[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 10 (Wednesday, February 11, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H428-H431]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
BLACK HISTORY MONTH
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 7, 1997, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Owens) is recognized
for 60 minutes.
Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by saluting my
colleague, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Louis Stokes). This is an
annual Special Order that he has sponsored for many years, and we
regret the fact that this is the last time that he will do it. We thank
him very much for keeping the torch alive, and I assure him that in his
memory the caucus will continue this tradition for years to come.
The gentleman from Ohio goes home to Cleveland, where there is the
whole public library, a brand new pace setting state-of-the-art
library, named after him. Cleveland also is a place where there is a
new kind of macroeconomics reaching out to encourage and embrace all
business, but certainly offering a great opportunity for black
businesses, African-American businesses. Cleveland is setting an
example with a progressive mayor, I suppose one of the protegee of the
gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Lou Stokes), and the whole tradition of the
Stokes family there in Cleveland.
So I salute the gentleman. I think the theme of this year's Black
History Month is very fitting and proper for him and the leadership in
Cleveland, Ohio.
I also would like to note, Mr. Speaker, that I will take only 30
minutes of the hour, since none of my colleagues are here, and I want
to thank the other side of the aisle for agreeing to allow us to do
this back to back to give us more time to finish the Special Order on
Black History.
I would like to continue in the same vein as my colleagues have
proceeded before, saluting black business as a continuation of
empowerment. Not a new thrust of empowerment. It is a continuation
toward empowerment and it is inseparable.
What is happening with the African-American business community cannot
be separated from political leadership and the history of civil rights
and political developments related to the struggle for freedom of the
African-American people in America. We cannot separate the two. I would
like to bring that perspective to my discussion of the importance of
this Black History observance this year.
We ought to become more economic minded. We should focus more on
economics. We should understand we cannot separate economics from
politics. They cannot be separated. They are inextricably interwoven in
the history of this country. A lot of people have made a great attempt
to separate economics from government, but that is not the case. That
cannot happen. It is not true history when we try to do that.
The impact of the transcontinental railroad on the economic
development of America is one example of how government, assuming a
very aggressive position, created a situation where the industrial and
business development of a nation certainly jumped forward by leaps and
bounds. If the government had not taken the initiative, if the people
in Washington had not said that we will subsidize the building of a
transcontinental railroad, a railroad that will link the East with the
West, if they had not paid so much per mile and been willing to
undertake that giant project, encouraging, of course, contracting with
and encouraging private enterprise to do it, it would never have
happened. We would not have had the linkage between the East and the
West, which made this Nation one nation in terms of business and
industry.
And government, of course, has taken the initiative in many other
ways, and I want to talk a little bit tonight about one of the latest
initiatives. It is very small compared to the transcontinental
railroad, or the building of the Tennessee Valley Authority, or the
great leap forward we took when we passed the Morrill Act, the act
which created the land grant colleges in every State.
Those land grant colleges were very practical institutions. They had
the theoretical instruction in the classroom. I say had, but they still
exist. They have the agricultural experiment stations; they have county
agents that
[[Page H429]]
take the knowledge and information right out to the farmers in the
fields and practitioners. It is not by accident that America has the
best fed population in the world. It is not by accident that we have
the lowest cost food in the world. There was a lot of activity that
took place, fostered by government.
The Morrill Act is at the heart of our great agricultural success in
this country. We do not have anything like that on the drawing board
now, but the empowerment zones that have been created are a small
extension of that kind of activity by government.
Empowerment zones are designed to revitalize economically depressed
areas. There are two categories of empowerment zones. One is the rural
empowerment zone, and we have three of those now; and we have six urban
empowerment zones, both designed to revitalize the area, but slightly
different sets of guidelines for the two.
{time} 2045
We have authorized already in legislation the creation of 15
additional urban empowerment zones and 5 additional rural empowerment
zones, and they have a great role to play in the development of
African-American business in our big cities. We have to think of
business in the context of the environment created partially by the
actions of government. Government must still deal with discrimination,
the kind of discrimination that denies access to loans, access to
capital.
Through the impetus of government, we have certain kinds of community
development funds and certain kinds of pressures on banks to do more
lending in African-American neighborhoods and to African-American
businesses. There are a lot of activities of government that have
created a situation where historic racial prejudice has played a role
in depressing business activity in the African-American communities.
We have heard some glowing stories here, as is appropriate, of
successful businesses and successful businessmen in the African-
American community. We have also praised some existing enterprises that
are quite large and on the stock market and doing very well. Black
Entertainment Television, BET, is one of those examples. But behind the
story of BET there is an interesting situation that demonstrates that
when people say that money is color blind or the investment community
is color blind, it is not true.
BET got a foothold, sort of, in the cable television industry because
in the early days of cable, as cable came on line in our cities, there
was a deliberate attempt by the entrepreneurs who were the owners of
the early cable networks to avoid African-American communities in the
big cities. There was this stereotyped notion that these people cannot
pay for cable, they will not pay a subscription fee each month, they
will not use cable the way the middle class will use it, or the white
middle class and the suburban people. So they avoided and delayed
wiring the inner city communities; they were some of the last
communities wired.
But much to their shock, because they did not do accurate surveys and
they violated some of their own premises in terms of the way we plan
for market, the prejudice was so great that they never looked very,
very closely. Much to their surprise, they found that some of their
best customers and customers who were most loyal and continue and
always pay their cable bills, and right now they are at the heart of
the cable income in our big cities, are the African Americans, African-
American communities. They use cable in great amounts despite the
miscalculation, the delayed wiring of our communities.
There was another such miscalculation in the area of fast-food
restaurants. For a long time the big restaurants, McDonald's and Burger
King, were avoiding the opening of franchises within the inner city
communities. They did not do objective market studies. It was not the
fact that green is green and we can make money here and, therefore, we
shall go where the money can be made; they had their own stereotypes
and drawbacks that delayed the development of franchises in the inner-
city communities. Now some of their highest-income-producing franchises
are in inner-city communities, the fast-food restaurants.
Sometimes I think it is, perhaps, not so good that so many of our
young people are existing on so much cholesterol. But that is for
another discussion.
So we have an atmosphere that still is not free and objective. The
marketplace is not without political interference and not without
government intervention. The marketplace is not free and open.
We also need to understand some of the dynamics that have taken place
historically and are still taking place which affect and impact
African-American businesses. We need to understand that dynamic. We
need to understand and not let it get lost, the fact that ownership is
the result of inheritance mostly. You know, people who own things can
start tracing back to the fact where they inherited something from
their parents, and then their parents inherited something from their
grandparents; and it goes back and back and back, and the line of
people being able to pass things down is one of the predominant factors
in the accumulation of wealth, of capital, of assets.
Now, there are some unusual situations. Bill Gates certainly is not
the richest man maybe in the world because of that accumulation
process. He is the beneficiary of something else, you know, the public
development of electronics. The fact that the military and the
Government of the United States put a great deal of investment into the
development of radio, development of television, development of the
Internet et cetera, laid the basis for people like Bill Gates to use
their genius to capitalize on that. So those are the exceptions.
Most family studies that have been done show that in families who can
trace back where they are now economically there is some indication
that that was the result of money being passed down from one generation
to another. Sometimes it might have been only furniture that a couple
inherited or got from their parents, or maybe sometimes it is just a
home, one home. Or sometimes, in fact, in this day and age, it is
usually a contribution toward the down payment on a house that comes
from the parents to a modern couple.
College graduates about to start out, large numbers get a little
boost in terms of wedding presents or some other kind of gift from
their parents which enables them to buy the house that becomes one of
their major assets.
So the accumulation of wealth relies very heavily on family
generations and things being passed down from one generation to the
other. Given that fact, the fact that there were 232 years of slavery
where people of African descent not only could not own anything, they
were themselves property; for 232 years nothing could be passed down.
We cannot trace back an accumulation of assets from a present-day
black family to the time that they, their parents or their ancestors
were brought here in chains from Africa. We certainly cannot jump the
ocean and go to some country where they had an opportunity to bring
some of their wealth from their country, from their family, with them
when they came. It might have just been no more than a suitcase.
Many immigrants came to America; all they had was a suitcase with
clothing, meager belongings, and a few valuables maybe that were passed
down. But that suitcase was far more than any slave arriving on a slave
ship had, I assure my colleagues. Slaves were even deprived of
association with each other. Deliberately, most slave ships and most
slave traders mixed up the tribes and broke down the groups so that any
inheritance of a code of honor, mores and traditions, all of that was
also wiped out.
We could not have that because people spoke different languages, came
from different groups. So we could not even inherit some sense of being
and sense of order that came from the old country.
Africa had societies and organizations, and it is well documented,
governments of various natures which could have been passed down. But
all of that was deliberately wiped out. So certainly nothing concrete,
nothing physical, no assets were passed on.
Imagine, 232 years, that is 7 generations, out of the loop. So when
we look at people of African descent and where they are economically in
the structure of America, stop and think about the
[[Page H430]]
fact that there is a gap there where nothing was passed down, nothing
could accumulate, no assets could be transferred for 232 years, for
almost 7 generations.
That has an impact of where we are in terms of capital for African-
American businesses today, in terms of wealth that exists among
families so those families may support businesses.
Of course, we are an integrated society. We are not depending on
segregated communities where only African-American families will
support African-American businesses. There is a bigger picture now, a
global situation.
Let us take a look at the global macroeconomics of today and how that
impacts on African-American communities.
Parren Mitchell was one of my great heroes. He sat here. Often, he
sat right there. It was his favorite seat. He was the author of the
set-asides which required the Federal contracts to set aside a small
portion, 10 percent. It went down to 4 percent in some bills.
But the set-aside principle was established by Parren Mitchell. The
set-aside principle was based upon the fact that we needed to do
something to compensate for the fact that those 232 years were imposed
on people. The government was a party to that imposition.
The history and tradition, whatever makes up a country and a nation,
has to take responsibility for what happened. One way to try to work
out of that situation is to deal with some special treatment,
compensatory treatment. What a horrible word, a horrible concept for
most Americans. They just do not want anybody to have special
treatment. Well, we got special treatment for 232 years. For 232 years,
we were treated like no other Americans.
Even the Native Americans, who certainly have much to complain about
in terms of the way they were treated, even they were not deprived of
their traditions and their whole sense of family structure, as well as
the right to own. Their problems are great, and I certainly think that
they, too, are owed some special treatment, but we got special
treatment.
One way to get out of the situation that we are in now is to have
some special treatment which is compensatory. Affirmative action is
compensatory treatment. Nobody wants to hear that these days. They want
to see everybody as being equal.
In the world of business, nobody wants to talk about giving anybody
any special favors, but let us take a look at this world of business.
In macroeconomic terms, we are faced with a situation now where the
United States of America has bailed out Mexico with the $20 or $30
billion loan to help the economy of Mexico. At present, we have
contemplated a bailout of Indonesia, $50 or $60 billion.
We are not going to be the sole participants in the bailout, but we
are going to participate, and we will probably end up, the people of
America, paying the lion's share of whatever is done to bail out
Indonesia's economy, Malaysia, Thailand, South Korea. They are talking
about $50 to $60 billion for South Korea.
We are engaged in global economics. We are showering special
treatment on certain groups. There is what I call an international
banking socialism where government does step in through its
International Monetary Fund or a bank.
Government steps into the market when the market is in great trouble.
Government stepped in in this country to save the savings and loans,
the victims of the savings and loan swindles.
The government has stepped in in Mexico. Now it proposes to do that
in South Korea, in Malaysia, and Indonesia. Billions, we are talking
about billions. They have used it badly.
Obviously, when you have a crash of an economy and you need a $50
billion bailout, a lot of things went wrong. A lot of things have gone
wrong. Mismanagement, corruption, all kinds of things have gone wrong.
How did they get the money in the first place? It is so difficult to
get a thousand dollar loan if you are an African American walking into
a bank in this country. How did they get billions, and they did not
have competence to manage it well? How did they get billions when they
had corruption? I mean, obviously corruption could not be hidden. How
did all of this happen?
Government was very much involved in South Korea during the war,
Korean War. North Korea attacked South Korea, and the city of Seoul was
destroyed several times. When I visited there, I was amazed at the
metropolis that was built up. It took lots and lots of money and lots
and lots of help from the outside, which I do not want to disparage at
all. Generosity should be encouraged.
But a lot of businesses existed. We visited steel mills and
automobile manufacturing plants. What I am reading in the paper now is
that those plants had nothing to do with reality.
The third largest steel producer in the world is in South Korea. It
did not make sense. There was no market for that much steel from that
place. But they were given lots of money. Billions and billions of
dollars flowed into the building of the steel industry in Korea.
{time} 2100
The cars that are manufactured, rolling off the line, they do things
so beautifully in terms of the mechanics and the engineering, but
evidently the financing, there was something radically wrong.
How did they get from the bankers, the hard-nosed investment
community, how did they get all that community, and why can't African
American communities get a few billion to develop Bedford-Stuyvesant in
my district, or Brownsville, to develop New York, a few billion to
develop Harlem, to develop Watts in Los Angeles? When they talk about
development in the inner-city communities, they start talking about a
few hundred thousand here and there.
Even the empowerment zone concept, which is the most generous attempt
at economic development, they have limited it to six urban areas to
begin with, and three rural areas. Now we are going to add 15 more
urban areas and 5 rural areas. That is very much a piecemeal approach
in terms of the number of communities that can participate.
But even in the structure that they have set up, where there is the
greatest amount of generosity in terms of the Federal Government
providing tax credits so that private industry will come in and large
amounts of tax credits are available in this situation, at the same
time they are going to supply millions of dollars for loans and for
some social program investment, et cetera.
It is a great program, but it is not on the level of the kind of aid
we have given to Mexico or to South Korea or to Indonesia, the kind of
dollars that are flowing. Private industry is not running to get into
our neighborhoods, which are very good investments, because we are
operating within the context of the United States of America laws. The
laws, the codes, the regulations, all the things that protect
businesses anywhere else in America protect businesses in the African
American community.
Mr. Speaker, what I am saying is that we come to praise the fact that
African-American business is moving forward at a more rapid pace. We
come to praise the new opportunities and the middle class that has made
those opportunities into reality. There was a great program on public
television last night, Henry Louis Gates was the host of a number of
interviews dealing with the fact there are two societies in the black
community. One is that booming middle-class black community, growing by
leaps and bounds, incomes rising, and then the other is the great
majority of the black community, the African-American community, where
you have tremendous suffering and the prosperity of the 1990's has not
caught on there at all. High unemployment in areas like one-half of my
congressional district, where unemployment has steadily been up at 15
percent for adults, and for young people it is as high as 30 percent.
It has been that way for the last 10 years. It has not impacted.
We must, while we salute the progress, understand that something more
has to be made to happen. We have to look at economic development in
new ways.
We certainly would like to have an empowerment zone in our community.
We are applying for one, along with the gentleman from New York (Mr.
Towns) and the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Velazquez), trying to get
an empowerment zone in Brooklyn, to get
[[Page H431]]
the kind of stimulus we need to have to encourage and develop and
enhance and sustain more African-American businesses, more businesses
in the Hispanic community, too.
We have a situation there where hospitals are our largest employers,
more than 5,000 people employed in one hospital complex in my district,
and there is a danger that the politics of the situation may result in
the closing down of the hospitals. The politics now are frightening us
because the economic development we foresee if we get an empowerment
zone, we see the hospitals being able to generate a whole set of
additional businesses in our community, as they do now, they employ
large numbers of people. There are cleaning services, food services,
there are various other kinds of services, the people that do the
repair, the x-ray machines, all kinds of services that are there that
will be gone if we do not take care of the politics that are seeking to
close down our hospitals and move them somewhere else.
So the politics are inseparable from the economics. We hope the
encouragement, the possibilities of an economic empowerment zone, will
lead to less of a drive to close down the hospitals and leave a big
slum in the middle of our communities.
There are numerous other examples of how the politics have to be in
place and have to work hand in hand. The government and political
situation have to go hand in hand with the economic development. The
whole area of tourism, which Cleveland understands very well, Lou
Stokes from Cleveland, the Mayor there, understands the building of a
Rock and Roll Museum in the heart of Cleveland is a great step forward
economically. Just build the place that has a great attraction for
people, and when they come, they bring their dollars and they support
many other kinds of businesses.
The development of our big cities is one of the most outstanding
museums of African-American history, is now in downtown Detroit, and
they had written off downtown Detroit 10 years ago and said it would
never come back. Downtown Detroit is coming back in many different
ways, and one of the ways it is coming back is the political leadership
has chosen to make an investment in the downtown in many ways. One of
the ways they are making the investment, of course, is the building of
facilities like an African-American museum that has the highest
attendance of any such museum anywhere in the country.
As I close, I would like to bring to your attention the fact that I
came here from a special showing by HBO of the film, Four Little Girls,
a documentary film directed by Spike Lee. In that film, one of the
things that I noticed right away as they depicted the Birmingham
community out of which those four little girls who were murdered by the
bombing in the church on a Sunday morning, they came out of very well-
organized families. They came out of a community which was low- and
middle-class probably, but you could see from the houses, from the
neighborhood, very stable. They came out of the kind of environment
that I grew up in, much poorer, we did not have brick houses, but wood
houses, but there was an order and stability there, especially as the
prosperity of World War II came to our communities and the prosperity
right after the war. And when you have jobs and families had income,
you did not have the drug problems, you did not have the
disintegration, you did not have the need for large numbers of welfare.
When you take care of the economy and do what is right by the
economy, and spread and share the wealth, then many other problems get
solved. It is amazing how many of our communities have been torn
asunder that once had so much organization, so many middle-class
institutions, those kids belonged to the Girl Scouts and the Sunshine
Club, and all the stuff that we now have to try to recreate in our
urban communities that have been torn apart by the lack of jobs and
disintegration of families, the coming of drugs, et cetera.
So the economics will blossom, the economics must blossom. They are
key to revitalization of our communities and our people, but they
cannot happen, it does not happen by itself. The market forces need to
work hand in hand with government, and government needs to assert
itself and understand that it should be there, more than just for
multibillion dollar bailouts. That kind of socialism we do not need.
It should be there in terms of stimulating the economy, as it did
with the Morrill Act, as it did with the Transcontinental Railroad, as
it did with the GI Bill of Rights, which created a whole work force
that could step forward, an intelligent, well-educated work force,
created overnight, in large numbers, from the returning GI's because we
provided an education, and on and on it goes.
Government and business need to work together to guarantee that there
will be a continuing empowerment through business and economic
development in the African-American community.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
Mr. OWENS. I yield to the gentleman from California.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I have a few thoughts on black history
that I thought that I would present tonight, and I thank the gentleman
for yielding.
Mr. Speaker, I would just like to say I am here today to recognize a
part of black history that sometimes people forget about, and that is
that African Americans, as we all know, African Americans have played a
tremendous role in ensuring American prosperity since the founding of
our country. But all too long and for all too often, people are just
focusing on the labor that was provided by African Americans who began
as slaves and then became part of our labor force.
It is well-known that they have contributed much, and it is also
well-known that in recent years African Americans have become
increasingly owners of small businesses and mom and pop shops, all the
way to Fortune 500 corporations.
But what is less well-known is a subject dear to my heart, and that
is that black Americans have made and continue to make a vital
contribution to the technological edge that America has and have made
tremendous contributions to America's technological success, from the
earliest days of our republic. Black Americans have, over the years,
benefited from our country's strong patent system, and we have the
strongest patent protection of any Nation in the world, but through the
invention of black Americans, utilizing this right, by the way, at
times their other rights were being totally trampled upon, but their
rights for patent protection were being protected. Because of this,
they have made tremendous contributions to our country, that sometimes
are totally overlooked, and these contributions have added greatly to
our way of life, to the quality of life of Americans.
I have a list here, quite a few African American inventors that have
done things. How many people know that Elijah McCoy, a black American
in 1872, had over 57 patents on engines and machinery that were part of
the whole steam engine and the basis for the settling of the West and
the basis for our whole industrialization of our country? Those steam
engines and the parts he invented were so important that when people
went back at the turn of the century to ask for parts to an engine,
they would say, ``Now, is this the real McCoy?''
That is where that came from. The real McCoy was a black American who
was an inventor who played such an important part in the development of
the steam engine.
Lewis Howard Latimer in 1881 took Thomas Edison's light bulb, and we
all know Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, but it was not
practical until Howard Latimer, a black American, took that and
invented a long-lasting carbon filament that replaced this original
bamboo filament that Edison had been working with.
How many of our fellow Americans understand that and appreciate these
types of contributions?
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