MILLION MAN MARCH : Clinton Calls for End to Racism : Speech: Racial gulf exposed by Simpson trial demands individual remedy, he says.

President Clinton urged black and white Americans on Monday to “clean our house of racism”--declaring that the racial gulf exposed by the O.J. Simpson trial demands an individual, more than a government, solution.

In the most sweeping analysis of racial issues of his presidency, Clinton said black men must take more responsibility for themselves and their families. And blacks must understand why whites recoil in fear from the violence of some black neighborhoods, he said.

At the same time, Clinton said, whites are wrong to believe that blacks are “getting more than their fair share of jobs and promotions.” Any idea that blacks are getting an equal opportunity in society is sadly mistaken, he said.

As a throng of black men rallied in Washington, Clinton denounced recent hateful impulses, strongly implicating both former Los Angeles Police Detective Mark Fuhrman and Louis Farrakhan, leader of the “Million Man March” in Washington.

The address was Clinton’s first major speech on racial issues since the Simpson trial brought an outpouring of racial anger, and it came only after various commentators and advocates complained that he was failing to provide leadership to a divided nation.

Speaking to a largely student crowd of 10,000 at the University of Texas, Clinton talked repeatedly of his Administration’s commitment to help minorities and foster racial unity. But this address was not about government. It was about how white and black Americans treat each other, and how men treat their families.

Decrying a rift “tearing at the heart of America,” Clinton said the Simpson trial had made Americans aware that whites and blacks see the world in vastly different ways, ways that “go beyond and beneath the Simpson trial and its aftermath, which brought these perceptions so starkly in the open.”

He said the solution must come in a new open conversation between Americans. “This may seem like a simple request, but for tens of millions of Americans, this has never been a reality,” he said. “They have never spoken, and they have never listened. . . . “

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There are “too many today, white and black, on the left and the right, on the street corners and the radio waves, who seek to sow division for their own purposes. To them, I say, ‘No mo” he said. “We must be one.”

Clinton ventured again and again into topics that are sensitive with the black audience whose support is important to his reelection bid.

Whites are not racist to say that a culture of welfare, illegitimacy and absentee fathers “cannot be broken by social programs unless there is first more personal responsibility,” he said. Nor are they racist to shun neighborhoods where thugs carry guns like “old West desperadoes,” or to recoil when they hear that gang members feel justified in shooting anyone who shows them disrespect.

“Blacks must understand and acknowledge the roots of white fear in America,” he said. “By experience, or at least what people see on the news at night, violence for those white people too often has a black face.”

At the same time, Clinton insisted that whites must acknowledge that blacks still suffer severe injustice at the hands of the economic and justice systems.

“It is so fashionable to talk today about African Americans as if they had been some sort of protected class,” he said. “. . . That is not true; that is not true.” Too many police departments, he said, still treat blacks as if they were still in the “bad old days.”

Clinton said he was asking “every governor, every mayor, every business leader, every church leader, every civic leader, every union steward, every student leader--most important, every citizen--to take personal responsibility for reaching out to people of different races, for taking time to sit down and talk through” the racial divide.

Without mentioning Farrakhan’s name, Clinton had strong words for the black separatist leader, who is often accused of racism and anti-Semitism.

The President said that although he honors the marchers’ goals of personal atonement and greater responsibility, “1 million men do not make right one man’s message of malice and division.”

“No good house was ever built on a bad foundation,” he said. “Nothing good ever came of hate.”

Clinton said that although most whites do their best to live lives free of prejudice, “too many destructive ideas are gaining currency in our midst.” Referring to Fuhrman without naming him, Clinton said the tape-recorded “voice of one policeman should fill you with outrage.”

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“White America must understand and acknowledge the roots of black pain,” he said, detailing signs of the troubled condition of black Americans. Black men are many more times as likely as others to be homicide victims, he said, and almost one in three black males in their 20s are under supervision of the criminal justice system.

But he also spoke of the justice system’s injustices to blacks, mentioning Rodney King and Emmett Till, a Chicago youth visiting Mississippi who was killed--mutilated, shot and dumped in a river--in 1955 after whistling at a white storekeeper’s wife.

“It is beyond wrong when law-abiding black parents have to tell their law-abiding children to fear the police whose salaries are paid by their own taxes,” he said. On the other hand, he said, all citizens owe a debt of respect to police agencies.

Clinton drew a distinction between the needs of the black community 30 years ago, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. marched, and today. Now, he said, the agenda is less about access to government services and more about “black men taking renewed responsibility for themselves, their families and their communities.”

He stressed the responsibilities of fatherhood, saying the absence of fathers “may be the biggest social problem in our society” because it contributes to so many other problems. Citing statistics that one in four children now live without fathers, Clinton said this is not exclusively a black problem. But it “aggravates the conditions of the racial divide.”

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Clinton also decried domestic violence, saying he hopes “these men in Washington today pledge among other things to never, never raise their hands in violence against a woman.” Later, aides denied that Clinton was referring to the wife abuse detailed in the Simpson case.

The President’s address, especially his remarks about Farrakhan, drew sharp responses from Republicans vying for their party’s presidential nomination.

“I am shocked and dismayed that President Clinton did not find the moral courage to denounce Louis Farrakhan by name,” said Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas. “Farrakhan is a racist and anti-Semite, unhinged by hate. And I resent the implication by the President of the United States that ours is a racist nation.”

Texas Sen. Phil Gramm said his concern is that marchers “do not convey Farrakhan’s message, which nobody wants conveyed.”

Former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander said Clinton “should have the courage to condemn” Farrakhan by name. “The reason we have a President is to provide leadership at times like this.”

And Patrick J. Buchanan said that although Americans should unite behind the goals of the march, “there can be no unity behind the rhetoric and message of Farrakhan.”

Clinton had worked intensely on the speech for the last several days, and stayed up until 3 a.m. the night before the march working on it with Donald Baer, the White House communications director, and two speech writers.

To seek ideas and sound out black reaction, he spoke with a series of black leaders, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), Washington lobbyist Vernon Jordan, Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown, Assistant Atty. Gen. Deval Patrick, and White House public liaison chief Alexis Herman.

Clearly, Clinton’s remarks carried political risk, especially in the supercharged atmosphere after the Simpson verdict. But it also provided an opportunity.

“Talking about this gives him a chance to really decide what the terms of the political debate will be,” Bill McInturff, a pollster who works for Dole, said last week.

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Clinton was widely applauded for another frank analysis of race relations, which he delivered in November, 1993, in Memphis, Tenn. On that occasion, he stood in the pulpit from which King gave his final speech before his 1968 assassination to declare that the civil rights leader’s dream was dishonored by those who committed crimes and neglected their families.

The President gave a wide berth to an explosive topic raised by the Simpson trial, so-called jury nullification, in which jurors decline to convict a defendant despite the law--in the case of black defendants, perhaps because of what they view as the endemic racism of the criminal justice system. Some legal analysts believe the Simpson verdict may encourage juries to abort cases.

So far, no senior Administration official has touched the topic since the Simpson verdict, and Clinton let it pass.

* EXCERPTS OF CLINTON’S SPEECH: A12-A13