The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“THE MORAL IMPLICATIONS OF AS- SAULT ON AFFIRMATIVE ACTION” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H2380-H2385 on Feb. 28, 1995.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
THE MORAL IMPLICATIONS OF AS- SAULT ON AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 4, 1995, the gentleman from New York [Mr. Owens] is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, all of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus are very concerned about the latest development with respect to an announcement that affirmative action and the elimination of all aspects of affirmative action has been placed on the agenda of the Republican Party.
That concern is expressed in many different ways. Several of my colleagues were here yesterday, and they talked about the details of affirmative action from a very legalistic perspective. Several of them are lawyers and they understand the legal wranglings related to affirmative action, some are very familiar with the history of affirmative action laws, and they gave an interesting and useful background on affirmative action.
They make their contribution in their way, and I am, on the other hand, concerned about affirmative action from another point of view, the moral implications of the assault on affirmative action that is being projected by the Republican Party, by their leadership.
I am concerned about the fact that when you couple an assault on affirmative action with the nastier parts of the Contract With America, and the Contract With America is just beginning to manifest itself in all of its barbarity, and I use that word deliberately, because the aspects of the Contract With America which are going forward now have to do with taking school lunch programs away, limiting school lunch programs, and denying the entitlement to a free lunch to children in need.
{time} 2145
It has to do with rescissions which are taking place to wipe out the summer youth program, one of the most practical, successful and much needed programs that we have, employing teenagers, young people during the [[Page H2381]] summer. There are all too few jobs already, but in the rescission process the committees have begun to eliminate, first they want to water down this year's program and cut that drastically and then they want to eliminate it completely and on it goes. There are education programs, child nutrition programs, programs that are very vital to poor people and certainly vital to the people in my district that are being cut.
And this is just the beginning. It is the beginning of a process of finding in the budget the money needed to give a tax cut which would go mostly to people who are very well off. It is a revision of a process of finding money in a budget in order to increase the defense budget, and if there is any part of the budget that does not need to be increased, certainly it is the defense budget. I think a recent poll shows that the American people in their great wisdom, the common sense of the American people is astonishing, they have in a poll indicated, a large percentage, I think about 60 percent indicated that things should stay the way they are. I do not want to quote the numbers but the overwhelming percentage of people who responded to the poll felt that things should at least stay the way they are or there should be a cut in defense.
The smallest group of people who responded, the smallest category of people who responded were people who wanted the defense budget increased. So the leadership of the majority party here is out of step with the common sense and the wisdom of the American people. But their being out of step and having the power, of course, they have the votes, does not mean they are going to cease the folly of increasing the defense budget at the expense of much needed programs like school lunch programs and summer youth employment programs.
So, I am very troubled by those cuts, and those cuts are not a game of Republican versus Democrats. The Republicans make one move, Democrats make another. These are cuts which go to the heart of what the Federal Government is all about in terms of providing a safety net for people who are most in need.
We are going to snatch away this safety net, we are going to kick people out into the streets. We are going to do some horrendous things in an attempt to balance the budget and in an attempt to find money for greater defense expenditures and for a tax cut for people who need a tax cut least of all.
Those are terrible prospects. But when you add to that an announcement that we are going to have an assault on affirmative action, we are going to make affirmative action a major issue in the coming 1996 election campaign, it means that the Contract With America authors and the people who signed the contract, the leadership promoting the contract, the people who are pushing these tremendous domestic cuts and the defense increase, they are not willing to take their package and go to the American people and say well, this is the way we see it, we agree, we disagree with the Democrats, we are in charge now, we are able to push our program through and, therefore, you pass judgment on it. I think it would be fair, although I profoundly disagree with the tremendous budget cuts and I disagree with the thrust and essence of the Contract With America, I still think it is a legitimate opposition program, and the opposition, I call them the elite, oppressive minority. The elite oppressive minority, should take their program to the people and have them pass judgment on it at the ballot box.
But when the elite oppressive minority decides that it wants an insurance marker, it wants to guarantee victory by moving into another arena, by attacking affirmative action, already we have an attack on immigrants, now we are going to add an attack on affirmative action, we are adding something to the brew, we are pouring poison into the situation, and saying that we are going to resort to exacerbating racial tensions and playing on racial fears in order to win the 1996 election. It is race-baiting, it is the oldest trick in the world. It is scapegoating and it is going to be, you know, Willy Horton to the maximum degree.
We are going to have a situation where people do not think about the budget cuts. They will not think about the merits of the Contract With America. It will just be gut reactions to a racist appeal. That is the way I see the announcement that affirmative action is now going to be a major target between now and 1996.
I hope we do not go that way. I hope that the leadership of the majority party here in the Congress will reconsider. I hope that we will go forward and have a contest in 1996 which will be on the merits of the programs offered by the Contract With America, authors and signers versus the Democratic Party, its President, the opposition here in Congress, and that we will have a decent election based on what is best for America and having people make that choice.
I do not think we will have a decent election. I think we will go down the road toward disaster if we wage a full-scale attack on affirmative action and we make the next election a racial referendum.
It is something that is very tempting. The easy road to power or the easy road to a consolidation of power is very tempting. The people who are the cause of the problems in Yugoslavia, the Serbians, the Serbians who put in motion ethnic cleansing, they wanted an easy road to power, the easiest road to power to exacerbate and excite people's racial fears and to pray on racial tensions.
The people in Rwanda, the Hutus, the Hutus sought an easy road to power by exacerbating the differences between the two tribes and the Tutsis. All that started as a matter of political expediency and they were using it to consolidate power. It got out of hand and it became such a frenzy until it spilled over into the streets and people went out and massacred people. It is estimated that 500,000 people were massacred. The Hutus massacred 500,000 Tutsis. It all started with some egomaniac in power, politicians in power who wanted to consolidate their power and made an appeal to the worst in people in order to do that.
You might say well, your exaggerating, that could never happen here. No, it could not happen here, overnight certainly, and it will not happen here between now and 1996. But whenever the easy route to power is taken, whenever you choose to play on racial fears, there is no way you can guarantee you are going to be able to turn it off when the time comes to turn it off.
The appeal to racial fears at this point in our history I think would be a disaster, and I want to take the time to make my appeal. You know, 100 seems to be a magic number, so if I have to come here to the floor 100 times to make 100 appeals for justice and 100 appeals for us to turn aside from this course of action, then I will do that because I think it is just that important, I think it is just that dangerous that the movement toward racism in our next election will set in motion something that would be disastrous for our country.
At a time of maximum prosperity in the richest nation that has ever existed in the history of the world, as we move into the 21st Century Americans must not yield to destruction of our society through the use of a barbaric political process. If we cannot do it any other way we certainly should not resort to playing on racial fears.
When you combine an assault on affirmative action with a Republican Contract With America, you create a kind of scorched Earth approach to the reordering of our society. Government by an elite minority, for the benefit of the elite minority, becomes the driving philosophy. We would have to call it the way we see it. I do not think it is exaggerating to say that we have a high-technology, a group that has a great knowledge of high-technology, and they will use electronic witchcraft to promote this oppressive elite minority. And now they want to spread, use that power to spread a racist, anti-immigrant brew throughout the minds of
America, to poison the minds of the American voters.
The goal of this oppressive minority is to turn democracy on its head by stampeding the majority into voting against its own interests. Assaults on affirmative action, attacks on immigrants, these are actions which are the key elements of a stampeding kind of approach to politics. You do not want people to think, you would want them to feel a gut reaction and act as a result. [[Page H2382]]
I think all poor and disadvantaged people whose needs inconvenience the needs, and the programs which serve poor and disadvantaged people inconvenience this oppressive elite minority, I think they become targets as a rule of wanting to get them out of the way, they become the targets of a rather ruthless set of actions.
The rescissions that have been announced, the bills that are moving through committees that block grant school lunch programs, and block grant child care programs, and block grant child nutrition programs, and WIC Programs--block grants become a kind of a swindle. We know from experience that when the Federal Government moves from entitlements at the Federal level to block grants at the local level it means that you are setting up a situation where the responsibility to provide for all of those in need will be taken away. You do not have to have an entitlement. If you have a block grant, the State will spend as much money as it has and when the money runs out, no matter how great the need is, it will not spend any more, and the people will have to do without, whether it is hungry children or people in need of child care or any other block-granted function.
So the block grant is not just an administrative move, it is not an administrative convenience. The block grant is a swindle that is perpetrated. You start the block grant with an amount of money at one level and you stop. And as the years go by, the block grant is cut. It automatically is cut because no money is added to it to keep up with inflation, and then, of course, sometimes the Committee on Appropriations actively begins a process of cutting. This is the history of block grants, so we have no reason to believe that block grants are not just another way to swindle people out of their entitlements. People who are in great need will be forced to go without as a result of the block grants being instituted.
The most specific and the most intensely pursued target of the oppressive elite minority are not just the poor and the disadvantaged. That in general is the way this is being approached, is that all poor and disadvantaged people become obstacles in the way. Their needs inconvenience this oppressive elite minority that is in charge. But among the poor and the disadvantaged, the minority that becomes the group that becomes the biggest target and the most intensely pursued target becomes the American of African descent. The Americans of African descent, the people who are the descendants of slaves, are in a very special category. It is not that we are the only beneficiaries of affirmative action; affirmative action, of course, benefits a lot of other people other than African-Americans. You know, women are the beneficiaries of affirmative action, Asians, Hispanics, a number of people benefit from affirmative action.
{time} 2200
And they will be hurt in the process. But I think the drive and the focus and the intensity of the move is focused on African-Americans, and that is the way we see it, and that is why we are responding with such intensity.
It was the African-American population, the descendants of slaves, who fought the battles during the civil rights era during the fifties and sixties, and we fought for the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. We fought for set-asides. We have pressured and pushed and gotten Presidents to issue Executive orders on affirmative action. We have been on the cutting edge, and we are the driving force, so any attempt to wage an assault on affirmative action is an assault on African-
Americans, people of African descent. That is the primary thrust of what is happening here.
The Contract on America, which started by focusing on the destruction of all poor and working families, has now added an assault on affirmative action to its blitzkrieg. This new aggression makes it crystal clear the primary objective, the No. 1 target, of the oppressive elite minority are African-Americans, the descendants of slaves.
If you crush the African-Americans, if you crush the core of the resistance to the planned tyranny of the oppressive minority, this is the merciless logic, crush them first, this is the merciless logic of the opposition, and when the blacks are silenced, the other components will fall in line.
Some people will acquiesce after the blacks are silenced. They will acquiesce with a guilty conscience, but they will acquiesce. Many others will find it convenient and comfortable to be bought off or sell out. This is a scenario we see.
In the 1996 election, they will turn the election into a racist election. You stampede people into a situation where you consolidate power not on the basis of the programs that you have come forward with or your ideology or your achievements, but on the basis of deep-seated primitive racial fears.
While others stumble about in confusion, I think African-Americans clearly see what is happening. We see the enemy converging down upon us. Our intense reaction is based on the fact that we understand. We are not going to wait until it unfolds, and, you know, the details are in place. The very fact that at this particular moment you get an attack on affirmative action, a concerted assault, tells us a great deal, and we understand the implications.
The Contract With America is a contract against us to begin with, and then the assault on affirmative action continues that attack. The combination of budget cuts and assaults on affirmative action are definitely designed to bombard the African-American community until it becomes a kind of political Hiroshima, beat it to death. The goals of this oppressive minority, the goal of the oppressive elite minority which is in charge now, is to paralyze us and incapacitate us. They want to bring African-Americans to the point where they are incapable of ever counterattacking.
We cannot finish the fight that we have begun for full rights, and we cannot pursue the fight that we started for equal justice if we are the subject of this kind of ruthless attack in 1996. The goal of the ruthless elite, this oppressive minority, is to terminate our vanguard role, to destroy our leadership position in the struggle for justice and opportunity, which African-Americans have traditionally occupied.
The situation is that serious, and I would like to plead to the leadership of the Republican Party, the leadership in control of this House, to drop their agenda for the assault on affirmative action. I would like to plead for a different approach to winning the 1996 election in line with the merits of your case and not igniting a racial war that none of us will be able to control.
I would like to also, if you are determined to pursue affirmative action and the assault on affirmative action, I would like to also make an appeal for you to take a close look at why we need affirmative action. Affirmative action is a set of activities and programs which are designed to, in the present again, compensate for past wrongs. Affirmative actions are put forth by nations and groups and not be individuals.
Individuals who are living now may not have been guilty of the wrongs that led to the implementation of affirmative-action policies, just as the average German alive today is not in any way guilty for what Hitler did in World War II. Nevertheless, his nation is responsible, and his nation pays reparations to
those people who were victims. The Nation is a continuing entity in the same way America, the United States of America, is a continuing entity, and we are responsible for the wrongs that were done to a group of people, the African-Americans who were brought here against their will and thrown into slavery.
I appeal to all concerned to take a hard look at slavery and not make us force the issue of an examination of slavery and what the implications are. We ought to be concerned about what we did to African-Americans. We ought to be concerned about the descendants of the victims of those crimes. We ought to be concerned about the fact that certain people are the descendants of the beneficiaries of the slave industry.
Slavery was an industry, and it went on for 200 years in America. And, therefore, I think, you know, great masses of people were wittingly and unwittingly beneficiaries of the economy that was generated by slavery. It made America richer faster. It built a lot of the institutions that we have, not just in the South. They hang slavery around the neck of the South and leave it there, but in New York City we had [[Page H2383]] one of the largest slave ports in the country, I think the third largest place where you had slaves brought in in the early days of America, which was New York City. It was a port where slaves came in in large numbers, and New York City was built by slave labor.
Large numbers of slaves were imported into that area. So it is not just one area of the country. It is the whole country benefited from the slave industry.
I think it is fitting and proper to discuss slavery and the crimes involved in slavery as we look at affirmative action. Affirmative action is designed to correct past wrongs. Past wrongs, the most immediate past wrongs were 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation and after the 13th amendment when we had a long history of discrimination, oppression, Klu Klux Klan, lynchings and all kind of things happened for a whole 100 years after slavery was ended.
But before that, you had 200 years of slavery.
When you put it all together, there is a need to do something, to atone for those sins and to compensate for those crimes.
Slavery in America lasted for more than 200 years. The slave industry, as I said before, encompassed more than half the world. It was not just America. It permeated the lives of the citizens of all of the nations of Europe, Africa, South America, North America. Slavery was a dominant driving force at the heart of the economy of the Western World for more than 100 years.
At that period of history the slave trade and slave labor was far more valuable than gold, diamonds, oil. Slave labor was a primary means for the accumulation of vast amounts of capital. Slavery was a monstrous, enduring, all-encompassing, overwhelming crime, and it occupies a unique place in human history. In duration, no other crime of that kind against a group has lasted for so long, more than 200 years, that America's slavery lasted.
In volume, the number of people involved and the amount of human misery generated and the amount of murder and other phenomena, torture, not other phenomenon matches this global crime.
Now, as I spoke here last week, I mentioned in the process that merely crossing the Atlantic, large numbers of slaves perished, and I started that as an introduction to my discussion of slavery as a background for justifying affirmative action.
Large numbers of people perished crossing the Atlantic. It was just a figure that I thought was interesting. I mentioned that 200 million people perished in the Atlantic slave crossings, because that is a figure I have heard repeatedly, given by certain historians and lecturers, and this aroused a lot of interest.
So I want to just take a moment before I continue to mention the fact that I had gotten a large amount of inquiries and a large amount of comments about the statement about the large number of people who had perished in the crossing, just crossing the Atlantic, a large amount of slaves.
There were people who called who merely wanted to use racial epithets and let off steam, and I want to tell them I do not appreciate that. I prefer for you to keep your dirt at home. We are not interested in your racial epithets.
You know, other people who called seriously wanted to know, you know, how such a large figure was generated. On some well-known TV show, they ridiculed the number and talked about it and generated a lot of interest, and I am glad that we started a dialog about slavery.
{time} 2210
I am glad that the process has begun. The figure of 200 million certainly was questioned. I got serious people, some historians and experts who were upset about the fact that that figure was being used. But they also, some of those same experts who called and discussed it, said that they understood where I got the figure from, that there are a set of people, historians and experts on the subject, supposed to be experts, who take the position that the number was that high. In fact I really read it as recently as last June in a New York Times column, if you want to know where the figure came from.
It is not just from the column that I referred to, I had heard it many times from various people whom I heard talking. I did not know there was so much controversy. I did not even think about the fact that the figure seems to be a little large due to the fact that the capacity of the slave ships was limited and all the other things. I just have heard it mentioned so many times I recited it as a fact.
In this New York Times column that appeared on June 19, 1994, just this past summer, there was a statement which explains some of what has been happening. It let me know that among the people who are supposed to know the subject very well, there is a lot of disagreement.
I will read one quote from the article. It says,
Estimates of how many blacks were lost at sea in roughly 400 years of the slave trade in the Americas vary widely. Some place the figure between 100 and 200 million; others say perhaps as many as 14 million. Whichever is true, many historians note that the number of enslaved Africans who died at sea was so great that sharks learned to follow the slave routes because they fed on the bodies thrown overboard.
That is an article in the New York Times, June 19, 1994, page 25, column 1. It is a longer article about the whole matter of slaves who perished at sea.
But among the historians, there is a great deal of controversy. I do not want to get into the middle of that. Some say one of reasons you have such wild estimates, differences are so great, is that some historians and experts are estimating the number of people who were lost due to slavery over a period of 400 years, not just the 200 years that the North American slave trade existed, but the period of slavery extended over 400 years. They are not looking at just slavery as it affected North America but also the slave ships that went to South America, the Caribbean, and all over. That is how they get some of the divergence in their totals, the differences in their totals.
They also say many experts refused to accept the records that are available and that the citations of some historians who have looked at the record that are available from the British and the French, Portuguese and the Spanish, that these records are a joke, that they are not reliable, that slavery has always been a kind of a bandit unground operation. Even during the period when it was regulated--most of the time it was not regulated--but during the period when nations attempted to regulate slavery, the records were ridiculous because they made rules and nobody checked or tried to enforce them.
The British, for instance, had a rule that any slave ship could only carry slaves in relation to their tonnage. It could only carry a certain number of slaves.
The size of ships determined the number of slaves it would carry. Therefore, the number of slave berths on the ship had to be in accordance with the tonnage of the ship. Immediately, it was noted that most of those same ships, they doubled the number of slaves that they carried regardless of the berths.They crowded, put two people into every berth for one. That kind of practice was a regular practice. They noted that when they recorded their cargoes, they just told the lies and they did not record their cargoes. Sometimes when they arrived in parts, what they recorded as the number of slaves on board had nothing to do with the real number, and some ships off loaded slaves before they got into ports where they kept records. Pirates took ships, in many cases, and did not obey any regulations, and they landed cargoes in various places. On and on it goes.
There were so many holes in the recordkeeping until these people have estimates that are far greater than most conservative estimates say, the records were ridiculous and could not be relied upon. That was the matter of legal slavery, there was illegal slavery.
After the practice was outlawed, there was no attempt to regulate it, it was just outlawed, it went on for many, many years, decades after it was outlawed. There were no regulations, and nobody
attempted to abide by regulations. So you have wildly gyrating numbers.
I would say this is a debate that I will leave to the historians and experts on slavery. I did not mean to get off on [[Page H2384]] that tangent. I think I will stop counting at 10 million or 20 million. You know, when you are dealing with human beings, human suffering, human murder, 10 million, 20 million, that is enough for me. I will not argue about the rest.
My example was that here was such a horrendous crime, starting with the slave trade and the delivery of the cargo from one continent to another, that we ought to take a close look at it as we deliberate about affirmative action.
It was one of the most cruel and inhuman tortures ever inflicted on mankind, this transport from Africa to New World in packed slave ships. It was only the beginning of the kind of torture and pain and suffering that the slaves endured. When they arrived at the markets in America, of course they were sold at auction, they were declared property of the slave owner, and once that happened, the daily lives of the slaves in America was as bad as any torture that the devil in hell could heap upon the backs of the worst sinners.
In their daily routine, slaves were forced to endure hunger, filth, rape, torture, murder. The life of a slave was often treated with less sanctity than the life of a horse. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, more than 200 years in America, the crimes against slaves went on and on. It was a unique kind of human destruction. The object of the slave industry was not to incinerate or destroy the body of the slave, the object of America's slavery was to obliterate the soul of the slave. They wanted to keep the body, make it a more efficient beast of burden, but they wanted to destroy the human soul. Slave owners were seeking to breed, to condition, to train the world's most efficient beast of burden, enhance and build up the slave body but destroy and obliterate the slave's soul. This was the monstrous mission of the slave economy. It was illegal to teach a slave to read. Strict punishment was inflicted upon anyone who tried to teach a slave to read.
No sense of family was permitted to slaves. Slave children were regularly sold away from their mothers. Most slaves were never allowed to know who their fathers were. And on and on it goes.
I am not interested in giving a lecture on slavery. What my concern is is that as we look at affirmative action, the set-asides, all the kinds of things that we have done in the very recent past, in the last three decades, in the last three decades we have taken some steps to begin to deal with the impact, the fallout, the results; some of the results, that is, of what was done during that period.
{time} 2220
This is only in the last three decades. So after three decades of taking steps which were positive steps, removing the barriers of segregation, establishing set-aside programs, establishing affirmative action programs, promoting diversity in the marketplace, we have done some wonderful things in the last three decades. But we had two centuries of the institution of slavery. After that 100 years, another century of oppression.
My point is, we as Americans, black and white, should take a closer look at the origin of the wrongs, the nature of the wrongs, the nature of the crime, the nature of the since that affirmative action is seeking to overcome. We should take a closer look and we should perhaps establish a commission to look at slavery and is implications, to look at maybe the need to go beyond affirmative action, do something different from affirmative action, maybe reparations. There is a bill that is introduced every year by my colleague, John Conyers, which deals with setting up a commission to study reparations, just to study the possibility of reparations for the descendants of slaves because the descendants of slaves are descendants of victims. Maybe we should take a close look at that. Maybe we should do that in some kind of reasonable way and not shout at each other about it. If we have an assault on affirmative action on the one hand and demagogues in the streets trying to arouse people's racial fears, then we will have to answer with other shouts and screams about the victimization and the cruelty, and I do not think it is the best way to approach this. Let us look at it in a reasonable atmosphere. Let us look at it with a commission. Let us take a look at whether affirmative action meets the need.
The President has said he wants to review affirmative action programs. My answer to that is, good, my response to that is, good, Mr. President. Review affirmative action programs, and you may find there is a need to strengthen many of them or you may find that many of them are not adequate to accomplish the purpose we want to accomplish and we want to do something stronger, something beyond the affirmative action.
I hope that we could enter that kind of dialog and could have a look at affirmative action in a positive way instead of the use of affirmative action as a weapon, the use of affirmative action as a short cut to power, the use of affirmative action to poison the atmosphere, the use of the assault on affirmative to whip people into a frenzy and to have American voters stampede on election day against their own interests.
Let me just take one more step that I am sure will not be a pleasant one for most of you. In examining slavery, you are going to find many, many very interesting things. Maybe we ought to have parents teach their kids about slavery and not have them learn about it in the streets because there are horrors that need to certainly be discussed in gentle tones. We are very concerned at this point, some people have made us very concerned about teenage pregnancy. Teenage pregnancy is always an evil in my opinion. It is a double evil because you destroy the life of a child who is the mother, not prepared for that kind of responsibility, and you certainly destroy the life or run the risk of destroying the life of the child who has to be raised by a child. No one would like to see teenage pregnancies reduced as much as I would or people who have large numbers of pregnant teenagers in their districts. No one would like to see welfare not be used as a tool to perpetuate teenage pregnancies. I think that there have been some abuses in this area. There is a need to take a hard look at it and to approach it in a reasonable manner and try to do the things that are positive to end large numbers of teenage pregnancies.
I think that the wrong way to approach it is to demonize teenage mothers and make them all monsters, teenage mothers suddenly become monsters and some people sort of imply that it is a threat to the moral fabric of America, these teenage pregnancies. I think that there was a time when teenage pregnancies were a threat to the moral fabric of America.
I am just going to close with an example of the kind of way in which teenage pregnancies were once a threat to the moral fabric of America. During slavery, teenage pregnancies were promoted by slave owners. During slavery, it benefited the industry to have teenagers become pregnant as fast as possible. During slavery, every girl who was a slave was expected to become a mother as fast as possible.
The horrors of this need to be considered. We had a threat to the moral fabric of the Nation. We should be thankful that we ended slavery. We should be
thankful that there was an Abraham Lincoln. We should be thankful that there was a 13th amendment, the Emancipation Proclamation. We should be thankful that we, in 1995, are out of all of that grotesque, those grotesque practices, because they were horrendous and unbearable and it was a threat to the Nation.
But the people who are in control of the present society and who determine what happens to teenage mothers in many cases need to hear that they are in control. If teenagers had some hope, if teenage males as well as teenage females could look forward to a future where a job was possible, if they could look forward to going to college, those who have what it takes and those who qualify, that they are going to be able to get into college without having to have that determined about whether or not their parents have money, if they are going to be able to enjoy the benefits of the Pell grants which are being threatened, enjoy the benefits of certain other higher education programs that we have right now which are being threatened by the budget cuts, if they
[[Page H2385]] are going to be able to look forward to getting jobs when they come out of college because we have an economy which is doing the things necessary to keep the quality of life at a certain level and, therefore, you need people for that purpose, then we would have a different story in terms of teenage pregnancies, if young people could look forward to a better life.
There is a great concentration of teenage pregnancy among black youth, black teenagers. But I assure you, just like every other social ill in America, if we do not attend to it, if we do not provide some hope for black teenagers, the same kind of problem will drift into the white community and the other ethnic groups. It will result in the same, it will have the same result. No hope, an economy which offers no hope, a world which does not care about allowing people to develop to their fullest capacity, that will produce the same results in any ethnic group eventually.
But the present situation that we control, we are not providing any jobs. We have just taken steps to cut off teenager summer jobs. The Department of Labor has just transferred from the category of jobs for urban youth, they have transferred that money, large amounts, into a category for displaced workers. Displaced workers need it. We ought to have the guts to go at the appropriate amount for displaced workers and not take the money away from teenage youth in the cities to go to displaced workers or anybody else. All of these policies add up to a control of the economy, a control of the society which determines the lives of these teenages.
In a less direct way, slave owners determined the lives of teenagers. Slave owners had direct control of the life of their slaves. They had direct control of the lives of the teenage girls. And here is how they behaved. And here is something we still, a crime we still have to atone for.
``When a girl became a woman''--I am reading from a book called Bullwhip Days, ``Bullwhip Days, the Slaves Remember.'' It is an oral history and Bullwhip Days was compiled by the Federal Writers Project. During the depression, the WPA funded writers to do projects so the Federal Writers Project went out and they interviewed slaves. They determined that there were a limited number of slaves who still were alive. People who had been born slaves, lived as slaves. They went out and they interviewed them. They recorded the interviews. And then the results of those interviews, some of those, these are excerpts that were taken from those interviews of actual slaves. So I am going to read in the next few weeks from Bullwhip Days.
I am just going to read a small section of it today dealing with teenage pregnancy. ``When a girl became a woman,'' this is the voice of a slave talking, ``when a girl became a woman, she was required to go to a man and become a mother. The master would sometimes go and get a large hale, hardy Negro man from some other plantation to go to his Negro woman. He would ask the other master to let this man come over to his place to go to his slave girls. A slave girl was expected to have children as soon as she became a woman. Some of them had children at the age of 12 and 13 years old. Negro men six feet tall went to some of these children.''
Slave masters were in control of the lives of the teenagers. Part of the industry was to make the teenagers pregnant.
{time} 2230
That was from a slave named Hilliard Yellerday.
From the voice of Hannah Jones, Hannah Jones talks in very crude terms:
Ben Oil had a hundred niggers. He just raised niggers, on his plantation. His brother-in-law, John Cross, raised niggers, too. He had a hundred and twenty-five niggers. He had a nigger farm. His older brother-in-law, old man English, had a hundred niggers. Dey all hes' had nothin' else but niggers.
That was what their business was, raising niggers. Hannah Jones.
Lewis Jones, the voice of Lewis Jones:
My mammy am owned by Massa Fred Tate and so am my pappy and all my brudders and sisters. How many brudders and sisters? Lawd A'mighty! I'll tell you, `cause you asks, and dis nigger gives de facts as `tis. Let's see; I can't lect de number. My pappy have twelve chillun by my mammy and twelve by anudder nigger, name' Mary. You keep de cout. Den, dere am Lisa. Him have ten by her. And dere am Mandy. Him have eight by her. And dere am Betty. Him have six by her. Now, let me `lect some more. I can't bring de names to mind, but dere am two or three others what have jus' one or two chillun by my pappy. Dat am right--close to fifty chillun, `cause my mammny done told me.
``You've got to understand, the master told my pappy that he is the breeding nigger.'' He is the breeding nigger. Lewis Jones.
Finally, I close with John Smith, another slave. The voice of John Smith:
My marster owned three plantations and three hundred slaves. He started out wid two `oman slaves and raised three hundred slaves. One wuz called ``Short Peggy,'' and the udder wuz called ``Long Peggy.'' Long Peggy had twenty-five chilluns. Long Peggy, a black `oman, wuz boss ob de plantation. Marster freed her after she had twenty-five chilluns. Just think o'dat--raising three hundred slaves wid two `omans. It sho' is de trufe, do.'
And that was the voice of John Smith.
Every time a teen-aged daughter or granddaughter or great granddaughter of these two women became of age, they had to become pregnant and have children as part of the slave industry.
I think pregnancy, teenage pregnancy under those conditions, was a threat to the moral fiber of America. If it had continued, of course, this Nation would have gone down, down, down, and not been able to supply the moral leadership for the free world.
We ended that kind of condition, but the results of it en masse, it was not just done in this one plantation. It was all across the South, breeding farms, and nobody ever talks about this.
It is just one aspect of the crime of slavery, one aspect that needs to be brought to light, and you can take a look at it. We may take a look at rape, we may take a look at torture, we may take a look at murder, we may take a look at all the efforts made to deny the slaves the right to learn to read and write even after they were freed. We may take a look at the Ku Klux Klan. I hope we do not have to take a look at all these things in defense of affirmative action, to prove how great the wrong was.
But if affirmative action and programs like affirmative action exist to correct past wrongs, then people need to understand how deep and how broad and how ugly those wrongs were as part of the discussion.
If we are going to have a discussion to eliminate and erase, if we are going to denigrate and castigate people who are the beneficiaries of affirmative action today, then take a look at their ancestors and what they had to go through. They are descendants of the victims, and there are other people who are descendants of the beneficiaries. People benefited. They got rich from slavery. The economy boomed in many places. The descendants of the beneficiaries now want to further punish and persecute the descendants of the victims.
This is an odd way, perhaps you think, to approach the discussion of affirmative action. But I think that it has to be done if we are not to commit a sin, an error, a set of crimes greater than even slavery was.
If we set off racial wars, if we play on racial fears, if we heighten the race fears in the country just to win the next election, we may set in motion something we can never stop.
In one election we had Willie Horton, now we are going to have an assault on affirmative action. If they keep working these appeals to race, where do we go from there?
We have seen what happened in Serbia when people played the race card. We have seen what happened in Rwanda when people, leaders, demagog played the race card. We have seen what happened in Germany when demagogues played the race card, the religion card, sent one group off after another in a scapegoating process.
That is the direction we are headed in, and some of us are alarmed, so alarmed that we come to you with these very unpleasant discussions. We need to take a look at what wrongs were committed and be chastened by that as we go forward.
Let's stop the people who want to destroy America with race-baiting. Let's stop the assault on affirmative action now.
____________________
