[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 37 (Tuesday, February 28, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H2380-H2385]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




       THE MORAL IMPLICATIONS OF AS- SAULT ON AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 1995, the gentleman from New York [Mr. Owens] is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, all of the members of the Congressional Black 
Caucus are very concerned about the latest development with respect to 
an announcement that affirmative action and the elimination of all 
aspects of affirmative action has been placed on the agenda of the 
Republican Party.
  That concern is expressed in many different ways. Several of my 
colleagues were here yesterday, and they talked about the details of 
affirmative action from a very legalistic perspective. Several of them 
are lawyers and they understand the legal wranglings related to 
affirmative action, some are very familiar with the history of 
affirmative action laws, and they gave an interesting and useful 
background on affirmative action.
  They make their contribution in their way, and I am, on the other 
hand, concerned about affirmative action from another point of view, 
the moral implications of the assault on affirmative action that is 
being projected by the Republican Party, by their leadership.
  I am concerned about the fact that when you couple an assault on 
affirmative action with the nastier parts of the Contract With America, 
and the Contract With America is just beginning to manifest itself in 
all of its barbarity, and I use that word deliberately, because the 
aspects of the Contract With America which are going forward now have 
to do with taking school lunch programs away, limiting school lunch 
programs, and denying the entitlement to a free lunch to children in 
need.

                              {time}  2145

  It has to do with rescissions which are taking place to wipe out the 
summer youth program, one of the most practical, successful and much 
needed programs that we have, employing teenagers, young people during 
the [[Page H2381]] summer. There are all too few jobs already, but in 
the rescission process the committees have begun to eliminate, first 
they want to water down this year's program and cut that drastically 
and then they want to eliminate it completely and on it goes. There are 
education programs, child nutrition programs, programs that are very 
vital to poor people and certainly vital to the people in my district 
that are being cut.
  And this is just the beginning. It is the beginning of a process of 
finding in the budget the money needed to give a tax cut which would go 
mostly to people who are very well off. It is a revision of a process 
of finding money in a budget in order to increase the defense budget, 
and if there is any part of the budget that does not need to be 
increased, certainly it is the defense budget. I think a recent poll 
shows that the American people in their great wisdom, the common sense 
of the American people is astonishing, they have in a poll indicated, a 
large percentage, I think about 60 percent indicated that things should 
stay the way they are. I do not want to quote the numbers but the 
overwhelming percentage of people who responded to the poll felt that 
things should at least stay the way they are or there should be a cut 
in defense.
  The smallest group of people who responded, the smallest category of 
people who responded were people who wanted the defense budget 
increased. So the leadership of the majority party here is out of step 
with the common sense and the wisdom of the American people. But their 
being out of step and having the power, of course, they have the votes, 
does not mean they are going to cease the folly of increasing the 
defense budget at the expense of much needed programs like school lunch 
programs and summer youth employment programs.
  So, I am very troubled by those cuts, and those cuts are not a game 
of Republican versus Democrats. The Republicans make one move, 
Democrats make another. These are cuts which go to the heart of what 
the Federal Government is all about in terms of providing a safety net 
for people who are most in need.
  We are going to snatch away this safety net, we are going to kick 
people out into the streets. We are going to do some horrendous things 
in an attempt to balance the budget and in an attempt to find money for 
greater defense expenditures and for a tax cut for people who need a 
tax cut least of all.
  Those are terrible prospects. But when you add to that an 
announcement that we are going to have an assault on affirmative 
action, we are going to make affirmative action a major issue in the 
coming 1996 election campaign, it means that the Contract With America 
authors and the people who signed the contract, the leadership 
promoting the contract, the people who are pushing these tremendous 
domestic cuts and the defense increase, they are not willing to take 
their package and go to the American people and say well, this is the 
way we see it, we agree, we disagree with the Democrats, we are in 
charge now, we are able to push our program through and, therefore, you 
pass judgment on it. I think it would be fair, although I profoundly 
disagree with the tremendous budget cuts and I disagree with the thrust 
and essence of the Contract With America, I still think it is a 
legitimate opposition program, and the opposition, I call them the 
elite, oppressive minority. The elite oppressive minority, should take 
their program to the people and have them pass judgment on it at the 
ballot box.
  But when the elite oppressive minority decides that it wants an 
insurance marker, it wants to guarantee victory by moving into another 
arena, by attacking affirmative action, already we have an attack on 
immigrants, now we are going to add an attack on affirmative action, we 
are adding something to the brew, we are pouring poison into the 
situation, and saying that we are going to resort to exacerbating 
racial tensions and playing on racial fears in order to win the 1996 
election. It is race-baiting, it is the oldest trick in the world. It 
is scapegoating and it is going to be, you know, Willy Horton to the 
maximum degree.
  We are going to have a situation where people do not think about the 
budget cuts. They will not think about the merits of the Contract With 
America. It will just be gut reactions to a racist appeal. That is the 
way I see the announcement that affirmative action is now going to be a 
major target between now and 1996.
  I hope we do not go that way. I hope that the leadership of the 
majority party here in the Congress will reconsider. I hope that we 
will go forward and have a contest in 1996 which will be on the merits 
of the programs offered by the Contract With America, authors and 
signers versus the Democratic Party, its President, the opposition here 
in Congress, and that we will have a decent election based on what is 
best for America and having people make that choice.
  I do not think we will have a decent election. I think we will go 
down the road toward disaster if we wage a full-scale attack on 
affirmative action and we make the next election a racial referendum.
  It is something that is very tempting. The easy road to power or the 
easy road to a consolidation of power is very tempting. The people who 
are the cause of the problems in Yugoslavia, the Serbians, the Serbians 
who put in motion ethnic cleansing, they wanted an easy road to power, 
the easiest road to power to exacerbate and excite people's racial 
fears and to pray on racial tensions.
  The people in Rwanda, the Hutus, the Hutus sought an easy road to 
power by exacerbating the differences between the two tribes and the 
Tutsis. All that started as a matter of political expediency and they 
were using it to consolidate power. It got out of hand and it became 
such a frenzy until it spilled over into the streets and people went 
out and massacred people. It is estimated that 500,000 people were 
massacred. The Hutus massacred 500,000 Tutsis. It all started with some 
egomaniac in power, politicians in power who wanted to consolidate 
their power and made an appeal to the worst in people in order to do 
that.
  You might say well, your exaggerating, that could never happen here. 
No, it could not happen here, overnight certainly, and it will not 
happen here between now and 1996. But whenever the easy route to power 
is taken, whenever you choose to play on racial fears, there is no way 
you can guarantee you are going to be able to turn it off when the time 
comes to turn it off.
  The appeal to racial fears at this point in our history I think would 
be a disaster, and I want to take the time to make my appeal. You know, 
100 seems to be a magic number, so if I have to come here to the floor 
100 times to make 100 appeals for justice and 100 appeals for us to 
turn aside from this course of action, then I will do that because I 
think it is just that important, I think it is just that dangerous that 
the movement toward racism in our next election will set in motion 
something that would be disastrous for our country.
  At a time of maximum prosperity in the richest nation that has ever 
existed in the history of the world, as we move into the 21st Century 
Americans must not yield to destruction of our society through the use 
of a barbaric political process. If we cannot do it any other way we 
certainly should not resort to playing on racial fears.
  When you combine an assault on affirmative action with a Republican 
Contract With America, you create a kind of scorched Earth approach to 
the reordering of our society. Government by an elite minority, for the 
benefit of the elite minority, becomes the driving philosophy. We would 
have to call it the way we see it. I do not think it is exaggerating to 
say that we have a high-technology, a group that has a great knowledge 
of high-technology, and they will use electronic witchcraft to promote 
this oppressive elite minority. And now they want to spread, use that 
power to spread a racist, anti-immigrant brew throughout the minds of
 America, to poison the minds of the American voters.

  The goal of this oppressive minority is to turn democracy on its head 
by stampeding the majority into voting against its own interests. 
Assaults on affirmative action, attacks on immigrants, these are 
actions which are the key elements of a stampeding kind of approach to 
politics. You do not want people to think, you would want them to feel 
a gut reaction and act as a result. [[Page H2382]] 
  I think all poor and disadvantaged people whose needs inconvenience 
the needs, and the programs which serve poor and disadvantaged people 
inconvenience this oppressive elite minority, I think they become 
targets as a rule of wanting to get them out of the way, they become 
the targets of a rather ruthless set of actions.
  The rescissions that have been announced, the bills that are moving 
through committees that block grant school lunch programs, and block 
grant child care programs, and block grant child nutrition programs, 
and WIC Programs--block grants become a kind of a swindle. We know from 
experience that when the Federal Government moves from entitlements at 
the Federal level to block grants at the local level it means that you 
are setting up a situation where the responsibility to provide for all 
of those in need will be taken away. You do not have to have an 
entitlement. If you have a block grant, the State will spend as much 
money as it has and when the money runs out, no matter how great the 
need is, it will not spend any more, and the people will have to do 
without, whether it is hungry children or people in need of child care 
or any other block-granted function.
  So the block grant is not just an administrative move, it is not an 
administrative convenience. The block grant is a swindle that is 
perpetrated. You start the block grant with an amount of money at one 
level and you stop. And as the years go by, the block grant is cut. It 
automatically is cut because no money is added to it to keep up with 
inflation, and then, of course, sometimes the Committee on 
Appropriations actively begins a process of cutting. This is the 
history of block grants, so we have no reason to believe that block 
grants are not just another way to swindle people out of their 
entitlements. People who are in great need will be forced to go without 
as a result of the block grants being instituted.
  The most specific and the most intensely pursued target of the 
oppressive elite minority are not just the poor and the disadvantaged. 
That in general is the way this is being approached, is that all poor 
and disadvantaged people become obstacles in the way. Their needs 
inconvenience this oppressive elite minority that is in charge. But 
among the poor and the disadvantaged, the minority that becomes the 
group that becomes the biggest target and the most intensely pursued 
target becomes the American of African descent. The Americans of 
African descent, the people who are the descendants of slaves, are in a 
very special category. It is not that we are the only beneficiaries of 
affirmative action; affirmative action, of course, benefits a lot of 
other people other than African-Americans. You know, women are the 
beneficiaries of affirmative action, Asians, Hispanics, a number of 
people benefit from affirmative action.
                              {time}  2200

  And they will be hurt in the process. But I think the drive and the 
focus and the intensity of the move is focused on African-Americans, 
and that is the way we see it, and that is why we are responding with 
such intensity.
  It was the African-American population, the descendants of slaves, 
who fought the battles during the civil rights era during the fifties 
and sixties, and we fought for the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights 
Act. We fought for set-asides. We have pressured and pushed and gotten 
Presidents to issue Executive orders on affirmative action. We have 
been on the cutting edge, and we are the driving force, so any attempt 
to wage an assault on affirmative action is an assault on African-
Americans, people of African descent. That is the primary thrust of 
what is happening here.
  The Contract on America, which started by focusing on the destruction 
of all poor and working families, has now added an assault on 
affirmative action to its blitzkrieg. This new aggression makes it 
crystal clear the primary objective, the No. 1 target, of the 
oppressive elite minority are African-Americans, the descendants of 
slaves.
  If you crush the African-Americans, if you crush the core of the 
resistance to the planned tyranny of the oppressive minority, this is 
the merciless logic, crush them first, this is the merciless logic of 
the opposition, and when the blacks are silenced, the other components 
will fall in line.
  Some people will acquiesce after the blacks are silenced. They will 
acquiesce with a guilty conscience, but they will acquiesce. Many 
others will find it convenient and comfortable to be bought off or sell 
out. This is a scenario we see.
  In the 1996 election, they will turn the election into a racist 
election. You stampede people into a situation where you consolidate 
power not on the basis of the programs that you have come forward with 
or your ideology or your achievements, but on the basis of deep-seated 
primitive racial fears.
  While others stumble about in confusion, I think African-Americans 
clearly see what is happening. We see the enemy converging down upon 
us. Our intense reaction is based on the fact that we understand. We 
are not going to wait until it unfolds, and, you know, the details are 
in place. The very fact that at this particular moment you get an 
attack on affirmative action, a concerted assault, tells us a great 
deal, and we understand the implications.
  The Contract With America is a contract against us to begin with, and 
then the assault on affirmative action continues that attack. The 
combination of budget cuts and assaults on affirmative action are 
definitely designed to bombard the African-American community until it 
becomes a kind of political Hiroshima, beat it to death. The goals of 
this oppressive minority, the goal of the oppressive elite minority 
which is in charge now, is to paralyze us and incapacitate us. They 
want to bring African-Americans to the point where they are incapable 
of ever counterattacking.
  We cannot finish the fight that we have begun for full rights, and we 
cannot pursue the fight that we started for equal justice if we are the 
subject of this kind of ruthless attack in 1996. The goal of the 
ruthless elite, this oppressive minority, is to terminate our vanguard 
role, to destroy our leadership position in the struggle for justice 
and opportunity, which African-Americans have traditionally occupied.
  The situation is that serious, and I would like to plead to the 
leadership of the Republican Party, the leadership in control of this 
House, to drop their agenda for the assault on affirmative action. I 
would like to plead for a different approach to winning the 1996 
election in line with the merits of your case and not igniting a racial 
war that none of us will be able to control.
  I would like to also, if you are determined to pursue affirmative 
action and the assault on affirmative action, I would like to also make 
an appeal for you to take a close look at why we need affirmative 
action. Affirmative action is a set of activities and programs which 
are designed to, in the present again, compensate for past wrongs. 
Affirmative actions are put forth by nations and groups and not be 
individuals.
  Individuals who are living now may not have been guilty of the wrongs 
that led to the implementation of affirmative-action policies, just as 
the average German alive today is not in any way guilty for what Hitler 
did in World War II. Nevertheless, his nation is responsible, and his 
nation pays reparations to
 those people who were victims. The Nation is a continuing entity in 
the same way America, the United States of America, is a continuing 
entity, and we are responsible for the wrongs that were done to a group 
of people, the African-Americans who were brought here against their 
will and thrown into slavery.

  I appeal to all concerned to take a hard look at slavery and not make 
us force the issue of an examination of slavery and what the 
implications are. We ought to be concerned about what we did to 
African-Americans. We ought to be concerned about the descendants of 
the victims of those crimes. We ought to be concerned about the fact 
that certain people are the descendants of the beneficiaries of the 
slave industry.
  Slavery was an industry, and it went on for 200 years in America. 
And, therefore, I think, you know, great masses of people were 
wittingly and unwittingly beneficiaries of the economy that was 
generated by slavery. It made America richer faster. It built a lot of 
the institutions that we have, not just in the South. They hang slavery 
around the neck of the South and leave it there, but in New York City 
we had [[Page H2383]] one of the largest slave ports in the country, I 
think the third largest place where you had slaves brought in in the 
early days of America, which was New York City. It was a port where 
slaves came in in large numbers, and New York City was built by slave 
labor.
  Large numbers of slaves were imported into that area. So it is not 
just one area of the country. It is the whole country benefited from 
the slave industry.
  I think it is fitting and proper to discuss slavery and the crimes 
involved in slavery as we look at affirmative action. Affirmative 
action is designed to correct past wrongs. Past wrongs, the most 
immediate past wrongs were 100 years after the Emancipation 
Proclamation and after the 13th amendment when we had a long history of 
discrimination, oppression, Klu Klux Klan, lynchings and all kind of 
things happened for a whole 100 years after slavery was ended.
  But before that, you had 200 years of slavery.
  When you put it all together, there is a need to do something, to 
atone for those sins and to compensate for those crimes.
  Slavery in America lasted for more than 200 years. The slave 
industry, as I said before, encompassed more than half the world. It 
was not just America. It permeated the lives of the citizens of all of 
the nations of Europe, Africa, South America, North America. Slavery 
was a dominant driving force at the heart of the economy of the Western 
World for more than 100 years.
  At that period of history the slave trade and slave labor was far 
more valuable than gold, diamonds, oil. Slave labor was a primary means 
for the accumulation of vast amounts of capital. Slavery was a 
monstrous, enduring, all-encompassing, overwhelming crime, and it 
occupies a unique place in human history. In duration, no other crime 
of that kind against a group has lasted for so long, more than 200 
years, that America's slavery lasted.
  In volume, the number of people involved and the amount of human 
misery generated and the amount of murder and other phenomena, torture, 
not other phenomenon matches this global crime.
  Now, as I spoke here last week, I mentioned in the process that 
merely crossing the Atlantic, large numbers of slaves perished, and I 
started that as an introduction to my discussion of slavery as a 
background for justifying affirmative action.
  Large numbers of people perished crossing the Atlantic. It was just a 
figure that I thought was interesting. I mentioned that 200 million 
people perished in the Atlantic slave crossings, because that is a 
figure I have heard repeatedly, given by certain historians and 
lecturers, and this aroused a lot of interest.
  So I want to just take a moment before I continue to mention the fact 
that I had gotten a large amount of inquiries and a large amount of 
comments about the statement about the large number of people who had 
perished in the crossing, just crossing the Atlantic, a large amount of 
slaves.
  There were people who called who merely wanted to use racial epithets 
and let off steam, and I want to tell them I do not appreciate that. I 
prefer for you to keep your dirt at home. We are not interested in your 
racial epithets.
  You know, other people who called seriously wanted to know, you know, 
how such a large figure was generated. On some well-known TV show, they 
ridiculed the number and talked about it and generated a lot of 
interest, and I am glad that we started a dialog about slavery.
                              {time}  2210

  I am glad that the process has begun. The figure of 200 million 
certainly was questioned. I got serious people, some historians and 
experts who were upset about the fact that that figure was being used. 
But they also, some of those same experts who called and discussed it, 
said that they understood where I got the figure from, that there are a 
set of people, historians and experts on the subject, supposed to be 
experts, who take the position that the number was that high. In fact I 
really read it as recently as last June in a New York Times column, if 
you want to know where the figure came from.
  It is not just from the column that I referred to, I had heard it 
many times from various people whom I heard talking. I did not know 
there was so much controversy. I did not even think about the fact that 
the figure seems to be a little large due to the fact that the capacity 
of the slave ships was limited and all the other things. I just have 
heard it mentioned so many times I recited it as a fact.
  In this New York Times column that appeared on June 19, 1994, just 
this past summer, there was a statement which explains some of what has 
been happening. It let me know that among the people who are supposed 
to know the subject very well, there is a lot of disagreement.
  I will read one quote from the article. It says,

       Estimates of how many blacks were lost at sea in roughly 
     400 years of the slave trade in the Americas vary widely. 
     Some place the figure between 100 and 200 million; others say 
     perhaps as many as 14 million. Whichever is true, many 
     historians note that the number of enslaved Africans who died 
     at sea was so great that sharks learned to follow the slave 
     routes because they fed on the bodies thrown overboard.

  That is an article in the New York Times, June 19, 1994, page 25, 
column 1. It is a longer article about the whole matter of slaves who 
perished at sea.
  But among the historians, there is a great deal of controversy. I do 
not want to get into the middle of that. Some say one of reasons you 
have such wild estimates, differences are so great, is that some 
historians and experts are estimating the number of people who were 
lost due to slavery over a period of 400 years, not just the 200 years 
that the North American slave trade existed, but the period of slavery 
extended over 400 years. They are not looking at just slavery as it 
affected North America but also the slave ships that went to South 
America, the Caribbean, and all over. That is how they get some of the 
divergence in their totals, the differences in their totals.
  They also say many experts refused to accept the records that are 
available and that the citations of some historians who have looked at 
the record that are available from the British and the French, 
Portuguese and the Spanish, that these records are a joke, that they 
are not reliable, that slavery has always been a kind of a bandit 
unground operation. Even during the period when it was regulated--most 
of the time it was not regulated--but during the period when nations 
attempted to regulate slavery, the records were ridiculous because they 
made rules and nobody checked or tried to enforce them.
  The British, for instance, had a rule that any slave ship could only 
carry slaves in relation to their tonnage. It could only carry a 
certain number of slaves.
  The size of ships determined the number of slaves it would carry. 
Therefore, the number of slave berths on the ship had to be in 
accordance with the tonnage of the ship. Immediately, it was noted that 
most of those same ships, they doubled the number of slaves that they 
carried regardless of the berths.They crowded, put two people into 
every berth for one. That kind of practice was a regular practice. They 
noted that when they recorded their cargoes, they just told the lies 
and they did not record their cargoes. Sometimes when they arrived in 
parts, what they recorded as the number of slaves on board had nothing 
to do with the real number, and some ships off loaded slaves before 
they got into ports where they kept records. Pirates took ships, in 
many cases, and did not obey any regulations, and they landed cargoes 
in various places. On and on it goes.
  There were so many holes in the recordkeeping until these people have 
estimates that are far greater than most conservative estimates say, 
the records were ridiculous and could not be relied upon. That was the 
matter of legal slavery, there was illegal slavery.
  After the practice was outlawed, there was no attempt to regulate it, 
it was just outlawed, it went on for many, many years, decades after it 
was outlawed. There were no regulations, and nobody
 attempted to abide by regulations. So you have wildly gyrating 
numbers.

  I would say this is a debate that I will leave to the historians and 
experts on slavery. I did not mean to get off on [[Page H2384]] that 
tangent. I think I will stop counting at 10 million or 20 million. You 
know, when you are dealing with human beings, human suffering, human 
murder, 10 million, 20 million, that is enough for me. I will not argue 
about the rest.
  My example was that here was such a horrendous crime, starting with 
the slave trade and the delivery of the cargo from one continent to 
another, that we ought to take a close look at it as we deliberate 
about affirmative action.
  It was one of the most cruel and inhuman tortures ever inflicted on 
mankind, this transport from Africa to New World in packed slave ships. 
It was only the beginning of the kind of torture and pain and suffering 
that the slaves endured. When they arrived at the markets in America, 
of course they were sold at auction, they were declared property of the 
slave owner, and once that happened, the daily lives of the slaves in 
America was as bad as any torture that the devil in hell could heap 
upon the backs of the worst sinners.
  In their daily routine, slaves were forced to endure hunger, filth, 
rape, torture, murder. The life of a slave was often treated with less 
sanctity than the life of a horse. Day after day, week after week, 
month after month, year after year, more than 200 years in America, the 
crimes against slaves went on and on. It was a unique kind of human 
destruction. The object of the slave industry was not to incinerate or 
destroy the body of the slave, the object of America's slavery was to 
obliterate the soul of the slave. They wanted to keep the body, make it 
a more efficient beast of burden, but they wanted to destroy the human 
soul. Slave owners were seeking to breed, to condition, to train the 
world's most efficient beast of burden, enhance and build up the slave 
body but destroy and obliterate the slave's soul. This was the 
monstrous mission of the slave economy. It was illegal to teach a slave 
to read. Strict punishment was inflicted upon anyone who tried to teach 
a slave to read.
  No sense of family was permitted to slaves. Slave children were 
regularly sold away from their mothers. Most slaves were never allowed 
to know who their fathers were. And on and on it goes.
  I am not interested in giving a lecture on slavery. What my concern 
is is that as we look at affirmative action, the set-asides, all the 
kinds of things that we have done in the very recent past, in the last 
three decades, in the last three decades we have taken some steps to 
begin to deal with the impact, the fallout, the results; some of the 
results, that is, of what was done during that period.
                              {time}  2220

  This is only in the last three decades. So after three decades of 
taking steps which were positive steps, removing the barriers of 
segregation, establishing set-aside programs, establishing affirmative 
action programs, promoting diversity in the marketplace, we have done 
some wonderful things in the last three decades. But we had two 
centuries of the institution of slavery. After that 100 years, another 
century of oppression.
  My point is, we as Americans, black and white, should take a closer 
look at the origin of the wrongs, the nature of the wrongs, the nature 
of the crime, the nature of the since that affirmative action is 
seeking to overcome. We should take a closer look and we should perhaps 
establish a commission to look at slavery and is implications, to look 
at maybe the need to go beyond affirmative action, do something 
different from affirmative action, maybe reparations. There is a bill 
that is introduced every year by my colleague, John Conyers, which 
deals with setting up a commission to study reparations, just to study 
the possibility of reparations for the descendants of slaves because 
the descendants of slaves are descendants of victims. Maybe we should 
take a close look at that. Maybe we should do that in some kind of 
reasonable way and not shout at each other about it. If we have an 
assault on affirmative action on the one hand and demagogues in the 
streets trying to arouse people's racial fears, then we will have to 
answer with other shouts and screams about the victimization and the 
cruelty, and I do not think it is the best way to approach this. Let us 
look at it in a reasonable atmosphere. Let us look at it with a 
commission. Let us take a look at whether affirmative action meets the 
need.
  The President has said he wants to review affirmative action 
programs. My answer to that is, good, my response to that is, good, Mr. 
President. Review affirmative action programs, and you may find there 
is a need to strengthen many of them or you may find that many of them 
are not adequate to accomplish the purpose we want to accomplish and we 
want to do something stronger, something beyond the affirmative action.
  I hope that we could enter that kind of dialog and could have a look 
at affirmative action in a positive way instead of the use of 
affirmative action as a weapon, the use of affirmative action as a 
short cut to power, the use of affirmative action to poison the 
atmosphere, the use of the assault on affirmative to whip people into a 
frenzy and to have American voters stampede on election day against 
their own interests.
  Let me just take one more step that I am sure will not be a pleasant 
one for most of you. In examining slavery, you are going to find many, 
many very interesting things. Maybe we ought to have parents teach 
their kids about slavery and not have them learn about it in the 
streets because there are horrors that need to certainly be discussed 
in gentle tones. We are very concerned at this point, some people have 
made us very concerned about teenage pregnancy. Teenage pregnancy is 
always an evil in my opinion. It is a double evil because you destroy 
the life of a child who is the mother, not prepared for that kind of 
responsibility, and you certainly destroy the life or run the risk of 
destroying the life of the child who has to be raised by a child. No 
one would like to see teenage pregnancies reduced as much as I would or 
people who have large numbers of pregnant teenagers in their districts. 
No one would like to see welfare not be used as a tool to perpetuate 
teenage pregnancies. I think that there have been some abuses in this 
area. There is a need to take a hard look at it and to approach it in a 
reasonable manner and try to do the things that are positive to end 
large numbers of teenage pregnancies.
  I think that the wrong way to approach it is to demonize teenage 
mothers and make them all monsters, teenage mothers suddenly become 
monsters and some people sort of imply that it is a threat to the moral 
fabric of America, these teenage pregnancies. I think that there was a 
time when teenage pregnancies were a threat to the moral fabric of 
America.
  I am just going to close with an example of the kind of way in which 
teenage pregnancies were once a threat to the moral fabric of America. 
During slavery, teenage pregnancies were promoted by slave owners. 
During slavery, it benefited the industry to have teenagers become 
pregnant as fast as possible. During slavery, every girl who was a 
slave was expected to become a mother as fast as possible.
  The horrors of this need to be considered. We had a threat to the 
moral fabric of the Nation. We should be thankful that we ended 
slavery. We should be
 thankful that there was an Abraham Lincoln. We should be thankful that 
there was a 13th amendment, the Emancipation Proclamation. We should be 
thankful that we, in 1995, are out of all of that grotesque, those 
grotesque practices, because they were horrendous and unbearable and it 
was a threat to the Nation.

  But the people who are in control of the present society and who 
determine what happens to teenage mothers in many cases need to hear 
that they are in control. If teenagers had some hope, if teenage males 
as well as teenage females could look forward to a future where a job 
was possible, if they could look forward to going to college, those who 
have what it takes and those who qualify, that they are going to be 
able to get into college without having to have that determined about 
whether or not their parents have money, if they are going to be able 
to enjoy the benefits of the Pell grants which are being threatened, 
enjoy the benefits of certain other higher education programs that we 
have right now which are being threatened by the budget cuts, if they 
[[Page H2385]] are going to be able to look forward to getting jobs 
when they come out of college because we have an economy which is doing 
the things necessary to keep the quality of life at a certain level 
and, therefore, you need people for that purpose, then we would have a 
different story in terms of teenage pregnancies, if young people could 
look forward to a better life.
  There is a great concentration of teenage pregnancy among black 
youth, black teenagers. But I assure you, just like every other social 
ill in America, if we do not attend to it, if we do not provide some 
hope for black teenagers, the same kind of problem will drift into the 
white community and the other ethnic groups. It will result in the 
same, it will have the same result. No hope, an economy which offers no 
hope, a world which does not care about allowing people to develop to 
their fullest capacity, that will produce the same results in any 
ethnic group eventually.
  But the present situation that we control, we are not providing any 
jobs. We have just taken steps to cut off teenager summer jobs. The 
Department of Labor has just transferred from the category of jobs for 
urban youth, they have transferred that money, large amounts, into a 
category for displaced workers. Displaced workers need it. We ought to 
have the guts to go at the appropriate amount for displaced workers and 
not take the money away from teenage youth in the cities to go to 
displaced workers or anybody else. All of these policies add up to a 
control of the economy, a control of the society which determines the 
lives of these teenages.
  In a less direct way, slave owners determined the lives of teenagers. 
Slave owners had direct control of the life of their slaves. They had 
direct control of the lives of the teenage girls. And here is how they 
behaved. And here is something we still, a crime we still have to atone 
for.
  ``When a girl became a woman''--I am reading from a book called 
Bullwhip Days, ``Bullwhip Days, the Slaves Remember.'' It is an oral 
history and Bullwhip Days was compiled by the Federal Writers Project. 
During the depression, the WPA funded writers to do projects so the 
Federal Writers Project went out and they interviewed slaves. They 
determined that there were a limited number of slaves who still were 
alive. People who had been born slaves, lived as slaves. They went out 
and they interviewed them. They recorded the interviews. And then the 
results of those interviews, some of those, these are excerpts that 
were taken from those interviews of actual slaves. So I am going to 
read in the next few weeks from Bullwhip Days.
  I am just going to read a small section of it today dealing with 
teenage pregnancy. ``When a girl became a woman,'' this is the voice of 
a slave talking, ``when a girl became a woman, she was required to go 
to a man and become a mother. The master would sometimes go and get a 
large hale, hardy Negro man from some other plantation to go to his 
Negro woman. He would ask the other master to let this man come over to 
his place to go to his slave girls. A slave girl was expected to have 
children as soon as she became a woman. Some of them had children at 
the age of 12 and 13 years old. Negro men six feet tall went to some of 
these children.''
  Slave masters were in control of the lives of the teenagers. Part of 
the industry was to make the teenagers pregnant.
                              {time}  2230

  That was from a slave named Hilliard Yellerday.
  From the voice of Hannah Jones, Hannah Jones talks in very crude 
terms:

       Ben Oil had a hundred niggers. He just raised niggers, on 
     his plantation. His brother-in-law, John Cross, raised 
     niggers, too. He had a hundred and twenty-five niggers. He 
     had a nigger farm. His older brother-in-law, old man English, 
     had a hundred niggers. Dey all hes' had nothin' else but 
     niggers.

  That was what their business was, raising niggers. Hannah Jones.
  Lewis Jones, the voice of Lewis Jones:

       My mammy am owned by Massa Fred Tate and so am my pappy and 
     all my brudders and sisters. How many brudders and sisters? 
     Lawd A'mighty! I'll tell you, `cause you asks, and dis nigger 
     gives de facts as `tis. Let's see; I can't lect de number. My 
     pappy have twelve chillun by my mammy and twelve by anudder 
     nigger, name' Mary. You keep de cout. Den, dere am Lisa. Him 
     have ten by her. And dere am Mandy. Him have eight by her. 
     And dere am Betty. Him have six by her. Now, let me `lect 
     some more. I can't bring de names to mind, but dere am two or 
     three others what have jus' one or two chillun by my pappy. 
     Dat am right--close to fifty chillun, `cause my mammny done 
     told me.

  ``You've got to understand, the master told my pappy that he is the 
breeding nigger.'' He is the breeding nigger. Lewis Jones.
  Finally, I close with John Smith, another slave. The voice of John 
Smith:

       My marster owned three plantations and three hundred 
     slaves. He started out wid two `oman slaves and raised three 
     hundred slaves. One wuz called ``Short Peggy,'' and the udder 
     wuz called ``Long Peggy.'' Long Peggy had twenty-five 
     chilluns. Long Peggy, a black `oman, wuz boss ob de 
     plantation. Marster freed her after she had twenty-five 
     chilluns. Just think o'dat--raising three hundred slaves wid 
     two `omans. It sho' is de trufe, do.'

  And that was the voice of John Smith.
  Every time a teen-aged daughter or granddaughter or great 
granddaughter of these two women became of age, they had to become 
pregnant and have children as part of the slave industry.
  I think pregnancy, teenage pregnancy under those conditions, was a 
threat to the moral fiber of America. If it had continued, of course, 
this Nation would have gone down, down, down, and not been able to 
supply the moral leadership for the free world.
  We ended that kind of condition, but the results of it en masse, it 
was not just done in this one plantation. It was all across the South, 
breeding farms, and nobody ever talks about this.
  It is just one aspect of the crime of slavery, one aspect that needs 
to be brought to light, and you can take a look at it. We may take a 
look at rape, we may take a look at torture, we may take a look at 
murder, we may take a look at all the efforts made to deny the slaves 
the right to learn to read and write even after they were freed. We may 
take a look at the Ku Klux Klan. I hope we do not have to take a look 
at all these things in defense of affirmative action, to prove how 
great the wrong was.
  But if affirmative action and programs like affirmative action exist 
to correct past wrongs, then people need to understand how deep and how 
broad and how ugly those wrongs were as part of the discussion.
  If we are going to have a discussion to eliminate and erase, if we 
are going to denigrate and castigate people who are the beneficiaries 
of affirmative action today, then take a look at their ancestors and 
what they had to go through. They are descendants of the victims, and 
there are other people who are descendants of the beneficiaries. People 
benefited. They got rich from slavery. The economy boomed in many 
places. The descendants of the beneficiaries now want to further punish 
and persecute the descendants of the victims.
  This is an odd way, perhaps you think, to approach the discussion of 
affirmative action. But I think that it has to be done if we are not to 
commit a sin, an error, a set of crimes greater than even slavery was.
  If we set off racial wars, if we play on racial fears, if we heighten 
the race fears in the country just to win the next election, we may set 
in motion something we can never stop.
  In one election we had Willie Horton, now we are going to have an 
assault on affirmative action. If they keep working these appeals to 
race, where do we go from there?
  We have seen what happened in Serbia when people played the race 
card. We have seen what happened in Rwanda when people, leaders, 
demagog played the race card. We have seen what happened in Germany 
when demagogues played the race card, the religion card, sent one group 
off after another in a scapegoating process.
  That is the direction we are headed in, and some of us are alarmed, 
so alarmed that we come to you with these very unpleasant discussions. 
We need to take a look at what wrongs were committed and be chastened 
by that as we go forward.
  Let's stop the people who want to destroy America with race-baiting. 
Let's stop the assault on affirmative action now.


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