[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 205 (Wednesday, December 20, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E2419]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

[[Page E2419]]


           TRANSFORMATION: HELPING THE NEEDY BECOME NON-POOR

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                           HON. NEWT GINGRICH

                               of georgia

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, December 20, 1995

  Mr. GINGRICH. On this floor, I've often discussed the book ``The 
Tragedy of American Compassion,'' where author Marvin Olasky examined 
over 300 years of what has worked in American social policy. His main 
point: You do not want to maintain the poor, you want to transform 
them. The goal of helping is to get them to be non-poor. You help an 
addict by getting them to give up their addiction. You help an 
alcoholic by getting them to be a recovering alcoholic. You work to 
transform people, because if you only maintain them, you will ruin 
their lives.
  One of our colleagues, the gentleman from Maryland, Mr. Mfume, knows 
more than a little bit about this kind of transformation. His life is a 
testimony to it. He recently announced his decision to leave this body 
to assume the Executive Directorship of the National Association for 
the Advancement of Colored People. His very personal journey is 
detailed poignantly in Courtland Milloy's excellent column from the 
Sunday, December 17 Washington Post. As the gentleman embarks on a very 
different mission of transformation, we wish him well. I submit the 
Post column into the Congressional Record. Certain lessons should 
transcend either party or ideological lines:

             [From the Washington Post, December 17, 1995.]

                  Transformed, Mfume Leads by Example

                         (By Courtland Milloy)

       In explaining his transformation from street dude to 
     political leader, Kweisi Mfume talks of having had a 
     ``spiritual experience.'' This is not to be mistaken for a 
     religious occasion, such as going to church. It's more akin 
     to a spiritual emergency, or crisis, in which Mfume tried for 
     years to change his ways but found willpower alone to be 
     insufficient.
       Mfume recalls the days when his name was Frizzell Gray, and 
     how he and his buddies used to stand outside a liquor store 
     in Baltimore, drinking alcohol and telling lies. On one 
     particular night while in his early twenties, he was 
     overpowered by a feeling of ruination, of being a man on a 
     road to nowhere. It was in that moment of truth, he says, 
     that he received the courage and strength, some would say 
     grace, to start a new life.
       Now that Mfume has been selected to serve as president of 
     the National Association for the Advancement of Colored 
     People much is being made of the man he became after that 
     night on the street corner. He went on to become a radio disc 
     jockey, a Baltimore city councilman and a member of the U.S. 
     House of Representatives.
       But Mfume's true value has little to do with his job 
     descriptions. It is the process of his personal change that 
     holds the key to the transformation of the NAACP; it is the 
     spiritual emergency of Frizzell Gray that points the way to 
     real advancement for African Americans.
       ``People thought I was crazy,'' Mfume told Peter J. Boyer 
     of the New Yorker magazine last year. ``But that night I left 
     that corner and prayed and asked for God's forgiveness and 
     asked my mother to please forgive me this one time for 
     letting her down. I had let her down--that was not the way I 
     was raised.
       ``I said that if I had just one more chance, I would never, 
     every again go back to that, and I would try to find a way to 
     atone for it. And I cried on the floor that night on my 
     knees. I made a very real promise to myself, to my mother and 
     to God that night--that if I could just get to that point and 
     get one more chance I would do everything I could do to make 
     a difference.''
       Mfume had to fight to get off that corner. His former 
     drinking buddies would not let him just walk away. He says 
     they regularly beat him up until they decided that he was a 
     ``lost cause'' and finally left him alone.
       Mfume learned a most important lesson from those struggles: 
     Sometimes you may have to take a fall to take a stand.
       Among the most difficult tasks facing Mfume now is 
     redefining the struggle for civil rights; no one seems to 
     know for sure where to go from here. But Mfume has a pretty 
     good idea. His story suggests that we don't have to go 
     anywhere, that we need only stand where we are and begin to 
     treat those around us with courtesy, kindness, justice and 
     love.
       ``You are not a man because you killed somebody Mfume said 
     last year during a Father's Day service at St. Edwards 
     Catholic Church in West Baltimore. ``You're a man when you 
     know how to heal somebody.'' As Boyer described the scene, 
     ``it was no greeting card homage to dear Dad, but, rather, 
     call to arms in a war for cultural survival.''
       Some would say that Mfume won that war when he went back to 
     school and earned a high school equivalency degree in 1968. 
     But it was when he began taking responsibility for the 
     children he had fathered out of wedlock that he became a real 
     winner.
       Some would say that he won when, as a disc jockey, he 
     stopped playing jock rap music in favor of political dialogue 
     and jazz. But more important was Mfume's newfound attitude of 
     gratitude that had allowed him to work at the radio station 
     as a low-paid gofer until he had learned some skills.
       Mfume, now 47, has been elected to Congress five times 
     since 1986. He has served on the powerful House Banking 
     Committee and, in 1992, became chairman of the Congressional 
     Black Caucus.
       But he sacrificed a secure job to help resurrect the NAACP, 
     an organization that, for all intents and purposes, is dead. 
     It died the day black Americans forgot where we came from and 
     began to act as if the modicum of success that some of us 
     enjoy had somehow been won through personal charm and good 
     looks instead of the struggles and sacrifice of others.
       This misguided sense of self-reliance, brought on in part 
     by a profound ignorance of history, is probably the single 
     most important reason black America has been brought to its 
     knees.
       To make his change, Mfume had to admit that he was 
     spiritually bankrupt and that he needed help from a power 
     greater than himself. That honesty paid off with a new 
     consciousness, and his willingness to be of service to his 
     fellow man has resulted in a new energy, insight and 
     intuition worthy of his new name, which means ``conquering 
     son of kings.''
       The NAACP, like much of black America, is in the same boat 
     that Frizzell Gray had been in. But with Mfume at the helm, 
     there is hope that what happened to him can happen to others 
     as well.

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