Proclamation 5347—Minority Enterprise Development Week, 1985

The greatest strength of our economic system is the opportunity it affords to every American to prosper according to his or her own talents and efforts. No other nation in history has so boldly set individual opportunity as its leading goal or come so close to achieving it.

This emphasis on opportunity works to the benefit of all Americans, but it especially helps Americans who are members of minority groups. In the past, these minority entrepreneurs were subject to laws and regulations that prevented them from competing freely in the marketplace. But those laws contradicted the spirit of freedom that animates our democracy, and today they are only an historical memory, a reminder of the need to be forever vigilant in defense of individual freedom.

Minority enterprises today form a significant proportion of all the Nation's businesses, and their number is continuing to grow. The talents, insights, and hard work of minority Americans are adding to our Nation's technological prowess, providing us with new solutions for important problems and creating jobs in many industries, some of which did not even exist only a few years ago. This is the genius of economic freedom, and we should do everything in our power to preserve this freedom and expand it so that opportunity for all will continue to be the defining characteristic of our society.

Now, Therefore, I, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim the week of October 6 through October 12, 1985, as Minority Enterprise Development Week, and I call upon all Americans to join together with minority business enterprises across the country in appropriate observances.

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-eighth day of May, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty-five, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and ninth.

RONALD REAGAN