    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book II)]
    [September 30, 1997]
    [Pages 1271-1274]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Meeting With the President's Advisory Board on Race
    September 30, 1997

    [John Hope Franklin, Chair of the President's Advisory Board on Race,
    introduced the President and the Vice President.]

        The President. Thank you very much, Dr. Franklin, members of the
    board, ladies and gentlemen. First let me, again, thank the board for
    its willingness to serve. And to those of you who came to Little Rock
    last week for the 40th anniversary of the integration of Central High, I
    thank you for coming there. It was a very important occasion, I believe,
    and one that all of us who were there felt was immensely rewarding.
        I want to talk today about how we go forward from here. When I was
    at Little Rock Central High School, after we had this magnificent
    ceremony celebrating the 40th anniversary of the event and the original
    nine students went into the school, I went back outside and spent quite
    a long while talking to the students and the young people who were
    there. And all they talked to me about was how we were going to go
    forward. And I just listened to them.
        I think you made a very important beginning by urging that we focus
    on education and economic opportunity, things which cut across racial
    lines but are necessary to bring us together.
        One of the young men in the audience said to me that--he said, ``I
    don't think they had these gang problems 40 years ago, and I'm worried
    about that now.'' It was very touching, you know. So I think it's very
    important that we throw this into the future now, we begin to focus on
    it, and I agree that we should begin with education and economic
    opportunity.
        But if I could go back to the original mission of the board, I also
    think it's important that we have the facts. So this afternoon, I know
    you're going to hear from noted scientists and demographers who will
    share their research on our changing population patterns and attitudes
    on race, and I think that's an important thing.
        Secondly, I think it's important that we continue this dialog. I got
    as much out of the hour

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    or so I spent after the ceremony in Little Rock just listening to the
    young people talking as I worked my way down the lines of people who
    were there as anything else. I'm going to have a townhall meeting on
    this subject on December 2d, and I will continue to do what I can to
    support you in reaching out to Americans of all backgrounds and actually
    discussing this so that we build bridges of mutual understanding and
    reconciliation.
        But finally and in the end, we have got to decide what it is we are
    going to do. This summer I announced the first of what I hope will be a
    long series of actions consistent with the work we are doing here with
    the board when I said that we would have an initiative to send our most
    talented teachers to our most needy school districts by offering them
    scholarships for their own education if they would, in turn, teach in
    those districts for a number of years. I think that will be very
    helpful.
        Later today our Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Andrew
    Cuomo, will announce new efforts to end housing discrimination in
    America. First, HUD will issue $15 million in grants to 67 private,
    nonprofit housing groups, State and local governments to combat housing
    discrimination and to promote fair housing practices. And then Secretary
    Cuomo will double the number of housing discrimination enforcement
    actions over the next 4 years.
        It's clear to me now that there is more housing discrimination in
    America than I had thought there was when I became President, and that
    that has been kept alive too long in too many neighborhoods, keeping,
    among other things, too many families from sending their children to the
    schools of their choice. So I applaud what Secretary Cuomo is doing, and
    I will strongly support him.
        Let me say again, I look forward to today's discussion. I think it's
    important that we build on that--where I thought we were at the end of
    the ceremony in Little Rock, where there was a great sense among the
    people there and I felt around the country who were watching it, a great
    sense that now we have to do things, and that every individual American
    just about is interested in this issue and understands how important it
    is and understands that we'll all have to do our part if we expect to
    come out where we want to be.
        So, Dr. Franklin, I look forward to going on with the discussion.
    And I think maybe the Vice President might like to say a word or two,
    and then we could go forward.

    [The Vice President praised the President's initiative on race and
    thanked the board members for serving. He stated he had learned from
    Chairman Franklin that the question of race should be addressed by first
    acknowledging difference and establishing mutual respect, before trying
    to transcend that difference and reach out for the highest common
    denominator. He then said that he looked forward to the discussion.]

        Chairman Franklin. Well, there are two things that we could do. One
    is, we can tell you what we've done. Secondly, we can ask you if you
    want to raise any questions about what we should do or what we are
    doing.
        The President. Well, why don't you begin by telling us--giving us
    all a report on what you have done.

    [Chairman Franklin introduced board member Robert Thomas, president and
    CEO of Nissan U.S.A., who said he had found that the racial issues were
    indeed real and were greatly exacerbated by issues regarding poverty.
    Board member William Winter, former Mississippi Governor, noted the
    diversity in his grandchildren's school and stated that education,
    particularly of young people, was the key to success in achieving one
    America. Board member Suzan Johnson Cook, Bronx Faith Community Church
    pastor, concurred that education and diversity were critical issues. She
    emphasized that people in the faith community had been energized by the
    initiative and were eagerly seeking ways to cooperate across
    denominational lines and also with the corporate community and the labor
    community. Board member Angela Oh, lawyer and civil rights activist,
    suggested that the initiative should be guided by compassion, vision,
    intelligence, and courage, and should welcome input from nontraditional
    sources. She noted that there were not many vehicles set up for public
    participation other than townhall meetings but that there was a lot of
    energy and interest, even among cynics. Board member Linda Chavez-
    Thompson, AFL-CIO executive vice president, reiterated that a lot of
    people wanted to participate in the townhall meetings and that the
    Nation's youth must be involved, and she emphasized the importance of
    economic

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    issues. Board member Thomas Kean, Drew University president, commented
    that there was no other place in the world where so many different
    groups had come to live together, resolving race and ethnic issues in a
    democratic manner, and then stated that dialog on those issues was
    extraordinarily important in itself. Chairman Franklin explained that
    the board had been working along two tracks, to emphasize shared
    aspirations, ideals, and values, and at the same time to discover
    practical ways to realize overall goals, such as the new HUD efforts to
    combat housing discrimination.]

        The President. I would just say, I think there are, in addition to
    the kind of town meeting formats and maybe--I think it's very important
    to try to see, identify, and highlight some laboratory situation--either
    laboratories because you think that people are doing something that
    works, it ought to be able to be done somewhere else. And I agree with
    Suzan--I mean what's going on in the Bronx today, if she'd told anybody
    10 years ago that this would be happening in the Bronx, nobody would
    have believed you. To what extent is that unique to the Bronx, to what
    extent is it something that could be done anywhere else, how did it
    happen--those things, I think, are important.
        There is another sort of laboratory that I think would be worth
    looking at, and I'll just give you one example. I believe now that the
    Fairfax County School District just across the river is now the most
    diverse school district in the United States. I think it has even more
    ethnic diversity than the New York or the Los Angeles or the Chicago
    school districts. I believe that's right. According to the USA Today
    article on it last week, they have kids from 182 different countries
    with over 100 different language groups in this one school district.
        Now, that goes back to Governor Winter's picture there of his
    grandchildren. It would be interesting to know, to me, I think--and
    maybe we should all go there together. I'm just giving you this as an
    example; we could go somewhere else and do the same thing. How are these
    differences dealt with within the schools for the children? How are the
    kids dealing with their diversity and their shared values? Is there an
    explicit attempt to do this? How do they get along?
        Then I would say, is their experience consistent with or
    inconsistent with their parents' experience in the workplace? What I
    have seen over time--I hate to use--a much-used buzzword is
    ``empowerment,'' but what I have seen is that all these racial issues
    get much worse when people feel like they don't have any basic control
    over their lives, which is obviously why you asked us and our
    administration to focus on the economic and educational issues first.
        But I think it would be interesting to see how, in a place that is
    very much--I don't think this should be the only one--but a place that
    is very much sort of standing out in big capital letters, what the
    future might become in America: How are the kids doing? How are their
    parents doing? What is the difference in how their parents are being
    treated at work and how the kids are treated at school? Are there any
    differences? What kind of dialog goes on in the homes of these people
    between the parents and the children about their experiences at school
    and at work, and are there differences there?
        It seems to me that somehow we have to imagine how all of this is
    going to play out in the real world. And anything the Government does,
    for example, needs to really make sense in terms of how these folks'
    lives are playing out. And so I think maybe one of the things we ought
    to do is try to either organize either a set of expeditions or a
    confined set of what you might call townhall meetings with people who
    have actually lived in the kinds of circumstances that we imagine
    America's future to be. And I think that would be one suggestion that I
    have, and I'd kind of like to be a part of that, if you don't mind.
    [Laughter]
        But anyway, I think about this all the time, because I always think
    about how we can--and Dr. Franklin and I talked about this the first
    time we visited--how we finish our sort of unfinished business and still
    recognize that time is not waiting for us and our children are being
    thrown into a world that is radically different. So that might be one
    way to proceed. I think we might learn a great deal if you could get
    some of these children and maybe even some of their parents together and
    have an honest talk about how the kids are doing in the schools, how the
    parents are doing in the workplace and in the larger society, and what
    that tells us about where we need to go in the future.

    [[Page 1274]]

    [Chairman Franklin commented that board members had found an enormous
    number of experiments already going on in various parts of the country
    that might be helpful.]

        The President. One of the things that I believe this group should
    strongly consider doing is actually publishing a kind of a compendium of
    those local efforts with a brief description of how they work, who the
    leader is, and how you can contact those people and let--one of the
    things we're trying to do is to replicate what works around the country.
    And I think that it's obvious that when people have challenges and
    problems, they're not going to sit around waiting for some--for the
    President or a national body or anybody else to start talking about it.
        So what I would recommend is that one of the things we consider
    doing is trying to, without pretending to be exhaustive, take--I don't
    know--20, 50, 100 of the things that you believe work the best, get a
    brief description of them, have a person who can be contacted, ask them
    if they would mind our promoting them, and find a way to publish it and
    widely disseminate this around the Nation so that we can generate more
    interest among more people in, if not copying, at least adapting what
    has worked to places where there aren't such efforts going on.
        Chairman Franklin. I think that our Executive Director already has
    some plans in that regard. Judy Winston is planning some how-to kits and
    various things like that.
        The President. Judy will get them well-published. [Laughter]

    [Executive Director Winston discussed plans to provide information on
    promising practices regarding interracial dialogs to the public, not
    just in published form at the end of the board's year of study but on a
    website for immediate access and response. The Vice President then asked
    for examples of unique and particularly promising approaches to dialog
    or promoting diversity. Board members described various programs
    operating in California, Mississippi, North Carolina, New York, and New
    Jersey, and encouraged further efforts by individuals, businesses, and
    labor organizations. Chairman Franklin then thanked the President and
    the Vice President for their support and their participation in the
    discussion.]

        The President. Thank you.
        The Vice President. Thank you very much.
        The President. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

    Note: The President spoke at 10:16 a.m. in the East Room at the
    Mayflower Hotel.