Remarks at the Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland, Ohio

President George Forbes, my good friend Dr. Reverend Otis Moss, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters:

I'm glad to be back here in this church. I came here as a candidate; I was received with open arms. I'm back here as President now, received again with open arms. Reverend Moss is a very discerning person. He knows protocol; he understands the status of human beings. The last time I was here, he took me into the community center, and this time, as President, he's let me come in the sanctuary. [Laughter]

He made a beautiful speech a few minutes ago, and I'm going to take it as my text. The first time I heard Reverend Moss preach was in a sad congregation at the time of the death of Martin Luther King, Sr.'s wife, Mrs. Martin Luther King, Sr. He only spoke 5 minutes. I believe it was the best sermon I have ever heard. I doubt that he's preached a 5-minute sermon since then. [Laughter] But it was beautiful.

And tonight, before I begin my own remarks, I would like to report to you that I have, just a few minutes ago, talked to Shirley Jordan, the wife of Vernon Jordan. His father, his mother are there with her in the Fort Wayne Hospital. I had a long conversation with Dr. Jeffrey Towles, who's the surgeon who has ministered to our brother, Vernon Jordan. He reports that he was the victim of a critical wound. He's in the intensive care center. He is in satisfactory condition. He needs intense medical care, and he needs our prayers. And I would like to ask all of you for just one minute to stand, and let's pray for the quick recovery of our brother, Vernon Jordan.

[Pause for silent prayer.]

I thank you very much. Amen.

My first thought when I heard about this attack, which I believe was an assassination effort—I was filled with a sense of outrage and a sense of sadness. I've known Vernon Jordan for a long time in Atlanta; we worked together. I was the Governor; he occupied a major position in shaping the lives of poor people and black people throughout the Southeast by giving them a right to vote. He was planning then to run for Congress. He later decided, as you know, to go to the Urban League. He's been a severe critic of mine on occasion, and I've listened to him very closely. I've been to his home; he's spent the night at my home, and we're close personal friends.

It's ironic that his life should be attacked, because he has spent it and will spend it in the future fighting against the causes of violence. He realizes that we must have an end to bloodshed and the hatred in this country, whether it's based on religion or race or ethnic divisions. That kind of hatred resulting in violence can destroy us all.

We live under a Constitution that promises us life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, equal opportunity, but we also know that our Founding Fathers wrote in that we should ensure domestic tranquillity. Martin Luther King, Jr.—I know his wife was in this church recently—said, and I'd like to quote something I wrote in the hotel room a few minutes ago: "Every crisis has both its danger and its opportunities. The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands in moments of challenge and controversy."

We know where Vernon Jordan has always stood, and we know where, if our prayers are answered—and I believe they will be—he will stand in the years to come.

As President I have a great responsibility. I'm the chief law enforcement officer of our Nation. I'm the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. But I'm also the person charged with the responsibility to alleviate the causes of dissension and despair and hopelessness and hatred.

Reverend Otis Moss has helped me a lot. He's been to the White House twice in the last 2 weeks. The last time he came there I couldn't be with him, because a volcano erupted in the southern part of the State of Washington. I went out and saw the terrible destruction that resulted from that act of nature. It had the force of a hydrogen bomb, with 10 million tons of TNT, 500 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima in Japan to end the Second World War; 150 square miles of beautiful forestland leveled, devastated. And I flew over it. And I was impressed then with the power of God.

And I was also reminded of something else that Martin Luther King, Jr., said. He said man is not flotsam and jetsam on the river of life; man is the child of God. And the trust that we have in our institutions, in our families, in our communities, in our Nation and our religious faith, can tide us over difficult times. We are not the first ones who've faced difficult times; we're not the first ones that sought for full freedom; we're not the first ones who've sought to find the promised land.

Moses led the Israeli people out of Egypt to seek freedom, and they were happy and delighted when they crossed the Red Sea and wound up in what they thought was safety. But they wandered for a long time. They didn't reach their destination immediately. They turned against Moses. They began to complain about the manna and the quail and said, "We haven't got the things that we used to have: fruit and fish and wonderful foods." But they forgot about the freedom that they had found, and they forgot about the slavery that they had escaped. But they continued on a long, hard road.

As Otis Moss pointed out a few minutes ago, after 244 years the American people, and particularly the American black people, have not yet reached the promised land. But we're on the road toward the promised land.

To reach our goals is not going to be easy; it's not going to be simple—it never has. Sometimes it's required suffering, sometimes it's required patience. It's always required courage and determination and a sense of unity and a maintenance of our degree of faith.

We want our people to have good health. We don't yet have adequate health care in this country. But the programs for women and infants and children, if the present budget proposals are carried out, will be six times greater than they were the last time I stood in this church.

We're making progress down the road together, but I don't claim that we've yet reached the promised land. We want our children to have a good education and take the ability and the talent that God gives them and nourish it and develop it and then be able to use it.

God knows and you know and I know that one of the greatest deprivations ever perpetrated against black people in this country was the segregated schools and the absence of a quality education. Special programs for disadvantaged children are quite often not provided by local and State governments. Those have had to come from the Federal Government. In the last 3 1/2 years, since the last time I stood in this church, we have increased those programs three times over. We've not yet done enough. We've not yet reached the promised land, but we're making progress together in a constant, steady, determined fashion.

We want our people—young people, in particular—to have jobs, because there's nothing more devastating to a human being than to have one life to live on this Earth and not be able to expend that life or use that life in a productive way to serve oneself, to serve one's family, to serve one's community, and, indeed, to serve one's nation. And to arrive at the age of 16 or 17 or 18 or 21 and not have a chance for gainful employment is a devastating blow to a young person—man or woman.

We've not solved all those problems. In the last 3 1/2 years, we have added a net increase of 1 million jobs in our country for black people alone. The unemployment rate among young black people has gone down 14 percent. We have doubled the programs in the Job Corps, the CETA programs. And now we're asking the Congress for the only major new domestic program of the year, an additional $2 billion to be spent to take those young people that might be ready to drop out of high school and give them extra training, either on the job or in the high school with a job, and let that be a permanent part of American life. We've not yet got it through the Congress. We're fighting for it, and with your help we will get it. This is important that we do it.

The Federal Government jobs have gone down since I've been in office, the total. But jobs for black people employed in the Federal Government have increased 20,000, and we now have 15 percent of the total employment in the Federal Government; black employees. We haven't yet reached the promised land. We need to do more, but we're making progress down the right road.

And we want our people to have food. I want to be sure that no one in this country goes hungry. We have had an adequate food stamp program evolved, but as you know, a few years ago, the last time I was in this church, you had to have money to buy the food stamps to go back and get food. We've eliminated that requirement. Now you get the food stamps. And this is a major step forward, but the Congress is still treading on dangerous ground in not fully funding the food stamp program. We almost lost it the 15th day of May. But with your help and many like you, including Otis Moss, George Forbes, Vernon Jordan, others, we're making progress to make sure that people don't suffer from a lack of food.

Housing also is needed for our families. We've increased allocation of funds for housing by 75 percent. Government-assisted housing in next year's budget will jump from 240,000 to 300,000; we're going back now to get a hundred more thousand homes. Making progress; we haven't yet reached the promised land—God knows we have not—but we're making progress down the road toward the goals that we all share.

We already have programs that will let any young person of college age in this country get a college education without regard to their family financial condition if they're qualified to do the academic work. A major step forward; a long way yet to go but we're making progress.

I could go on and on; I don't want to make my talk too long but I would like to say this. Those programs are good. They are needed. They're long overdue. But we've got to be sure that we have justice in other ways. The decisions are made not by a President, not by a Congress, not even by a member of the city council; but over a long period of time the decisions are made by the regulatory agencies and by the Federal courts.

I wanted to bring people that knew what deprivation was into the Government with me, and Otis has mentioned some of those people: Pat Harris and Drew Days. You've also got Eleanor Holmes Norton, and you know we've had Andy Young. And we've got the Secretary of the Army, who understands what it means to be deprived of an equal opportunity to serve in the Armed Forces of our country. But we also need more and more people to serve permanently for life.

We've had some good Presidents in the past—Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy, and others. I've only been in office now 3 1/2 years, but I have been able to appoint more black Federal judges than all the previous Presidents put together since our Nation was founded. Next week we're going to have another one, George White. George, stand up a minute.

I'd like to say one other thing. This is a time of controversy; this is a time of challenge; this is a time of impatience; this is a time of inconvenience. But it's also a time of opportunity. It's a time to build on what we've already done. It's a time to look to the future with hope and with conviction that if we all pull together we'll continue to make progress.

I was in the Navy for 11 years, and if you put people that want to go in the same direction in a boat, and half of them are rowing forward and half of them are rowing backwards, the boat's not going very far. As a matter of fact, it could do worse than stand still. A President has got to face a lot of things: rampaging rivers, exploding volcanoes, Republicanism that might come back next November. And we don't want our boat to sink the first week in November, right? So, let's pull together.

Ours is a great country. We're all in it together. We never thought it would take this long to reach the promised land. When the civil rights bills were passed more than 15 years ago we thought the time would be short when full equality would be with us and when full equality of opportunity would be the lot of our families. We've not yet quite reached that goal. But we are moving in the right direction. It's going to take persistence, harmony, trust, conviction, and prayer.

James said "the effectual, fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much," right? And that's what we're going to need in the future: effective, fervent prayer. And we've got to make sure we're righteous and we're doing what's right in the eyes of God. And in this great land of opportunity we're going to make sure that we don't fail as we try to availeth much together.

Thank you very much. God bless you all.