All the Presidents' Words

On Saturday, November 13,1993, President William Jefferson Clinton stood in the Memphis pulpit where Martin Luther King, Jr., had preached the night before his assassination. Speaking in Dr. King's very rhythms and cadences, the president exhorted the 5,000 black ministers and leaders at the Temple Church of God in Christ, and by extension all citizens, to look squarely at both how far the country had come in the struggle for racial equality and at the great distance it still must travel. In chilling detail, he described the violence and drug trafficking that ravage cities in which children, afraid of random killing, plan their own funerals. He warned that the victories of the civil rights movement were being undermined by a "great crisis of the spirit that is gripping America today," that while Martin Luther King would take pride in the election of black Americans to political office and in the growing black middle class, were he to speak today, in all probability he would express utter dismay. Clinton even imagined the words King might have used:

I did not live and die to see the American family destroyed. I did not live and die to see 13-year-old boys get automatic weapons and gun down nine- year-olds just for the kick of it. I did not live and die to see young people destroy their own lives with drugs and then build fortunes destroying the lives of others. That is not what I came here to do. I fought for freedom, he would say, but not for the freedom of children to have children and the fathers to walk away from them . . . as if they don't amount to anything.