    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
    [May 11, 1999]
    [Pages 743-747]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at the Hubert H. Humphrey Civil Rights Award Dinner
    May 11, 1999

        Thank you so very much. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for the warm
    welcome. Thank you, Dorothy, for your
    wonderful words. She has been involved in this work for many years, but
    every time I hear her speak I always marvel at how young and vigorous
    and alive and energetic she always sounds.
        I'm honored to be here with Wade Henderson; Julian Bond; Rabbi
    Saperstein; Monsignor East; my good friend Justin Dart;
    Frances Humphrey Howard, it's nice
    to see you tonight, ma'am. I also want to--I have been told that Judy
    Shepard is here, the mother of Matthew Shepard,
    and she testified for the hate crimes legislation today. I don't know
    where she is, but I'd like to ask her to stand up--and I thank you.
    Where is she? Thank you very much, and God bless you. Thank you.
    [Applause]
        I would like to thank the members of the administration who are
    here: Secretary Herman; our EEOC Chair, Ida
    Castro; our Civil Rights Assistant Attorney
    General, Bill Lann Lee; Ben Johnson, who is continuing the work of our initiative
    on race at the White House; and Mary Beth Cahill and others on the White House staff. I thank them.
        I would also like to say a special word of appreciation to the many
    Members of the Congress who are here, well over a dozen House Members,
    and Senator Wellstone, Senator
    Sarbanes, and Senator Robb. I thank all of them for being here and for what they do.
    If it weren't for them, many of the things we have tried to do in the
    area of civil rights and human rights would not have been sustained in
    these last few years.
        When I saw Senator Robb's name here, it
    reminded me before I give out this Hubert Humphrey Award--or acknowledge
    the award winners, you're going to give it out--I admired

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    Hubert Humphrey very much, and I grew up just being almost crazy about
    him because I grew up in the South during the civil rights revolution.
    And I got to meet him when I was a young man and when he was making his
    last campaign and during his latter service in the Senate, after he had
    been Vice President.
        But I would like to say something I have rarely had the chance to
    say as President, but I don't think I would be here doing this, or we
    would be where we are as a country if it had not been for the President
    Hubert Humphrey served, Lyndon Johnson, and I think that we should never
    forget that. I just got back from Texas a few days ago, and I was
    thinking about it quite a lot down there.
        I want to congratulate the Hubert Humphrey Award winners tonight:
    Gary Locke; Ossie Davis
    and Ruby Dee; Jeannie Van Velkinburgh, who I know is back in the hospital
    tonight and couldn't be with us.
        We honor these people because of something Dr. King once said, ``No
    social advance rolls in on the wheels of inevitability.'' You all know
    they are pushed forward by courageous men and women who give themselves
    and inspire others to follow--people like my good friend Governor Gary
    Locke, who has used the power of his office to
    expand and defend opportunity for all the people of his State; Ossie
    Davis and Ruby Dee, who
    together for 50 years have advanced the cause of civil rights through
    their art and through their efforts to open the theater and movies to
    people of all backgrounds; and Jeannie Van Velkinburgh, who stood with the white martyrs of the civil rights
    movement in the South when she was paralyzed in 1997, trying to help a
    black man under attack by skinheads. All true American heroes. I know we
    are honored to be in their presence tonight. I congratulate them on
    their awards, and I congratulate you for your choices.
        For nearly half a century, the Leadership Conference has helped
    hundreds of diverse groups keep their eyes on the prize and speak with
    one booming voice. Today, your voice is louder, larger, and more diverse
    than ever. And that is good, because it is still sorely needed. While
    our economy has never been stronger and minority unemployment is the
    lowest it has been since separate measurements have been kept, there are
    still striking disparities in income, wealth, jobs, education, and
    criminal justice that breakdown along what DuBois called ``the color
    line,'' and other disparities that affect people who are disabled or
    people who are gay. In other words, we still have quite a little hill to
    climb before we can claim to be the one America of our Founders' dreams.
        I was thinking today how I could best honor the spirit of Hubert
    Humphrey. I could give a long speech. [Laughter] I should tell you, if
    he were here at this podium tonight and I was out there, I would want
    him to give a long speech. I loved his long speeches. But I think what I
    will do instead is to try to make briefer comments in the spirit of his
    service about just three things we still need to do before we cross that
    bridge into a new century.
        First, we must continue to work together for a fair and accurate
    census. I agree with Wade when he says the
    2000 census is a civil rights issue. It is a fundamental building block
    of democracy. We have to make sure the Census Bureau can do its job with
    the most up-to-date and scientific methods. We all say we live for the
    day when every American counts as much as every other American. Surely,
    that day must begin with counting every American.
        The second thing we have to do is to close the economic opportunity
    gaps that still exist among our people, in our inner-cities, our smaller
    and medium-sized towns, our rural areas, and on our Native American
    reservations. There will never be a better time for us to shine the
    light of economic opportunity on communities and neighborhoods that have
    been too long in the shadows. We do have the strongest economy in a
    generation, perhaps in this century. But we know--we know--that there
    are still large numbers of communities that have been left out and left
    behind.
        Just an hour ago I returned from Atlanta--I think Congressman
    Lewis is here--but I toured the Sweet Auburn
    Market in Martin Luther King's home neighborhood in Atlanta's
    empowerment zone, with the mayor of Atlanta, Bill Campbell, and two of his predecessors who are friends of many of
    yours, Maynard Jackson and Andy
    Young.
        I was there to highlight the fact that our greatest untapped markets
    today for America are not overseas; they are right here at home. There's
    an $85 billion consumer market out there that is grossly underdeveloped.
    Ever since we took office, Vice President Gore and I have worked hard to
    try to get more people to invest in that part of America, with the
    empowerment

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    zone program, the community development financial institution effort,
    special initiatives from HUD, from SBA, from the Department of Labor.
    And we have had some good success.
        But as I look back on it, even now, with unemployment at 4.3
    percent, with over 18 million new jobs, there are still inner-city
    neighborhoods, there are still medium-sized and smaller communities,
    there are still rural towns, there are still Native American
    reservations where there has been almost no new investment in job
    creation.
        And what I am attempting to do this year is to convince the Congress
    to pass legislation and the American business community to mobilize to
    invest in those communities to create jobs there. I took some of the
    biggest business leaders in America today to that market in Atlanta. And
    I let them sit there with me, and we listened to people talk about how
    they started their coffee shop and their bakery and their restaurant and
    how one man had bought an empty old mill and was converting it to 500
    apartments and how a young man who was a supplier to other businesses
    had taken his business from $150,000 a year to $12 million a year in 3
    years, starting with a modest loan.
        And in July, in early July, I'm going to take 3 days and do what I
    did today in Atlanta. I'm going to go across the country, to the poorest
    communities and to some places where a lot of good things are happening,
    to demonstrate why we need to have a national framework to give every
    community a chance to get the money it needs to start the businesses, to
    expand the businesses, to create the jobs, to stabilize the future.
        Our proposal is very straightforward: We want to double the number
    of empowerment zones where people get tax credits, loan guarantees,
    direct investment, and technical assistance. We want to dramatically
    increase the number of community development banks, but we want to pass
    a national new markets initiative that simply says we want to give
    business people and investors the same incentives to invest in poor
    American neighborhoods we give them to invest in our neighbors.
        We don't want to take those other incentives away. We want to grow
    the Caribbean economies. We want to grow the Central American economies.
    We want to encourage Americans to be involved in Africa, and we want a
    new partnership there. But we also believe that Appalachia, the
    Mississippi Delta, south Texas, and the Indian reservations of the high
    plains should get new American money now. So I would ask you to help me
    pass this legislation.
        The third thing I ask you to do is to help us pass the ``Hate Crimes
    Prevention Act'' this year. In 1997, the year Jeannie Van
    Velkinburgh and Oumar Dia were
    brutally attacked by skinheads, more than 8,000 hate crimes were
    reported in the United States. That's nearly one an hour. The hearings
    today that Mrs. Shepard testified at were held
    in the United States Senate by the Judiciary Committee, under the
    leadership of Senator Hatch. First, I commend
    Senator Hatch for holding those hearings. They are a welcome sign.
    Surely to goodness we can make fighting hate crimes a bipartisan, even a
    nonpartisan mission of the United States of America.
        I think we need to be clear about what our legislation is designed
    to do. It is not an effort to federalize crimes traditionally handled by
    the States. It is an effort to partner with local authorities. And it is
    not only about cracking down on hate crimes committed because of sexual
    orientation, gender, or disability. It's also about expanding civil
    rights protection for all Americans. Let's never forget what happened to
    James Byrd, Jr., in Texas. I met with his daughter in Austin, just a few days ago. She's down there trying
    to get the Texas legislature to pass State hate crimes legislation. We
    ought to be pulling for her and for the Texas legislators who are trying
    to get the job done, and we ought to remember that we also need it here
    in Washington.
        So I say to you, we need to do this for all Americans. We need to
    make the ``Hate Crimes Prevention Act'' and the ``Employment Non-
    Discrimination Act'' the law of the land, because it will help us to
    move toward one America, and it will help us to make a statement about
    what we are not, as well as what we are.
        I was honored to appear at a testimonial banquet for Rabbi
    Saperstein the other night. We've been
    friends for many years. I love and admire him very much. And I
    especially appreciate how hard he's worked for peace in the Middle East
    and how hard he's worked to protect the heritage and the historical
    rights of the Israeli people and still be fair and humane toward the
    Arabs, with whom they share that land.
        And I make this point for the following reason. It seems to me that
    the central irony of

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    our time is that most of us have a vision of America in the 21st century
    and the world in the 21st century in which we'll all be mixed up in
    wonderful ways. We'll have all this fabulous technology, and we'll be E-
    mailing people on the South Pole or wherever. [Laughter] Our kids will
    have pen pals in Africa and Mongolia. We'll jet around on airplanes and
    do business with people at the tip of Tierra del Fuego. Our kids will
    speak Japanese and Russian; one of them will solve the problem of
    Nagorno-Karabakh. We think this is what it's going to be like. It's
    going to be great.
        We just had this NATO Summit here. We had the leaders of 42
    countries here, all the way to central Asia, speaking all these
    different languages, because we see that the world is drawing us closer
    together--technology and commerce and culture all bringing us together.
    And most of us think it will really be neat if America can thrive in
    that kind of world because we're rapidly becoming the most diverse
    democracy ever known. And won't it be grand? That's the image we all
    have. That's the dream we have.
        And yet, our whole world is bedeviled by the oldest problem of human
    society, which is fear and hatred of the other. We have known it in
    America primarily as the curse of race--although we see discrimination
    and cruelty against people who are gay, discrimination against people
    who are disabled; we see it in other manifestations; we occasionally see
    religious discrimination in America. But primarily we have known it as
    race.
        And yet, we see it everywhere. Hillary wanted to come here tonight to pay her respects to the
    honorees, but she got on a plane today to continue years of work she has
    done in Ireland, to try to use women and children to bring together
    people across the lines of Catholic and Protestant Irish. And then she's
    going on to the refugee camps of Albania and Macedonia, to clarify our
    compassion and concern for the predominantly Muslim Kosovar Albanians
    who have been driven from their homes and female loved ones murdered.
        The bane of the Balkans is primarily a religious ethnic bane, first
    the Bosnian Muslims but now the Kosovar Muslims driven from their homes,
    systematically killed, raped, pillaged, their cultural and religious
    institutions and records destroyed. Why? Because they have been turned
    into something subhuman and so they somehow taint the land they share
    with the Serbs or the Croats or others.
        We saw with breathtaking speed what happened in Rwanda a few years
    ago, the world totally caught flat-footed with no mechanism to deal with
    the slaughter of Rwanda, where somewhere between 700,000 and 900,000
    people were killed in 100 days with no modern weapons, mostly hacked to
    death, because two African tribes who, in this case, who had shared the
    same land for 500 years, all of a sudden decided that they couldn't bear
    it anymore.
        I hope you support what we are doing in Kosovo and what we did in
    Bosnia. I want you to know that we also have worked to redeem the
    failure of the world to stop the slaughter in Rwanda by developing an
    Africa Crisis Response Team, working with the militaries of the
    countries in the region that are committed to democracy and human
    rights, so that, God forbid, if anything like this ever happens again,
    we in the United States and other freedom-loving people around the world
    will have Africans with whom we can work to move more quickly to stop
    genocide, to stop ethnic cleansing, to not let it happen again.
        But what I want to say to you is this: There will be fights around
    the world based on ethnic differences that we won't be able to stop.
    Sometimes people just fall out with one another. But if we want to at
    least be able to stand firm against ethnic cleansing, against genocide,
    and for the principle that it is possible to honor our differences, to
    enjoy our differences, to recognize our differences and still keep them
    contained within the framework of our common humanity so that life is
    more interesting but not unbearable--if that's what we want, and we
    expect people to take the United States seriously at a time when we are
    easy to resent because of our economic and military power, then people
    have to see us not only trying to do good around the world but trying to
    be good at home.
        You know, many of these people are struggling. Macedonia and
    Albania, the two poorest countries in Europe--think how easy it is for
    all of them to resent us, to say, ``Well, we're just waiting for our
    turn in history's clock to bring us to the top and take them down,'' to
    resent our power, to resent our wealth, to resent what they may think of
    as our preaching. I am telling you, it's imperative that we do this at
    this moment in history. But if we want to be a force for good, we have
    got to be good.

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        So when we stand up for the hate crimes legislation, when we stand
    up for the employment nondiscrimination legislation, when we stand up as
    a people and say that it's okay for us to have differences--and we're
    not even asking everybody to like everybody else in America. But we have
    got to find a way to get along by recognizing the fundamental human
    dignity of every person. We have got to find a way to do that so that we
    take advantages that are rife with all of our diversity by joining
    together in affirming our common humanity.
        Keep in mind, unless we can do that here at home, in the end, we
    will not be able to do that around the world. And our whole vision of
    the 21st century--our whole vision--what we want our children to see in
    the world of their dreams depends upon our being able to do both, to
    stand for what is good abroad and to keep struggling to be good at home.
    That's what our honorees have led us in doing. It is certainly what you
    have led us in doing. Don't get tired. We've still got a ways to go.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 8:15 p.m. in the International Ballroom at
    the Washington Hilton Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Dorothy,
    Height, chair, Wade Henderson, executive director, and Rabbi David
    Saperstein, executive committee member, Leadership Conference on Civil
    Rights; Julian Bond, chairman of the board, NAACP; Monsignor Raymond G.
    East, pastor, Nativity Catholic Church, Washington, DC; award presenter
    Justin Dart, Jr.; Frances Humphrey Howard, sister of Hubert Humphrey;
    Judy Shepard, mother of murder victim Matthew Shepard; award recipients
    Gov. Gary Locke of Washington, actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Jeannie
    Van Velkinburgh, who was shot while aiding murder victim Oumar Dia in
    Denver, CO, in 1997; and Renee Mullins, daughter of murder victim James
    Byrd, Jr.