[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 177 (Thursday, November 20, 2008)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2308-E2310]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 AMERICA'S TABLE: A THANKSGIVING READER CELEBRATING OUR DIVERSE ROOTS 
                           AND SHARED VALUES

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. JOHN LEWIS

                               of georgia

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, November 19, 2008

  Mr. LEWIS of Georgia. Madam Speaker, as we celebrate Thanksgiving, a 
uniquely American holiday, I rise today to remind this Congress that we 
are all one people, one family, one America. We all come from different 
backgrounds, but in millions of homes across the country, our 
celebrations look very much the same. We will gather around our dinner 
tables with family and friends giving thanks. This day is a reminder 
that we are all together in this American experiment, that we should 
celebrate our diversity, but also recognize our shared values.
  I commend to every family the publication called America's Table: A 
Thanksgiving Reader. The pamphlet is short and simple, and it is meant 
to be read at the Thanksgiving meal or as people contemplate the 
meaning of Thanksgiving. This booklet tells the story of American 
people by sharing profiles of men and women of diverse backgrounds. I 
am honored to be one of the people profiled in this year's publication.
  The American Jewish Committee began publishing America's Table 
annually on the Thanksgiving after the 9/11 disaster. They partner with 
ten human relations organizations, including the NAACP, the National 
Urban League, and the National Council of La Raza to distribute this 
wonderful pamphlet.
  We all have our stories of how we came to this great land. We must 
use this opportunity to celebrate our differences and our oneness as 
Americans. I submit a copy of this year's America's Table for the 
Record, and I hope and pray that Americans will continue to use it as a 
way to help build the Beloved Community, a nation at peace with itself.

[[Page E2309]]

                            America's Table

                         A Thanksgiving Reader


            celebrating our diverse roots and shared values

       You are holding the eighth annual edition of America's 
     Table.
       As in past years, the brief narrative on the white pages is 
     intended to be read aloud at the Thanksgiving meal. It helps 
     us express gratitude for living in a nation where each of us, 
     regardless of background, is entitled to a place at the 
     table.
       The facing pages contain profiles of eight accomplished 
     Americans. These profiles can be read at the Thanksgiving 
     meal or whenever you have time. Five of the profiled 
     individuals arrived in America recently. Another is descended 
     from slaves. All are deeply engaged in helping America fully 
     achieve the promise of opportunity and mutual respect.
       By reading America's Table on Thanksgiving, we add new 
     meaning to our most beloved and universal holiday as a time 
     to celebrate our diverse roots and shared values. In some 
     homes, a leader designates the parts to be read. At other 
     gatherings, people simply go around the table, switching 
     readers at each sentence, paragraph, or page. Do whatever 
     feels right for you and your family and friends.
       And enjoy a warm and peaceful holiday.
       November 2008
       Adams Costa Spencer Lind Tanaka Carney Schultz Pucinski 
     Leibowitz McLaren Gonzales Szymankiewicz Giannini Humphreys 
     Zimmer Poulos Tinley Kahn Trugglio Singh Sandbuig Jackson 
     Kogovsek Smith Rivera Acosta Demetrios Nemec Schwartz Nwaguru 
     Rosenbaum Kimura Peck Teters Foulks Koproski


                        We are each on a journey

       These are the names of the generations that came to 
     America.
       They reveal individual lives that represent the story of 
     our nation.
       These are the names of the generations that built America.
       They recall our parents and grandparents and mirror 
     ourselves.
       These are the names of the generations that will care for 
     America.
       They remind us why we gather at this Thanksgiving table.
       Calderon Lew Durley Branovan Sharma Hassan Montalto 
     Paterson Jordan Cheng Gioia Noriega Ellison Josephs Kassab 
     Phillips Pun Letona Linares Brooks Gilchrist Mineta Levine 
     Patel Tsosie Yuo Meghani Verdeja Aoun Parens Al-Suwaij Morris 
     Rangel Hong Lafley Nganji Ahuja Totenberg Lewis Shamim Padron
       Chung-Wha Hong ``We were watching the presidential debates 
     with Jimmy Carter, and I remember my mother saying, `He's 
     going to be the president and he does the dishes' ''
       Growing up in South Korea, Chung-Wha Hong gained her 
     impressions of the United States from black-and-white TV.


                America is heaven for women and children

       Hong was eleven when the family arrived in St. Louis, in 
     1977. Local people were welcoming, she recalls, but the 
     schools offered no programs for students like Hong who spoke 
     no English. ``I went to school and slept all day.''
       Her immigrant experience and the influence of her parents, 
     both religious leaders and social reformers, shaped her 
     career choice. After graduation from the University of 
     Pennsylvania, Hong returned briefly to Korea, where young 
     activists inspired her.
       Back in the United States, she worked in Washington, D.C., 
     for Korean and Asian organizations before moving to New York 
     to engage at the grassroots level ``on work that flows from 
     my identity as a Korean-American immigrant.''
       As head of the New York Immigration Coalition, Hong now 
     helps immigrants of all backgrounds cope with what she 
     describes as a convergence of issues facing new arrivals, 
     including: poverty, lack of English language skills, and 
     limited access to government services. These challenges, says 
     Hong, are compounded by anti-immigrant sentiment.
       ``Part of my job is to challenge people that this is not 
     what this country is about, to tap into people's better 
     instincts of generosity and justice.''
       The insightful questions of our children, innocently asked, 
     compel us to reconnect with our past.
       When our families came to America.
       How they got here.
       What they found.
       Why they came.
       At every table the answers are different, but much the 
     same.
       Many of us were immigrants and refugees from all regions of 
     the world, fleeing the afflictions of poverty and oppression.
       Drawn by the promise of a better life, we chose America and 
     she took us into safe harbor.
       Not every journey was easy.
       The first arrivals sometimes shunned those who followed.
       Not every journey was voluntary.
       The first African slaves landed in Jamestown a year before 
     the Pilgrims settled in Plymouth.
       Not every journey was righteous.
       Native Americans were devastated by a new nation's need to 
     conquer, cultivate, and build.
       A.G. Lafley knows something about diversity.
       On his father's side, Lafley is descended from a French 
     Canadian man who migrated to New England in the 1850s and 
     married a Native American woman. A few decades later, his 
     mother's family arrived in Boston from County Cork, Ireland.
       ``My mother was adamant about understanding the world and 
     people who are different from you,'' says Lafley. ``She was a 
     card-carrying member of the League of Women Voters. I 
     remember being dragged around in the '52, '56, and '60 
     presidential elections in neighborhoods we didn't live in.''
       Lafley enrolled as a Ph.D. student in history before a 
     hitch in the Navy overseeing retail supply shifted his career 
     goals. After Harvard Business School, he joined Cincinnati-
     based Procter & Gamble in 1977, becoming CEO in 2000 and 
     chairman in 2002.
       For Lafley, diversity is a competitive advantage at a 
     company that employs 138,000 people from 140 nationalities 
     and ethnicities, and provides household and personal care 
     products for more than three billion consumers.
       Lafley recalls a recent conversation with a young mother 
     and her family in a modest home on a hillside above Sao 
     Paulo, Brazil. ``We sit around the kitchen table,'' he says.


                       I learn through her story

       ``It may take a little longer to work across cultures and 
     languages,'' says Lafley, ``but we're going to come up with 
     more ideas and create something that will make a 
     difference.'' Sometimes the difference is big.
       ``We developed a unique and proprietary product that can 
     render any source of water anyplace in the world potable.''
       Jean Nganji ``Are you Hutu or Tutsi?''
       The question was raised by a teacher when Jean Nganji was a 
     seven-year-old schoolboy in Rwanda.
       ``Go home and ask your parents,'' the teacher commanded.
       The next day, he recalls, ``I said, `I am Tutsi' '' 
     Nganji's parents then pushed him hard to excel academically.
       ``Why?'' he asked.
       ``Just listen,'' they said. ``Don't ask questions.''
       The answer soon emerged, as Nganji was forced to repeat 
     grades, despite his competence, because he was Tutsi. When he 
     realized that a Tutsi admissions quota made it difficult to 
     attend college in Rwanda, he was accepted at a small school 
     in Massachusetts with the help of his friend Andre, who had 
     moved to America.
       The two young men became college roommates soon after 
     Nganji arrived in the United States, in October 1989. But 
     Andre was Hutu, and a year later, with the outbreak of war, 
     the friendship ended.
       The genocide started on April 6, 1994. On April 15, Nganji 
     learned that his parents and youngest brother were killed. 
     The daughter of his eldest brother, who perished, was saved 
     by her nanny, a Hutu woman who claimed the four-year-old was 
     her little sister.
       Today, Nganji lives near Boston. He tells his story at 
     schools in America and travels regularly to Rwanda on a 
     project that helps Tutsi and Hutu youth tell their stories 
     through film. ``I have found therapy and peace talking to 
     young people.''


      Do not fall into the traps of ignorance, bigotry, and racism

                 We are each part of America's journey

       We did not leave history behind, like unwanted baggage at 
     immigration's door.
       Our particular pasts and our shared present are wedded in 
     hyphenated names:
       African-American,
       Irish-American,
       Italian-American,
       Korean-American,
       Polish-American.
       We are not always on a first-name basis with one another.
       But we quickly become acquainted in playgrounds and 
     classrooms, in college dorms and military barracks, and in 
     offices and factories.
       We feel at home.
       In some parts of the world, our differences would be 
     threatening.
       We feel enriched.
       In America, our differences resonate in our names, 
     language, food, and music. They inspire art and produce 
     champions and leaders.
       We feel free to disagree.
       We are a family, and what is a family gathering without 
     debate?
       Gurpreet Singh Ahuja was completing his residency in New 
     Delhi, in 1984, when Indira Gandhi was assassinated.
       Reports that the prime minister was shot by Sikhs set off 
     reprisals throughout India. ``As a physician in the hospital, 
     I saw the charred bodies of those young men and women.''
       The violence contradicted his experience growing up. ``As a 
     Sikh, we're reminded to respect all faiths. They're all paths 
     to the same central truth.''
       He and his wife, Jasjit Singh, also a doctor, moved to New 
     York, in 1986, where they continued their medical training 
     before moving to Washington, D.C., and then to Southern 
     California. They visited family in India annually.
       ``Every time I stepped foot back on American soil it would 
     give me a great sense of exhilaration and liberation.''
       That feeling was tested in the aftermath of 9/11 and the 
     rash of hate crimes that began with the murder of a Sikh 
     living in Arizona. The events evoked memories of 1984. Says 
     Ahuja,


              I never lost faith in the system in America

       He helped establish the California Sikh Council to promote 
     tolerance and educate

[[Page E2310]]

     people about the Sikh faith, and now serves as president of 
     the council. Jasjit Singh is vice president of the Central 
     Orange County Interfaith Council.
       ``As a relatively recent immigrant, I am very appreciative 
     of the opportunities that this country has given me,'' says 
     Ahuja. ``Our value system must remain steadfast. That's what 
     distinguishes us from most any other country in the world.''
       Nina Totenberg ``Ninotchka, we're proud of you.''
       Nina Totenberg still cherishes her father's words. She had 
     just endured a period of intense scrutiny after her reporting 
     led to testimony by law professor Anita Hill, during the 
     confirmation hearing of Justice Clarence Thomas.
       Her father, Roman Totenberg, a world-renowned violinist, 
     performed across Europe by age eleven. A Polish Jew, he left 
     Europe in 1935. ``He saw the rise of Hitler,'' says his 
     daughter, ``but he came to America because it represented a 
     kind of equality and meritocracy that did not exist in 
     Europe.''
       Nina Totenberg's mother, Melanie, shared her interest in 
     American politics. ``I remember my mother watching the Army-
     McCarthy hearings on TV all day every day, explaining to me 
     what was going on,'' says Totenberg. ``I knew who all those 
     senators were and I was eight years old.''
       At 16, reading The Making of the President, the classic 
     book about the 1960 election, Totenberg confirmed her 
     childhood desire to be a witness to history. ``I wanted to be 
     a reporter from the time I realized that I couldn't be Nancy 
     Drew.''
       For the past three decades, Totenberg has reported for 
     National Public Radio and is best known for her coverage of 
     the Supreme Court. ``There are a lot of injustices in the 
     world and in this country,'' she says. ``The ones that I can 
     do something about--I will try to do something about.'' She 
     credits her father, who still teaches at age 97.


      You can't get my dad to do something he thinks is not right

       We believe in fairness.
       In America, the loudest voice does not always have the last 
     word, and every voice has a right to be heard.
       We act with hope.
       Not because life is perfect, but because we are free to 
     face life, and all its imperfections, on our own terms.
       We rely on faith.
       In a sturdy and tested framework of law and government that 
     works because of the confidence we place in it and in each 
     other.


         We are each responsible for keeping America on course

       ``Are we there yet?'' the children ask.
       We know the answer.
       We pursue justice.
       But still have a way to go.
       We celebrate freedom.
       But endlessly debate what it means to be free.
       Our table is brimming.
       But not everyone receives a fair portion.
       John Lewis Growing up in a large family on a small farm in 
     rural Alabama, John Lewis cared for the chickens.
       When his parents wanted to sell or trade chickens, or have 
     one for dinner, ``I would protest,'' Lewis recalls. ``They 
     were creatures of God, and we didn't have a right to abuse 
     them.''
       Lewis was fifteen in 1955, when Emmett Till, a black 
     teenager, was brutally murdered in Mississippi, Rosa Parks 
     refused to move to the back of the bus, and Martin Luther 
     King, Jr., organized the Montgomery bus boycott. Listening to 
     King on the radio, ``It was like he was saying, `John Lewis, 
     you can do it,


                   You, too, can make a contribution

       Lewis went to Nashville, to study nonviolence and become a 
     minister. He participated in sit-in demonstrations, Freedom 
     Rides, and the creation of a campus group called the Student 
     Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
       ``Even when I was being beaten, I saw these individuals 
     almost like the chickens,'' he says. ``They were innocent 
     creatures and something happened to them.''
       As chairman of SNCC, at 23, Lewis stood with King and other 
     civil rights leaders on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial 
     during the March on Washington in August 1963, preaching, 
     ``Wake up, America.'' He has exerted leadership in Congress 
     since 1986, representing the district around Atlanta. ``We've 
     made progress,'' says Lewis. ``The world is so different from 
     the world I grew up in.''
       Still pursuing his vision of a ``beloved community,'' Lewis 
     asserts, ``We need to turn toward each other to create a 
     greater sense of community and belonging.''
       Tasneem Shamim. In the late 1990s, at about age 40, Tasneem 
     Shamim began to feel spiritually empty.
       She missed a sense of compassion and universality, which 
     she remembered from her childhood in India and could not find 
     in the mosques in New Jersey, where Shamim, a doctor, lives 
     with her husband and three children.
       ``One of my early memories is going with my grandmother to 
     the small villages. My grandmother started organizations to 
     help women out of poverty and oppression.''
       To help reconnect with her feelings, Shamim visited the 
     holy sites in Mecca and Medina, and she decided to cover her 
     hair. Her mother and sister were concerned about potential 
     antagonism, and one friend asked, ``Do you have to go to 
     chemotherapy?''
       For Shamim, the head scarf is an opportunity to prompt and 
     answer questions about Islam. Most important, it makes her 
     more conscious of her roles in life.
       ``You become a doctor mostly to please God. God says, `You 
     cannot help Me, but help the creatures that I have created.' 
     ''
       Shamim also began studying Sufism, a spiritual strand of 
     Islam. At the urging of a Sufi leader that she express her 
     religion in good works, Shamim established the Muslim Women's 
     Coalition, a national organization devoted to community 
     service and mutual respect.


                 People accept that America is a quilt

       Progress can be slow as we propose and protest, argue and 
     advocate.
       But we are grateful to be part of this vigorous democracy.
       We enjoy its unparalleled privileges and accept its 
     obligations:
       To pursue our dreams while helping others.
       To advance our convictions while respecting others.
       To prepare our children for the gift of the American 
     journey.

                          ____________________