[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 29 (Monday, July 26, 1999)]
[Pages 1426-1431]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to Representatives of the Legal Community

July 20, 1999

    Thank you. Let me say to all of you, I can't do any better than 
that. [Laughter] It was terrific. I wish every newspaper in American 
would reprint those remarks. Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.
    I want to thank you all for coming. What a wonderful group we have 
here. First, I thank Attorney General Reno and Deputy Attorney General 
Holder for the wonderful job they do in so many ways. Associate Attorney 
General Fisher is here with them and Bill Lann Lee of the Civil Rights 
Division. One big civil rights issue is getting him confirmed, I might 
add. [Applause] Thank you.
    I thank Secretary Slater and Secretary Daley for joining us, and Ben 
Johnson, who runs our one America Initiative; and Chris Edley, who used 
to be part of our administration--still is--I just don't have to pay him 
anymore. [Laughter]
    Thank you, Senator Leahy and Congressman Becerra, for coming. I 
think there are at least two people in this room, Jerry Shestack and 
Bill Taylor, who were here in 1963 with President Kennedy. I thank them 
for coming. Thank you, Mayor Archer, for coming--former Secretary of 
State Warren Christopher, former Attorney General
Benjamin Civiletti.
    There are so many people here--I just have to mention one person 
because it's my most intimate, personal acquaintance with affirmative 
action, the president of the American Bar Association, Phil Anderson, 
gave me a job in 1981, when I was the youngest former Governor in 
American history--[laughter]--with dim future prospects. So I thank him 
for being here, as well. [Applause] Thank you.
    And I'd like to say a special word of appreciation to the man who 
directs our national service program, Senator Harris Wofford, who was 
very intimately involved with President Kennedy's civil rights 
initiatives. Thank you for being here, sir, today.
    As has been pointed out, President Kennedy called more than 200 of 
America's leading lawyers to this room 36 years ago, the

[[Page 1427]]

summer of 1963--when America was awakening to the fact that in our laws 
and in our hearts, we were still far short of our ideals.
    It is difficult today to imagine an America without civil rights. 
But when I came here 36 years ago in the summer of 1963, as a delegate 
to American Legion Boys Nation, there were only four African-American 
boys there, and the hottest issue was what we were going to do about 
civil rights.
    It didn't seem so inevitable back then. Across my native South, 
there were sheriffs, mayors, Governors defying the courts; police dogs 
attacking peaceful demonstrators; firehoses toppling children; 
protesters led away in handcuffs; and too little refuge in the hallowed 
sanctuary of the law.
    It was in this atmosphere that the
President turned to America's lawyers and enlisted them in the fight for 
equal justice. With Vice President Johnson and Attorney General Robert 
Kennedy at his side, the President asked the lawyers there to remember 
their duty to uphold justice, especially in places where the principles 
of justice had been defied.
    The lawyers answered that call, creating a new Lawyers' Committee 
for Civil Rights Under Law and a new tradition of pro bono service in 
the legal profession. I asked you here today because we need your help 
as much as ever in our most enduring challenge as a nation, the 
challenge of creating one America. We have worked hard on that here. In 
the audience today I see Dr. John Hope Franklin, Governor William 
Winter, Judy Winston. I think Angela Oh and Dr. Suzan Johnson are here, 
but I haven't seen them yet--people who worked on this for me to shine a 
special spotlight on the issues. And we have now institutionalized that 
effort insofar as we can in the White House. But there is a limit to 
what we can do without you.
    Just as your predecessors, with the Constitution as their shield, 
stared down the sheriffs of segregation, you must step forward to 
dismantle our time's most stubborn obstacles to equal justice--poverty, 
unemployment and, yes, continuing discrimination. Behind every watershed 
event of the civil rights struggle, lawyers, many pro bono, remain 
vigilant, securing equal rights for employment, education, housing, 
voting, and citizenship for all Americans. Their success, as you just 
heard from Bill--every time a lawyer does that, it inspires a whole new 
generation of people to seek the law as a career. I suspect many of us 
were inspired to go to law school because we thought lawyers were 
standing up for what was right, not simply because they were making a 
good living.
    Thirty-six years ago, in that 200, there were 50 African-American 
lawyers. They came to the White House, but they couldn't have found the 
same welcome in the hotels, restaurants, and lunch counters of America--
a cruel irony.
    Today, thanks in large measure to the efforts of our lawyers, 
Americans of all backgrounds and colors and religions are working, 
living, and learning side by side. The doors of opportunity are open 
wider than ever. We are living in a time of unprecedented prosperity, 
with the longest peacetime expansion in our history and the lowest 
African-American and Hispanic unemployments ever recorded since we began 
to keep separate data in the early 1970's. Our social fabric is mending, 
with declining rates of welfare, crime, teen pregnancy, and drug abuse.
    But the challenge to build one America continues. It is different, 
but it is just as real as it was when Vernon Jordan started with the 
Urban League as a young man, or before he was working in the South on 
registering voters. I saw firsthand in the new markets tour I took a 
couple of weeks ago, we will never be one America when our central 
cities, our Indian reservations, our small towns and rural areas here in 
the most prosperous time in history are still living in the shadows of 
need and want. They're struggling with unemployment and poverty rates 
more than twice the national average--over 70 percent on some of our 
reservations. Your fellow Americans, many of them, are living in houses 
that it would sicken you to walk through--at the time of our greatest 
prosperity.
    Everything President Johnson worked for and dreamed of that he 
thought could happen after all these years has still not reached quite a 
large number of your fellow Americans. So, what are we going to do about 
it?

[[Page 1428]]

    We know that two out of five African-American and Latino children 
under the age of 6 are still in poverty, in spite of all of our 
prosperity, in spite of the fact that a million children were lifted out 
of poverty just in the last couple of years. We also know that we can't 
be one America when a lot of minorities still distrust law enforcement 
and our legal system generally and shy away from entering the legal 
profession.
    We can't be one America when, here we are, on the eve of the new 
millennium, when we act as if everything good will happen and all the 
rationality will fade away, but we still have to read about brutal 
killings like those in Indiana and Illinois, allegedly conducted on the 
basis of religious conviction; or what happened in Jasper, Texas; or to 
Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming.
    The struggle for one America today is more complex than it was 36 
years ago, more subtle than it seemed to us that it would be back then. 
For then, there was the clear enemy of legal segregation and overt 
hatred. Today, the progress we make in building one America depends more 
on whether we can expand opportunity and deal with a whole range of 
social challenges. In 1963 the challenge was to open our schools to all 
our children. In 1999 the challenge is to make sure all those children 
get a world-class education.
    And of course, if I could just expound on that for a moment, we've 
worked hard on that. And one of the things we have to do is to bring 
teachers to the communities where they're needed most. I offered an 
initiative to give scholarships to young people who would go and teach 
in inner-city or rural schools that were underserved. And I call for 
these scholarships as part of our race initiative. I believe they will 
make a real difference.
    The efforts we have made to make the class sizes smaller and to 
bring the Internet to all of our kids, even in the poorest classrooms, 
these things are beginning to make a difference. The hundreds of 
thousands of people who have gone into the elementary schools to teach 
people to read are making a difference. I can tell you that in the last 
3 years we have seen, for the first time in a very long time, at the 
4th, 8th, and 12th grade level substantial improvements in reading 
scores, our children moving up about half a grade level. But there is a 
long way to go.
    Last year, just before the election, the Congress came together 
across party lines, and I shouted, ``hallelujah,'' because they voted to 
create and fund--to create 100,000 school teachers to lower class size 
in the early grades, something we know that is particularly important to 
poor children and people who don't come from strong educational 
backgrounds. And we now have the research that shows it has continuing 
benefits. I just released the funds to hire the first 30,000 of those 
teachers.
    But now, unbelievably, in this non-election year--although you 
wouldn't know it from reading the press--[laughter]--there are some who 
propose to kill the class size initiative and replace it with a program 
that doesn't guarantee that one red cent will go to hiring a single 
teacher or reducing the size of a single class. Now, this is very 
important because we now, finally, for the last 2 years, have a student 
population that is bigger than the baby boom generation. So it is not 
only the most diverse in history, it is the largest in history; and 
about 2 million teachers are scheduled to retire in the next few years.
    I'm happy to report, I hope in part because of the importance of 
education rising in the national consciousness, as the Secretary of 
Education told me 2 days ago, that we now have 10 percent of our college 
students saying they're considering being teachers. That's twice the 
percentage of 5 years ago, and that's encouraging. But we have to get 
them in the classroom.
    So if the research says it's a good idea, if we voted to do it, if 
we've already funded 30,000 of the teachers, why in the world would we 
turn around and reverse field? The people who want to kill the 100,000 
teacher initiative say they want to do it because they want to improve 
the quality of the existing teacher core. Well, I'm for that, and we've 
set aside sums to do it. But that shouldn't be a cover for the fact that 
we've got to do more to lower class size in the early grades, especially 
for our poorest children, especially for our minority children, 
especially for all these children whose first language is not even 
English.

[[Page 1429]]

    Across the river here in Alexandria we have kids who literally speak 
100 different languages as their native tongue, from 180 different 
racial and ethnic groups. We cannot afford to back up on this. I also 
believe very strongly that it would be wrong to pass a risky tax scheme 
before we first fund education and make sure we can save Social Security 
and Medicare, something that also has a big impact on minority 
communities in our country and will have a huge impact on the ability of 
the baby boom generation to retire in dignity without imposing new 
burdens on their children and their grandchildren, just as many of them 
are moving into the middle class for the first time in their family's 
history.
    So I hope that--this is a nonlegal issue, but since all of us, as 
our detractors never tire of saying, are overeducated--those of you who 
believe in education will stand with us as we try to preserve this 
important reform. Well, strengthening our schools is important, and 
bringing economic opportunity to those places that I visited and all 
those places like them in America, it is absolutely essential. But what 
I asked you here today for was to simply say we still need lawyers. We 
need the work lawyers do. We need the ideas lawyers get. We need the 
dreams lawyers dream. We still need people to fight for equal justice.
    And so I ask you to do two things today. First, I ask you to 
recommit yourselves, as Bill has asked, to fighting discrimination, to 
revitalizing our poorest communities, and to giving people an 
opportunity to serve in law firms who would not otherwise have it. You 
can help inner-city entrepreneurs negotiate loans to start new 
businesses. You can help neighborhood health clinics navigate the 
regulatory mazes they have to do to stay open. You can help nonprofits 
secure new supermarkets and merchants in underserved communities. Just 
for example, those of you who come from urban areas, today in the 
highest unemployment urban areas in America, there is still at least a 
25 percent gap between the money that the people who live there earn and 
have to spend to support themselves and the opportunities they have to 
spend it in their own communities.
    In East St. Louis, where I visited, there is a 40 percent gap. We 
went to a Walgreens store that was the first new store to open in the 
inner city in 40 years. Mayor Archer here is exhibit A. The unemployment 
rate in Detroit is less than half what it was in 1993 when I took 
office, because he convinced people that there were people in his 
community that could work and that were already working and that had 
money to spend and that they ought to be part of the future. And we need 
to do that everywhere, and that work cannot be done without legal 
assistance.
    And it is a civil rights issue. It is a civil rights issue for 
people to have jobs and dignity and a chance to start businesses and the 
chance to be able to shop in their own neighborhoods and walk to the 
grocery store, instead of having to ride a bus and wait on the schedule 
and stand in the rain and do all the things people have to do. It is a 
huge issue. And if we can't do it now, we'll never get around to doing 
it. So I ask you to help us with that.
    I hope you will help me to pass my new markets initiative, because 
what it says is, we're going to give people the same incentives to 
invest in inner cities and rural areas and Indian reservations, the same 
incentives to invest there we give them to invest in the Caribbean, in 
Africa, in Latin America and Asia. I don't want to repeal those 
incentives; I want Americans to help poor people all over the world rise 
up. But they ought to have the same incentives to invest in poor people 
right here at home, and I hope you'll help me do that.
    The second thing I want you to do is to set the best possible 
example. Mr. McBride has spoken better than I can. We may have torn down 
the walls of segregation, but there are still a lot of walls in our 
hearts and in our habits. And sometimes, we can--we are not aware of 
those walls in our hearts, but we have to test them against our habits. 
So invite more lawyers of all backgrounds to join your firms. How are we 
going to build one America if the legal profession which is fighting for 
it doesn't reflect it? We can't do it.
    I am so pleased that the organizations here have made the 
commitments they've made to diversity and to pro bono work. I thank the 
American Bar Association, the Corporate Counsel Association, for 
pledging to launch new initiatives to promote greater diversity

[[Page 1430]]

in the profession. The ABA will bring together lawyers and academics, 
law firms and bar associations, to provide financial aid to minority law 
students and to mentor them as they embark on their legal careers. We've 
got to do more work to mentor them before, in the places that have tried 
to do away with affirmative action--I believe wrongly--sometimes under 
court decisions with which I respectfully disagree. But if you don't get 
there in the first place, it won't matter if there's someone helping you 
once you do get there.
    The Counsel Association has promised to encourage its 11,000 members 
to hire more minority-owned law firms and to dedicate more of their 
resources to pro bono legal work in communities. I thank the hundreds of 
law firms who have agreed to dedicate at least 3 percent of billable 
hours--about 50 hours a year per lawyer--to pro bono work, which is the 
ABA standard. As Bill pointed out, this booming economy has been pretty 
good to America's lawyers and law firms. Last year, top firms increased 
their revenues by 15 percent. There will never be a better opportunity 
to help those who need it most. If Mr. McBride's firm thought it was a 
good idea, it's probably a pretty good idea for other firms, as well.
    And there's one other point I would make, following on what he said. 
I think it's good business strategy over the long run, not only for all 
the reasons you said, but because the recovery of the last 6 years has 
proved a fundamental thing about a community: that is, when other 
people, particularly people who haven't had a chance, do well, those of 
us that are in a position to take it, that are going to do all right, 
regardless, do better. When the least of us do well, the rest of us do 
better. We are all stronger. And we should never forget that.
    So I hope every American firm will meet the ABA standard. Just 
imagine this: if every lawyer in America--about 800,000--dedicated just 
50 hours a year to pro bono work, that would be 40 million hours of 
legal help. That's a lot of personal problems solved, a lot of headaches 
gone away, a lot of hurdles overcome, a lot of business started. Think 
of what we could do.
    A 1993 ABA study found that half of all low income households had at 
least one serious legal problem each year, but three-quarters had no 
access to a lawyer. Now we can fill that gap. Now America's lawyers can 
afford to fill that gap. And I would argue, if we really believe in 
equal justice we cannot afford not to fill that gap.
    I want to thank the Association of American Law Schools for pledging 
to help more schools incorporate community service in their curriculum--
something I strongly believe in--so that more law graduates will come 
out of law school predisposed to do volunteer work and pro bono work. 
All these are wonderful pledges. I thank the presidents of the ABA, the 
Minority Bar Associations here, the American Corporate Counsel 
Association, the representatives of the San Francisco and New York City 
bars, the cochairs to the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights for 
agreeing to meet every month.
    You heard what Eric Holder said--for our part the Justice 
Department, working with Ben Johnson and the White House Office on One 
America, will do whatever we can to support these efforts. And a year 
from now, we'll gather again and see where we've succeeded and where we 
need to do more. I don't want to wait another 36 years. I ask you to 
work on this. I want it to be steady work for America's lawyers.
    I ask Eric Holder and Neal Katyal of the Justice Department to 
report to me on the progress. We will know we have succeeded if more 
lawyers begin to make community service a vital part of their practice. 
We will know we will have succeeded when we have more businesses, more 
health clinics, more affordable housing in places once bypassed by hope 
and opportunity. We'll know we'll have succeeded when our law schools, 
our bar associations, and our law firms not only represent all 
Americans, but look like all America.
    One of the best things Dr. King ever said was that ``the arc of the 
moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.'' Our Nation's 
lawyers have bent that arc toward justice. Our Nation has been 
transformed for the better. So I ask you again to lead us along that 
arc--from the America we know to the one America we all long to live in.

[[Page 1431]]

    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 3 p.m. in the East Room at the White House. 
In his remarks, he referred to Robert B. (Ben) Johnson, Assistant to the 
President and Director of the President's Initiative for One America; 
Judith A. Winston, Executive Director, One America in the 21st Century: 
The President's Initiative on Race; John Hope Franklin, Chairman, 
Christopher Edley, consultant, and Angela E. Oh, Suzan D. Johnson Cook, 
and Mayor Dennis W. Archer of Detroit, members, President's Advisory 
Board on Race; former Gov. William Winter of Mississippi; Jerome J. 
Shestack, former president, American Bar Association; civil rights 
attorney William W. Taylor III, Zuckerman Spaeder law firm; Bill 
McBride, managing partner, Holland & Knight law firm, who introduced the 
President; and Neal Kumar Katyal, Adviser for National Security to the 
Deputy Attorney General, Department of Justice.