    [Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 30, Number 3 (Monday, January 24, 1994)]
    [Pages 105-110]
    [Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

    <R04>
    Remarks Honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., at Howard University

    January 17, 1994

        Thank you very much. Thank you, Charles DeBose, for that fine
    introduction and, even more important, for the example that you have set
    by your service. I can think of no more significant tribute to the life
    and memory of Dr. King than what you are doing and what all the other
    young people who are involved in community and national service are
    doing throughout this country. I know a number of them are behind me
    here on the stage, and I want to thank them all.
        Dr. Jenifer and Mrs. Jenifer, to Joyce Ladner and all the
    distinguished people here at Howard, I'm delighted to be back here
    again. I thank and honor the presence of all the civil rights leaders
    who are in the audience; three members of the Little Rock Nine, who
    helped to integrate Little Rock Central High School in my home State so
    many years ago; my good friend and the distinguished journalist,
    Charlayne Hunter-Gault; and members of my Cabinet here; presidents of
    other universities here; and other distinguished American citizens, all
    of whom have labored in the vineyard that produced Martin Luther King.
        I want to say a special word, too, if I might at the outset, of
    appreciation for the fact that Howard provided the moment for me to
    remember again that in all great debates there should be some discord.
    When the president of the student body got up here, I thought to myself,
    well, we do have a responsibility to seek justice as we see it. And I
    was glad she was here doing that.
        It was a year ago on this day that I last spoke at Howard, and I'm
    glad to be back on this day. Only three American citizens, one from each
    century of our history, are honored with a holiday of national scope.
    Two were Presidents, but the other never occupied any office, except the
    most important in our democracy: He was a citizen. George Washington
    helped to create our Union, Abraham Lincoln gave his life to preserve
    it, and Martin Luther King redeemed the moral purpose of our United
    States. Each in his own way, each in his own time, each three of these
    great Americans defined what it means to be an American, what
    citizenship requires, and what out Nation must become.
        Dr. King, his family, and those who joined in his cause set in
    motion changes that will forever reverberate across America, across the
    lines of geography, class, and race. The people who are here today,
    those whom I've mentioned and those whom I did not, all of them reflect
    that stunning fact. They endured beatings; they risked death; they put
    their lives on the line. They marched when they were tired; they went to
    bed often without a place to sleep. They made the word ``American'' mean
    something unique because they, all of them, in a way were trying to get
    us to live by what we said we believed. For all of you who are very
    young here today, many of you who were not even born when Martin Luther
    King died, it may seem to you that the struggle was a very long time
    ago.

    [[Page 106]]

    But if you look around you, you can see that the history of that
    struggle is still alive today, still being written and still being made,
    still waiting to be fully redeemed.
        I'm glad to be here at Howard today, and I'm glad that Howard and
    other historically black institutions of higher education are
    represented here by satellite and that all of them are working still to
    do what Martin Luther King knew must first be done: to give an education
    to all of our citizens without regard to their race. Howard's alumni
    alone include a Justice of the United States Supreme Court, a United
    States Senator, a Nobel laureate, the Mayor of our Nation's Capital, and
    at least, by my last count, at least 17 people who occupy important
    positions in my administration, including the Secretary of Agriculture,
    Mike Espy, who is here. For that, I say thank you.
        It's also fitting that Howard's School of International Study is
    expanding, ready to educate a new generation of students about a rapidly
    changing and ever more integrated world. Dr. King would have been very
    pleased by that. His last speech, delivered the night before he was
    slain in Memphis, on April 3d, 1968, contained a prophetic message of
    hope about the world he saw evolving. He said he imagined himself
    standing at the beginning of time with a panoramic view of the whole of
    human history, with God Almighty saying to him, ``Martin Luther King,
    which age would you like to live in?'' He then considered all the
    momentous history that would beckon someone of his enormous intellect
    and understanding, from the earliest civilizations to the Renaissance,
    to the Emancipation Proclamation, but he said he would have said to the
    Lord, ``If you allow me just to live a few years in the second half of
    the 20th century, I will be happy.'' He said, ``That's a strange
    statement to make because the world is all messed up, but something is
    happening in the world. The masses are rising up, and wherever they are
    assembled today, the cry is always the same, `We want to be free.'''
        I think Dr. King would be gratified to see freedom's march today,
    gladdened to see what happened last September 13th when Prime Minister
    Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands and signed the Israel-PLO accord,
    overflowing with joy to see Nelson Mandela walk out of his jail cell
    after 27 years, working with a white South African President to set in
    motion genuine elections and then in good humor and with good spirit
    campaigning against him to be the leader of the country. This is an
    astonishing development.
        Freedom is moving in the world. This past week, as all of you know,
    I traveled to Europe to help support freedom's rebirth there. I want to
    tell you a little bit about that, because it relates to what I want to
    say to you about what we must do here at home. My highest duty as our
    President is to keep our Nation secure. And the heart of our security
    abroad lies in our ties with Europe, in its past turmoils, its future
    promise.
        For decades our security depended upon protecting a divided Europe.
    Europe was the center of two world wars which took more lives from the
    face of the Earth in less time than any two events in history. After the
    Second World War, Europe was divided, but war did not come again, in
    part because we protected the people on our side of the dividing line.
    But then the Berlin Wall came crashing down. People rose up and demanded
    their own freedom.
        Now we have seen the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the end of
    communism in Eastern Europe, the collapse of the Soviet system itself,
    new elections being held all over what was the Soviet Union. Now, that
    is an astonishing thing. But these new democracies remain fragile. They
    offer us the hope of a peaceful future and new trading partners, new
    prosperity, new opportunities to enrich our own lives by learning from
    different cultures and ethnic groups. But they are still threatened by
    the explosive mix of old ethnic tensions and new economic hardships.
        Russia has adopted a new democratic constitution and elected a
    Parliament freely for the first time to go with their popularly elected
    President. But the reformers are embattled there, as ordinary citizens
    struggle to understand how they can come out ahead in an economy which
    is still very hard for them and as they listen at election times to
    people who are calling them to an idyllic past that never existed, one
    based on division instead of unity.

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        The nuclear weapons of the former Soviet Union, too many of them are
    still there, remaining a source of instability, of potential for
    accident, an invitation to terrorist diversion. We're working as hard as
    we can to dismantle them, and we're making remarkable progress. But
    they're still there.
        We can't ignore these dangers to democracy. The best way to keep
    Europe from ever falling apart again, from dragging the young people of
    this country to that continent to fight and die again is to try to build
    for the first time in all of history a Europe that is integrated,
    integrated in a devotion to democracy, to free economies, and to the
    proposition that all these countries should respect one another's
    borders. That was the goal of my trip.
        We made great strides. We offered--we in the NATO alliance that kept
    the world safe after World War II--we offered all these countries, all
    of them, the chance to be part of a new Partnership For Peace that does
    not divide Europe but unites it. We said, let's turn our swords into
    plowshares by planting together for our common security. Let's have a
    military exercise in Germany with an American general, with Poles and
    Czechs and Russians standing side by side and working together. Let's
    say we're going to write a whole new future for the world, different
    from its past. That is our great hope, and we made a good beginning.
        We also sought to go country by country to bolster the new
    democracies, to tell people, look, there are always going to be problems
    in democracy and always going to be conflict. We just got a little of it
    today. [Laughter] I told them, I said, we've been at this for 200 years
    now, 200 years, and we didn't even give all of our citizens the right to
    vote until a generation ago. You've got to work at this. You've got to
    work at this, and you cannot be discouraged, and you cannot give up. And
    so I pledged to help the people who believe in democracy. And democracy
    means more than one thing. It means majority rule. It also means respect
    for minority and individual human rights.
        And we worked hard to try to build better economic ties because
    America cannot prosper unless the world economy grows. We cannot, we
    cannot meet our obligations to the young people in this audience today
    unless we say to them, ``If you work hard, you get an education, and you
    do what is right, you will have a job and an opportunity and a better
    life.'' We cannot do that. And to do that, we have to live in a world
    where all of us are working together to grow the economy. No rich
    country--and with all of our poverty, we are still a very rich country--
    none has succeeded in guaranteeing jobs and incomes to its people unless
    you always are finding more people to buy what you produce, your goods
    and your services. So I went to Europe because I think the trip will
    help to create jobs for the young people in this audience. And unless we
    can do that, our efforts are doomed to failure.
        And so we had a remarkable trip: to build a more secure world; to
    build a more democratic world; to build a more economically prosperous
    world; to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons; and yesterday, with my
    meeting with the Syrian President in Switzerland, to try to keep moving
    the most historically troubled area of the world, the Middle East,
    toward a comprehensive peace.
        But as I come home on this Martin Luther King Day from a trip that
    fought for democracy and economic progress and security, I have to ask
    myself: How are we doing on these things here at home? How are we doing
    on these things at home? If democracy is the involvement of all of our
    people and if it is making strength out of our diversity, if we want to
    say to the people in the troubled areas of Europe, ``Put your ethnic
    hatreds behind you; take the differences, the religious differences, the
    racial differences, the ethnic differences of your people, and make them
    a strength in a global economy,'' surely we must do the same here.
        In the last year, we've worked hard on that. Five of the members of
    my Cabinet are African-Americans. Sixty-one percent of the Federal
    judges I have appointed are either women or members of different racial
    minority groups. And they have also, I might add, been accounted the
    most highly qualified group of Federal judges ever nominated by a
    President of the United States.
        In the last year, our economy has created more jobs in the private
    sector than in the previous 4 years combined. Unemployment

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    is down; interest rates are down; investment is up. Millions of middle
    class Americans have refinanced their homes and started new businesses.
    All this is helping us to move in the right direction.
        We are working hard to protect rights fought for and won. American
    workers should not fear for their jobs because of discrimination. Under
    the Labor Secretary, Bob Reich, the Department of Labor's Office of
    Federal Contract Compliance has collected more than $34.5 million in
    back pay and other financial remedies for the victims of racial
    discrimination. That is a big increase over the previous year. We have
    filed a record number of housing discrimination cases, a 35-percent
    increase over the previous year. We are working to fight against
    discrimination in lending, because if people can't borrow money, they
    can't start businesses and hire people and create jobs.
        Just last week, in a coordinated effort strongly led by the HUD
    Secretary, Henry Cisneros, who would have been here today but is on his
    way to Los Angeles to deal with the aftermath of the earthquake, we
    ended an ugly chapter in discrimination in Vidor, Texas. Under the
    protection of Federal marshals, FBI agents, and the police, and with the
    support of the decent people who live there, a group of brave and
    determined African-Americans integrated at last Vidor's public housing.
        Today I pledge to you continued and aggressive enforcement of the
    Fair Housing Act. In a few moments I will sign an Executive order that
    for the very first time puts the full weight of the Federal Government
    behind efforts to guarantee fair housing for everyone. We will tolerate
    no violations of every American's right for that housing opportunity.
        But my fellow Americans, the absence of discrimination is not the
    same thing as the presence of opportunity. It is not the same thing as
    having the security you need to build your lives, your families, and
    your communities. So I say to you, it is our duty to continue the
    struggle that is not yet finished, to fight discrimination. We will, and
    we must. But it is not the same thing as the presence of opportunity.
        That is the struggle they're dealing with in Russia today, in the
    other former Communist economies. They have the vote. It's exhilarating.
    But how long will it take for the vote to produce the results that
    democratic citizens everywhere want so that people will be rewarded for
    their work and can raise their families to live up to the fullest of
    their God-given abilities? That is our job here.
        That's why this national service program is so important and why I
    was elated that Mr. DeBose was going to introduce me today, because
    national service is a part of our effort to create opportunity by
    building communities from the grassroots up and at the same time to give
    young people the opportunity to pay some of their costs of college
    education. And it is a part of the work that the Secretary of Education,
    who is here, has done to try to revolutionize the whole way we finance
    college education.
        We know right now that 100 percent of the people need not only to
    graduate from high school but to have at least 2 years of education
    after high school in the global economy. We know it, but we're not
    organized for it. And so under the leadership of the Education Secretary
    and the Labor Secretary, our administration is working to set up a
    system to move all young people from high school to 2 years of further
    training while they're in the workplace, in the service, or in school.
    And we're doing our dead level best to make sure that the cost of a
    college education is never a deterrent to seizing it, by reorganizing
    the whole student loan program. Last year the Congress adopted our plan
    to reorganize the college loan program, to lower the interest rates,
    string out the repayments, require people to pay back as a percentage of
    the income they are earning when they get out, not just based on how
    much they borrow when they're in school. No one should ever refuse to go
    to college because of its cost.
        And earlier today, to give one more example of what we mean by the
    presence of opportunity, on this Martin Luther King Day I met with a
    group of business leaders and urged them to become active partners in
    communities where the need is greatest. We have learned time and again
    now, ever since Martin Luther King lived and died, that even

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    when we have times of great economic growth there are areas in the inner
    cities and in rural America that are totally left out of the economic
    progress that occurs. We have learned that unless we can rebuild our
    communities from the grassroots up, unless we can rebuild the
    institutions of a community in ways that support work and family and
    children, that millions and millions of Americans will be left out of
    the American dream.
        And so today we announced our creation of 104 empowerment zones and
    enterprise communities that can make a difference, that will give people
    at the grassroots level the power to educate and employ people who
    otherwise will be lost, to themselves and to the rest of us, for a
    generation. That is the sort of thing that Martin Luther King would want
    us to do, not just to let discrimination go away but to create
    opportunity.
        And finally, let me say that we will never do this unless we create
    the ways and means for people to choose a peaceful and wholesome life.
    The most important experience I have had as your President here at home,
    I think, in the last several months was having the opportunity to go to
    Memphis and to stand in the pulpit where Dr. King gave his last address
    and speak to 5,000 ministers of the Church of God in Christ, many of
    whom are longtime personal friends of mine, and say that Martin Luther
    King did not live and die to give young people the right to shoot each
    other on the street.
        I come home thinking to myself: I am so proud of the fact that I had
    the chance to be President at a time when the United States was leading
    an agreement with Russia, in Ukraine, in Belarus, in Kazakhstan to
    dismantle weapons of mass destruction; but we can't get guns out of our
    own schools. I'm proud of the fact that we are pursuing an aggressive
    high-technology policy, under the leadership of the Vice President, that
    will help to turn this whole nation into a giant high-tech neighborhood
    so we can learn from one another and relate to each other; but we can't
    even make it safe for kids to walk the streets of their own
    neighborhoods.
        We would be asked, I think, by Martin Luther King how come this is
    so. When Mr. DeBose stood up and said everybody can be great because
    everybody can serve--Martin Luther King's greatest quote--I say to you
    today, we have to ask ourselves what our personal responsibility is to
    serve in this time. And when we cannot explain these contradictions,
    then we have to work through them. We may not have all of the answers;
    none of us do. I cannot expect you to have them; as President, I don't
    have them. But I know what the problems are, and so do you. And we know
    there are some things that will make a difference. And we have an
    obligation to try in our time to make that difference. There are too
    many questions we cannot answer today.
        Dr. King said, ``Men hate each other because they fear each other.
    They fear each other because they don't know each other. They don't know
    each other because they can't communicate with each other. They can't
    communicate with each other because they are separated from each
    other.'' We all need to think about this. We've got a lot of walls still
    to tear down in this country, a lot of divisions to overcome, and we
    need to start with honest conversation, honest outreach, and a clear
    understanding that none of us has any place to hide. This is not a
    problem of race; it is a problem of the American family. And we had
    better get about solving it as a family.
        Laws can help. That's why I wanted to pass the Brady bill. That's
    why I want to take these assault weapons off the street. That's why I
    want to do a lot of other things that will help to regulate how we deal
    with this craziness of violence on our streets. That's why I want more
    police officers, not to catch criminals even as much as to prevent
    crime. We know that community policing prevents crime if it's done
    right. Laws can help.
        But Martin Luther King reminded us, too, that laws can regulate
    behavior but not the heart. And so I say to you, we must also seek what
    Abraham Lincoln called ``the better angels of our nature.'' And we all
    have a responsibility there. When he spoke here at Howard, Martin Luther
    King said the following things, and I thought about it today when I was
    looking at Mr. DeBose up here introducing me, expressing the pride in
    the service he rendered and how it changed the minds and the hearts of
    the people with whom and for whom he worked. Dr. King

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    said, ``Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It
    comes through the tireless effort and persistent work of dedicated
    individuals who are willing to be coworkers with God. And without this
    hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of
    stagnation. And so we must help time, and we must realize that the time
    is always right for one to do right.'' ``Time is neutral,'' he said.
    ``Time can either be used constructively or destructively.'' All he
    asked from each of the rest of us was to put in a tiny, little minute.
        So, will we make Martin Luther King glad or sad about the way we use
    our tiny, little minutes? In any one minute in America today, two
    aggravated assaults take place, six burglaries occur, three violent
    crimes are committed, and three times an hour, that violent act is a
    murder. But think about it. Within the stand of the same minute, two men
    from different worlds, like Arafat and Rabin, can shake hands and set
    off on a new road to peace. A leader can agree that his country must
    give up the world's third largest nuclear arsenal. In one minute, people
    can make an enormous positive difference: they decide to keep a seat on
    a bus instead of move to the back; they decide to show up for school
    instead of be shunted away; they decide to sit at a lunch counter even
    if they won't get to eat that day; they decide to pursue an education
    even if they're not sure there's a pot of gold at the end of the
    rainbow; they work to keep their neighborhoods safe just to create a
    tiny little park where children can play without fear again; they keep
    their families together when it's so easy to let them fall apart; and,
    they work to give a child the sense that he or she is important and
    loved and worthy, with a future.
        When I think about it I'm often sad that Martin Luther King had so
    few precious minutes on this Earth. Two days ago he would have
    celebrated his 65th birthday, and the older I get the younger I realize
    65 is. [Laughter] But you know, he did a lot with the time he had, and I
    think we should try to do the same.
        Thank you.

    Note: The President spoke at 2:20 p.m. in Cramton Auditorium. In his
    remarks, he referred to Charles DeBose, Jr., National Service intern,
    Franklyn Jenifer, president, and Joyce Ladner, vice president for
    academic affairs, Howard University.