[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
[February 19, 1999]
[Pages 219-223]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at the NAACP 90th Anniversary Celebration
February 19, 1999

    I have been friends with Chairman Bond a 
long time. We have had many interesting conversations; not all of them 
have been that laudatory. But Julian, I have that on film now, and I'm 
going to play it--[laughter]--whenever I need a little boost in life, 
I'm just going to turn that film on. [Laughter]
    Thank you. I want to say publicly something I said to Julian 
Bond privately when he agreed to become the 
chair of the NAACP. I called him, and I thanked him. And I thank him 
again. And I thank all of you for what you are doing.
    When Kweisi Mfume agreed to become 
president of the NAACP and leave the Congress, I wept. [Laughter] But he 
told me, he said, ``Now, don't worry.'' He said, ``I'll have a good 
replacement in Congress''--and he did--``and I need to do this. It's the 
right thing for my country and for my people.'' And he, too, has served 
well. And I'm very proud of our friendship and of the service.
    I thank all of you who are helping. When Suzanne DuBose was up here talking about scientists slowing down the 
speed of light and the rest of us speeding up the speed of justice, I 
wish I had thought of that myself. [Laughter] That line won't rest. It 
will be used again and again. [Laughter]
    I want to thank Bell Atlantic and all the other companies who are 
standing with the NAACP. I am delighted to see Bishop Graves and the other officers here. And Bishop, thank you 
for your friendship.
    Most of the people with our administration have been introduced, but 
I want to thank Secretary and Mrs. 
West and Secretary Slater and Bill Lann Lee for being 
here, and Judy Winston, who did such a 
good job with our initiative on race. I want to acknowledge, also, the 
presence in the audience of Mary Beth Cahill, our new Special Assistant to the President for Public 
Liaison. And I want to recognize Ben Johnson, and many of you know he is the first Director of the 
White House Office on our Initiative for One America, and I thank him 
for doing that. Since Bell is so well recognized, there's one other 
former member of the White House staff here, Eric Eve, who went on for the money and the fame of Bell. I want 
to thank him.
    Ladies and gentlemen, I came here tonight for two purposes. One is 
to say a simple thank you. Thank you for what you've done for America, 
and thank you for being my friends. I am grateful. I am very grateful. 
The second is to say that--as Suzanne said so eloquently--we're in a lot 
better shape than we used to be, but nowhere near where we ought to be. 
And what we have to do as a people, as a whole country--but especially 
you, because you know--you know things about where we are and where we 
need to go that not every American does, because of the life you've 
lived and the things you've seen and the work you do. You know that no 
great nation, and certainly not this one, can afford to say, ``Well, 
we're a lot better off than we used to be, so let's take a vacation from 
progress. Let's take a vacation from our struggle for liberty and 
equality. Let's take a vacation from our attempt to spread the reach of 
prosperity and freedom to Africa, to the Caribbean, to our friends in 
the Americas.''
    You know that this is not a time to take a break; it is a time to 
thank God for our prosperity and our opportunities and make the best use 
of them. The Sun is shining, and we need to make hay. We need to work 
while the Sun is shining.
    And to do what I would like to do in these last 2 years of my 
Presidency, just like the last

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6, we need the help of every one of your 2,200 branches. We need to 
forge new coalitions across the lines of race and class and religion. We 
need to close America's remaining opportunity gaps.
    A lot of you have lived in homes when you were younger--and not so 
well off and prosperous as you are now--[laughter]--where there were 
literally gaps in the walls or the windows, and you could feel the wind 
blowing. Well, there are a lot of people still getting blown by those 
kinds of winds and the opportunity gaps of America.
    Kweisi said, as all of you know, that the NAACP was formed 90 years 
ago. It was founded, as all of you know, I'm sure, in direct response to 
a riot in Springfield, Illinois. Now, I learned something in getting 
ready to come here tonight that I did not know. I had always thought it 
was simply a cruel irony that this riot occurred in Abraham Lincoln's 
hometown and where he was buried. I learned that the white mob was 
actually deliberately conducting the riot there, trying to make Mr. 
Lincoln turn over in his grave. They yelled, storming through the black 
neighborhoods, ``Lincoln freed you; we'll show you where you belong.''
    Well, quite to the contrary, it was the NAACP that helped to show 
you where you belong. On any bus, in any lunch counter, in any voting 
booth, in any school, in the Armed Forces, in the highest echelons of 
Government and business--you belong everywhere. And so do your friends. 
And we will never make what Congressman John Lewis so beautifully called 
the ``beloved community'' until everybody who belongs can be wherever 
they belong.
    I am very grateful for the work we have done together in these last 
6 years. Previous speakers commented on all these folks from our 
administration and how our crowd looks like America. What I would like 
history to say is, ``They had the administration that looked the most 
like America and that did the most for America, proving that excellence 
and diversity and community all go hand in hand.''
    I am grateful that we have stronger communities, with a dropping 
crime rate; that there are only about half as many people on welfare as 
there were 6 years ago; that the doors of college are open to every high 
school student who will work for it through the HOPE scholarship and the 
other academic aid that we have provided; that we have the longest 
peacetime expansion in history and the lowest peacetime unemployment 
since 1957. I am grateful that the prosperity is wider, with the lowest 
African-American unemployment rate ever recorded, the highest African-
American homeownership rate ever recorded, record numbers of new 
African-American businesses every year.
    But it takes a long time to get it all fixed. Just before I came 
over here tonight, 117 years too late, I awarded a pardon posthumously 
to Lieutenant Henry Flipper, who, because of racial prejudice, was 
wrongfully convicted of conduct unbecoming an officer and dismissed from 
the Army more than a century ago. He was born a slave. He was the first 
African-American graduate of West Point. He served with great 
distinction in the 10th Cavalry. In Fort Sill, Oklahoma, he eliminated 
the cause of malaria as a civil engineer by digging what is still called 
``Flipper's Ditch'' and is now a national monument. He lived to be 84. 
He served as an adviser to a Cabinet Secretary; he did all kinds of 
wonderful work throughout the world. He was cleared of wrongdoing 20 
years ago, but he was never, never fully restored in his good name until 
about an hour and a half ago, when, in the presence of 16 of his family 
members, several African-American graduates of West Point, General Colin 
Powell, and a number of others who are here, I signed his pardon.
    Now, we don't want the rest of America to have to wait 117 years for 
justice. And we don't want people to have to wait until they're gone for 
people to say something halfway nice about them. We don't want to have 
America outraged, even though we honor the outrage, by another killing 
like the killing of James Byrd.
    We know still, every day there are qualified African-Americans who 
are turned away from home loans or business loans; African-American 
drivers pulled over because they look suspicious. Some of you call it 
the offense of ``driving while black.'' We know every day there are 
African-American children who are stuck in failing schools when they're 
entitled to good schools.
    So we've been working at it for 6 years, to try to bring a special 
focus to the need to build one America, and to deal not only with the 
problems of African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans and Native 
Americans but the fact that we are now becoming the most diverse 
democracy in the world--California, 10 percent Asian-American, soon to 
have no majority race. We started the initiative on race in 1997 to

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institutionalize the work of building one America. I appointed Ben 
Johnson to continue our work in an 
organized, specific, and concrete way. And I want you to help us do 
that.
    I would like it very much if, after the next Presidential election, 
the new President is asked repeatedly, ``Now who is going to head your 
One America Office?'' I don't want this to be a one-shot deal. I want 
this to be a journey, not a destination. And I want it to be something 
that makes us think more and more every day, seriously, about how we're 
going to build unity out of our increasing diversity, get rid of our old 
problems, and meet our new challenges. And I want you to help me do 
that.
    I want you to help us, also, to pass this new budget, which helps to 
close some of those large opportunity gaps: the disparities in 
education, in jobs, in economic development, in civil rights 
enforcement, in homeownership, and quality health care.
    I came here tonight to celebrate and thank you, not to talk policy, 
but I want to mention just two areas. First, the economy. We all know 
that even though we have the lowest peacetime unemployment rate since 
1957, there are places that haven't felt much of this vaunted recovery. 
We all know that even though we have the lowest African-American 
unemployment rate every recorded--and the same for Hispanic-Americans--
it's still quite a bit higher than the national average. And for young, 
single men, it is still quite high indeed.
    Now, if we can't use this moment of unprecedented prosperity to 
bring jobs and opportunity and enterprise to the neighborhoods and to 
the people who have not yet felt it but are willing to work for it, we 
will never get around to doing the job. Now is the time to do that.
    So the NAACP is a nonpartisan organization; you do have Republican 
supporters out across this country who believe in civil rights. And I 
want you to go get them. [Laughter] And haul them up here to Washington, 
with the Democrats, too, and say, ``Look, we want you to pass this new 
markets initiative. We can put $15 billion in private investment into 
neighborhoods in this country that have not seen new investment and new 
jobs and new opportunity for people by giving the right kind of 
incentives, the right kind of tax cuts, the right kind of loan 
guarantees, the right kind of support to business people. And if we 
don't get around to doing it now, we will never get around to it.'' We 
need to do it now.
    I also want to tell you that a lot of farsighted business people 
have figured out that it would be very good for the American economy. 
Why? For the first 5 years of my Presidency, 30 percent of our growth 
came from expanded exports, selling more to other people around the 
world. Last year we had a good year, but we didn't get 30 percent growth 
from our exports. Why? You know why, because of the financial troubles 
in Asia and in a lot of Latin American countries. Now, I think we ought 
to help our friends in Asia, Latin America, and in Africa to trade with 
us more so we can grow and they can grow. But in the meanwhile, we've 
got the most significant untapped market for the growth of the American 
economy right here at home, in all these neighborhoods that still are 
not growing as they should.
    The second thing I want to ask you to do is to help me give every 
child in this country a world-class education. I want you to help me 
finish the job of hiring 100,000 more teachers. I want you to help me 
finish the job. I want you to help me again. I want you to bring your 
Republican and your Democratic friends up here and help me convince the 
Congress not to say no this time to our proposal to build or modernize 
5,000 schools. I'm tired of going into these inner-city schools and 
seeing schools so old we can't even hook them up to computers, with 
broken windows and peeling plaster. It's wrong. And in many other areas, 
you go, and the kids are all having half their classes in housetrailers 
because the schools are bursting at the seams. We need to do that. I 
want you to help me continue our work to hook up every classroom and 
library to the Internet by the year 2000. I want to ask you to help me 
change the way we give out Federal money, to not become victim to a 
tyranny of low expectations.
    I have said many times that I want to end the practice of social 
promotion, but not for the purpose of punishing the kids for a system 
that is failing them. And let me just give you one fact--I said this in 
the State of the Union, but I'm going to say it until I'm convinced 
every American knows it--last year, in the international test in math 
and science, a representative sample of American children, by race and 
income, scored near the top of the world in the fourth grade test. By 
the eighth grade, they had fallen to average. By the 12th grade, they

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were near the bottom. Nobody came and took brain cells out of those 
kids' heads. They did not get dumber. The system was failing them.
    So, yes, I believe we should end social promotion, but we also are 
tripling funds for after-school and summer school and tutoring programs 
and sending more college students into the schools to mentor kids when 
they're in middle school and tell them they can stay in school and go to 
college and what they need to do to do that. We need to do that.
    We are dramatically increasing our scholarship program to tell young 
people, ``If you'll go into inner cities or isolated rural areas and 
teach school for 3 or 4 years, we'll pay off your student loan. We want 
you to go out there and give something back to your country.''
    We have got to change the way we spend the money. The teachers and 
the parents and the kids are telling us what works; we ought to stop 
funding what doesn't work and start funding what does. We ought to say 
that school districts should raise standards for teachers, and we put 
money in there. There are so many of our teachers out there having to 
teach courses, with the schools overcrowded, that they don't have 
college majors or college minors in.
    That's what happens in high school. It's not that these people are 
not dedicated. They are, but they have not had the chance to be properly 
prepared. And the schools can't get enough teachers to put enough people 
in the classrooms with the kind of academic background. We ought to help 
them change that.
    And there are school districts with schools that are doing great and 
schools that aren't doing so well. The school with the biggest--the 
State with the biggest gain in student performance in the last couple of 
years is North Carolina, because they adopted a strategy that says, 
``We've got to turn around or shut down failing schools.'' When you do 
that, you almost never have to shut one down. They find a way to turn 
around.
    The great English scholar Benjamin--I mean, Samuel Johnson, once 
said--I had Benjamin Johnson on my mind--[laughter]--Samuel Johnson said 
that it is remarkable how the prospect of one's own demise concentrates 
the mind. [Laughter] We don't want to punish anybody; we want to turn 
schools around--and there's things in this budget to do that--and to 
help the teachers and to give the parents more information and to help 
more districts set up charter schools and to do things that will work, 
so that we don't have one size fits all.
    I read a story the other day about a school district out West that 
organized a school just for high school dropouts. Let them come at 
different hours. Let them have access to computers and special tutors. 
And all of a sudden, almost all the dropouts came back to school. There 
are all kinds of different things that can be done to raise the 
performance level of our schools.
    But I think all of you know that we'll never really have one 
America, and we'll never really get by discrimination, unless we create 
opportunity in the schools and opportunity in the economy. So I ask you 
to help me pass these initiatives.
    Now, let me just say one last thing. I was delighted to be asked to 
come tonight, honored to accept. The work that I have been privileged to 
do as President, and before, in my life to advance the cause of equal 
opportunity is perhaps the thing I cherish most, of all the things that 
I and my wife and our administration have been able to do.
    You'd be amazed how may times in my weekly lunch with the Vice 
President, after we get through with 
whatever business we have to do, we get back to talking about this 
subject. I guess it's because I grew up in the segregated South. Maybe 
it's because I met and was influenced by people like some of you here 
tonight, so many years ago. But part of it is, I know that it's a pure 
miracle that, starting out from where I did as a kid, I wound up here 
tonight. A pure miracle.
    I once heard a guy say every politician wants you to believe he was 
born in a log cabin he built himself. [Laughter] But the truth is, we 
don't build our log cabins ourselves. And not a person standing here or 
sitting here tonight got here on your own. And most of us get out of 
this life better off than we deserve, because God is good and so are the 
people that we get in touch with.
    But it really bothers me that there are children in this country who 
are certainly just as smart, full of as many dreams, with whatever 
abilities God gave me--that they have them--who may not be able to live 
out their dreams. And if all of us as citizens have one responsibility, 
apart from honoring our country and Constitution and laws, it ought to 
be to make sure

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that at the end of our days we have done everything we can to make sure 
no one we ever touched was denied the chance to live their dreams. We 
know we'll be better off when that's true. We know we'll all get 
something out.
    I look at these young kids that are here tonight, these young 
people. I'm kind of jealous, actually. If they'd let me be 20, I think 
I'd let them be President. [Laughter] You know? I think about the life 
that lies before them and all that they might be. I imagine, 30 years 
from now, some African-American, Hispanic, Asian female standing here as 
President of the United States, you know?
    But I know that as long as there are Native American reservations 
where young American citizens live in communities where the diabetes 
rate is 2 and 3 and 4 and 5 times the national average; as long as there 
are neighborhoods where kids really don't have a chance to get a world-
class education; as long as there are places where nobody's taking care 
of the pollution, so the health rates are not what they ought to be; as 
long as there is anyplace where anybody can't live out their dreams, the 
NAACP will have work to do, and America will have new ground to break. 
And together, there is no better cause for our energies and our lives.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 9:07 p.m. in the Great Hall at the National 
Museum of Women in the Arts. In his remarks, he referred to Julian Bond, 
chairman of the board, Kweisi Mfume, president and chief executive 
officer, and Bishop William H. Graves, vice chairman of the board, 
NAACP; Suzanne DuBose, president, Bell Atlantic Foundation; Gail West, 
wife of Secretary of Veterans Affairs Togo D. West, Jr.; Judith A. 
Winston, former Executive Director, President's Initiative on Race; and 
Gen. Colin Powell, USA (Ret.), chairman, America's Promise--The Alliance 
For Youth.