[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 30, Number 24 (Monday, June 20, 1994)]
[Pages 1296-1299]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the Community at Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago

June 17, 1994

    Just give her another hand. She did a good job, didn't she? 
[Applause.]
    Ladies and gentlemen and boys and girls, I am glad to be here today, 
glad to be back here today, glad to be here with Tiffany, who represents 
our best hope for the future and our obligation to do the right thing 
here in Robert Taylor Homes and throughout the United States.
    I'm glad to be here with Secretary Cisneros. You can tell by 
listening to him talk that he really cares about you and what happens to 
you. And I hope you can tell that he didn't just appear when he became 
the Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He was 
a mayor for many years in San Antonio, Texas. And I believe he'll go 
down in history as perhaps the most gifted Secretary of the Department 
of Housing and Urban Development we ever had for trying to deal with 
problems like this.
    I want to thank Senator Simon; Senator Moseley-Braun; Congressman 
Rush; Congresswoman Collins; Vince Lane; the mayor, who's not here, but 
I saw him earlier this

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morning; your State senator; your members--your alderman; your United 
States Attorney who's here; and my good friend, Bishop Ford, thank you, 
sir, for being here. God bless you.
    Hillary and I are delighted to be here. Vince Lane brought me here 3 
years ago before I even started running for President, because I had 
heard that there was an effort here by citizens to engage in tenant 
patrols, to give our young people something to say yes to, to try to 
make these housing units safer, and I asked if I could come and see it.
    When I first came here, I was just the Governor of another State, an 
interested American, a person who couldn't tolerate the thought that 
young people would be raised in the kind of danger and deprived of the 
kind of hope that I was seeing, not just here but throughout the United 
States. And I will never forget as long as I live the first impression I 
had going into the units where there had been a real effort to clean 
them up and make them safe, going into others where people still plainly 
felt at risk, and then, most important of all to me 3 years ago, talking 
to the young people about their lives and what they wanted for the 
future.
    And I come back here today; I want you to know that I am very 
honored as President to have the chance to work with you to prove that 
we can make life better here, that we can have more opportunity for our 
children, more safety for our streets, more responsibility from all of 
our people; that we can, in short, do what we ought to do to give 
everybody a better future, thanks to you and our partnership.
    You know, I have to say this just for a moment. I was a little late 
coming to Illinois yesterday because I spent most of the day working on 
our differences with North Korea over their nuclear program. A major 
part of my job is dealing with the security of this country, the 
national security. But it's also important to recognize that this 
Nation's security also depends upon whether the children who live here 
in Robert Taylor Homes can go to sleep at night safe and get up and go 
to school in the morning safe. That is a big part of our national 
security as well.
    And everything we have tried to do in the last 18 months, from 
creating more jobs to training our people to take them, to trying to 
provide health care for all Americans, to working on empowering our 
communities through welfare reform and the crime bill and the family 
leave bill, everything is designed to achieve some pretty simple 
objectives: to give every American without regard to race or gender or 
region or income a chance to live up to the fullest of his or her God-
given capacities; to challenge every American to assume the 
responsibilities of good citizenship and good conduct; and to rebuild 
the strength of our national community at the grassroots level where the 
people live and to do it by having our Government work for ordinary 
people again, not just for the most powerful and the most organized.
    Well, that involves people like you. There are plenty of people, I 
think, who just want to live in peace and have a chance. I look out here 
and see these kids and I heard Tiffany's classmates cheering for her 
when she got up, and I thought to myself, this would happen in any town 
in America. In any little small town in America if the President showed 
up, well, if a student introduced him, the classmates would cheer. 
There's no real difference here--except that you have been asked to live 
in circumstances where there is too much violence, too many drugs, and 
not enough things for our young people to say yes to. You just can't 
tell people to say no all the time; they have to have something to say 
yes to as well.
    That's why I want to thank these men and the others who are here 
with the midnight basketball program. I love that program. And it's 
going to make a difference. I want to thank the young people there with 
their ``Peer Power'' T-shirts on. I want to thank the people who are in 
the City Year project here--I've got one of their T-shirts--in community 
service. I want to thank the people here who work in the tenant patrols. 
I want to thank people, in other words, who are doing something to seize 
your own destiny.
    You know, I like to think, and I believe with all my heart, that as 
President I can make a positive difference for America, that I can make 
this a better country. But you know and I know that if what we're really

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trying to do is to change the lives of the American people for the 
better, all I can ever do is to be your partner. You still have to do 
your part. And the power that I see in the hearts and the eyes of the 
people with these ``Midnight Basketball'' shirts on or the people with 
the ``Peer Power'' shirts on or the people who engage in the tenant 
patrol or who are involved in the drug-free program here that I see--
this ``Phillips Academy'' shirt--the power there is the most important 
power in the United States of America. When the people of this country 
make up their mind to do something, there is no stopping them.
    I do want to say this--Secretary Cisneros mentioned it--after the 
dispute in the courts involving the sweeps policy here, I asked the 
Secretary to come here, along with the Attorney General, and come up 
with a plan that would enable us to continue to try to work with you to 
make these communities safer. And we did put some more money, as he 
said, into law enforcement here. But I want you to know that when we go 
back to work in Washington next week, Senator Simon, Senator Moseley-
Braun, Congressman Rush, and Congresswoman Collins and I, we're going to 
be facing the responsibility of resolving the most important anticrime 
measure that has ever come before the United States Congress. And in 
that bill are 100,000 more police officers for our streets and our 
cities. In that bill is a ban on semi-automatic assault weapons. And I 
just saw hundreds of them here in the police station.
    It's interesting, when I was there, one of the reporters asked me 
about the policy here of the sweeps and about the assault weapons, and 
he said, ``Mr. President, are we going to have to be willing to give up 
some of our personal freedom to live in safety?'' And I said that I 
thought the most important freedom we have in this country is the 
freedom from fear. And if people aren't free from fear, they are not 
free.
    This bill has harsher punishments for people who are serious 
criminals, but it also has more opportunities for young people to stay 
out of crime in the first place: more money for programs like the 
midnight basketball, more money for after school programs, more money 
for summer jobs, more money for drug treatment, more money to give our 
people something to say yes to as well as to say no to.
    This is a big deal, folks. It will make a difference here in Chicago 
and throughout the United States of America. And it is imperative that 
we pass that crime bill and pass it now, so we can go about the work of 
making you even safer and helping you to take responsibility for your 
future. And I hope you will support that.
    I want to thank Tiffany because she testified for the crime bill, 
didn't you? And she made an impression on the Members of the Congress. 
This is not a Republican issue or a Democrat issue. It's not an African-
American, Hispanic, or a white issue. It's about our children and our 
future and what kind of people we are and whether we're going to behave 
like civilized human beings, or whether we're just going to take every 
little old quick advantage we can get, even if we have to kill people to 
do it. We cannot survive as a people if our children cannot grow up safe 
and free from fear in good schools, on safe streets, doing wholesome, 
constructive things.
    I will say again, that's why we worked so hard to try to find a way 
to continue the sweeps policy that Vince Lane developed, not because we 
want to take anybody's freedom away from them but because we want our 
children to be free from fear.
    Let me just say one last thing. We talk a lot in this country about 
our rights. And our rights as Americans are the most important things to 
us. We have rights written into our Constitution that other people all 
around the world would still give their lives for: the right to free 
speech, say what's on our mind; the right to worship God as we choose; 
the right to assemble with people who agree with us and say whatever we 
want in groups, even if it offends everybody else; the right to be free 
from arbitrary conduct by our Government; the right to a trial by jury. 
We have a lot of rights in this country. But the thing that makes our 
rights work is the right of the community to exist and the 
responsibilities of citizens to help them exist.
    And the thing I take away from this today, the thing I took away 
from my last visit to Robert Taylor Homes, is that deep inside the

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spirit of you, all of you who live here, is the overwhelming desire not 
only to exercise your rights but to see this community be full of 
responsible citizens, to make the community work again. And I will take 
that back to Washington when we fight for the crime bill, when we fight 
to reform the welfare system, when we fight for the empowerment zones to 
get investment and jobs into these communities, when we fight to give 
you a chance, because I know that here in this place there are people 
like you and there are thousands more like you all across America who 
really believe, who really believe, that we can solve these problems, 
that we can live together as brothers and sisters, that we can exercise 
the responsibility required of any great nation. And I will always 
remember that.
    And I want you to believe, every time you put on one of these 
midnight basketball shirts, every time you participate in a tenant 
patrol, every time a student joins a drug-free program, every time one 
of these kids goes into a community service program like City Year, 
every time you do that, you are saying, ``I not only claim my rights as 
an American, I recognize I have responsibilities as an American. I'm 
going to do my part to give this country back to the kids and take it 
away from the drug dealers and the gun-toters.'' That's what we've got 
to do together. And I know we can do it.
    God bless you, and thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 10:20 a.m. on the basketball court outside 
the community center. In his remarks, he referred to community resident 
Tiffany Hudson, U.S. Attorney James B. Burns, and Bishop Louis Henry 
Ford, pastor, St. Paul Church of God in Christ, Chicago, IL.