January 28, 1976
Page 1278
LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE ON CIVIL RIGHTS HONORS SEN. PHIL HART
Mr. MUSKIE, Mr. President, last Monday night, our colleague and my good friend, Senator PHIL HART, was honored by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights as part of that organization's 27th annual board meeting.
I had the good fortune to attend and to hear the senior Senator from Massachusetts, TED KENNEDY, give eloquent tribute to Senator HART for his tireless efforts to advance the cause of civil rights in this country.
It was proper that the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights give special recognition to PHIL. HART. The organization is made up of 135 national civil rights, labor, religious and civic groups, pledged to work for the enactment of civil rights and social welfare legislation. For his part, the senior Senator from Michigan has not only shared those goals, but worked tirelessly to see them achieved. As TED KENNEDY put it, "he has spoken for the finest dreams of the human spirit."
Mr. President, with congratulations to my friend from Michigan, I ask unanimous consent that Senator KENNEDY'S remarks be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the remarks were ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
ADDRESS BY SENATOR EDWARD M. KENNEDY AT THE TESTIMONIAL DINNER FOR SENATOR PHILIP HART OF THE LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE ON CIVIL RIGHTS
I am pleased to join with so many distinguished Americans this evening to pay tribute and to express our deep personal regard for Phil Hart.
First let me thank Roy Wilkins for his kind words of introduction. For so many years and through so many battles, Roy Wilkins has stood above the crowd leading both black and white America toward the vision of a just society. The NAACP and the Leadership Conference will miss his guidance and inspiration. And the nation can never repay him for a lifetime of dedication and commitment to equality in this land.
Those who have spoken before me — Andy Biemiller, Clarence Mitchell, Joe Rauh and Leonard Woodcock — already have expressed the admiration, and the affection that we feel toward Phil Hart.
Many of them, and many of the people in this room worked with him as Lieutenant Governor and have known his courage. Many of you in this room have walked with him as U.S. Attorney and have known his commitment to justice. And many of you were at his side in the Senate before I came to Washington and have known his determination to awaken this land to its own ideals.
But I yield to no one in affection and respect for Phil Hart and the mark he has made on the conscience of the Senate and the conscience of America.
The poet Keats wrote of those "who feel the giant agony of the world, and more, like slaves of poor humanity, Labor for mortal good ...".
And that has been the labor of Phil Hart for 18 years in the Senate and throughout his career of public service.
So many times and in so many ways, Phil Hart has called out to the best within us. He has not spoken for his state alone. He has not spoken for his nation alone. He has spoken for the finest dreams of the human spirit.
While Phil Hart led the struggle to enact the great civil rights landmarks of the past decade — the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Open Housing Act of 1968 — he was not doing it only for black America. He was doing it because he believes that this nation cannot fulfill its destiny divided against itself.
He felt the deep hurt within this land — the searing wound on America's conscience of segregation, the bitter contradiction between the Fourteenth Amendment and Jim Crow laws and the distortion of our nation's ideals by racism.
Those who rode the buses into the South, those who were being arrested marching into Birmingham, those who walked hand-in-hand before armed troopers in Selma — they were the true descendants of Jefferson, the bearers of our heritage and our future.
I remember how Phil Hart spoke in the Senate. He spoke for the young men and women who dared to challenge a system of fear. He spoke for Medgar Evers, for four young girls in Birmingham, whose names never made the front pages or the nightly news programs.
He said, "This is not a proposal to take basic rights away from anybody; but it is to insure that basic rights are accorded to those, who, for a hundred years, have been promised them and to this moment find themselves denied."
President Kennedy had turned to Phil Hart to help manage the drive for the first Omnibus Civil Rights Act and Lyndon Johnson turned to him to complete that work in1964. And he turned again to Phil Hart to direct the struggle that yielded the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
We cannot forget those years and the revolution they marked in this land.
More than any one person in Congress in those years, Phil Hart was a missionary for Civil Rights. And he fulfilled his mission well. Phil Hart was the one to interpret those years to his colleagues, to help us understand the depth of unrest in this land, to translate the demand of President Kennedy that "the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise," to bring us nearer to the cry of the Reverend Martin Luther King "free at last, free at last ..."
He understood too that passing a law was not the final answer. Just before the first major bill was passed in the Senate, he said:
"... the verdict ultimately is with the people of this country. It is the day-to-day conduct of each of us which will write the final chapter to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
"Every American should be judged as an individual by our individual merits — and not, while we are still 50 feet away, by the color God gave us."
And so Phil Hart helped lead the march to help black Americans check into this country's hotels. But that's not all he did. Since then, he has kept us marching to make sure that black Americans have enough in their pocketbooks when it’s time to check out of those hotels.
Phil knows it makes no sense to enact laws to safeguard personal and civil rights unless we also move vigorously to enforce those laws.
What sense does it make to have affirmative action programs or equal job opportunities, when there are no jobs for blacks, and when the skills for those jobs lie far outside their reach.
Phil Hart quietly demanded of his colleagues that they look at the nation, that they look and that they ask themselves "Is it fair?"
Is it fair that a child growing up black in the ghettos of our cities is more likely to drop out of high school than to graduate from college?
Is it fair that any young child should know no home except the next migrant camp?
Is it fair that a child born on an Indian reservation may not see a doctor for the first six years of his life?
Is it fair that a white child's future in Appalachia is limited to the hollows his father, and his father before him, have struggled to escape?
Is it fair that any child's future should be limited by the color of his skin, or a Spanish lilt to his name or to the sharing of an Indian heritage?
Phil Hart asks those questions. He asks them softly. But he asks them with irresistible logic and persistence. And he asks them with quiet force, with understanding and with compassion. And more than any other Senator in my time, he has been listened to.
For two centuries, civil rights in America rested on the elimination of laws and policies that were deliberately engineered to discriminate, to oppress and to deprive. For the third century of American history, civil rights for the minority will be the only way to guarantee protection of human rights for everyone in this nation.
America's heritage rests upon the noble vision that all men are created equal.
Historians of the future will wonder about the years we have just passed through. They will ask how it could be, a century after the Civil War, that black and white had not yet learned to live together in the promise of this land. They will ask, what sort of country was it, that drove a great and sensitive black American named Paul Robeson, to think he could find greater freedom in the Soviet Union than in the nation of his birth.
Phil Hart has carried high the banner of civil rights throughout his long tenure in the Senate. He has carried equally high the banner of civil liberties.
This is a nation of dissenters — from the earliest religious outcasts our security, and our freedom depend on how well we protect the right of individual dissent.
Phil Hart understood that cause. He would be found on the mall in Washington listening to the Viet Nam veterans who protested a country engaged in an immoral war and therefore at war with itself.
His was a voice calling for an end to the war before it was the popular course. His was a voice calling for recognition of conscientious objection to that war — so that an individual could be true to himself and his beliefs. His was a voice asking that those who suffered from a decade of war — veterans and exiles alike — be enabled to contribute to this society. For they are all victims.
Phil Hart has challenged those who would use the instruments of illegal force, even though they wear the uniforms of the law. FBI and CIA illegal excesses endanger the liberty of us all. Phil Hart knows it, and he is working now to defend the individual against the unbridled use of state power.
Young Blacks in the South and Chicanos in the Southwest who will go to the polls this November — and many of the several thousand black elected officials and the several hundred Latino elected officials — let them know the debt owed to Phil Hart.
Others who break through the barriers of housing discrimination let them know the debt.
Children who obtain a decent education they could never have had before — let them know the debt as well.
The advances for black and brown Americans over the years that Phil Hart was in the Senate are large. They are the product of tears and suffering and pain — men and women and children who each gave of themselves — sometimes giving their lives — in the struggle for freedom and equality.
Phil Hart was there too. Not alone and not by his efforts unassisted, but Phil Hart was there. And it was important that he was there, because he was irreplaceable.
However, while we can see landmarks along the course of the civil rights struggle and the great distance travelled, we have not yet reached our destination.
There is a continuing crisis in America today, a crisis measured by the gulf between the minorities and the majority culture in education, in jobs, in housing, in health, in income.
We cannot fail the challenge to provide economic security to 8 million jobless workers, 12 million welfare mothers and their children and hundreds of thousands of inner city youngsters who have never had a decent job.
We cannot turn away from the challenge for equal education and quality education. Phil Hart did not turn away when that challenge came to Detroit. I will not turn away in Boston. Nor can we turn from that commitment anywhere in this land.
In an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote a section condemning the violation of liberty and human dignity of persons captured in the slave trade — the ancestors of black Americans. The Continental Congress struck this section from the final draft.
And so those words were not proclaimed on July 4, two hundred years ago. But now we can put it back, at least in practice, and in our hearts, as we celebrate the document that began our Revolution.
For if we seek justice for ourselves, then we must demand it for others. If we seek equality for ourselves, then we must demand it for others. For none of us shall enjoy those precious fruits of our heritage in the future — unless all of us enjoy them together.
Carl Sandburg, wrote: "To the question, What will the story be of the Family of Man across the near or far future? Some would reply ...
"There is only one man in the world, and his name is All Men.
"There is only one woman in the world, and her name is All Women.
"There is only one child in the world, and the child's name is All Children."
Phil Hart understood those words. He has lived them in the Senate for the past 18 years. I know he will live them in private life as well. And we stand in his shadow and in gratitude for the vision of justice he has given us. For all that and much more, we honor him this evening.