[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-


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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.