[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 19 (Monday, May 17, 1999)]
[Pages 867-871]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at the Hubert H. Humphrey Civil Rights Award Dinner

May 11, 1999

    Thank you so very much. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for the warm 
welcome. Thank you, Dorothy, for your wonderful words. She has been 
involved in this work for many years, but every time I hear her speak I 
always marvel at how young and vigorous and alive and energetic she 
always sounds.
    I'm honored to be here with Wade Henderson; Julian Bond; Rabbi 
Saperstein; Monsignor East; my good friend, Justin Dart; Frances 
Humphrey Howard, it's nice to see you tonight, ma'am. I also want to--I 
have been told that Judy Shepard is here, the mother of Matthew Shepard, 
and she testified for the hate crimes legislation today. I don't know 
where she is, but I'd like to ask her to stand up--and I thank you. 
Where is she? Thank you very much, and God bless you. Thank you. 
[Applause]
    I would like to thank the members of the administration who are 
here: Secretary Herman; our EEOC Chair, Ida Castro; our Civil Rights 
Assistant Attorney General, Bill Lann Lee; Ben Johnson, who is 
continuing the work of our initiative on race at the White House; and 
Mary Beth Cahill and others on the White House staff. I thank them.
    I would also like to say a special word of appreciation to the many 
Members of the Congress who are here, well over a dozen House Members, 
and Senator Wellstone, Senator Sarbanes, and Senator Robb. I thank all 
of them for being here and for what they do. If it weren't for them, 
many of the things we have tried to do in the area of civil rights and 
human rights would not have been sustained in these last few years.
    When I saw Senator Robb's name here, it reminded me before I give 
out this Hubert Humphrey Award--or acknowledge the award winners, you're 
going to give it out--I admired Hubert Humphrey very much, and I grew up 
just being almost crazy about him because I grew up in the South during 
the civil rights revolution. And I got to meet him when I was a young 
man and when he was making his last campaign and during his latter 
service in the Senate, after he had been Vice President.
    But I would like to say something I have rarely had the chance to 
say as President, but I don't think I would be here doing this, or we 
would be where we are as a country if it had not been for the President 
Hubert Humphrey served, Lyndon Johnson, and I think that we should never 
forget that. I just got back from Texas a few days ago, and I was 
thinking about it quite a lot down there.
    I want to congratulate the Hubert Humphrey Award winners tonight: 
Gary Locke, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Jeannie Van Velkinburgh, who I 
know is back in the hospital tonight and couldn't be with us.
    We honor these people because of something Dr. King once said, ``No 
social advance rolls in on the wheels of inevitability.'' You all know 
they are pushed forward by courageous men and women who give themselves 
and inspire others to follow. People like my good friend, Governor Gary 
Locke, who has used the power of his office to expand and defend 
opportunity for all the people of his State. Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, 
who together for 50 years have advanced the cause of civil rights 
through their art and through their efforts to open the theater and 
movies to people of all backgrounds. And Jeannie Van Velkinburgh, who 
stood with the white martyrs of the civil rights movement in the South 
when she was paralyzed in 1997, trying to help a black man under attack 
by skinheads. All true American heroes. I know we are honored to be in 
their presence tonight. I congratulate them on their awards, and I 
congratulate you for your choices.
    For nearly half a century, the Leadership Conference has helped 
hundreds of diverse groups keep their eyes on the prize and speak with 
one booming voice. Today, your voice is louder, larger, and more diverse 
than ever. And that is good, because it is still sorely needed. While 
our economy has never been stronger and minority unemployment is the 
lowest it has been since separate measurements have been kept, there are 
still striking

[[Page 868]]

disparities in income, wealth, jobs, education, and criminal justice 
that breakdown along what DuBois called ``the color line,'' and other 
disparities that affect people who are disabled or people who are gay. 
In other words, we still have quite a little hill to climb before we can 
claim to be the one America of our Founders' dreams.
    I was thinking today how I could best honor the spirit of Hubert 
Humphrey. I could give a long speech. [Laughter] I should tell you, if 
he were here at this podium tonight and I was out there, I would want 
him to give a long speech. I loved his long speeches. But I think what I 
will do instead is to try to make briefer comments in the spirit of his 
service about just three things we still need to do before we cross that 
bridge into a new century.
    First, we must continue to work together for a fair and accurate 
census. I agree with Wade when he says the 2000 census is a civil rights 
issue. It is a fundamental building block of democracy. We have to make 
sure the Census Bureau can do its job with the most up-to-date and 
scientific methods. We all say we live for the day when every American 
counts as much as every other American. Surely, that day must begin with 
counting every American.
    The second thing we have to do is to close the economic opportunity 
gaps that still exist among our people, in our inner-cities, our smaller 
and medium-sized towns, our rural areas, and on our Native American 
reservations. There will never be a better time for us to shine the 
light of economic opportunity on communities and neighborhoods that have 
been too long in the shadows. We do have the strongest economy in a 
generation, perhaps in this century. But we know--we know--that there 
are still large numbers of communities that have been left out and left 
behind.
    Just an hour ago I returned from Atlanta--I think Congressman Lewis 
is here--but I toured the Sweet Auburn Market in Martin Luther King's 
home neighborhood, in Atlanta's empowerment zone with the mayor of 
Atlanta, Bill Campbell, and two of his predecessors, who are friends of 
many of yours, Maynard Jackson and Andy Young.
    I was there to highlight the fact that our greatest untapped markets 
today for America are not overseas, they are right here at home. There's 
an $85 billion consumer market out there that is grossly underdeveloped. 
Ever since we took office, Vice President Gore and I have worked hard to 
try to get more people to invest in that part of America, with the 
empowerment zone program, the community development financial 
institution effort, special initiatives from HUD, from SBA, from the 
Department of Labor. And we have had some good success.
    But as I look back on it, even now, with unemployment at 4.3 
percent, with over 18 million new jobs, there are still inner-city 
neighborhoods, there are still medium-sized and smaller communities, 
there are still rural towns, there are still Native American 
reservations where there has been almost no new investment in job 
creation.
    And what I am attempting to do this year is to convince the Congress 
to pass legislation and the American business community to mobilize to 
invest in those communities to create jobs there. I took some of the 
biggest business leaders in America today to that market in Atlanta. And 
I let them sit there with me and we listened to people talk about how 
they started their coffee shop and their bakery and their restaurant and 
how one man had bought an empty old mill and was converting it to 500 
apartments and how a young man who was a supplier to other businesses 
had taken his business from $150,000 a year to $12 million a year in 3 
years, starting with a modest loan.
    And in July, in early July, I'm going to take 3 days and do what I 
did today in Atlanta. I'm going to go across the country, to the poorest 
communities and to some places where a lot of good things are happening, 
to demonstrate why we need to have a national framework to give every 
community a chance to get the money it needs to start the businesses, to 
expand the businesses, to create the jobs, to stabilize the future.
    Our proposal is very straightforward: We want to double the number 
of empowerment zones where people get tax credits, loan guarantees, 
direct investment, and technical assistance. We want to dramatically 
increase the number of community development

[[Page 869]]

banks, but we want to pass a national new markets initiative that simply 
says we want to give business people and investors the same incentives 
to invest in poor American neighborhoods we give them to invest in our 
neighbors. We don't want to take those other incentives away. We want to 
grow the Caribbean economies. We want to grow the Central American 
economies. We want to encourage Americans to be involved in Africa, and 
we want a new partnership there. But we also believe that Appalachia, 
the Mississippi Delta, south Texas, and the Indian reservations of the 
high plains should get new American money now. So I would ask you to 
help me pass this legislation.
    The third thing I ask you to do is to help us pass the hate crimes 
prevention act this year. In 1997, the year Jeannie Van Velkinburgh and 
Oumar Dia were brutally attacked by skinheads, more than 8,000 hate 
crimes were reported in the United States. That's nearly one an hour. 
The hearings today that Mrs. Shepard testified at were held in the 
United States Senate by the Judiciary Committee, under the leadership of 
Senator Hatch. First, I commend Senator Hatch for holding those 
hearings, they are a welcome sign--surely the goodness we can make 
fighting hate crimes a bipartisan, even a nonpartisan mission of the 
United States of America.
    I think we need to be clear about what our legislation is designed 
to do. It is not an effort to federalize crimes traditionally handled by 
the States. It is an effort to partner with local authorities. And it is 
not only about cracking down on hate crimes committed because of sexual 
orientation, gender, or disability. It's also about expanding civil 
rights protection for all Americans. Let's never forget what happened to 
James Byrd, Jr. in Texas. I met with his daughter in Austin, just a few 
days ago. She's down there trying to get the Texas legislature to pass 
State hate crimes legislation. We ought to be pulling for her and for 
the Texas legislators who are trying to get the job done, and we ought 
to remember that we also need it here in Washington.
    So I say to you, we need to do this for all Americans. We need to 
make the hate crimes prevention act and the employment nondiscrimination 
act the law of the land, because it will help us to move toward one 
America, and it will help us to make a statement about what we are not, 
as well as what we are.
    I was honored to appear at a testimonial banquet for Rabbi 
Saperstein the other night. We've been friends for many years. I love 
and admire him very much. And I especially appreciate how hard he's 
worked for peace in the Middle East and how hard he's worked to protect 
the heritage and the historical rights of the Israeli people and still 
be fair and humane toward the Arabs, with whom they share that land.
    And I make this point for the following reason. It seems to me that 
the central irony of our time is that most of us have a vision of 
America in the 21st century and the world in the 21st century in which 
we'll all be mixed up in wonderful ways. We'll have all this fabulous 
technology, and we'll be E-mailing people on the South Pole or wherever. 
[Laughter] Our kids will have pen-pals in Africa and Mongolia. We'll jet 
around on airplanes and do business with people at the tip of Tierra del 
Fuego. [Laughter] Our kids will speak Japanese and Russian; one of them 
will solve the problem of Nagorno-Karabakh. We think this is what it's 
going to be like. It's going to be great.
    We just had this NATO Summit here. We had the leaders of 42 
countries here, all the way to central Asia; speaking all these 
different languages because we see that the world is drawing us closer 
together. Technology and commerce and culture all bringing us together. 
And most of us think it will really be neat if America can thrive in 
that kind of world because we're rapidly becoming the most diverse 
democracy ever known. And won't it be grand? That's the image we all 
have. That's the dream we have.
    And yet, our whole world is bedeviled by the oldest problem of human 
society, which is fear and hatred of the other. We have known it in 
America primarily as the curse of race. Although we see discrimination 
and cruelty against people who are gay, discrimination against people 
who are disabled, we see it in other manifestations. We occasionally see 
religious discrimination in America. But primarily we have known it as 
race.

[[Page 870]]

    And yet, we see it everywhere. Hillary wanted to come here tonight 
to pay her respects to the honorees, but she got on a plane today to 
continue years of work she has done in Ireland, to try to use women and 
children to bring together people across the lines of Catholic and 
Protestant Irish. And then she's going on to the refugee camps of 
Albania and Macedonia, to clarify our compassion and concern for the 
predominantly Muslim Kosovar Albanians who have been driven from their 
homes and female loved ones murdered.
    The bane of the Balkans is primarily a religious ethnic bane. First, 
the Bosnian Muslims, but now the Kosovar Muslims driven from their 
homes, systematically killed, raped, pillaged, their cultural and 
religious institutions and records destroyed. Why? Because they have 
been turned into something sub-human and so they somehow taint the land 
they share with the Serbs or the Croats or others.
    We saw with breathtaking speed what happened in Rwanda a few years 
ago, the world totally caught flat-footed with no mechanism to deal with 
the slaughter of Rwanda, where somewhere between 700,000 and 900,000 
people were killed in 100 days with no modern weapons, mostly hacked to 
death, because two African tribes who, in this case, who had shared the 
same land for 500 years, all of a sudden decided that they couldn't bear 
it anymore.
    I hope you support what we are doing in Kosovo and what we did in 
Bosnia. I want you to know that we also have worked to redeem the 
failure of the world to stop the slaughter in Rwanda by developing an 
Africa Crisis Response Team, working with the militaries of the 
countries in the region that are committed to democracy and human 
rights, so that, God forbid, if anything like this ever happens again 
we, in the United States, and other freedom-loving people around the 
world, will have Africans with whom we can work to move more quickly to 
stop genocide, to stop ethnic cleansing, to not let it happen again.
    But what I want to say to you is this: There will be fights around 
the world based on ethnic differences that we won't be able to stop. 
Sometimes people just fall out with one another. But if we want to at 
least be able to stand firm against ethnic cleansing, against genocide, 
and for the principle that it is possible to honor our differences, to 
enjoy our differences, to recognize our differences, and still keep them 
contained within the framework of our common humanity so that life is 
more interesting but not unbearable; if that's what we want, and we 
expect people to take the United States seriously at a time when we are 
easy to resent because of our economic and military power, then people 
have to see us not only trying to do good around the world but trying to 
be good at home.
    You know, many of these people are struggling. Macedonia and 
Albania, the two poorest countries in Europe--think how easy it is for 
all of them to resent us, to say, ``Well, we're just waiting for our 
turn in history's clock to bring us to the top and take them down,'' to 
resent our power, to resent our wealth, to resent what they may think of 
as our preaching. I am telling you, it's imperative that we do this at 
this moment in history. But if we want to be a force for good, we have 
got to be good.
    So when we stand up for the hate crimes legislation, when we stand 
up for the employment nondiscrimination legislation, when we stand up as 
a people and say that it's okay for us to have differences--and we're 
not even asking everybody to like everybody else in America--but we have 
got to find a way to get along by recognizing the fundamental human 
dignity of every person. We have got to find a way to do that so that we 
take advantages that are rife with all of our diversity by joining 
together in affirming our common humanity.
    Keep in mind, unless we can do that here at home, in the end, we 
will not be able to do that around the world. And our whole vision of 
the 21st century--our whole vision--what we want our children to see in 
the world of their dreams depends upon our being able to do both: to 
stand for what is good abroad and to keep struggling to be good at home. 
That's what our honorees have led us in doing. It is certainly what you 
have led us in doing. Don't get tired. We've still got a ways to go.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

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Note: The President spoke at 8:15 p.m. in the International Ball Room at 
the Washington Hilton Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Dorothy, 
Height, chair, Wade Henderson, executive director, and Rabbi David 
Saperstein, executive committee member, Leadership Conference on Civil 
Rights; Julian Bond, chairman of the board, NAACP; Monsignor Raymond G. 
East, pastor, Nativity Catholic Church, Washington, DC; award presenter 
Justin Dart, Jr.; Frances Humphrey Howard, sister of Hubert Humphrey; 
Judy Shepard, mother of Matthew Shepard who was murdered in a hate crime 
in Wyoming in 1998; award recipients Gov. Gary Locke of Washington, 
actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Jeannie Van Velkinburgh, who was shot 
while aiding a hate crime victim in Denver, CO, in 1997; Renee Mullins, 
daughter of James Byrd, Jr., who was murdered in a hate crime in Texas 
in 1998; and former mayors Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young of Atlanta, 
GA.