[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 30, Number 10 (Monday, March 14, 1994)]
[Pages 496-499]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at the United Negro College Fund Dinner in New York City

March 10, 1994

    The President. Thank you very much. I want to begin by expressing my 
appreciation for being able to join the honorees here tonight and all 
the distinguished Americans who are here, the presidents of the 41 UNCF 
colleges. Given my roots, I couldn't help noticing, of the 41 UNCF 
colleges, all but Wilberforce are located in the South. And sometimes 
I'm not so sure about Ohio and where it is. [Laughter] For any of you 
who are from there, that was a compliment from me.
    You know, Bill Gray once came to Arkansas to give a speech for me, 
and I thanked him profusely. He was then the chairman of the House 
Budget Committee, perhaps the most powerful Member of the House at that 
time, except the Speaker. And he was exhausted, and he came down there. 
I said, ``I cannot tell you how much I appreciate it.'' And he said, 
``Well, one of these days I'll give you a chance to demonstrate it.'' At 
the time, he knew more about my future than I did, I assure you. 
[Laughter]
    I've been terribly impressed with the people who have been 
recognized here tonight, Stephen Wright and Arthur Fletcher, my longtime 
friend Vernon Jordan. You could chronicle his demise up there; his 
hair's going gray, and he's relegated to playing golf with me. 
[Laughter] I want to say a special word of recognition to Christopher 
Edley, Sr., because he has not only rendered great service to this 
organization but he has given me his son to be the Associate Director of 
the Office of Management and Budget. Now, the younger Mr. Edley was not 
so fortunate in his education. He was consigned to Swarthmore and 
Harvard. [Laughter] But he got over it, and he's doing quite nicely now 
in the Federal Government. I enjoyed the presentation to your 
distinguished alumni, Pearline Cox and----
    Audience members. Yea!

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    The President. Cheer again. That's all right. Don't be shy, go 
ahead. [Applause]
    And I was very impressed with Mrs. Trent not only for representing 
her husband's work but for setting the record straight on the way out. 
If it's all the same to you, ma'am, if you don't think you're too old to 
undertake a new challenge, I'd like to have you come to the White House 
and help me set the record straight, starting Monday morning. [Laughter]
    I'd also like to say that every President since Franklin Roosevelt 
has supported this fine work, but it was an especially important cause 
for my predecessor, George Bush, and I'd like to thank him in his 
absence for the support he gave to the UNCF and thank his brother for 
the leadership he has given. Thank you, Mr. Bush, for your leadership, 
sir.
    You know, when Bill Gray resigned from the Congress to take this 
job, I had an extended conversation with him, and I virtually cried when 
he told me he was leaving. But I now can look at him and his wonderful 
wife and see that there is life after politics, which is quite a 
wonderful thing because I can assure you there is less and less life in 
politics now than there used to be. [Laughter]
    I never will forget the lesson Bill Gray gave all of us as chairman 
of the House Budget Committee when he believed that you actually could 
bring the deficit down and increase our investment in our people at the 
same time. That is what we are trying to do, and that is the path that 
he blazed. He also educated a reluctant National Government on the 
meaning of freedom when he got Congress to pass sanctions against South 
Africa and helped to put America on the right side of the struggle for 
freedom and democracy. Six weeks from now, South Africa will hold the 
first free elections in its history, and one of the great, beautiful, 
and painful ironies in history, the jailed Nelson Mandela, and the 
jailer, Mr. de Klerk, who set him free, in an election where people will 
freely choose the course of their future. And you had something to do 
with that, quite a bit, Bill Gray, and America thanks you and the world 
thanks you. I think we all ought to know that that election will not be 
the end of South Africa's struggles, it will just be the beginning of a 
new phase, a phase in which free people will be called upon to overcome 
the legacy of their own past, a struggle in which we are still engaged 
in this country.
    One thing that the UNCF has always known is that the more free you 
are, the more you need to know. One of our administration's principal 
initiatives will be to try to support higher education in South Africa 
and to try to foster stronger linkages between your institutions and the 
institutions of higher education in South Africa, so that together we 
can march into the future.
    Today Bill Gray was notified by the Director of the Agency for 
International Development, Brian Atwood, in our administration, that the 
UNCF and the Hispanic Association of Higher Education are now going to 
work together to try to guarantee more participation in international 
aid programs for historically black colleges and universities throughout 
our country.
    We have made a lot of progress since Dr. Patterson started his work 
and Franklin Roosevelt was President, a lot of progress since Benjamin 
Davis led soldiers in World War II simply to fight for their basic 
rights as citizens to defend this country. All the way along, those of 
you who have been part of the heart and soul of this administration have 
known that learning was the key to liberation.
    I have been blessed in my administration with people who have 
graduated from the member schools of this distinguished group: the 
Energy Secretary, Hazel O'Leary, graduate of Fisk; my wonderful 
Presidential Assistant for Public Liaison, Alexis Herman, who graduated 
from Xavier and is here with me tonight; the Chief of Staff to the First 
Lady, Maggie Williams, and the Presidential Assistant for Personnel, 
Veronica Biggins, both graduated from Spelman, Dr. Cole; and my dear 
friend from Arkansas, our Nation's distinguished Surgeon General, 
Joycelyn Elders, graduated from Philander Smith, my State's contribution 
to this distinguished organization.
    We have named the most distinguished and the most diverse group of 
Federal judges of any group in our history, and many of those who are 
African-Americans started their educational lives at UNCF schools. 
Today, 17 of the 40 Members of Congress

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who are African-Americans and members of the Congressional Black 
Caucuses came from your schools.
    In November, I signed an Executive order on Historically Black 
Colleges and Universities and committed our administration to their 
collective progress under the leadership of Catherine LeBlanc, who is 
here tonight with me. Since then, we have proposed putting more money 
into programs like Upward Bound, increasing funding for Pell grants, 
guaranteeing a new $375 million historically black colleges and 
universities capital financing program, and creating a whole new system 
of college loans so that our young people can borrow money to go to 
college at lower interest rates and pay it back on better terms, so that 
young people will never be discouraged from borrowing money to go to 
college because of the burden of repaying it and never be discouraged 
from taking a more public-service-oriented job when they get out because 
their salaries will be insufficient to cover the cost of the loan. Now 
they can elect to pay it back as a percentage of their income over a 
long period of time.
    And finally, we have, I hope and believe, at long last lifted the 
cloud that had been hanging over scholarships for minorities and said we 
will support them and we believe in them, because learning is the key to 
liberation.
    What I want to say to you in closing is this, my friends: If 
learning is the key to full freedom in America, it must necessarily be 
true also that people must be free to learn. And too many of our young 
people are no longer truly free to learn.
    I had an astonishing experience today in Brooklyn, before I came 
here, I met at Brooklyn College with several hundred young students 
there and young volunteers in community service programs all across the 
country. And we heard presentations from nine people who painted a stark 
portrait of America as it is: a wonderful woman from Detroit whose two 
sons had been shot down in a gang fight, one of them dying, who 
channeled her heartbreak into building a program, the acronym of which 
is SOSAD, to try to give young people the chance to avoid the fate that 
her son met. We met there today a young teenager from Oakland, 
California, who had been caught in a crossfire and had his body 
shattered. He lost an eye. He was paralyzed from his waist down. One of 
his legs had been amputated. He was confined to a wheelchair. And do you 
know, he is spending his life telling people who are the victims of 
violence, of gunshot wounds, and knife wounds, not be full of vengeance 
and bitterness, and trying to convince them and their families not to 
shoot back, not to stab back, not to fight back, but instead to build 
back their lives. This young man riveted that crowd. There were many 
others who came there, a young man from New Jersey who left a corporate 
career in New York and instead took his necktie off and put a T-shirt 
and decided to devote the rest of his life to building one-on-one 
relationships with kids in trouble, to give them a chance to get to the 
point where they would be free to learn. These are the kinds of people 
that I met.
    But what I find is, even though there are hundreds, indeed, 
thousands of these stories all across America, you and I know that we're 
still losing an awful lot of our children. When the UNCF started--you 
think about this--when the UNCF started, just about everybody associated 
with its creation believed two things: number one, if you could make 
everybody free of discrimination, and number two, if you could give 
everybody the chance to get a good education, we could have real freedom 
and real opportunity and real community in America. We assume that.
    If anybody had told anyone 50 years ago that after 50 years there 
would be 2,000 people a year killed by gunshot wounds in New York City 
alone, no one would have believed that. If anybody had told the founders 
of this organization 50 years ago that the out-of-wedlock birthrate in 
many of our cities would be in excess of 50 percent and that it gets 
worse and worse and worse as people are driven more and more and more 
into poverty, no one would have believed that. If anyone had said 50 
years ago, what we're going to do with all this freedom in 50 years is 
have a flowering African-American middle class, an enormous explosion of 
entrepreneurs, unparalleled achievement by hoards of young 
professionals, and a dark flip-side in which people are killing each 
other with reckless abandon and people's lives are being lost and

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more and more young people are living in chaos and gangs, which people 
have feared, have been created, I am convinced, to do nothing more than 
fill the vacuum which has been created by the absence of family and 
community, of effective schooling and strong community organizations and 
hope, no one would have believed it.
    And so I say to you, as we celebrate all the achievements that we 
see around this room tonight, as we celebrate all the achievements we 
know that are to come, we must recognize the inherent limits on the 
programs I just outlined and the support I just mentioned and the work 
that you are doing, unless we can also go back and pick up the rest of 
our brothers and sisters who are beyond the reach of these efforts.
    And so I ask you to honor your past by creating a new freedom for 
those who have been left behind in this brave new world in which there 
is so much good and so much bad existing side by side. All these other 
kids count, too, the ones that will never get to your doors unless you 
and all of your schools participate in this national service program and 
have your kids out there tutoring these kids, turning these kids away 
from violence, teaching people in our schools that there are nonviolent 
ways to resolve your angers, your frustrations, your disappointments, 
the thwarting we all feel every day in our lives. You can do that. You 
can teach the illiterate to read. You can teach the frustrated to be 
peaceful. You can raise the children up when they are very young. You 
can help to implant values into children who aren't getting them in 
other places. You have a larger, a different, a more profound mission 
than ever before.
    I want to support you in that mission, too, because I know, I know, 
if we can get back to the point where the promise of all those ads we 
saw tonight, from the very first to Maya Angelou's magnificent poem, if 
we can do that, then this country's going to be all right. But if you 
want to hear somebody singing that poem over and over in their head, 
``And still I rise and still I rise and still I rise,'' it has to be 
true not just for the best of us but for all the rest of us. That is our 
challenge. Let us do our best to meet it.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 8:38 p.m. at the Sheraton Hotel and Towers. 
In his remarks, he referred to United Negro College Fund president and 
chief executive officer William H. Gray III; former presidents Stephen 
Wright and Vernon Jordan; former executive director Arthur A. Fletcher; 
former chief executive officer Christopher Edley; Viola Trent, wife of 
William Trent, first executive director; founder Frederick C. Patterson; 
and author Maya Angelou. A tape was not available for verification of 
the content of these remarks.