Remarks at the NAACP Fight for Freedom Fund Dinner in Detroit, Michigan - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, May 8, 2000

I'm grateful that, as Wendell said so much more eloquently than I could, we have appointed more minorities and women to more positions in the Government and on the bench than any administration in history by a good long ways. I'm grateful for that.

I am profoundly touched by your prayers, your friendship, and your support. I reminded Secretary Slater when Reverend Anthony was up here preaching--[laughter]--that I went home with him last week to a memorial service for Daisy Bates, the great Arkansas heroine of the civil rights movement who shepherded those nine children through Little Rock Central High School 43 years ago and who just died a few months ago. Daisy's minister, Reverend Rufus Young, who is a gentleman way up in his eighties, with a frail walk, with a strong voice, got up and looked up at me and he said, "Mr. President, the only reason you've survived is that so many of us black folks were praying for you so hard." [Laughter]

What I hope now is we will turn our prayers and energies toward tomorrow. For when people gather together, even though it's important to remember the past, in my wife's words, it's even more important to imagine the future. And I guess what I would like to ask you is, in this millennial election season, as a citizen--forget about party, forget about anything else--what do you as a human being believe that America should be doing?

I have waited a long time for my country to be in the position to create the future of our dreams for our children. I watched for a long time America just being paralyzed by these assumptions of what we could not do. When I got elected President, I think most people thought we could never get rid of the deficit, much less run a surplus, but we have. I think most people thought the crime rate would always go up and never go down. But it's gone down for 7 years in a row now. I think most people thought that people on welfare didn't really want to work. But that turned out to he wrong. Almost 7 million have moved out of welfare. They were wrong about that.

I think most people thought a lot of things couldn't get better. And now we don't have any excuses, because we know when we get together and work together, things can get better. And so what I want to ask you is, what do you propose to do about it?

A great country can make mistakes not only when times are tough but when times are good. I look out here in this sea of faces, and I wonder how many thousand stories there are here tonight--stories of triumph and heroism and struggle against the odds to overcome some racial or economic or other handicap--how many of you have lost a loved one to violence or other tragedies. And now, what I want to say to you is: We know things can be better; what do you propose to do about it?

We have choices to make. I believe that we should keep on going with this economic recovery until we have brought economic opportunity to all those neighborhoods, all those little rural towns, all those Indian reservations, all those people who have still been left behind and don't know there's been a recovery because they haven't felt it. And we can do it now in a way that we've never been able to do before.