[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 39 (Thursday, February 27, 2025)]
[House]
[Pages H901-H905]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
REMEMBERING HISTORY AND WHY IT IS IMPORTANT
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 3, 2025, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Mfume) is recognized
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
General Leave
Mr. MFUME. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may
have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and include
extraneous material on the subject of my Special Order today.
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Haridopolos). Is there objection to the
request of the gentleman from Maryland?
There was no objection.
Mr. MFUME. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to talk about two things, one
particularly of import and interest, because we are exiting what we
have come to know in this country as Black History Month and the other
more pertinent in terms of the current news and what is going on,
particularly what has been going on over the last month and a half.
I begin my remarks today by talking about this whole notion of
history, why it is important, why nobody owns it, why it affects all of
us as Americans, and why it is important to remember. In remembering,
we tend not to make the same mistake again.
As we officially end the month tomorrow, I wanted to take some time
today to bring to the attention of the American public something that
is not highlighted and very seldom ever talked about but very important
because it was a grave injustice and a mark on our Nation's history. It
is referred to as the Tulsa Race Massacre which occurred in the summer
of 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
I want to walk us back to that summer and those three nights when the
affluent Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa, often referred to then and
now as Black Wall Street, was burned to the ground. It was totally
burned to the ground, and 300 African-American people--men, women, and
children--were murdered.
It is hard to imagine that that happened in this country in just the
last century, just a little over 100 years ago. It did, and the fact
that it did, I think, speaks volumes about why it is so very important
that we understand the deep hurt that took place and why we understand
also it is really our responsibility to remember that and to make sure
that we don't allow this Nation to creep down that dark kind of road
again.
That Tulsa Race Massacre, again, 300 people were murdered. It started
with a man being falsely accused of sexual assault, a 19-year-old kid.
On May 30, 1921, Sarah Page, a young White woman operating an elevator
in the Drexel Building in Tulsa, Oklahoma, encountered him. He
encountered her.
Dick Rowland was the name of the 19-year-old Black kid. He was a
shoeshine, a delivery boy, and worked in the Drexel Building. He was in
that building at that time because they had a public ``colored''
restroom facility. He came there to relieve himself, as he normally
did.
While there, both Rowland and Page were both in an elevator. A clerk,
ironically a White clerk, claimed to have heard a scream and called the
police, telling them that this kid, this 19-year-old kid, Rowland, had
sexually assaulted the young lady.
The police chief, whose name was John Gustafson, reported that the
young lady bore no scratches, no bruises, no disarranged dress. The
young woman said: No, he never made a bad remark to me of any kind.
This is public record.
That should be enough to negate this false claim that someone just
yelled out of the clear blue. Despite that, charges were brought
against the 19-year-old kid, Mr. Roland. He was arrested and then taken
to the Tulsa courthouse.
Later that afternoon, newspapers ran inflammatory articles hot off
the press that suggested that the 19-year-old kid, Rowland, had
sexually assaulted the young lady, and they ran with a story that
stirred emotions at that time.
{time} 1215
The story was: Headline. Headline. Read all about it. Young Negro
nabbed for attacking girl in elevator.
Even though the girl's testimony was: He never touched me. We never
spoke. He got on the elevator. He got off.
Even though there was no physical evidence to the contrary, that is
what the newspaper ran at the time.
Worried, as most of the residents were, that this kid was going to be
lynched, approximately 300 men met at the courthouse, and an estimated
25 Black men also arrived at the scene to back up the sheriff who had
sent out a plea for help. The sheriff wanted somebody there to protect
the courthouse to ensure justice and to make sure that this kid he had
had to take into custody was, in fact, safe.
However, when the crowd of White men swelled to roughly 3,000 and the
group of Black men swelled to about 75, a confrontation did not take
place. There was a standoff at the courthouse, and the National Guard
Armory in Tulsa opened its doors and allowed people to come in,
citizens, to arm themselves. They just took whatever weapons they
wanted. Then they dispersed.
Now, if this sounds a little strange, it really, really is. This was
104 or so years ago. It is the sort of thing that in this month where
we talk about Black history and American history, which are both
intertwined, it is important to say to a lot of people that this really
happened. I am not making it up. We have got court records. There are
newspaper records. There are reports of all sorts by those who reported
the news. This is an American fact. It is chilling. I mean, it is sad.
It is very, very sad.
I don't raise it today to make anybody feel bad. I just raise it to
say that you can't simply close the books and act like things did not
happen, call it DEI if somebody wants to talk about it, and pretend
that something that did happen, that was gross and so antihuman--it is
still repulsive to pretend that it did not happen.
For someone just tuning in right now, these are the statistics from
that day. Again, this community, Greenwood, was known as the Black Wall
Street at the time. It was thriving with businesses and
entrepreneurship and commerce.
Eighty-five of the businesses in that town owned by the Black
population were burned to the ground. One thousand of their homes were
set on fire and burned to the ground. As I indicated in my opening
remarks, 300 African Americans were killed that day and the next day,
and there were 700 people injured, overflowing the hospitals, which in
that day and time were challenged anyway.
The total damage was estimated to be $1.5 million, but in today's
dollars it is $32 million plus.
What was left of the town? Just smoldering ashes.
Again, it is important to talk about this, because this actually
happened. For anybody thinking that Black History Month is just a
celebration of all the great things that Africans Americans did or
invented or their role in the
[[Page H902]]
arts or in sports or anything like that, it is. It is also about the
shame of massacres in this country, the home of the free and the land
of the brave, and how somehow we are just supposed to cover it over and
never believe that it happened. There is importance in remembering. The
importance is to remember so that it never happens again.
As I indicated, there is this standoff. The sheriff has called for
help. He believes that this mob of 300 White men are going to storm the
small jail, take the 19-year-old kid, and lynch him.
The National Guard, for some reason, opened its doors so citizens can
run in and get weapons and arm themselves.
We don't know who fired the first shot or what happened, but we do
know that what was to happen would be the worst race massacre in
American history.
Gunfire broke out between the Greenwood men and the White mob, and at
least 20 persons fell dead right there at that first volley.
During the shoot-out--this is from published reports. This is not
hearsay.
During the shoot-out, White mobs prevented the ambulances from
treating Black men and let them lay there and die. Around the city,
racial violence ensued, including an unarmed Black man being chased
into the Royal Theater and then murdered viciously on the stage.
Greenwood men fled from the courthouse because they were outnumbered
and because they were pursued by this crazy mob of enraged men.
Most of the Black men made it back to their side of town, preparing
to defend their community, their wives, their children, and their
property, which caused rumors to circulate again, rumors that ginned up
a response that was completely out of touch with reality. It was being
said that there was a Negro uprising and, therefore, get ready to
protect yourself and get ready at the same time to defend your
property, even though the property was not under assault. It was the
property of the Black citizens there.
Throughout the night, they were engaged in gun battles at the Frisco
tracks. Those were the tracks that separated Black Greenwood from the
White sections of Tulsa.
Interestingly, many of the Black men--and you will see some of them
in some of these photographs--donned their World War I uniforms, their
military uniforms, the uniforms that they had worn to protect the
Nation in segregated troops in our armed services. Those uniforms had
hung in their closets. They put them back on to remind the mob that
they were Americans, that they were patriots, that they had offered to
give their lives, and so many never returned home.
I thought that was kind of fascinating that you are being besieged;
you are watching scores of your neighbors be murdered, lynched, burned;
you are watching businesses being destroyed; and you still love your
country so much that you go and get your uniform, your military
uniform, and put it on and stand in your doorway to protect your house.
On that same night, the police chief, the sheriff, and a judge
requested that Governor JBA Robertson send the National Guard in so
that they would have troops to restore order.
Around this time, however, fires began to erupt in the town of
Greenwood. Remember, this was called then, and it is now, the Black
Wall Street of America. It was great commerce, great independence,
great businesses, and great people developing a community that they
could be proud of, that Oklahoma could be proud of, and that the Nation
could be proud of.
Around this time, fires began to erupt, and firefighters were
actually threatened by the White mobs as they tried to extinguish the
flames. They could not protect all of the homes. That is why 1,000
homes burned down.
They started rounding up Black civilians for them to be interred, to
be locked up, put in jail.
From 2 a.m. that morning until 5 a.m., members of the Tulsa Police
Department, the National Guard, and American Legion formed mobs of
White men into companies and made a plan to invade Greenwood at
daybreak. They were going to end it once and for all, even though they
had started it.
Unlike the gun battles of the night before, this violence was more
one sided during this invasion as it was carried out. Despite pockets
of resistance from Black residents, they were overwhelmed, the women,
the children, and the elderly.
We have this crazy, crazy situation where this is happening in Tulsa,
Oklahoma, and yet there is not a sound from the White House. Knowing
that the National Guard has been called up, knowing by this time that
200 Black citizens had been murdered, there is this eerie, eerie
silence.
The mobs carried out their terrorizing campaign. They did it with the
old-style, early automobiles, the few that were around at the time.
They did it with machine guns mounted on grain elevators. They did it
as mobs, with tiki torches and knives and shotguns. They were organized
and began methodically burning Greenwood down block by block, while
women and children stood there watching people being set ablaze.
It is horrific. It is the sort of thing that I really don't want to
have to come here and talk about, but unless we tell the story of how
we became who we are, every aspect of that story, I think we do a
disservice to history. It is something, as I have said before, that is
just absolutely shameful.
Dr. A.C. Jackson, who at the time was a Black doctor and one of
America's more prominent surgeons, a Black man, was murdered
surrendering with his hands in the air on the steps of his porch. His
home was then looted and burned.
An elderly, paralyzed Black man was gunned down when he refused, when
ordered, to stand. He couldn't stand. He was paralyzed. He was shot
down and killed.
These are the reports that are still in the newspapers of the time,
those that talked about and wrote about what was happening.
A Black double amputee was tied to the bumper of a car and dragged
through the streets until he died and could not say anything else.
While there was resistance, including a group of Black men fighting
the invaders at the Mount Zion Baptist Church there in Greenwood, the
resistance was ultimately scattered by overwhelming machine gun fire.
As I have said before, this scene, and scenes like this, are part of
the history that we have to pledge to ourselves that we will never,
ever revisit.
You can see these persons who were the last ones that did not get
murdered. What does the headline say? ``Captured Negroes on way to
convention hall . . . June 1, 1921.''
It was a community of law-abiding, hardworking, successful people
that caused Black communities around the Nation to look at Tulsa as the
epitome of what could happen in terms of commerce and what could happen
in terms of education and what could happen in terms of just being able
to raise families the right way in America. That picture never returned
to the way it was.
People envied what was going on there until what they knew had
happened and what we all know did happen. Again, practically every
building in that Black community, dozens of churches, five hotels,
three restaurants, four drug stores, eight doctor's offices, two dozen
grocery stores, a public library, and over 1,000 homes burned to the
ground.
{time} 1230
As I said before, this is really not something that anybody wants to
talk about or regurgitate. It is very painful, quite frankly, when you
read through the books of history and see this.
My role here on the floor is not to make anybody feel bad or to shame
anybody. I just want us to remember that this took place, to know it,
and to not assume that things like this will never happen again. If you
live long enough, you might see everything twice. We must pledge
ourselves as a nation that we would never ever permit something like
this to take place again.
There was silence from the White House when this was happening. The
Governor there finally got involved on the third day. Martial law was
declared on June 1. The massacre had largely ceased by then, and the
fires continued to smolder and burn throughout the day. That martial
law was lifted on June 3. The National Guard left Tulsa on June 4.
The primary role of the National Guard during the massacre was to
arbitrarily take any and all Black men
[[Page H903]]
into custody, which prevented them from trying to fight the blazes that
were burning down their own homes.
This may also be hard to believe, but internment camps were set up at
the Convention Hall, McNulty Park, and Tulsa County Fairgrounds. We
didn't see internment camps again until the 1950s when Americans of
Japanese ancestry were huddled up and locked behind bars out of a
strange and twisted paranoid fear that they somehow would forget their
loyalty to their new homes and their loyalty to the country that they
loved. These were the first internment camps set up in Tulsa, and armed
guards were placed there to oversee the 4,000 to 6,000 people who were
detained in those camps, which were reported at the time to have
terrible sanitary conditions and inadequate food.
For at least a month after the massacre, African Americans needed to
be sponsored by a White Tulsan in order to get a special ID card in
order to leave the internment camp for 24 hours. You really just can't
make this up.
Without their card, those without employment were forced to work, to
clean the city, to bury more bodies that had not been buried, and to
live in that internment camp for almost a year, 4,000 to 6,000 people.
It is difficult to fully confirm the number of casualties. I have
said before the best estimates by reporters at the time and the
newspaper were that there were 300 people killed, that many of them
were just thrown into mass graves. It was difficult to count because
you were not allowed out on the streets. Reports from the Red Cross at
that time documented at least 700 injuries, people who lost their eyes,
lost their limbs, had their fingers cut off.
These sights, these sounds, and these horrors that I have just
described bear a resemblance to an apocalyptic war zone, quite frankly,
but it wasn't a war zone. It was the country that we love. ``My
country, tis of thee, sweet land of liberty.'' It was devilish
destruction that took place.
I want to put up these numbers again for somebody just tuning in and
asking what I am talking about. I am using the end of Black History
Month, again, not to sing flowery songs or to talk about great
achievements within the African-American community because we do that
throughout the year, but to talk about a pain that continues to burn in
the hearts of people who had to go through that, and to remind all of
us that this really did happen.
In 1921, Oklahoma impaneled a grand jury that subpoenaed 200
witnesses and returned 70 indictments, interestingly enough, mostly
against Black people in the community who were the victims of the riot
and victims of the massacre. Appallingly, the only people ever accused
and the only people to go to prison were the Black people of that
community.
The grand jury deemed that the massacre was a riot and blamed it on
Black men who went to the courthouse that night at the request of the
sheriff to help protect the courthouse and to help keep mobs from
lynching the young 19-year-old kid who was there and had been falsely
accused.
Tulsa's Public Welfare Board was formed to handle the rebuilding--
remember, this was 1921--which was replaced by Tulsa's then-mayor, T.D.
Evans, with a reconstruction committee. In his speech announcing the
committee, Mayor Evans again blamed the riot on the Black people of
Greenwood and suggested that the land should be redeveloped for
industrial purposes.
Remember, this was Black Wall Street at the time, the envy of
communities around the country, the model of self-initiatives,
discipline, and citizenship, but the mayor said it ought to be
redeveloped for industrial purposes.
Seated on the committee that granted his wish were individuals that
included the likes of Tate Brady, who was a wealthy White landowner who
was also later identified in several reports as a leading Klansman.
The city tried to force survivors out of Greenwood by passing a new
fire ordinance that made rebuilding extremely expensive. Even though
your house had been burned down, you would think the government would
try to help you, but they made it more expensive since so many homes of
the 1,000 that had been burned never got rebuilt.
A year later, in September 1921, an African-American attorney named
Buck Colbert Franklin secured a permanent injunction against that
ordinance, even though many had already been arrested for simply trying
to rebuild their homes.
The FBI got involved, and a gentleman by the name of T.F. Weiss, a
special agent, was leading up this effort. The FBI's predecessor agency
was also sent at that time to investigate whether crimes had taken
place during the riot--whether crimes had taken place.
We have a complete onslaught of violence that carries over for 3 days
where 300 people are murdered while living in the community that they
helped to build, where all of their businesses are burned to the
ground, where 1,000 homes are totally destroyed, where the cost and the
estimate was more than the State of Oklahoma even wanted to think
about. Yet, in Agent Weiss' own report, he makes mention that, on the
night of May 31, a police officer had recruited men from nearby towns
to join in the raid that would take place the next morning, which
should have been evidence itself of preplanning, but the report was
never turned in. Agent Weiss took less than a week to complete his
interviews and write a report, which may have never been reviewed by an
individual at the Justice Department.
In the halls of our judicial system, victims and descendants
desperately continued to seek some form of redress, and they were all
met with similar blockades.
In September 1926, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that insurance
companies could not be sued for the damages that took place as a result
of the massacre. You pay your insurance year after year. After you have
built your own house and lived there with your family and somebody
burns it down, you go to whatever the insurance company was at the time
to try to seek some relief, but the Supreme Court in Oklahoma ruled
that those insurance companies didn't have to do a damn thing, nothing.
Residents tried to sue Mayor Evans. They tried to sue the Tulsa
police and others throughout the decade of the 1920s. All of those
lawsuits, all of them, were dismissed.
In 2003, survivors and descendants of Tulsa alleging civil rights
violations and a denial of equal protection in the case of Alexander v.
Oklahoma began a process that gets us closer to where we are today.
There were descendants.
In fact, there were two women who both, I believe, are 105 or 106
years of age who fought this. They never stopped trying. They never
gave up. They were the last group of survivors. They brought their case
all the way to the Supreme Court. These are the witnesses who saw 300
people murdered, 1,000 homes destroyed, 85 businesses destroyed. They
held on some sort of way because they believed, as they said, that they
had to tell the story before they died because no one else wanted to
tell the story. It is unbelievable.
In June of last year, the Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed the case,
finding that the plaintiffs did not have legitimate grievances or that
their grievances did not fall within the scope of the law that they
sought to utilize.
This is just absolutely amazing. I don't know what it would have been
like to hold on all those many years with a nightmare of a story in
your gut and in your belly, with the crying and the pain and the
violence that you witnessed as a young person, but they held on. They
held on.
In 2010, just a decade before the Supreme Court of Oklahoma's
decision, the John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation was opened
in Tulsa. That center was established to foster dialogue about
historical and racial violence and the lingering effects that it has on
people and how they find that pain and promote healing.
That is why this story is so interesting. Mrs. Viola Ford Fletcher
and Ms. Lessie Benningfield Randle never stopped believing that their
country would, in fact, correct a wrong that had gone on so long.
God only knows that when they leave this planet for their eternal
rest, we have to carry on with their belief that there will be a
reckoning, that there will be reconciliation, and that there will be a
need to tell the story, not to make anybody feel bad but to make
everybody more committed to the fact
[[Page H904]]
that we have to be one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty for
all.
{time} 1245
I don't want to belabor the point, so I won't. I can just tell you,
Mr. Speaker, that I have lived long enough to know that difficulties
between groups in our society are not novel nor are they new but that
our approach to those differences must be both.
For more than 200 years we have joined together different colors,
different creeds, and different nationalities, all under that one flag,
and while this assembled diversity has produced the most successful
experience of democracy in the world's history, we have by no means
clearly achieved perfect harmony.
Slavery was allowed to exist legally for almost 200 years. Crosses
were burned to terrorize people in an ugly desecration of the symbol of
love. Just a century ago, Protestants and Catholics battled in the
streets of New York City, and on that day 44 Catholics were killed. At
the end of the decade of the 1930s, a ship by the name of the St. Louis
with a human cargo of Jewish men and Jewish women was denied safe
harbor in this, the land of the free and the home of the brave and sent
back to a madman named Hitler.
At the beginning of World War II, as I mentioned earlier, Japanese
Americans were huddled up and placed behind bars in internment camps
out of the fear that they somehow would forget their loyalty to their
new home.
After the attacks of 9/11, Arab and Muslim Americans were set upon
and beaten in the streets of America--lest we ever forget, by angry men
who formed mobs of their own--because their religion and because their
ethnicity were deemed to be a threat to the land that they professed to
love.
There have been times that we have sought as a Nation to ban the
teaching of foreign language and to slam shut the doors of elementary
schools simply because they were sponsored by religious groups. There
have been occasions and there have been periods where our differences
of race, our differences of religion, and our differences of
nationality have produced an ugly alienation instead of producing
harmony.
Nevertheless, as I prepare to conclude this portion of my remarks,
let me remind all of us that there are still yet other differences: The
difference between the people who have and the people who have not.
The difference between the people in this room, Members of the United
States Congress, you and I, and the millions of people in this country
who at this hour are out of work or working at jobs that provide them
with a scant living and no real dignity.
The difference between us, you and I, on one hand, living as we do in
relative comfort and the millions of people in the streets across
America torn by the terrible pain of drug addiction.
The difference between us and the illiterates.
The difference between us and the homeless.
The difference between our child parents and the 15-year-olds in
towns and communities across this Nation, who at this hour are about to
have children of their own, creating a situation where they are lost,
unprepared, and doomed to raising another generation of disadvantaged
children.
Those differences produce frustration, and they produce anger.
America at her best has always treated those differences with a blend
of common sense and compassion. America at her worst has treated such
differences with the empty evenhandedness of Marie Antoinette: Just let
them eat cake. We can't be bothered.
Yet we know that this is not a perfect nation and we are not perfect
people, but God calls all of us to a perfect mission. Whether we are
Christian, Jew, Muslim or something else, it is still a mission to feed
the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless, teach the illiterate,
provide guidance to our young, and security to our seniors.
Part of that guidance means remembering the stony road that we
charred to get to where we are here in 2025, by remembering something
as painful even as the Tulsa race massacre, which I have tried to talk
about now over and over again, and to remember committing ourselves and
promising those who have gone before us and those who will come after
us that we will never allow something like that to happen again.
I have not given up on the American Dream or the American
possibility, and I have come to the floor tonight to ask people around
this country not to give up also. I am convinced that this Nation still
stands before the world as perhaps the last expression of a possibility
of mankind, devising a social order where justice is the supreme ruler
and law is but its instrument, where freedom is the dominant creed and
order is but its principle, where equity--equity--is the common
practice and fraternity the true human condition.
It is also my conviction that we may be the last generation of
Americans who has the opportunity to help our Nation totally fulfill
that promise and to realize that still-yet-to-achieve possibility.
So, Mr. Speaker, again, I call our attention to the matter of the
Tulsa race massacre as we conclude Black History Month tomorrow, but
this could be December. It doesn't matter. It is something we have to
not hide in books and say: Those books are banned; and tell a
generation of young people: You can't read this, you don't need to know
that.
Again, we have to use it in an instructive way to talk about how far
we have come since then and why we must do more and why something like
that can't take place.
I am going to talk a bit just briefly about this whole situation that
we are facing, regrettably, with people being laid off and fired and
being asked: What did you do last week?
I do want to make sure that my colleague, the distinguished gentleman
from Alabama, has an opportunity to come forward and make another very
important point.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Figures).
Mr. FIGURES. Mr. Speaker, I thank Representative Mfume for yielding.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today with a question similar to many of the
questions we just heard the distinguished gentleman from Maryland raise
as it relates to historical events that happened across the country,
particularly in Tulsa, but it is a question that gets to the core of
what he is saying, and that is: Who are we as Americans?
Who are we as a nation?
Who are we as a people?
In the flurry of activity that comes out of this administration and
that comes out of the White House it is easy to overlook certain things
that the administration is doing that are impacting people whom we may
not see every day that we may not even know. One of those unfortunate
occurrences happened late last week when the administration decided to
revoke the temporary protected status of half a million people who are
in the Nation legally from the nation of Haiti.
Now, the TPS program, the temporary protected status program, is
specifically designed to provide temporary status, legal status--not
permanent status, not citizenship, but temporary status--to people who
are from nations who find themselves in situations similar to what is
going on in Haiti right now, where they are wrapped in a situation of a
destabilized government, a not-too-long-ago assassinated President, a
situation where gangs are literally controlling large swaths of the
country, over 85 percent of the capital city. It is not safe for people
to be pushed back into those environments.
This is one that is personal to me because I have had the privilege
in life to have met a man named Gerald Dessources who came to this
country from the nation of Haiti. He worked his way through college,
refined his English by listening to Sesame Street and by listening to
Martin Luther King's speeches. He went on to become an engineer at a
Fortune 500 company here in the United States in New York.
I have had the privilege to get to know a woman from Haiti by the
name of Katlyn Dessources, who immigrated here as a young child
following her mother who was pursuing that American Dream of making
life better for her children. She too worked her way through to her
American Dream. She has been a healthcare worker for decades.
The two of them, Gerald and Katlyn, it didn't stop with them. Those
same values they brought with them, that same dream that they brought
with
[[Page H905]]
them from the country of Haiti, they instilled that in their children,
their four daughters, one of whom is a schoolteacher, one of whom is a
speech pathologist, one of whom is an Ivy-League-educated gynecological
oncologist in North Carolina, and the fourth of whom holds four
different degrees from three different Ivy League schools, and I have
the privilege of calling her my wife and the mother of our children.
They come from Haiti. They are evidence of what Haitians have
produced for this country and contributed to this country.
For us as America to ignore the current conditions of what is
happening in Haiti, to turn our backs on people who need us most, this
is a Nation that prides itself on being that beacon of hope. This is a
Nation where when you look at one of our most famous landmarks, the
Statue of Liberty, it says: ``Give me your tired, your poor, your
huddled masses yearning to breathe free.''
However, by ignoring the conditions that are currently present in
Haiti, we are not living up to that model. We are not living up to that
creed. What we are doing is sending people back to an environment where
they are certain to meet ends that we would not wish on anybody.
We see the reports of gang violence in the streets. We see the
reports of women being raped. We see the reports of children being
forced to partake in armed conflict. We see the reports of food
insecurity. We see the reports of people who no longer own the homes
that they left because they are now under the control of armed gangs.
We see the reports that Haiti doesn't have a police force that can
protect its people. They don't have a military force that can protect
its people.
Yet, we are sending people back to that environment. It is not safe,
and it is not the right thing to do. There are ways to lead with
strength but decency. There are ways to enforce the law in a manner
that recognizes reality and exudes compassion.
This is not that. This is not who we are as Americans. We can do so
much better than this. We can be that place of refuge. We can be that
place that America and the world still look up to as standing up for
people who need us most.
Again, TPS is not about permanent citizenship. This is about a
temporary place for people to be safe from gun violence and armed
conflicts, from being kidnapped and held for ransom. That is what will
surely happen to some of the people who are returned back to Haiti.
These are people who are a proud people and who are a hardworking
people. My wife's family is just one example of that. They are just one
example. There are millions of Haitian Americans who make vital
contributions to this country every single day. For us to turn our
backs on them now is simply not right. It is indecent. It is inhumane.
Quite frankly, it is un-American.
So, Mr. Speaker, I urge, I plead, and I beg of the White House to
reconsider its restriction on TPS and extend the protection for the
Haitians who are in America.
{time} 1300
Mr. MFUME. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time is
remaining.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from Maryland has 9 minutes
remaining.
Mr. MFUME. Mr. Speaker, I associate myself with the remarks from the
distinguished gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Figures) and to also urge the
White House to move forthwith on that request and other similar
requests.
I will say a couple of words before I conclude. The matter of the
Tulsa Race Massacre was very important. I hope that, to the extent that
anybody paid attention, that it makes a difference in terms of trying
to remember how far we have come and why we can't, in fact, go back.
I simply also indicate that it is my intention to come back onto the
floor next week to spend time again on the matter of the mass layoffs
and firings that have been taking place that are affecting Federal
workers throughout this country, 80 percent of whom are outside of
Washington, D.C., and many of whom are in my State of Maryland and the
city of Baltimore.
I will again urge some sort of prudence. I think most people will
agree that we all want to do away with waste, fraud, and abuse.
I am the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Government Operations
and the Federal Workforce, which has been doing just that for the last
2 or 3 years. The committee has been identifying it and trying to make
sure that we, in fact, come to grips with it.
I think the thing that concerns most Americans has been the speed and
the surgical way that people have been cut out of employment,
oftentimes without any kind of review. It is wrong. I have said it over
and over again, and I think most people now are starting to recognize
that ``due process'' is more than just 2 words. It is a way that we
have to move forward.
It doesn't mean stopping anything, but it does mean affording people
the courtesy of a process, and I would strongly urge Members of this
body to keep that in mind as we go forward.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Figures) for his
comments, and I yield back the balance of my time.
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