[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 30, Number 20 (Monday, May 23, 1994)]
[Pages 1096-1099]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Dinner

 May 16, 1994

    Thank you, Elaine. Thank you, I think. It's pretty hard to follow 
Elaine Jones, especially when she's on a roll like she was tonight. 
[Laughter] And the rabbi, sounding more like a Baptist preacher every 
day. [Laughter] And Vernon, who speaks well when he's asleep. [Laughter] 
And Dan Rather with a sense of humor. [Laughter]
    Ladies and gentlemen, I come here overwhelmingly to do one thing, to 
say on behalf of a grateful nation, thank you. Thank you to the Legal 
Defense Fund. Thank you to Thurgood Marshall, in the presence of his 
wonderful wife. Thank you to Bill Coleman. Thank you to Jack Greenberg. 
Thank you to Julius Chambers. Thank you, Elaine Jones. Thank you, all of 
you who have made it possible for us to come here today to celebrate the 
40th anniversary of Brown. Thank you. I thank Bob Bennett and Chester 
Davenport and all those who made this dinner possible. But most of all, 
I just wanted to say thank you.
    I was sitting out there looking at Elaine, listening to her say all 
these nice things, waiting, wondering how many days it would be before I 
would get my next lecture--[laughter]--and what new challenge would be 
presented.
    Thurgood Marshall and this organization won 29 victories before the 
Supreme Court but none as important as Brown. It changed our country and 
our lives. In a clear voice it said that we could no longer be two 
nations, separate and unequal. We are one people, one nation under God, 
indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. That's what it said. And 
it said that about the schools. And I was thinking what a difference it 
had made. I was thinking tonight as Elaine gave me my report card on 
judges and told me to do a little better--[laughter]--that today, since 
I have been privileged to be your President, there is a new minority in 
the Nation: A minority of those who have been appointed to the Federal 
bench are white men. A majority are women and people of color. And yet, 
the appointees that I have sent to the Senate have the highest 
percentage of people rated well-qualified by the American Bar 
Association of any President since those nominations have been made. And 
I am proud of that. And Brown v. Board of Education helped to make that 
possible.
    Oh, there's lots of other good things that happened because of 
Brown. I wonder if some of the people who are in my administration today 
could be there were it not for Brown. Thurgood Marshall and Bill Coleman 
and Jack Greenberg, they believe we're one nation indivisible under God, 
we're all going up or down together. What I wonder is whether the rest 
of us still believe that and, if so, whether we are prepared to endure 
the rigors of this time to make that real.
    You know, I was raised in the South when I knew a lot of people who 
were second-class citizens. I lived in a State where it took the 
President of the United States calling out the National Guard simply to 
let my friend Ernest Green and eight other people go to high school. And 
thanks to the work of this organization, my daughter got to go to that 
school system and never know that, and I'm grateful.
    I think it's important for us not to let young people today forget 
that. Tomorrow, Secretary Riley and Ernest Green and Thurgood Marshall, 
Jr., and I are going to Martin Luther King Junior High School in 
Beltsville, Maryland, to teach young people why Brown and its ideas are 
still important, why they still

[[Page 1097]]

matter. But we have to ask ourselves whether we think they still matter.
    Recently in various speeches, my good friend Vernon Jordan and then, 
last weekend at Howard, General Colin Powell have reaffirmed the 
fundamental meaning of Brown in the face of blacks and whites alike who 
seem to be retreating from its lesson, either out of fear or resignation 
that it is no longer possible to make it real in our lives.
    We see an alarming new study among African-Americans that warns of a 
pervasive sense of alienation, especially among the young, so that fully 
half of them want to opt out of the American system. They want to 
separate themselves. They believe that they're already a nation within a 
nation. That's why so many large crowds, I think, are drawn to the 
message of those who preach separatism in a negative way. There are too 
many extremists of all kinds across the entire political and racial 
spectrum who think the only way they can advocate their own ideas and 
build themselves up is by putting other people down, sometimes in the 
most devastatingly vicious ways.
    I say to all of you, we have to ask ourselves: Do we still believe 
in Brown? And if we do, what are we prepared to do, not only to stand up 
for it but to make it real in our time?
    Tomorrow we must celebrate Brown with the realization that a lot of 
folks have a mood that threatens to sever the ties that bind us. And we 
must confront a new segregationism that would tear us apart. To do it, 
we must recognize that Brown was ultimately not an answer but a 
challenge. And now 40 years later, you and the LDF must challenge me and 
our Government, and together we must challenge the Nation to revitalize 
the meaning of Brown in our time.
    When the courts were hearing Brown, America was reading a book by 
Ralph Ellison, called ``Invisible Man.'' He died just a month ago today. 
That book had an incredible impact on me. And still today when I see 
people denying each other's humanity, I remember the words of Ralph 
Ellison, and I think we are trying to make people who make us 
uncomfortable, who threaten us, who frighten us, invisible. But they 
will not go away. There are too many of us in this country today who 
simply don't accept one another's legitimacy.
    Last March, the leading moral voice for tolerance and reconciliation 
in Northern Ireland came to our country. His name is John Hume. He's a 
Catholic member of the British Parliament who represents a city in 
Northern Ireland where Catholics and Protestants have waged fights and 
built walls of hatred for 300 years. The day after he had dinner with us 
at the White House, he gave a speech in which he said this: ``The 
essence of the Irish problem is a division in the hearts and minds of 
our people . . . let us walk to Abraham Lincoln's Memorial and look at 
the message of peace that's written there for everybody, E Pluribus 
Unum--from many, one. The essence of unity is the acceptance of 
diversity.''
    To be sure, there can be no unity when people have not learned to 
accept one another as they are and when they think they can only fulfill 
themselves by denying others' humanity. But accepting diversity is only 
half the story. And that is our challenge today. Diversity is not an end 
in itself, although it is a very good thing; it is simply the only way 
we can build in a free society a larger community to which everyone 
belongs, in which everyone has a common stake in the future, and in 
which everyone can have a decent life.
    Anyone who knows the history of this organization knows you don't 
have to have the same skin color to have the same values. But we also 
have to be able to frankly speak about our problems and our differences.
    You know, I thought a lot about what I should say here tonight, and 
I got all kinds of advice. Like I normally do when I get in trouble, I 
discarded it all and decided to say what I thought. [Laughter] If you 
think about what's going on today--what motivated Vernon to say what he 
did in his Urban League speech and General Powell to say what he did, 
what motivates people to go hear Mr. Farrakhan in large crowds--what are 
all these cross currents? Why is it that we're having trouble living 
with Brown and living by Brown? Well, it's because Brown didn't solve 
all of our problems, and we've got some new problems. And in the face of 
those, there's more than one response, and it's really tough.

[[Page 1098]]

    No one can doubt that we are much, much, much better off today 
because of Brown and all those other decisions that said we had to be 
one people. It changed us forever for the better. But no one can doubt 
that it couldn't solve all the problems. There's still racism. There's 
still inequality. There is more trouble with violence and the breakdown 
of family and community and the absence of work in parts of our country. 
The vacuum that has created has given rise to all kinds of terrible 
conditions.
    We had, in a town near here, last weekend, a 13-year-old boy who 
just won a scholarship that could have led him out of poverty through an 
excellent education--the promise of Brown--shot dead on a street corner 
because he happened to be in the wrong place; two groups of people were 
feuding and shooting at each other.
    We have here in this community a poor neighborhood where people 
decided that if they wanted their kids to be able to play in the yard 
and their old folks to be able to sit on park benches, they'd have to do 
what rich folks do. So they just built a little fence around their 
living quarters, and they got some security guards. And sure enough, 
they might as well have been out in some fancy neighborhood in southern 
California: The kids could play again and the old folks could sit again 
in safety.
    But we have these problems. Now, what are we going to do about them? 
There seems to me four things we can do, and three of them are wrong. 
One is, we can come to a dinner like this and talk about how wonderful 
Brown was and preach until the day we die and not do anything to deal 
with the problems of this time. If so, we will lose a whole generation 
of young people to other courses of action.
    Or we can do what I said--Elaine mentioned if you preach venom, you 
get a talk show; if you preach love, you get a yawn. Deborah Tannen, a 
professor at Georgetown, has written a book called ``You Just Don't 
Understand.'' She says we're caught up in what she calls a ``culture of 
critique,'' where shouting matches drown out constructive conversation 
and where you only really have any status at all in society if you're 
just slamming somebody else and putting them down and you don't really 
have to do anything as long as you just talk. So you can do that, you 
can say the wrong things and reject the spirit of Brown and do nothing 
but cash in, and that's wrong.
    Or you can do what is disturbingly working: You can say the wrong 
things; you can preach division; you can deny the Holocaust ever 
occurred. But you can help people solve real problems. You can tell 
families they've got to stay together, and daddies they've got to take 
care of their kids, and people they ought to stay off drugs and 
everybody ought to show up for work every day. And that is a very 
dangerous thing, because in the end, we will still lose; because in the 
end, you cannot have a democracy where you lift up one group by putting 
somebody else down. But it is a tempting thing when people are doing 
things that change lives.
    I say this to make this point. People desperately wish their lives 
to change. They want to do something that will make a difference. They 
want safer streets, not nice talk. They want schools that work, not nice 
talk. They want children to be raised by caring parents, not nice talk. 
So we have to recognize that the only acceptable thing to do is to do 
what Thurgood Marshall and Bill Coleman and Jack Greenberg did 40 years 
ago. We have to not only talk the talk, we have to walk the walk. We 
have to not only advocate Brown, we have to deal forthrightly and 
aggressively with the problems we face today in a way that actually 
changes people's lives. That is what we have to do.
    There are a lot of people that don't think we can do this. There are 
a lot of people that are filled with doubt. I had Members of Congress 
walk right up there and vote for the Brady bill last year--after 7 years 
of fooling around with it and looking for excuses and caving in and 
finally passing it--who did not believe it would make a difference. But 
it has. It's just like Brown: It hasn't solved all the problems, but it 
has saved lives already. We had people put their political careers on 
the line here last week, walking down the aisle in the House of 
Representatives to vote for the assault weapons ban, putting their necks 
on the line, afraid it might not make a difference. But it will.

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    And I'm telling you, that is the kind of thing we have to deal with, 
knowing that there is no ultimate perfect answer but that we expect 
something that will not occur if we think we can simply advocate the 
ideas that are embodied in the Brown decision and not change our own 
behavior and the behavior of our country to give our kids a safe and 
decent and well-educated childhood to put things back together again. 
There is no alternative for us if we want to keep this country together 
and we want, 100 years from now, people to celebrate the 140th 
anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education in the greatest country the 
world has ever known, fully diverse, where everybody, all God's 
children, can live up to the fullest of their God-given potential.
    And in order to do it, we all have to overcome a fair measure not 
only of fear but of resignation. There are so many of us today, and all 
of us in some ways at some times, who just don't believe we can tackle 
the big things and make a difference. But I tell you, the only thing for 
us to do to honor those whom we honor tonight is to tackle the big 
things and make a difference.
    I'm proud that Elaine Jones and all the rest of you are trying to 
deal forthrightly with the problem of violence and the fear it produces 
and what it's doing to drive our people apart. I want you to think about 
what we can do to honor the sacrifices of those whose shoulders we stand 
on tonight. They did not do all this work to preside over the collapse 
of American society, to give people an equal opportunity to get an 
inferior education, to give people an equal opportunity to be 
unemployed, to give people an equal opportunity to stand on the street 
corner and be gunned down by some kid that nobody ever loved enough or 
disciplined enough or cared enough about to give a different way of 
living to.
    We cannot stand chaos and destruction, but we must not embrace 
hatred and division. We have only one choice.
    Let me read this to you in closing. It seems to me to capture the 
spirit of Brown and the spirit of America and what we have to do today, 
starting with what is in our heart. These are lines from Langston 
Hughes' wonderful poem ``Let America Be America Again'': ``Oh yes, I say 
it plain, America never was America to me. And yet I swear this oath, 
America will be.'' Let that be our oath on this 40th anniversary 
celebration.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 8:15 p.m. in the International Ballroom at 
the Washington Hilton. In his remarks, he referred to Elaine R. Jones, 
director counsel, LDEF; Rabbi David Saperstein, director, Religious 
Action Center, Union of American Hebrew Congregations; Vernon Jordan, 
dinner chairman; Dan Rather, dinner host; Cecelia Marshall, widow of 
Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall; William T. Coleman, former 
Secretary of Transportation; Jack Greenberg, Columbia University law 
professor; Julius L. Chambers, chancellor of North Carolina Central 
University; Robert Bennett and Chester Davenport, dinner corporate 
cochairs; Ernest Green, one of the Little Rock Nine who integrated the 
public school system in Little Rock, AR; Thurgood Marshall, Jr., Deputy 
Counsel and Director of Legislative Affairs for the Vice President; and 
Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam.