dead or or missing and that was a very powerful symbol for me, which uh then became a song, and this struck me as a perfect metaphor.

(Sting speaking to crowd in Spanish) (Crowd cheers) JACK: As we landed our planes in Mendoza and all of a sudden all the way out through the airport, all these women from the mothers of the disappeared from both countries were standing to honor our musicians coming in.

They were along the root of the plane as we taxied and came out the whole way.

Everybody was crying.

It was overwhelming really, and so that night when Sting began the first note of "They Dance Alone," the Argentina mothers came from one side and Chilean mothers come from the other and they met in the stage in Mendoza.

(Crowd cheers) (Sting continues to sing in Spanish) JACK: That's when you see the perfect marriage of music and human rights.

These are one of the great moments of life.

STING: And then it's you know the solo dance, the cueca.

I was dancing with these mothers, grandmother, they reminded me of my own mom and my gran and it was probably one of the most emotional unforgettable moments.

Wow, this is surreal, but it's also very real (chuckles) and um, the whole audience knew exactly the story we were telling.

PETER GABRIEL: These gatherings were sort of hot spots of um, of a sense of possibility.

JESSICA: I don't think you can overstate the results of that tour.

When you think about the times we were in, no social media, you know barely computers.

In my experience with Amnesty, you were always begging the press to come to a press conference.

It was so hard to get anyone interested in these issues and suddenly everybody was running after us.

CHARLES FULGOOD: The media awareness about the Declaration of Human Rights and Amnesty's name recognition just went through the stratosphere and our membership, I think it tripled or quadrupled, so that's more power, right?

It's more resources for the battle.

That's a bigger boat.

That's what you've been dreaming about, right?

It was amazing the kind of awareness that it produced and the people that it brought in... ♪♪ (Sting sings) (Music ends and crowd applauds) (Pensive piano music) JACK: Our job out here, right?

Us normal citizens is to build within the culture, and this is why Jess and I, and our staff at Amnesty, we went to music.

We activists have to set a climate that the people doing the good stuff have support out into- out into the population.

We have to convince your mom and my mom and all the other moms to get out of our tribes and go global and we have to find a way to support those people.

Like when in D.C., they blew up Letelier, the former minister in Chile.

TV ANNOUNCER: A powerful bomb today tore through a car as it was driving along Washington's usually quiet Embassy Row.

TV REPORTER: Former Ambassador Letelier, a director of a private research group called the Institute for Policy Studies, was pronounced dead on the scene.

Authorities investigating the killings would not speculate on a possible political motive, but within hours Letelier's coworkers at the Institute for Policy Studies voiced suspicions that Chilean Secret Police had been involved.

JACK: I read about this and I volunteered just to you know, help out if I could at the funeral.

I started to think about how, you know, if they could kill Letelier here in the nation's capital of the United States, they could kill any of us dissidents in the world, and I think I really got angry about that.

And I decided in my little Irish head one day, I'm going to get these people back for this.

I just took it personally and I thought, I'll get revenge on Chile one day for these two people who should not have been killed, and then when Pinochet lost in the election finally, I was invited to produce a two day concert in Chile in the stadium where so many people had been killed and tortured.

DONNIE WAHLBERG: Being here in Chile for this concert is not to sell records, it's to make people aware of what's going on in the world.

This is where we make our stand and this is where we make a stand for the young people of America and hopefully the world.

PINO SAGLIOCCO: The things that made it, the things magical was to bring into the picture New Kids on the Block.

Because you reach out to the kids of the military people, so all those young kids who came to the show because New Kids on the Block was massive at that time.

They were all the sons of all those military there, so the 5,000 policemen we had outside, they were there not to do nothing because all their kids were in the concert.

That not only brought us the opportunity not to get in trouble; but it brought us also the opportunity to tell those kids, your parents, watch out, they're no good people.

They're not doing good for this country, and it's time for you guys to stand up and stand up for your rights and fight for it.

Because this country deserves better than what is being doing until now.

SURITA: We could have done it at a different time, could have done it 10 years later when things were different, but we chose to do it at that moment.

That was you.

[Jack chuckles] SURITA: So... JACK: I do want to get in their face.

And in that concert, we had Wynston Marsalis, Sting, Peter Gabriel, many of our artists from Chile, from Spain, and Wynton got to play jazz in the middle of a rock and roll show.

(Wynton taps a rhythm on his knees) JACK: Well, I thought of you as the clean hand of America because what jazz is.

WYNTON MARSALIS: There's no way for there not to be a connection between jazz and democracy because jazz is the art form of the people who espouse that philosophy and that is their aspiration.

Now, if we start to talk about democracy itself, if the drums are the president, the base is the judicial, and the piano is the legislative branch, so the piano is all the keys.

The piano can play the rhythm section, it can play solos.

The drums is the quick power.

The drums make a decision, you got to go with it whether you like it or not.

And the bass, actually one of our most famous bass players, Milt Hinton, he passed away now, his nickname was "the Judge."

The bass is the bottom foundation of the harmony and the root of the time.

That's some of the ways; I could tell you many more ways that jazz resonates exactly with our way of life, even down to the dumb decisions that we make; and why we're in the condition we're in now.

All of that was on a jazz bandstand 30 years before now.

JACK: It's the uniqueness of a special fight against oppression, against slavery, against Jim Crow.

That's where our strength and our decency is in this country.

It's...in that fight, I wanted them to see you to represent that fight.

MALE NEWS ANNOUNCER: The veneer of normality of Chile's National Stadium in Santiago is still haunted by the memory of the 5,000 people who were rounded up and killed there after the coup.

One of them, Victor Jara wrote "what horror the face of fascism creates.

For them, blood equals medals.

Slaughter is an act of heroism."

WYNTON MARSALIS: Central to the blues is what we call antagonistic cooperation, and this means that you identify what is wrong and you find within yourself the heroism to combat it.

The blues says, I feel bad.

I feel like I'm almost dead, but tomorrow is going to come and I'm going to get up out this bed.

I had trepidation because uh, once I played with Art Blakey 10 years before that and we played on a festival that had a lot of rock acts and when we came on stage, they started throwing bottles and stuff at us.

JACK: I shared that anticipation of will this fit a rock and roll show and all that.

WYNTON: So I told the cats, "Hey, if they throw stuff at you, don't run off.

Just walk off."

JACK: And the first note you hit, that's stadium lifted, lifted, literally lifted.

WYNTON: We played the blues.

Blues like universal music and in the middle of the trombone solo, he played something that they sing at soccer games.

(Trombone playing and crowd singing along) WYNTON: He didn't know that that was what they were playing.

We didn't know.

Then I started to listen to 'em.

Wow, okay.

They're singing some long phrase.

The thing they sang at soccer games fit exactly in the form of a 12 bar blues.

(Trombone continues) VERONICA: Because it was at the National Stadium that in Santiago was the first place where people was taken and people was killed, so the people that was at the stadium were all survivors.

So, it was their concert and it was a way, a specific way to get back what was taken away from them.

That was at the stadium.

It was back.

It's a place of entertainment and we are also, the fact that the concert was there, was a celebration of the life of the people that was taken away from there.

It was beautiful.

It was really, really beautiful.

(Trombone continues and piano chimes in) WYNTON: I wanted to be there, just in support of what we wanted to achieve for human rights in that area.

We were talking about the Pinochet and all- everything that had gone on, but that could also be equated with everybody that's unjustly imprisoned in the United States.

It's international.

The abuse of power is not something that's relegated to a particular group or tribe.

PINO: It was a celebration of life; was those people hanging together and the new generation with the older generation, they hanging together was like a rebirth of the stadium, rebirth of the nation, rebirth of the human rights moment in a way, which altogether they celebrate life and that celebration of life to all those people was really impressive, was really touching, was something that really crossed every border of emotion I ever seen in my life.

(Trombone solo fades out and crowd cheers) JACK: You can always look back with at least a bit of sense of justice that something was done for these people and that they were remembered; and I think that's the important of it, is all of us deserve to have a name and to be remembered that we were here on this earth and I think it's terribly important to the families of the disappeared that that moment should occur.

WYNTON: It's very difficult to embody the thing you want to be.

It's easy to say something, it's hard to do it.

And Jack is, this is his belief system.

He is what he believes, so there's really no such thing as grassroots.

He is grassroots.

JACK: I thought it was time for me to make a change.

And I ran into a little kid and I say to this kid, "I'm Jack Healey of Amnesty International."

And he went like this: "Well, I am the president of Amnesty International in my school."

I thought: I did my job.

We got down to that level.

That little kid is the president, he's proud of it.

He knows who we are.

I think I can go now, and so I set out to take a look at the world as a single person on what I could do with my experience and whatever income I could generate, and so I set out to create the Human Rights Action Center to do that.

FERYAL GHARAHI: Our organization is more action oriented, in terms of doing something for people, like building a factory in Bosnia for war widows and doing concrete things like uh... a concert for Aung Sun Suu Kyi, so that she'll be well known.

JESSICA NEUWIRTH: After I left Amnesty, I started the group, Equality Now, and Feryal was one of my two co-founders.

SURITA SANDOSHAM: I became the executive director for Equality Now, which Feryal had set up.

It was, you know, having like-minded people, um, like-minded women, and you could be strong and nobody would say anything and um, the organization's still around and it's doing great work.

JACK: I think my shyness never disappeared until I met Feryal.

She gave me the self-confidence to roll, to move on and use whatever I had, not for me, but for the victims of torture.

She used to say to me, "turn your voice into thunder.

That's your job."

JESSICA: I think Feryal depended on Jack so much and Jack depended on Feryal so much.

They were just really connected in so many ways.

And Feryal was just a force of nature.

She was just, she was so intense, so passionate, super smart, and incredibly supportive.

Like she's just the kind of person you just wanted next to you in a battle.

JACK: You know, Feryal's love for me is just really an expression of how the world can improve, is accepting one another in fullness with confidence and with...devotion.

She had a certain smile and she did it right before she died, right after the doctors told her what the story was.

She told him "that's a great report, doctor."

She actually said that and then stared at me that way for a good minute, for about a good 60 seconds to say thanks or I'm with you or whatever that power is.

She gave it to me not to worry, really.

So...[voice breaks].

She saved me from being a dumb middle-aged man, that's what she did.

[Laughs] That's what really happened.

(Melancholy piano music) JACK: You know people worry, what is human rights, right?

It's really only what a mother and dad want for a kid.

Good school, doctor if he gets hurt, surely a bite to eat, you know, right to travel and a job eventually.

There ain't much more to human rights than that.

It's what every parent wants for their child and I just feel since we all are the same about that, why can't we apply that to the world?

MAGGIE Q: This is Jack's life's work.

It's more serious than anything I can really think of.

My fiancé asked him, how do you make money?

How do you support yourself basically, and Jack said, "well, I don't need money."

You don't need money if you have ideas and I have ideas, so I go to the people with resources, I share my ideas and that's how I get what I need to be able to do the work that he does.

JACK: Every time I did a campaign, I had the freedom of movement and the freedom of using my own income and I didn't have a Board of Directors tell me what to do and I could raise my own money and it's thrilling to think that I can sit in my basement and get things done.

JACK: There's one campaign that I love I can't win yet, is Leonard Peltier, an American Indian who's been in jail for 42 years.

MAGGIE Q: I had been involved with different campaigns with Jack for Leonard over the last, you know, I don't know how many years, but we've always been sort of chipping away at the issue, but nobody's listening, right?

We haven't had any success with any of the administrations.

I don't think people really realize what the journey of a human rights activist is because there are subjects that are in vogue, obviously, and people attach to them, they make a comment, they say one or two things and they move on.

Right?

Jack, on the Leonard Peltier issue, this is an issue.

When Leonard got arrested, I mean I think this was 42 now, maybe 43 years ago?

Jack has been working on this since then.

Leonard is still not out of prison.

It's still something he believes in and he's still fighting for it.

JACK: Leonard, how are you?

LEONARD PELTIER: [on phone] How you doing, Jack?

How are ya?

JACK: I'm feeling good.

Yeah, feeling good.

How are you and how's your health?

LEONARD: [on phone] Pretty much the same.

I mean, you know?

I...of course, you know, I went through the heart operation.

JACK: You know, I'm still working on.... LEONARD: [on phone] It seems to be all right.

I've still got no other major problems, so I'm just waiting to die, bro.

That's all.

JACK: No, we want- We want to get you home.

We want to get you home.

LEONARD: [on phone] Well, that's, people keep saying, but nothing happens.

JACK: How long have you been in prison now?

They cut it off.

You talk about how long they've been in prison.

They cut the phone off.

(Rock electronic music plays) JACK: Democracy is like a small jazz quartet.

Everybody gets to play.

Everybody listens to everybody else.

Everybody else fits.

You make it fit.

The better it fits, the better the jazz is.

That's what democracy is, and I think the fight has to be fought gallantly, courageously, and with great fun.

ANNOUNCER: Funding for this program was provided in part by the Bloom Foundation.

(Folksy guitar music with beat) This program was also made possible through the generous support of the following... You can find out more information about the life and work of Jack Healey by visiting our website...