Gingrich Rejects Apology for Slavery

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) on Friday labeled a proposed congressional apology for slavery as “emotional symbolism” that would not contribute to healing the nation’s racial tensions nor advancing the status of minorities.

“We can go back and have all sorts of apologies,” Gingrich told reporters summoned to his office for an impromptu news conference on race relations. “But will one more child read because of it?”

He also described such symbolic proposals as “an avoidance of problem-solving [that] strikes me as a dead end.”

Gingrich’s dismissive comments followed a question on whether he supported legislation introduced this week by 12 white members of the House--six Republicans and six Democrats--calling for an official apology to the descendants of U.S. slaves.

The proposed legislation--and Gingrich’s comments about it--came as the White House focused attention on race relations by touting a speech on the subject President Clinton is to deliver today at UC San Diego.

Gingrich clearly was playing off Clinton’s initiative in his Friday remarks, saying that he plans his own effort to put improved relations between black and white Americans at the top of his policy agenda. That will include a speech next week, he said.

He also scoffed at the one specific to emerge in advance of Clinton’s speech--the president’s creation of a task force that is to conduct a yearlong study on the status of race relations and present a report to the White House.

“Unless the commission has a dramatically different agenda and dramatically different approach than the same tired old big-government liberalism, it’ll be like the commissions we’ve had for 30 years,” Gingrich said.

The proposal for the apology is a one-sentence statement requesting “that the Congress apologizes to African Americans whose ancestors suffered as slaves under the Constitution and laws of the United States until 1865.”

The measure, drafted by Rep. Tony P. Hall (D-Ohio), closely resembles a congressional resolution that provided an apology nearly a decade ago for the government’s internment of Japanese Americans in military-run camps during World War II.

Gingrich said the apology proposal is “a backward-oriented” approach to race relations.

“Any American, I hope, feels badly about slavery,” Gingrich said, adding that he would rather focus on stopping drugs, improving education and promoting job creation among African Americans. “I also feel badly about genocide in Rwanda. I also feel badly about a lot of things. . . . Finding new, backward-oriented symbolic moments so we can avoid real work doesn’t strike me as a strategy that’s going to solve the country’s problems.”

Brian Chase, a spokesman for Hall, said the congressman intends to meet with Gingrich “to provide the speaker with some additional information about the bill.”

White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry said the administration has yet to take a position on the proposed apology. But he said Clinton, in his speech today, will talk about slavery in terms of its impact on the lives of contemporary African Americans.

“It’s a unique feature of the history of African Americans that presents its own set of realities as we deal with questions of how whites relate to blacks in our society,” McCurry said.