[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
[February 16, 2000]
[Pages 269-273]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher 
Education Dinner
February 16, 2000

    Thank you very much. Dr. McClure, my 
mother is up in heaven smiling at that introduction. And she's probably 
the only person who heard it who believes every word of it. [Laughter] 
But I liked it, and I thank you. [Laughter]
    I thank you so much, all of you, for welcoming me. To your chair-
elect, Joann Boyd-Scotland, who sat with 
me for a few moments; your CEO, my long-time friend Dr. Henry 
Ponder; Dr. Earl Richardson, who welcomed me to Morgan State not too many years ago, 
and then Vice President Gore yesterday; to 
Dr. Iris Ish and all the members of my Board of 
Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities; to my 
president, the Arkansas Baptist College president, Dr. William 
Keaton, my long-time friend.
    I want to also have a special word of acknowledgement to your vice 
president, Dr. Wilma Roscoe. Her daughter, 
Jena, works in the White

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House; that's really why I'm here tonight, to preserve peace in the 
family. [Laughter]
    I want to thank all the White House members who are here: the 
Director of our Office of Public Liaison, Mary Beth Cahill; and Ben Johnson, who 
has done a wonderful job for us. I know he spoke here earlier today. I 
also would like to thank Catherine LeBlanc, who is Executive Director of our Initiative on 
Historically Black Colleges and Universities. And I congratulate all the 
alumni award winners here tonight.
    When Dr. McClure was saying his kind words, what I wanted to say 
was, I feel like the luckiest person alive, that at this moment in 
history I was fortunate enough to be given a chance to serve as 
President and to focus the attention of the Nation on the future, on 
some old-fashioned ideas: everybody counts; everybody ought to have a 
chance; everybody's got a role to play; we all do better when we help 
each other. The work I have done to build one America for a new century 
was a joy every day. Even on the darkest days, the fact that I had this 
job to do for you and for our children and our children's children made 
this a joy.
    And I think of all you have done to make the last 7 years possible. 
Think about what a different country America would be today had it not 
been for the institutions all of you represent. Think about what a 
different administration I would have had. We have Alexis 
Herman, the Secretary of Labor, graduate of 
Xavier. Togo West, the Secretary of 
Veterans Affairs; Bob Nash--the hardest job in the 
White House--he handles my appointments. I get the credit when they get 
it; he takes the blame when they don't. [Laughter] And Judith 
Winston, who ran our One America 
initiative when I put my White House committee together on race. All 
graduated from Howard. Dr. David Satcher, 
from Morehouse; Terry Edmonds, my chief 
speechwriter, from Morgan State.
    But if you think about this economy we have, which is not only the 
longest expansion in history but has given us the lowest African-
American unemployment rate ever recorded and the lowest poverty rate in 
20 years and the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years--that would 
not have happened if it hadn't been for the educational opportunities 
provided by the people in this room and their forebears, and you should 
be very, very proud of that.
    I was very glad to be invited to come by here and to be able to redo 
our schedule so I could come, because I wanted to make one simple point 
to you. Everybody knows how important your institutions were to 20th 
century America. I want everybody to know how important your 
institutions will be to 21st century America.
    A third of all the undergraduate and advanced degrees awarded to 
African-Americans are awarded by your institutions. I want America to 
know that and to know what a vital role you play in building your 
communities, nurturing new businesses, and revitalizing neighborhoods, 
as Howard is doing here in our hometown of Washington. I want America to 
know about your enormous contributions to research. I want every 
American to know that last November Tennessee State astronomers made the 
world's first direct detection of a planet orbiting another star.
    We've done what we could to play our role. The Vice President and I 
have worked hard to be good partners to you. I told Earl, Al Gore was so happy 
that he got to go to Morgan State yesterday, because when I got to go to 
Morgan State to give a commencement address, to talk about, of all 
things, science and technology--not him, I got to talk about that--he 
was so jealous. [Laughter] And I just told him, I said, ``It won't be 
long before nobody pulls rank on you anymore, but I'm going there.'' And 
he got to go yesterday.
    We want people to know what's going on. And we want you to be able 
to define a mission for the 21st century that will help to create 
opportunity for every responsible American. We now have 30 agencies in 
our Government all singing out of the same hymnal, working for you, to 
help you reach your goals and your aspirations. The budget I just 
submitted to Congress includes almost a 40 percent increase in HBCU 
funding, including the new dual degree program Secretary Riley talked about yesterday.
    I want to ask you now to think beyond that. In the State of the 
Union, I said that I thought America should be proud of what we had done 
together these last 7 years, but not satisfied. There's a big 
difference. We should remember that we got to where we are as a country 
with the right vision and the right values and an awful lot of effort--
an awful lot of effort. All of you know, because of the work you do, 
that the one constant of the time in which we live is change; that there 
is an inherent dynamism in this moment which rewards people who are

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educated, who work hard, who can think and create, and punishes the 
sluggards mercilessly.
    And I don't want to see our country become a sluggard in 2000 just 
because we're feeling good about ourselves. I don't want to see 
Washington become a sluggard in 2000 just because there's an election on 
the horizon that will occupy the headlines, because what is rewarded is 
action. And so I ask you to help me convince our country and our 
Congress that this may be an election year, but it's still got to be an 
action year.
    We have an action agenda. You know, I think we can really say--with 
the HOPE scholarships, with the direct student loan program, with a 
million work-study positions, with the increases in the Pell grants--
we've opened the doors of at least 2 years of college now to every 
American who will work for it. But it's time to open the doors of 
college for 4 years to every American who will work for it.
    That's why we want to raise the Pell grant again. That's why I want 
to make college tuition tax deductible up to $10,000, and I want to do 
it in a progressive way so that whether the family is in the 15 percent 
income tax bracket or the 28 percent income tax bracket, they get a 28 
percent tax deduction for college tuition. This can make a huge 
difference to help children stay in school.
    One of the things that bothers me most is that since 1993 we have a 
10 percent increase in the percentage of our high school graduates going 
on to college. A couple years ago, for the first time in history, the 
percentage of African-Americans graduating from high school on time was 
almost identical to the white majority. The percentage going on to 
college has significantly increased. But the dropout rate is still way 
too high.
    You wait till this census comes in. And it will give you a profile 
of the American people and their incomes and their prospects. And what 
it will show is just what the 1990 census showed, but more so: People 
with an education do well; people without an education work harder for 
less. We've got to get these kids into college; we've got to keep them 
in college. And you have to help us, financially, academically, in every 
way. I have proposed some new college completion grants to try to help 
schools experiment with new strategies to keep young people in school 
within the TRIO program. I know that this is a big concern of yours. 
This is a big issue to America.
    I want you to help me convince the country and the Congress that we 
ought to bring economic opportunity to every area that hasn't seen it. 
We ought to increase the number of empowerment zones under the program 
the Vice President has headed so ably. We 
ought--in every poor neighborhood in America, an inner city, a rural 
area, an Indian reservation--we ought to give people the same tax 
incentives to invest there that we give them to invest overseas, in 
Latin America or Africa or Asia. I'm for helping Americans to invest 
overseas, but we ought to give them the same incentives to invest in 
poor areas here, where people are dying to go to work or start 
businesses or have a better future.
    I want you to help me convince the country and convince the Congress 
that there are still a lot people out there in poverty; that they ought 
to have access to jobs and education; and that even though we have 2 
million-plus fewer children in poverty, there are still too many. And as 
rich as we are now, as low as our unemployment rate is now, there is no 
excuse for any child in America living in poverty. And we ought to say 
as a goal, we're going to make sure that we increase the earned-income 
tax credit for working families; we're going to make sure that we 
increase child care support; we're going to do whatever it takes to make 
sure that every parent can succeed at home and work, and no child is 
raised in poverty. I want you to help me convince the Congress and the 
country that that is the right thing to do.
    The one thing you can play a big role in is making sure we close the 
digital divide--it's okay to clap for that, that's good. [Applause] I 
was so pleased to learn of your new agreement with Gateway to empower 
your students, your faculty, your alumni with a million affordable new 
computers; to put in place the E-commerce tools for improving distance 
learning, on-line admissions, registration, and financial aid. It's a 
good company, doing what I think we ought to do.
    I visited Gateway's offices in Belfast, Northern Ireland. I met with 
all their young employees who worked there. They had young people from 
seven, eight, nine different countries working in one office there, 
talking all over the world where they were selling these computers. And

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Ted Waitt and the people at Gateway have decided 
that if they're trying to bring that kind of opportunity to the rest of 
the world, they ought to be closing the digital divide here at home. I 
applaud them, and I applaud you for working with them. We have to do 
more with that. There is so much we can do to help young people skip a 
generation of educational and economic development, in terms of time, if 
we close the digital divide.
    I ask you to help me persuade the Congress to give the biggest 
increase in civil rights enforcement in history--we still have actual 
problems with bigotry and discrimination out there--to enforce the equal 
pay laws; and to pass hate crimes legislation; to do things that will 
give us the tools to create one America.
    Let me just say this briefly in closing. I know you all agree with 
my agenda. I know you do, and I'm grateful for the support you've given 
us in everything we've worked on through the years together. But the 
truth is, you're feeling pretty good here tonight, too. Things are going 
pretty well at home, aren't they? Yes, you know some people in trouble, 
but more people are doing better. And so we're all feeling pretty good. 
The great test of our people in this age is what we do with our good 
feeling. How many times--anybody that's over 30 in this audience will 
identify with this--how many times in your life have you made a mistake 
not because things were going badly but because things were going well?
    The whole history of the civil rights movement is about people who 
were saints under fire. People'd burn crosses in their yards, throw 
rocks or bullets through the front window. Stand up and be counted. 
March down the street. We're commemorating Selma this year. We honor 
these people. But how many times have you made a mistake and failed, and 
your courage and your vision has failed you, not because you were under 
duress but because things were going so well you thought there were no 
consequences to taking your eye off the prize? And I want you to have a 
good time here tonight, but I want you to hear me about this.
    I thank you for acknowledging what I've tried to do with you for 
America. But being President should always be honor enough. If nobody 
ever did another thing for me in my life, and I spent the rest of my 
life doing for other people, I would never catch up, not ever. So what I 
want to say to you is, take a little time tonight while you're having 
fun at dinner and clapping for the award recipients and feeling pretty 
good about where you are and where your institutions are, but think 
about what you are going to do with this good fortune and what your 
country is.
    You know, you talked about me being a little boy in Hope. I'm 
talking to you now more as a citizen than as a President. I'm not 
running for anything, you know. [Laughter] And most days, I'm okay about 
it. [Laughter] And I think about the young people and how I've always 
said, don't stop thinking about tomorrow; keep your eyes on the future; 
always have a vision. But I also know that to understand today and 
tomorrow, you have to have some sense of what yesterday was like.
    This month when we celebrated the longest economic expansion in 
history, I did a little looking into, and thinking about, what was the 
longest economic expansion until this one. You know when it was? 
Nineteen sixty-one to 1968. Now, I remember what that was like. I 
remember in the beginning how full of hope we were when President 
Kennedy was elected. I remember when President Kennedy was assassinated, 
how heartbroken we were, but how we rallied as a country behind 
President Johnson.
    All these people that look back at the sixties and say American 
cynicism started when President Kennedy was assassinated are just wrong. 
That's not true. This country was heartbroken, but we stood up together, 
and we joined hands. And Lyndon Johnson provided great leadership, and 
he pulled us together. So in 1964, I'm graduating from high school into 
an America that was the nearest like this America. We had low 
unemployment, low inflation, high growth. And everybody thought as 
difficult as the civil rights problems were, they were going to be 
resolved in a peaceable manner, with this wizard in the White House and 
the votes in Congress, to lawfully give African-Americans what they were 
constitutionally entitled to. And all the while we would win the cold 
war against communism, and we would create the greatest society America 
had ever known. That's what I believed the night I graduated from high 
school.
    Two years later, we had riots in the streets, a half a million 
people in Vietnam; the country was beginning to be deeply divided. Two 
years after that, I graduated from college in this city, 2 days after 
Robert Kennedy was assassinated, 2 months and 4 days after Martin Luther 
King

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was killed, 5 weeks after Lyndon Johnson said he couldn't see his way 
clear to run for President again. The streets were burning in 
Washington, DC and the country was broken and divided. And we decided a 
Presidential election on the politics of division, the so-called Silent 
Majority. You remember that? The Silent Majority was, ``There are two 
kinds of folks in America, the Silent Majority and the loud minority, 
and you're either `us' or `them.''' [Laughter] We can laugh about it. 
But I want you to hear me now. I'm not running for anything.
    I have waited 35 years and some months for my country to be in a 
position again to build the future of our dreams for all our children. 
We dare not blow this. Every one of you who can remember how we felt in 
those early days of hope--you don't know whether in your lifetime you'll 
get a third chance. America has a second chance to do it together, to 
build one America, to give all our kids a good education, to give health 
care to all our people, to lead the world to peace and freedom, to 
figure out how to live together across all the lines that divide us. We 
have a chance.
    And it's so easy to forget that it requires effort, because things 
are going well. When you go home tonight, before you put your head on 
the pillow, just remember where you were, if you're old as I am or just 
old enough to remember where you were the last time America thought 
everything was going to be all right, more or less automatically--it 
would be taken care of by then--and how quickly we lost it all.
    I have waited 35 years. You can take us where we need to go--in the 
heart of every boy and girl who wasn't alive back then, in the spirit as 
well as the mind. We can do it, but we've got to work at it.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 7:52 p.m. in the International Ballroom at 
the Washington Hilton Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Wesley C. 
McClure, chair, Joann R.G. Boyd-Scotland, chair-elect, Henry Ponder, 
president and chief executive officer, Earl S. Richardson, secretary, 
and Wilma Roscoe, vice president, National Association for Equal 
Opportunity in Higher Education; Lucile Ish, Vice-Chair, President's 
Board of Advisers on Historically Black Colleges and Universities; Jena 
Roscoe, Associate Director, White House Office of Public Liaison; J. 
Terry Edmonds, Assistant to the President and Director of Speechwriting; 
and Ted Waitt, chairman and chief executive officer, Gateway 2000, Inc.