    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book II)]
    [November 13, 1993]
    [Pages 1981-1986]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the Convocation of the Church of God in Christ in Memphis
    November 13, 1993

        Thank you. Please sit down. Bishop Ford, Mrs. Mason, Bishop Owens,
    and Bishop Anderson; my bishops, Bishop Walker and Bishop Lindsey. Now,
    if you haven't had Bishop Lindsey's barbecue, you haven't had barbecue.
    And if you haven't heard Bishop Walker attack one of my opponents, you
    have never heard a political speech. [Laughter]
        I am glad to be here. You have touched my heart. You've brought
    tears to my eyes and joy to my spirit. Last year I was with you over at
    the convention center. Two years ago your bishops came to Arkansas, and
    we laid a plaque at the point in Little Rock, Arkansas, at 8th and
    Gaines, where Bishop Mason received the inspiration for the name of this
    great church. Bishop Brooks said from his pulpit that I would be elected
    President when most people thought I wouldn't survive. I thank him, and
    I thank your faith, and I thank your works, for without you I would not
    be here today as your President.
        Many have spoken eloquently and well, and many have been introduced.
    I want to thank my good friend Governor McWherter and my friend Mayor
    Herenton for being with me today; my friend Congressman Harold Ford, we
    are glad to be in his congressional district. I would like to, if I
    might, introduce just three other people who are Members of the
    Congress. They have come here with me, and without them it's hard for me
    to do much for you. The President proposes and the Congress disposes.
    Sometimes they dispose of what I propose, but I'm happy to say that
    according to a recent report in Washington, notwithstanding what you may
    have heard, this Congress has given me a higher percentage of my
    proposals than any first-year President since President Eisenhower. And
    I thank them for that. Let me introduce my good friend, a visitor to
    Tennessee, Congressman Bill Jefferson from New Orleans, Louisiana--
    please stand up; and an early supporter of my campaign, Congressman Bob
    Clement from Ten-

    [[Page 1982]]

    nessee, known to many of you; and a young man who's going to be coming
    back to the people of Tennessee and asking them to give him a promotion
    next year, Congressman Jim Cooper from Tennessee, and a good friend.
    Please welcome him.
        You know, in the last 10 months, I've been called a lot of things,
    but nobody's called me a bishop yet. [Laughter] When I was about 9 years
    old, my beloved and now departed grandmother, who was a very wise woman,
    looked at me and she said, ``You know, I believe you could be a preacher
    if you were just a little better boy.'' [Laughter]
        Proverbs says, ``A happy heart doeth good like medicine, but a
    broken spirit dryeth the bone.'' This is a happy place, and I'm happy to
    be here. I thank you for your spirit.
        By the grace of God and your help, last year I was elected President
    of this great country. I never dreamed that I would ever have a chance
    to come to this hallowed place where Martin Luther King gave his last
    sermon. I ask you to think today about the purpose for which I ran and
    the purpose for which so many of you worked to put me in this great
    office. I have worked hard to keep faith with our common efforts: to
    restore the economy, to reverse the politics of helping only those at
    the top of our totem pole and not the hard-working middle class or the
    poor; to bring our people together across racial and regional and
    political lines, to make a strength out of our diversity instead of
    letting it tear us apart; to reward work and family and community and
    try to move us forward into the 21st century. I have tried to keep
    faith.
        Thirteen percent of all my Presidential appointments are African-
    Americans, and there are five African-Americans in the Cabinet of the
    United States, 2\1/2\ times as many as have ever served in the history
    of this great land. I have sought to advance the right to vote with the
    motor voter bill, supported so strongly by all the churches in our
    country. And next week it will be my great honor to sign the restoration
    of religious freedoms act, a bill supported widely by people across all
    religions and political philosophies to put back the real meaning of the
    Constitution, to give you and every other American the freedom to do
    what is most important in your life, to worship God as your spirit leads
    you.
        I say to you, my fellow Americans, we have made a good beginning.
    Inflation is down. Interest rates are down. The deficit is down.
    Investment is up. Millions of Americans, including, I bet, some people
    in this room, have refinanced their homes or their business loans just
    in the last year. And in the last 10 months, this economy has produced
    more jobs in the private sector than in the previous 4 years.
        We have passed a law called the family leave law, which says you
    can't be fired if you take a little time off when a baby is born or a
    parent is sick. We know that most Americans have to work, but you ought
    not to have to give up being a good parent just to take a job. If you
    can't succeed as a worker and a parent, this country can't make it.
        We have radically reformed the college loan program, as I promised,
    to lower the cost of college loans and broaden the availability of it
    and make the repayment terms easier. And we have passed the national
    service law that will give in 3 years, 3 years from now, 100,000 young
    Americans the chance to serve their communities at home, to repair the
    frayed bonds of community, to build up the needs of people at the
    grassroots, and at the same time, earn some money to pay for a college
    education. It is a wonderful idea.
        On April 15th when people pay their taxes, somewhere between 15
    million and 18 million working families on modest incomes, families with
    children and incomes of under $23,000, will get a tax cut, not a tax
    increase, in the most important effort to ensure that we reward work and
    family in the last 20 years. Fifty million American parents and their
    children will be advantaged by putting the Tax Code back on the side of
    working American parents for a change.
        Under the leadership of the First Lady, we have produced a
    comprehensive plan to guarantee health care security to all Americans.
    How can we expect the American people to work and to live with all the
    changes in a global economy, where the average 18-year-old will change
    work seven times in a lifetime, unless we can simply say we have joined
    the ranks of all the other advanced countries in the world; you can have
    decent health care that's always there, that can never be taken away? It
    is time we did that, long past time. I ask you to help us achieve that.
        But we have so much more to do. You and I know that most people are
    still working harder

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    for the same or lower wages, that many people are afraid that their job
    will go away. We have to provide the education and training our people
    need, not just for our children but for our adults, too. If we cannot
    close this country up to the forces of change sweeping throughout the
    world, we have to at least guarantee people the security of being
    employable. They have to be able to get a new job if they're going to
    have to get a new job. We don't do that today, and we must, and we
    intend to proceed until that is done.
        We have a guarantee that there will be some investment in those
    areas of our country, in the inner cities and in the destitute rural
    areas in the Mississippi Delta, of my home State and this State and
    Louisiana and Mississippi and other places like it throughout America.
    It's all very well to train people, but if they don't have a job, they
    can be trained for nothing. We must get investment into those places
    where the people are dying for work.
        And finally, let me say, we must find people who will buy what we
    have to produce. We are the most productive people on Earth. That makes
    us proud. But what that means is that every year one person can produce
    more in the same amount of time. Now, if fewer and fewer people can
    produce more and more things, and yet you want to create more jobs and
    raise people's incomes, you have to have more customers for what it is
    you're making. And that is why I have worked so hard to sell more
    American products around the world; why I have asked that we be able to
    sell billions of dollars of computers we used not to sell to foreign
    countries and foreign interests, to put our people to work; why next
    week I am going all the way to Washington State to meet with the
    President of China and the Prime Minister of Japan and the heads of 13
    other Asian countries, the fastest growing part of the world, to say,
    ``We want to be your partners. We will buy your goods, but we want you
    to buy ours, too, if you please.'' That is why.
        That is why I have worked so hard for this North American trade
    agreement that Congressman Ford endorsed today and Congressman Jefferson
    endorsed and Congressman Cooper and Congressman Clement, because we know
    that Americans can compete and win only if people will buy what it is we
    have to sell. There are 90 million people in Mexico. Seventy cents of
    every dollar they spend on foreign goods, they spend on American goods.
        People worry fairly about people shutting down plants in America and
    going not just to Mexico but to any place where the labor is cheap. It
    has happened. What I want to say to you, my fellow Americans, is nothing
    in this agreement makes that more likely. That has happened already. It
    may happen again. What we need to do is keep the jobs here by finding
    customers there. That's what this agreement does. It gives us a chance
    to create opportunity for people. I have friends in this audience,
    people who are ministers from my State, fathers and sons, people--I've
    looked out all over this vast crowd and I see people I've known for
    years. They know I spent my whole life working to create jobs. I would
    never knowingly do anything that would take a job away from the American
    people. This agreement will make more jobs. Now, we can also leave it if
    it doesn't work in 6 months. But if we don't take it, we'll lose it
    forever. We need to take it, because we have to do better.
        But I guess what I really want to say to you today, my fellow
    Americans, is that we can do all of this and still fail unless we meet
    the great crisis of the spirit that is gripping America today.
        When I leave you, Congressman Ford and I are going to a Baptist
    church near here to a town meeting he's having on health care and
    violence. I tell you, unless we do something about crime and violence
    and drugs that is ravaging the community, we will not be able to repair
    this country.
        If Martin Luther King, who said, ``Like Moses, I am on the
    mountaintop, and I can see the promised land, but I'm not going to be
    able to get there with you, but we will get there''--if he were to
    reappear by my side today and give us a report card on the last 25
    years, what would he say? You did a good job, he would say, voting and
    electing people who formerly were not electable because of the color of
    their skin. You have more political power, and that is good. You did a
    good job, he would say, letting people who have the ability to do so
    live wherever they want to live, go wherever they want to go in this
    great country. You did a good job, he would say, elevating people of
    color into the ranks of the United States Armed Forces to the very top
    or into the very top of our Government. You did a very good job, he
    would say. He would say, you did a good job creating a black middle
    class of people who

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    really are doing well, and the middle class is growing more among
    African-Americans than among non-African-Americans. You did a good job;
    you did a good job in opening opportunity.
        But he would say, I did not live and die to see the American family
    destroyed. I did not live and die to see 13-year-old boys get automatic
    weapons and gun down 9-year-olds just for the kick of it. I did not live
    and die to see young people destroy their own lives with drugs and then
    build fortunes destroying the lives of others. That is not what I came
    here to do. I fought for freedom, he would say, but not for the freedom
    of people to kill each other with reckless abandon, not for the freedom
    of children to have children and the fathers of the children walk away
    from them and abandon them as if they don't amount to anything. I fought
    for people to have the right to work but not to have whole communities
    and people abandoned. This is not what I lived and died for.
        My fellow Americans, he would say, I fought to stop white people
    from being so filled with hate that they would wreak violence on black
    people. I did not fight for the right of black people to murder other
    black people with reckless abandon.
        The other day the Mayor of Baltimore, a dear friend of mine, told me
    a story of visiting the family of a young man who had been killed--18
    years old--on Halloween. He always went out with little bitty kids so
    they could trick-or-treat safely. And across the street from where they
    were walking on Halloween, a 14-year-old boy gave a 13-year-old boy a
    gun and dared him to shoot the 18-year-old boy, and he shot him dead.
    And the Mayor had to visit the family.
        In Washington, DC, where I live, your Nation's Capital, the symbol
    of freedom throughout the world, look how that freedom is being
    exercised. The other night a man came along the street and grabbed a 1-
    year-old child and put the child in his car. The child may have been the
    child of the man. And two people were after him, and they chased him in
    the car, and they just kept shooting with reckless abandon, knowing that
    baby was in the car. And they shot the man dead, and a bullet went
    through his body into the baby's body, and blew the little bootie off
    the child's foot.
        The other day on the front page of our paper, the Nation's Capital,
    are we talking about world peace or world conflict? No, big article on
    the front page of the Washington Post about an 11-year-old child
    planning her funeral: ``These are the hymns I want sung. This is the
    dress I want to wear. I know I'm not going to live very long.'' That is
    not the freedom, the freedom to die before you're a teenager is not what
    Martin Luther King lived and died for.
        More than 37,000 people die from gunshot wounds in this country
    every year. Gunfire is the leading cause of death in young men. And now
    that we've all gotten so cool that everybody can get a semiautomatic
    weapon, a person shot now is 3 times more likely to die than 15 years
    ago, because they're likely to have three bullets in them. A hundred and
    sixty thousand children stay home from school every day because they are
    scared they will be hurt in their schools.
        The other day I was in California at a town meeting, and a handsome
    young man stood up and said, ``Mr. President, my brother and I, we don't
    belong to gangs. We don't have guns. We don't do drugs. We want to go to
    school. We want to be professionals. We want to work hard. We want to do
    well. We want to have families. And we changed our school because the
    school we were in was so dangerous. So when we stowed up to the new
    school to register, my brother and I were standing in line and somebody
    ran into the school and started shooting a gun. My brother was shot down
    standing right in front of me at the safer school.'' The freedom to do
    that kind of thing is not what Martin Luther King lived and died for,
    not what people gathered in this hallowed church for the night before he
    was assassinated in April of 1968. If you had told anybody who was here
    in that church on that night that we would abuse our freedom in that
    way, they would have found it hard to believe. And I tell you, it is our
    moral duty to turn it around.
        And now I think finally we have a chance. Finally, I think, we have
    a chance. We have a pastor here from New Haven, Connecticut. I was in
    his church with Reverend Jackson when I was running for President on a
    snowy day in Connecticut to mourn the death of children who had been
    killed in that city. And afterward we walked down the street for more
    than a mile in the snow. Then, the American people were not ready.
    People would say, ``Oh, this is a terrible thing, but what can we do
    about it?''
        Now when we read that foreign visitors come to our shores and are
    killed at random in our

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    fine State of Florida, when we see our children planning their funerals,
    when the American people are finally coming to grips with the
    accumulated weight of crime and violence and the breakdown of family and
    community and the increase in drugs and the decrease in jobs, I think
    finally we may be ready to do something about it.
        And there is something for each of us to do. There are changes we
    can make from the outside in; that's the job of the President and the
    Congress and the Governors and the mayors and the social service
    agencies. And then there's some changes we're going to have to make from
    the inside out, or the others won't matter. That's what that magnificent
    song was about, isn't it? Sometimes there are no answers from the
    outside in; sometimes all the answers have to come from the values and
    the stirrings and the voices that speak to us from within.
        So we are beginning. We are trying to pass a bill to make our people
    safer, to put another 100,000 police officers on the street, to provide
    boot camps instead of prisons for young people who can still be rescued,
    to provide more safety in our schools, to restrict the availability of
    these awful assault weapons, to pass the Brady bill and at least require
    people to have their criminal background checked before they get a gun,
    and to say, if you're not old enough to vote and you're not old enough
    to go to war, you ought not to own a handgun, and you ought not to use
    one unless you're on a target range.
        We want to pass a health care bill that will make drug treatment
    available for everyone. And we also have to do it, we have to have drug
    treatment and education available to everyone and especially those who
    are in prison who are coming out. We have a drug czar now in Lee Brown,
    who was the police chief of Atlanta, of Houston, of New York, who
    understands these things. And when the Congress comes back next year, we
    will be moving forward on that.
        We need this crime bill now. We ought to give it to the American
    people for Christmas. And we need to move forward on all these other
    fronts. But I say to you, my fellow Americans, we need some other things
    as well. I do not believe we can repair the basic fabric of society
    until people who are willing to work have work. Work organizes life. It
    gives structure and discipline to life. It gives meaning and self-esteem
    to people who are parents. It gives a role model to children.
        The famous African-American sociologist William Julius Wilson has
    written a stunning book called ``The Truly Disadvantaged'' in which he
    chronicles in breathtaking terms how the inner cities of our country
    have crumbled as work has disappeared. And we must find a way, through
    public and private sources, to enhance the attractiveness of the
    American people who live there to get investment there. We cannot, I
    submit to you, repair the American community and restore the American
    family until we provide the structure, the values, the discipline, and
    the reward that work gives.
        I read a wonderful speech the other day given at Howard University
    in a lecture series funded by Bill and Camille Cosby, in which the
    speaker said, ``I grew up in Anacostia years ago. Even then it was all
    black, and it was a very poor neighborhood. But you know, when I was a
    child in Anacostia, a 100 percent African-American neighborhood, a very
    poor neighborhood, we had a crime rate that was lower than the average
    of the crime rate of our city. Why? Because we had coherent families. We
    had coherent communities. The people who filled the church on Sunday
    lived in the same place they went to church. The guy that owned the
    drugstore lived down the street. The person that owned the grocery store
    lived in our community. We were whole.'' And I say to you, we have to
    make our people whole again.
        This church has stood for that. Why do you think you have 5 million
    members in this country? Because people know you are filled with the
    spirit of God to do the right thing in this life by them. So I say to
    you, we have to make a partnership, all the Government agencies, all the
    business folks; but where there are no families, where there is no
    order, where there is no hope, where we are reducing the size of our
    armed services because we have won the cold war, who will be there to
    give structure, discipline, and love to these children? You must do
    that. And we must help you. Scripture says, you are the salt of the
    Earth and the light of the world, that if your light shines before men
    they will give glory to the Father in heaven. That is what we must do.
        That is what we must do. How would we explain it to Martin Luther
    King if he showed up today and said, yes, we won the cold war. Yes, the
    biggest threat that all of us grew up under, communism and nuclear war,
    com-

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    munism gone, nuclear war receding. Yes, we developed all these
    miraculous technologies. Yes, we all have got a VCR in our home; it's
    interesting. Yes, we get 50 channels on the cable. Yes, without regard
    to race, if you work hard and play by the rules, you can get into a
    service academy or a good college, you'll do just great. How would we
    explain to him all these kids getting killed and killing each other? How
    would we justify the things that we permit that no other country in the
    world would permit? How could we explain that we gave people the freedom
    to succeed, and we created conditions in which millions abuse that
    freedom to destroy the things that make life worth living and life
    itself? We cannot.
        And so I say to you today, my fellow Americans, you gave me this
    job, and we're making progress on the things you hired me to do. But
    unless we deal with the ravages of crime and drugs and violence and
    unless we recognize that it's due to the breakdown of the family, the
    community, and the disappearance of jobs, and unless we say some of this
    cannot be done by Government, because we have to reach deep inside to
    the values, the spirit, the soul, and the truth of human nature, none of
    the other things we seek to do will ever take us where we need to go.
        So in this pulpit, on this day, let me ask all of you in your heart
    to say: We will honor the life and the work of Martin Luther King. We
    will honor the meaning of our church. We will, somehow, by God's grace,
    we will turn this around. We will give these children a future. We will
    take away their guns and give them books. We will take away their
    despair and give them hope. We will rebuild the families and the
    neighborhoods and the communities. We won't make all the work that has
    gone on here benefit just a few. We will do it together by the grace of
    God.
        Thank you.

    Note: The President spoke at 11:51 a.m. at the Mason Temple Church of
    God in Christ. In his remarks, he referred to Elsie Mason, widow of
    Charles Harrison Mason, founder, Church of God in Christ; denomination
    officers Louis Henry Ford, presiding bishop, Chandler David Owens, first
    assistant presiding bishop, Cleveland L. Anderson, second assistant
    presiding bishop, L.T. Walker and Donnie Lindsey, Arkansas
    jurisdictional bishops, and Philip A. Brooks, general board member,
    Detroit, MI; and Mayor Kurt Schmoke of Baltimore, MD.