    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [July 20, 1999]
    [Pages 1266-1270]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to Representatives of the Legal Community
    July 20, 1999

        Thank you. Let me say to all of you, I can't do any better than
    that. [Laughter] It was terrific. I wish every newspaper in American
    would reprint those remarks. Thank you, sir.
    Thank you very much.
        I want to thank you all for coming. What a wonderful group we have
    here. First, I thank Attorney General Reno and
    Deputy Attorney General Holder for the
    wonderful job they do in so many ways. Associate Attorney General
    Fisher is here with them and Bill Lann
    Lee of the Civil Rights Division. One big
    civil rights issue is getting him confirmed, I might add.
        I thank Secretary Slater and Secretary
    Daley for joining us, and Ben
    Johnson, who runs our one America
    initiative; and Chris Edley, who used to
    be part of our administration--still is--I just don't have to pay him
    anymore. [Laughter]
        Thank you, Senator Leahy and
    Congressman Becerra, for coming. I think
    there are at least two people in this room, Jerry Shestack and Bill Taylor,
    who were here in 1963 with President Kennedy. I thank them for coming.
    Thank you, Mayor Archer, for coming--former
    Secretary of State Warren Christopher,
    former Attorney General Benjamin
    Civiletti.
        There are so many people here--I just have to mention one person
    because it's my most intimate, personal acquaintance with affirmative
    action, the president of the American Bar Association, Phil
    Anderson, gave me a job in 1981, when I
    was the youngest former Governor in American history--[laughter]--with
    dim future prospects. So I thank him for being here, as well.
        And I'd like to say a special word of appreciation to the man who
    directs our national service program, Senator Harris Wofford, who was very intimately involved with President
    Kennedy's civil rights initiatives. Thank you for being here, sir,
    today.
        As has been pointed out, President Kennedy called more than 200 of
    America's leading lawyers to this room 36 years ago, the summer of 1963,
    when America was awakening to the fact that in our laws and in our
    hearts, we were still far short of our ideals.
        It is difficult today to imagine an America without civil rights.
    But when I came here 36 years ago in the summer of 1963, as a delegate
    to American Legion Boys Nation, there were only four African-American
    boys there, and the hottest issue was what we were going to do about
    civil rights.
        It didn't seem so inevitable back then. Across my native South,
    there were sheriffs, mayors, Governors defying the courts; police dogs
    attacking peaceful demonstrators; firehoses toppling children;
    protesters led away in handcuffs; and too little refuge in the hallowed
    sanctuary of the law.
        It was in this atmosphere that the President turned to America's
    lawyers and enlisted them in the fight for equal justice. With Vice
    President Johnson and Attorney General Robert Kennedy at his side, the
    President asked the lawyers there to remember their duty to uphold
    justice, especially in places where the principles of justice had been
    defied.
        The lawyers answered that call, creating a new Lawyers' Committee
    for Civil Rights Under Law and a new tradition of pro bono service in
    the legal profession. I asked you here today because we need your help
    as much as ever in our most enduring challenge as a nation, the
    challenge of creating one America. We have worked hard on that here. In
    the audience today I see

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    Dr. John Hope Franklin, Governor William
    Winter, Judy Winston. I think Angela Oh and Dr. Suzan
    Johnson are here, but I haven't seen them
    yet--people who worked on this for me to shine a special spotlight on
    the issues. And we have now institutionalized that effort insofar as we
    can in the White House. But there is a limit to what we can do without
    you.
        Just as your predecessors, with the Constitution as their shield,
    stared down the sheriffs of segregation, you must step forward to
    dismantle our time's most stubborn obstacles to equal justice--poverty,
    unemployment, and yes, continuing discrimination. Behind every watershed
    event of the civil rights struggle, lawyers, many pro bono, remain
    vigilant, securing equal rights for employment, education, housing,
    voting, and citizenship for all Americans. Their success, as you just
    heard from Bill--every time a lawyer does that, it inspires a whole new
    generation of people to seek the law as a career. I suspect many of us
    were inspired to go to law school because we thought lawyers were
    standing up for what was right, not simply because they were making a
    good living.
        Thirty-six years ago, in that 200, there were 50 African-American
    lawyers. They came to the White House, but they couldn't have found the
    same welcome in the hotels, restaurants, and lunch counters of America--
    a cruel irony.
        Today, thanks in large measure to the efforts of our lawyers,
    Americans of all backgrounds and colors and religions are working,
    living, and learning side by side. The doors of opportunity are open
    wider than ever. We are living in a time of unprecedented prosperity,
    with the longest peacetime expansion in our history and the lowest
    African-American and Hispanic unemployments ever recorded since we began
    to keep separate data in the early 1970's. Our social fabric is mending,
    with declining rates of welfare, crime, teen pregnancy, and drug abuse.
        But the challenge to build one America continues. It is different,
    but it is just as real as it was when Vernon Jordan started with the
    Urban League as a young man, or before he was working in the South on
    registering voters. I saw firsthand in the new markets tour I took a
    couple of weeks ago, we will never be one America when our central
    cities, our Indian reservations, our small towns and rural areas here in
    the most prosperous time in history are still living in the shadows of
    need and want. They're struggling with unemployment and poverty rates
    more than twice the national average--over 70 percent on some of our
    reservations. Your fellow Americans, many of them, are living in houses
    that it would sicken you to walk through--at the time of our greatest
    prosperity.
        Everything President Johnson worked for and dreamed of that he
    thought could happen after all these years has still not reached quite a
    large number of your fellow Americans. So, what are we going to do about
    it?
        We know that two out of five African-American and Latino children
    under the age of 6 are still in poverty, in spite of all of our
    prosperity, in spite of the fact that a million children were lifted out
    of poverty just in the last couple of years. We also know that we can't
    be one America when a lot of minorities still distrust law enforcement
    and our legal system generally and shy away from entering the legal
    profession.
        We can't be one America when, here we are, on the eve of the new
    millennium, when we act as if everything good will happen and all the
    rationality will fade away, but we still have to read about brutal
    killings like those in Indiana and Illinois, allegedly conducted on the
    basis of religious conviction; or what happened in Jasper, Texas; or to
    Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming.
        The struggle for one America today is more complex than it was 36
    years ago, more subtle than it seemed to us that it would be back then.
    For then, there was the clear enemy of legal segregation and overt
    hatred. Today, the progress we make in building one America depends more
    on whether we can expand opportunity and deal with a whole range of
    social challenges. In 1963 the challenge was to open our schools to all
    our children. In 1999 the challenge is to make sure all those children
    get a world-class education.
        And of course, if I could just expound on that for a moment, we've
    worked hard on that. And one of the things we have to do is to bring
    teachers to the communities where they're needed most. I offered an
    initiative to give scholarships to young people who would go and teach
    in inner-city or rural schools that were underserved. And I call for
    these scholarships as part of our race initiative. I believe they will
    make a real difference.
        The efforts we have made to make the class sizes smaller and to
    bring the Internet to all of our kids, even in the poorest classrooms,
    these things are beginning to make a difference.

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    The hundreds of thousands of people who have gone into the elementary
    schools to teach people to read are making a difference. I can tell you
    that in the last 3 years we have seen, for the first time in a very long
    time, at the 4th, 8th, and 12th grade level substantial improvements in
    reading scores, our children moving up about half a grade level. But
    there is a long way to go.
        Last year, just before the election, the Congress came together
    across party lines, and I shouted, ``hallelujah,'' because they voted to
    create and fund--to create 100,000 school teachers to lower class size
    in the early grades, something we know that is particularly important to
    poor children and people who don't come from strong educational
    backgrounds. And we now have the research that shows it has continuing
    benefits. I just released the funds to hire the first 30,000 of those
    teachers.
        But now, unbelievably, in this non-election year--although you
    wouldn't know it from reading the press--[laughter]--there are some who
    propose to kill the class size initiative and replace it with a program
    that doesn't guarantee that one red cent will go to hiring a single
    teacher or reducing the size of a single class. Now, this is very
    important because we now, finally, for the last 2 years, have a student
    population that is bigger than the baby boom generation. So it is not
    only the most diverse in history, it is the largest in history; and
    about 2 million teachers are scheduled to retire in the next few years.
        I'm happy to report, I hope in part because of the importance of
    education rising in the national consciousness, as the Secretary of
    Education told me 2 days ago, that we now have 10 percent of our college
    students saying they're considering being teachers. That's twice the
    percentage of 5 years ago, and that's encouraging. But we have to get
    them in the classroom.
        So if the research says it's a good idea, if we voted to do it, if
    we've already funded 30,000 of the teachers, why in the world would we
    turn around and reverse field? The people who want to kill the 100,000
    teacher initiative say they want to do it because they want to improve
    the quality of the existing teacher core. Well, I'm for that, and we've
    set aside sums to do it. But that shouldn't be a cover for the fact that
    we've got to do more to lower class size in the early grades, especially
    for our poorest children, especially for our minority children,
    especially for all these children whose first language is not even
    English.
        Across the river here in Alexandria we have kids who literally speak
    100 different languages as their native tongue, from 180 different
    racial and ethnic groups. We cannot afford to back up on this. I also
    believe very strongly that it would be wrong to pass a risky tax scheme
    before we first fund education and make sure we can save Social Security
    and Medicare, something that also has a big impact on minority
    communities in our country and will have a huge impact on the ability of
    the baby boom generation to retire in dignity without imposing new
    burdens on their children and their grandchildren, just as many of them
    are moving into the middle class for the first time in their family's
    history.
        So I hope that--this is a nonlegal issue, but since all of us, as
    our detractors never tire of saying, are overeducated--those of you who
    believe in education will stand with us as we try to preserve this
    important reform. Well, strengthening our schools is important, and
    bringing economic opportunity to those places that I visited and all
    those places like them in America, it is absolutely essential. But what
    I asked you here today for was to simply say we still need lawyers. We
    need the work lawyers do. We need the ideas lawyers get. We need the
    dreams lawyers dream. We still need people to fight for equal justice.
        And so I ask you to do two things today. First, I ask you to
    recommit yourselves, as Bill has asked, to fighting discrimination, to
    revitalizing our poorest communities, and to giving people an
    opportunity to serve in law firms who would not otherwise have it. You
    can help inner-city entrepreneurs negotiate loans to start new
    businesses. You can help neighborhood health clinics navigate the
    regulatory mazes they have to do to stay open. You can help nonprofits
    secure new supermarkets and merchants in underserved communities. Just
    for example, those of you who come from urban areas, today in the
    highest unemployment urban areas in America, there is still at least a
    25 percent gap between the money that the people who live there earn and
    have to spend to support themselves and the opportunities they have to
    spend it in their own communities.
        In East St. Louis, where I visited, there is a 40 percent gap. We
    went to a Walgreens store that was the first new store to open in the

    [[Page 1269]]

    inner city in 40 years. Mayor Archer here
    is exhibit A. The unemployment rate in Detroit is less than half what it
    was in 1993 when I took office, because he convinced people that there
    were people in his community that could work and that were already
    working and that had money to spend and that they ought to be part of
    the future. And we need to do that everywhere, and that work cannot be
    done without legal assistance.
        And it is a civil rights issue. It is a civil rights issue for
    people to have jobs and dignity and a chance to start businesses and the
    chance to be able to shop in their own neighborhoods and walk to the
    grocery store, instead of having to ride a bus and wait on the schedule
    and stand in the rain and do all the things people have to do. It is a
    huge issue. And if we can't do it now, we'll never get around to doing
    it. So I ask you to help us with that.
        I hope you will help me to pass my new markets initiative, because
    what it says is, we're going to give people the same incentives to
    invest in inner cities and rural areas and Indian reservations, the same
    incentives to invest there we give them to invest in the Caribbean, in
    Africa, in Latin America and Asia. I don't want to repeal those
    incentives; I want Americans to help poor people all over the world rise
    up. But they ought to have the same incentives to invest in poor people
    right here at home, and I hope you'll help me do that.
        The second thing I want you to do is to set the best possible
    example. Mr. McBride has spoken better than I
    can. We may have torn down the walls of segregation, but there are still
    a lot of walls in our hearts and in our habits. And sometimes, we can--
    we are not aware of those walls in our hearts, but we have to test them
    against our habits. So invite more lawyers of all backgrounds to join
    your firms. How are we going to build one America if the legal
    profession which is fighting for it doesn't reflect it? We can't do it.
        I am so pleased that the organizations here have made the
    commitments they've made to diversity and to pro bono work. I thank the
    American Bar Association, the Corporate Counsel Association, for
    pledging to launch new initiatives to promote greater diversity in the
    profession. The ABA will bring together lawyers and academics, law firms
    and bar associations, to provide financial aid to minority law students
    and to mentor them as they embark on their legal careers. We've got to
    do more work to mentor them before, in the places that have tried to do
    away with affirmative action--I believe wrongly--sometimes under court
    decisions with which I respectfully disagree. But if you don't get there
    in the first place, it won't matter if there's someone helping you once
    you do get there.
        The Counsel Association has promised to encourage its 11,000 members
    to hire more minority-owned law firms and to dedicate more of their
    resources to pro bono legal work in communities. I thank the hundreds of
    law firms who have agreed to dedicate at least 3 percent of billable
    hours--about 50 hours a year per lawyer--to pro bono work, which is the
    ABA standard. As Bill pointed out, this booming economy has been pretty
    good to America's lawyers and law firms. Last year, top firms increased
    their revenues by 15 percent. There will never be a better opportunity
    to help those who need it most. If Mr. McBride's firm thought it was a good idea, it's probably a pretty
    good idea for other firms, as well.
        And there's one other point I would make, following on what he said.
    I think it's good business strategy over the long run, not only for all
    the reasons you said, but because the recovery of the last 6 years has
    proved a fundamental thing about a community: that is, when other
    people, particularly people who haven't had a chance, do well, those of
    us that are in a position to take it, that are going to do all right,
    regardless, do better. When the least of us do well, the rest of us do
    better. We are all stronger. And we should never forget that.
        So I hope every American firm will meet the ABA standard. Just
    imagine this: if every lawyer in America--about 800,000--dedicated just
    50 hours a year to pro bono work, that would be 40 million hours of
    legal help. That's a lot of personal problems solved, a lot of headaches
    gone away, a lot of hurdles overcome, a lot of business started. Think
    of what we could do.
        A 1993 ABA study found that half of all low income households had at
    least one serious legal problem each year, but three-quarters had no
    access to a lawyer. Now we can fill that gap. Now America's lawyers can
    afford to fill that gap. And I would argue, if we really believe in
    equal justice we cannot afford not to fill that gap.

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        I want to thank the Association of American Law Schools for pledging
    to help more schools incorporate community service in their curriculum--
    something I strongly believe in--so that more law graduates will come
    out of law school predisposed to do volunteer work and pro bono work.
    All these are wonderful pledges. I thank the presidents of the ABA, the
    Minority Bar Associations here, the American Corporate Counsel
    Association, the representatives of the San Francisco and New York City
    bars, the cochairs to the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights for
    agreeing to meet every month.
        You heard what Eric Holder said--for our part the Justice
    Department, working with Ben Johnson
    and the White House Office on One America, will do whatever we can to
    support these efforts. And a year from now, we'll gather again and see
    where we've succeeded and where we need to do more. I don't want to wait
    another 36 years. I ask you to work on this. I want it to be steady work
    for America's lawyers.
        I ask Eric Holder and Neal
    Katyal of the Justice Department to report
    to me on the progress. We will know we have succeeded if more lawyers
    begin to make community service a vital part of their practice. We will
    know we will have succeeded when we have more businesses, more health
    clinics, more affordable housing in places once bypassed by hope and
    opportunity. We'll know we'll have succeeded when our law schools, our
    bar associations, and our law firms not only represent all Americans,
    but look like all America.
        One of the best things Dr. King ever said was that ``the arc of the
    moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.'' Our Nation's
    lawyers have bent that arc toward justice. Our Nation has been
    transformed for the better. So I ask you again to lead us along that arc
    from the America we know to the one America we all long to live in.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 3 p.m. in the East Room at the White House.
    In his remarks, he referred to Robert B. (Ben) Johnson, Assistant to the
    President and Director of the President's Initiative for One America;
    Judith A. Winston, Executive Director, One America in the 21st Century:
    The President's Initiative on Race; John Hope Franklin, Chairman,
    Christopher Edley, consultant, and Angela E. Oh, Suzan D. Johnson Cook,
    former Gov. William Winter of Mississippi, and Mayor Dennis W. Archer of
    Detroit, members, President's Advisory Board on Race; Jerome J.
    Shestack, former president, American Bar Association; civil rights
    attorney William W. Taylor III, Zuckerman Spaeder law firm; and Bill
    McBride, managing partner, Holland & Knight law firm, who introduced the
    President.