Governor Bill Clinton Transcript of remarks given in Birmingham, Alabama April 30, 1992 Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank all of the people here on the platform with me and all of you for coming on this very, very beautiful evening in the Alabama springtime. I want to thank you for coming out and for caring about your country and for giving me the chance to make my case to you. Normally when I give my campaign speech, especially the closer I get to home, the more I talk about what it will take to restore our economic vitality as a nation, what my experiences as governor of a southern state have taught me as I've worked hard to preserve economic opportunity for our people. But tonight I want to ask you to forgive me if I depart from my normal campaign speech because there are some very troubling things going on in our country tonight, and all of us need to take a little time to think about them. Yesterday, after the jury rendered the verdict in the Rodney King case on Los Angeles, rioting broke out in that city. Then fires broke out . Now there are three major fires burning in Los Angeles, and nine people are dead. A heroic young firefighter lies in his hospital bed tonight, shot through the face and the neck, his wife and three children wondering whether he will recover. There has been a reaction of rioting in the streets in Atlanta, and tension is big in cities all across the United States. So I want to ask you to think for a moment about what I usually say is the second biggest problem in America, which is, as a people, we are coming apart when we ought to be coming together. Most of us who have seen the film don't understand the verdict in the King trial. However , we have to say that, whatever the verdict , it does not justify the violence which ensued. Today the Attorney General said, after a meeting with Reverend Jackson and Congresswoman Maxine Waters of Los Angeles, that he would look into the trial. And the President, to his credit, said that he would support the Justice Department's looking into whether federal legal action should be taken . But meanwhile, the violence continues in Los Angeles. I talked to a friend of mine today who was on his way to get a child out of school because he was afraid that the rioting was occurring too close to the school. I called the fire chief's office today just to express concern for the welfare of the fireman. It made me think about the 1960's again when I was a young man, and we had trouble here in Birmingham. The Watts section of Los Angeles burned in riots over poverty. In this month in 1968, Martin Luther King was killed in Memphis, on the eastern border of my home state. And Arkansas and Washington, D.C. erupted in violence. I can remember still to this day driving my car with a big red cross on it down into the inner city to the churches , where the people who were burned out of their homes were huddled in church basements waiting for food. In the 1960's people rioted over race , poverty and politics. Now the politics of our country have changed dramatically. Birmingham , Atlanta and Los Angeles all have black mayors, but the economics have worsened. Race and poverty problems remain, today accompanied by drugs and the disintegration of family on a scale we could not have imagined twenty years ago. So we ask tonight, as Americans, without regard to our race, what are we to do? First, we should say to our fellow Americans in Los Angeles: No matter how angered you are, no matter how aggrieved you are, stop the violence now. The verdict in the King trial is not an excuse to burn or steal or maim or kill. It is wrong. The abandonment of the poor in our cities can not be avenged. Justice cannot come from the savage behavior we must now watch on our evening news. This is worse than it was in the 60's because every day, in city after city after city in America, children grow up without parents to guide their way. Children walk to schools subject to random, drive-by shootings. Children themselves, who often have guns, shoot other children when they hardly understand what they are doing. The basic institutions that held our country together -- the family, the school, the church, the neighborhood -- all have been savagely weakened in a rising tide of drugs and violence. Families break down, and in so many places and in so many ways, gangs have moved in to fill the void created when people have nothing else to which they can belong, no other unit in which they are the most important person in the world. What are we to do about this, my fellow Americans? I could give you the best economic policy this country has ever seen, and to be sure, if elected President, that is exactly what I will try to do. But how can we revitalize America when one eight-year-old steals his brother's gun in Chicago and takes it to school and shoots another eight-year-old ? How can we rebuild a country where, in the city of Houston, eleven grade schools have metal- detectors to take the guns and knives off the eight and nine-year- olds ? How can we rebuild America when an emigrant father stops me in a hotel in New York and says, "My ten-year-old son tells me I should vote for you. I hope you can make him free because he's not free any more. He can't walk across the street and play in the park unless I go with him. He can't walk safely down the block to school unless I go with him. " Where does it all end ? I ask you all today to think about that because, in 1980, President Reagan said that the test for electing a President who wants to be re-elected is: Are you better off than you were four years ago ? Well, if that's the test, George Bush cannot be re-elected. But that is not enough of a test. Because if all we ask is whether you or you or you are better off, what about "us" ? We have been divided in this country for too long between "us" and "them". Each and every election we see a fresh new slate of arguments and ads telling us that "they" are the problem not "us" . They the minorities, they the Democrats. Them, them, them. Pretty soon, there are so many "thems", there are no longer any "us's". But there can be no "them" in America. There's only us. All of us pay. Those of us who live our comfortable lives, we pay for the division and failure in America. We pay for it in the crime rates that are going up everywhere. We pay for it when our tax dollars go to build jails instead of to educate children. We pay for it when our health-care bills explode because we have the most violent nation in the world. That is how we all pay. And I'll tell you something else, we pay for it when our economy goes down hill, because there are too many adults who are too illiterate to work in a global economy. We pay for it when there are too many places where people could be working instead of going on welfare. We pay for it over and over and over again. If you live in a country where people don't count, you pay for it. You pay for it. You pay for it. Tonight I just think we ought to say: As Americans, in this election, we want to do more than rebuild our economy. We want to rebuild our American community. We want to put people first again and push value on humanity and say that little children are going to have a good, safe, decent, clean, prosperous country to grow up in. We will not let their dreams die. We must begin by reclaiming safety and order and lawfulness in our streets. Crime breeds poverty just as much as poverty breeds crime. We cannot and we must not permit another generation of Americans to grow up on streets too unsafe to walk. For the last eleven years we have reduced our efforts to put police on the street when we should have intensified them. I have offered a program to put more police on the streets of our cities, to allow the same law enforcement officers to walk the same blocks day in and day out, to work as friends with their neighbors to prevent crime from happening, as well as to catch criminals after crime occurs. I have seen in Philadelphia, I have seen in the housing projects of Chicago, I have seen example after example of places that ought to be ridden with crime, which are crime-free today because there are police on-duty twenty-four hours a day, working with citizens who are not too ashamed or not too afraid or not too lazy to get up and work with them to keep their streets, their neighborhoods, their housing units safe. And that is what I pledge to try to bring to all of America I'll tell you something else. It isn't very popular to say in the South, I guess -- I live in a state where over half the adults have hunting or fishing licenses, or both. But too many kids have too many guns in their hands in the streets of our cities today. No nation would permit these children to walk around with guns. No nation would permit what is going on in Los Angeles tonight, with the automatic and the semi-automatic weapons in the hands of lawless vandals, who are using this King verdict as a simple excuse to go out and reap violence and shoot people, are running unchecked in the streets. And it is wrong. There is a law before Congress today that could have been passed last year that would have simply required a waiting period before any American can buy a handgun, to see whether they are underage, have a criminal background, have a drug history, have a mental health history. It would not infringe on any body's right to keep and bear arms, but it would make our streets safer . And the Brady Bill should pass the United States Congress and be signed by the President of the United States. We must rebuild the American family. We must make it easier to bring healthy babies into the world. Do you know that in many of our cities, a child has a smaller chance of living to be a year old than a child in Shanghai, China ? Every day, when low-birth weight babies are brought into the world with mental and physical limitations they will carry for the rest of their lives, the rest of us give $1500 a day to pay for them because we have stubbornly refused to follow the lead of other advanced nations and provide basic primary and preventive health care to all the people in this country, to control the cost of health care. If you vote for me, I will try to find the way for us to bring little children into this world and get them into school safe and healthy and ready to learn. Because, unless we do that, our entire future is in peril. And I will try to find a way to help parents be better teachers for their children and better parents for their children. In our home state we have a wonderful program where mothers -- even mothers who can't read or talk -- spend twenty minutes a day, five days a week, thirty weeks a year with their children for two years, to help them succeed in school. And it has helped the parents to succeed as parents, to keep families together, to strengthen the learning process of both the parent and the child , and, in the process, to strengthen the family. And if you vote for me, I'll tell you something else, I'll try to pass family leave and more child care; but I want this country to have a much tougher system of child support enforcement, too. I think we have too many parents who believe that governments raise children, but they don't. People must. This is the beginning of where we must start. There are so many things I'd like to say to you tonight about what schools can do. I have seen schools in high-crime areas be safe havens for children . There are so many things I'd like to say about what communities can do. I have a friend who is a judge in South Texas, who got 600 volunteers in his judicial district willing to work one-on-one with children when they first begin to get in trouble, when they are eight, nine and ten-years-old. And I tell you, we have to bring these problems back to our community. We need an army of volunteers in America in every community to deal one-on-one with these problems. Let's not kid ourselves: So many people who go into these gangs, deal drugs and commit acts of violence were never the most important person in the world to anyone. They were never connected to a better future. They were never given enough love or discipline, enough order or emotion to build a healthy life; and we must do that within the communities. No President can promise to wipe the stain of crime and drugs and lost human wreckage away from the schools of any community in America unless the people are willing to take responsibility -- each and every one of them -- to lift up the children in their communities. So I say to you tonight, my fellow citizens of America and my fellow Southerners, think of the long road we have walked in the last twenty-five or thirty years. Look at this crowd tonight: black and white together, people who want to reclaim their country to restore the values of freedom and fairness and progress and community. If we can do this to achieve more political equality, how can we stand by and let the very fabric of our society rot out from under us ? And yet that is what we are doing. It does not have to be that these children die in the streets of our cities. It does not have to be that their lives are lost to crime and drugs and gangs. It does not have to be that our schools fail just because the children who are in them come from families that are troubled. Let us resolve in this election: Yes, to have a new economic direction; yes, to organize to compete and win; but first to bind up the wounds of this nation. Because every child counts. And let us say again to our fellow Americans in Los Angeles: Stop the violence. Sit down in a room. Talk to one another. The one thing we have here that we learned the hard way is that we never got anywhere in this part of the country shouting at one another. When we started talking to one another, we found out that we were a lot more alike than we thought. Tonight when you go home, say a prayer for those people in Los Angeles. Say a prayer that justice can be done through law enforcement. Say a prayer that the evil and the hatred that has gripped the souls of people and makes them think they can shoot one another without feeling any remorse, will some how be lifted from them. Most of all, say a prayer that we will slice though the cynicism that has gripped America and made us believe that we can make no difference in these problems. This a great crowd here today, but if America believed this election would make any difference in the lives of real people, there would be five times as many people out here tonight. There are too many people that just don't believe it makes a difference any more. I'll tell you something, it can make a difference. Forty-five years ago when I was born to a widowed mother -- my father died in a car wreck three months before I was born -- in a state with an income barely half the national average, my people knew that life could matter. Because at least we had family and neighborhood and community, and we knew that if we worked hard and played by the rules, we'd be rewarded. And I had a chance to get a good education and work my way through college and law school, to see the world and to live the life that I dreamed of living, because the system worked for people who were in difficult circumstances. Today in Los Angeles, in Atlanta, in every major urban area and more rural areas in this country, people who play by the rules are not being rewarded. And I understand their frustration and their pain. But the beginning of wisdom is not to lash out or to burn or to shoot or to kill, or to waste your life selling drugs or doing them. The beginning of wisdom is to talk to one another , to reach out to one another, to touch one another, to lift up the voice in all of ourselves. And I tell you this: I have gone across this great land, pleading with people to bridge the racial gaps that have paralyzed this country. I went to New York, and I thought I was in the South in the 1950's. They said, "Well, you have to decide in New York. You can't get a majority of the Jewish vote if you get a majority of the black vote, because they don't get along with them." I said, "That's the dumbest thing I ever heard in my life." If they don't get along, they ought to -- two groups jointly repressed for generation after generation. And so we did get a majority of both the groups. But too few people voted because too few people believed it made a difference. So I say to you tonight: Thank you for coming. Thank you for your support. Thank you for caring enough about America just to be here. Go home tonight and think of those people on the streets in Los Angeles, terrified in their homes, fires burning all around, no belief in justice or progress. And say to them, in your own way, "I'm going to do the best I can this year to be a good American, to rebuild the safety of our streets, the sanctity of our families, the strength of our communities and the vitality of our economy." That is what my campaign is all about and what together we can do together for America in 1992. Thank you. God bless you all. End of Remarks