This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
Ambassador Harriet Babbitt, Deputy Administrator
Opening African American History Month Celebration
Washington, D.C., February 4, 1998
U.S. Agency for International Development
It is a privilege to be a part of this program commemorating
the milestones of African American history and honoring the
contributions of African Americans from our nation's earliest days.
Last month, as we celebrated Martin Luther King's birthday
together, Secretary Albright reminded us of six words Dr. King
wrote from a Birmingham jail which for her summed up America's
mission: "The goal of America is freedom."
America's history is the story of our journey toward that goal.
America cannot be fully understood without understanding the
central place of the African American's long struggle for freedom,
justice and opportunity. Anyone who sees our history as simply
the attempt of white America to assimilate African Americans has
missed a vital point. America would not be America without the
unique contributions of African Americans.
From Phyllis Wheatley's poems 200 hundred years ago, to
Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, African Americans
have spoken eloquently to the American conscience. Even more
than their words, their actions called our nation to live up to its
own highest principles:
-- Ralph Bunche at the United Nations,
-- Rosa Parks on a Mobile, Alabama bus,
-- James Farmer singing and joking to keep up the spirits of
young Freedom Riders,
-- John Lewis leading the marchers over Everett Pettit Bridge.
State troopers clubbed him senseless and fractured his
skull, but they could not subdue his spirit. Denied the
right to walk across a bridge or vote in an election, he
returned to walk in the halls of Congress and vote on
legislation that will shape our nation's future.
And who better conveyed the stern discipline of your most
demanding teacher and transforming power of your heart's most
cherished dream than Barbara Jordan? In that magnificent,
unforgettable voice, she invoked our Constitution as an ideal of
what the rights of all people should be.
By her life as well as her words, she helped extend those
rights to all who had been left out.
Talented African Americans helped to shape and enrich our
culture long before they won the right to vote -- even long before
they loosed the bonds of slavery. Without their contributions, we
would lose much of what we value as uniquely American.
As we approach the 21st century, American culture, perhaps
even more than American economic and military strength, exerts a
worldwide influence, especially among young people.
Yet to restrict our discussions of African American history to
the struggle for rights or to African American achievements in the
arts is to ignore the rich variety of African American contributions
to all aspects of our national life.
African American physicists and physicians, factory workers
and blacksmiths have contributed a host of practical inventions and
institutions, from early railroad communication systems to better
egg-beaters.
From Lewis Howard Latimer's carbon filament that made
Edison's electric lights affordable and Granville Woods' early life-saving incubator to Frederick Jones' movie box-office apparatus that delivers tickets and returns change to customers, African
Americans have been part of America's ongoing technological
revolution. They have expanded our nation's, and the world's,
capacity to do things easier, quicker, better.
From the first automatic refrigeration system for long-haul
trucks, which changed America's eating habits to physicist
Meredith Gourdine's (Gore-dean) invention of the first gas mask
and techniques for dispersing fog from airport runways and smoke
from buildings, African Americans have helped make our lives
safer and more abundant in thousands of practical, everyday ways.
They have also extended our reach in science and medicine:
-- Dr. Charles Drew, whose pioneering work with blood
plasma saved untold lives on the battlefields of World War II and
who created the system of blood banks on which we all depend.
-- Mae Jemison -- astronaut, physician, Peace Corps
volunteer.
William Faulkner, in accepting the Nobel prize spoke of the
importance of lifting the human heart by reminding us "of the
courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity
and sacrifice which have been the glory of (our) past. The poet's
voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of his
props, to help him endure and prevail."
Who better exemplified that calling than James Weldon
Johnson, with his glorious, "Lift Every Voice and Sing" (often
referred to as "the black National Anthem")?
In his autobiography Johnson insisted, "Every race and every
nation should be judged by the best it has been able to produce,
not the worst."
We owe that to each other -- to lift up the best we have been
able to produce. Beyond the legacy of bitterness and division, of
misconception and misunderstanding, we owe it our children to
remind them of the courage and sacrifice, the insight and the
inventiveness, the power to endure and prevail.
In this African American history month, we will celebrate
both those whose names we will never forget -- and those whose
names we will never know -- who fought the battles of the past
against oppression, bigotry and hatred, against disease and hunger
and war.
We know that none of those battles can be won for all time.
They must be fought anew by every generation, standing proudly
on the shoulders of the best who have gone before us.
They lift our hearts, and give us courage to face new
challenges, reach new heights. The knowledge of all that has
been overcome renews our commitment to that which we must still
overcome.
We gain strength from understanding the struggles as well as
the achievements of the best that have gone before, so that our
generation -- and our children's and our children's children's --
might endure and yet prevail.
This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
 |
Last Updated on: July 18, 2001
|
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
