Yvonne Scruggs-Leftwich, during her African American History Month keynote address on Feb. 9, delivered a compelling call to some 200 Library employees to carry on the struggle for affirmative action into the 21st century.
Yvonne Scruggs-Leftwich
Introduced in the Mumford Room by Deputy Librarian Donald L. Scott as "scholar, policy analyst, community activist and spokesperson for creative black leadership and urban politics," Ms. Scruggs-Leftwich repeated and alluded often to these verses — "There's a dream out in the land/With its back against the wall;/To save the dream for one,/It must be saved for all."
Ms. Scruggs-Leftwich, the executive director and chief operating officer of the Black Leadership Forum Inc., said affirmative action has lost ground in recent years. "I do not want the legacy of my fore-parents' contribution to this country to be erased. … The blood, the sweat and the tears … were the ultimate price which we paid for our inalienable rights as fully credentialed Americans," she said in her speech titled "The Legacy of African American Leadership for the Present and the Future."
"I want our mutual American and African American efforts to comprehend this legacy to be substantive enough that finally, finally, blacks will no longer need to punish whites for slavery and whites will no longer continue to punish blacks for slavery."
Ms. Scruggs-Leftwich noted the arrival of almost 800 African Americans in significant positions of authority in the federal government since 1992. Calling this a "seismic accomplishment," she said the federal government "has really begun to look like our communities across the land, to look like America."
Through their contributions and points of view, African Americans and other minorities serving the nation's institutions "do matter in the assault on racism," she said.
She said President Clinton's Race Initiative and Advisory Board of Race were too short-lived. "The president's Race Initiative is now a report. It is no longer a process. America is the poorer for that." Ms. Scruggs-Leftwich said that while the debates went on, they "established a new high for the examination of the thorny, uniquely American dilemma of the color line."
Noting that affirmative action lost ground with Proposition 209 in California and Washington State's Initiative 200, she said: "We must monitor events in California and Washington so that the American people can really see the devastating impact which 209 and 200 are having on diversity in colleges, universities and in the workplace."
The next affirmative action debates will occur during the 21st century and the battlefields have shifted from Capitol Hill to the states, she said, specifically to Michigan, Colorado, Nebraska, Arizona, New York, North Carolina, New Jersey and Indiana.
Other efforts will include promoting massive voter participation and ensuring that all are counted in the 2000 census. The effects of the census — redistricting, reapportionment and resources distribution — are critical. "These are all agenda items of great importance," she said.
"I always have emphasized that the blood, sweat and tears of our slave ancestors soaked the earth with richness and fertilized the economy to make America the great nation that it is today," she said. "But I do not believe that this knowledge of our uncompensated labor and hard-scrabble sacrifices for our country are yet widely enough appreciated to eliminate the need for Black History Month."
As executive director of the Black Leadership Forum, a 20-year-old confederation of the top national civil rights and service organizations, Ms. Scruggs-Leftwich facilitates discussion among African American leaders. A professor in George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management, she has served as deputy mayor of Philadelphia, a New York state housing commissioner and as deputy assistant director of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. She has written extensively on urban policy. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and was a Fulbright Fellow in Germany in 1955-56.
