[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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