DARLA MOORE SPEECH TO THE
PROGRAM FOR THE RURAL CAROLINAS
Pinehurst, North Carolina
March 29, 2006
John, thank you for such a nice introduction. For any of you who do not know Senator Matthews, I will tell you I wish we had many more committed and progressive leaders just like him in South Carolina. John is a leader in the fullest sense of the term – he understands the critical importance of economic empowerment, and, most important, he does not mind rolling up his sleeves and finding solutions to the economic disparities we face today rather than just talking about them. Let me give you just one example.
As pointed out in MDC’s publication, “The State of the South 2004, Fifty Years after Brown v. Board of Education,” the economic and educational attainment disparities between African American and whites in the South are dispiriting, particularly for us in South Carolina.
Rather than just talk about these disparities and continue the same practices, which obviously have not worked, John helped organize an African American Summit. To my knowledge, it is the first time I have witnessed the leaders of the varying African American organizations and communities in South Carolina meet to discuss their economic problems. John also asked Ed Sellers, as Chairman of the Council on Competitiveness, and me, as Chairman of the Palmetto Institute, to attend. Both of these organizations are working to help develop a vision and implement a new long-term economic strategy in South Carolina in order to improve and invigorate our state’s competitiveness. Again, rather than just talk about the disparities, John used the Summit as a means of connecting the problems of the African American community to the overall effort to improve South Carolina’s economy. I am hopeful that the meeting will lead to a real joint effort to seek ways to address these challenges. I applaud Senator Matthews for his effort to address the issue in such a constructive manner.
Now, allow me to turn my attention to this very outstanding audience I have the privilege of addressing today. Your goals are the stuff that our futures depend on:
-improve employment, income and wealth for those who our economies have left behind;
-building leadership capacity and assets for long-term success and economic renewal.
YOU ARE MY HEROES! I don’t know how to say it any other way. You know, Thomas Edison said that, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like hard work.” Well, I don’t see many opportunities getting by you. You are laboring on the real frontline, grabbing every opportunity you see to seeking solutions for communities that have been written off by so many. You represent diverse groups of community members who have come together through the generous assistance of the Duke Endowment and MDC to try new ideas, to seek real solutions, and to build opportunities through your own organizations and resources for those left behind by our economy. What a challenge. And, from what I have read you have achieved real successes:
·800 people have received small business training,
·152 small businesses have been started creating 325 new jobs,
·763 previously unemployed people have been trained and placed in jobs,
·3,500 left-behind families have collected $2.6 million in tax credits and refunds due to you providing them with no-cost income tax preparation services,
·264 people have completed financial literacy training, and
·219 people are enrolled in Individual Development Account Programs.
I would say that is quite impressive by any standard. You have every right to be proud of your accomplishments. I know these successes have given you the foundation and the impetus to expand your efforts both in your community and beyond. With the remaining few minutes I have with you today, I want to talk first about the Palmetto Institute and then about the efforts to expand your programs.
As John said, the Palmetto Institute is a non-profit, non-partisan, independent research foundation. I might add, one of the first organizations we turned to for guidance in creating the Institute almost four years ago was MDC. They not only gave us great insight on how to organize a non-profit research foundation but one of their senior fellows, Dr. Bishop, spared no words in telling us the difficult task we faced in South Carolina. The Institute’s mission is simple. We want to increase the wealth of all South Carolinians. Even though we track a multitude of metrics on a regular basis, our key measurement is per capita income. We use per capita income because we know to succeed in raising such measurement, we have to be concerned with the income of all South Carolinians, not just certain segments. Our only other caveat is that, even though we have superb Board members who do not mind sharing their opinions, we will not take a public position without thoughtful, independent research to support such a position.
We began our efforts at the Institute with a study to determine the comparative economic position of South Carolina in the new global, knowledge-based economy. The results, which confirmed South Carolina is not very competitive with its existing mix of industries and the quality of our economic foundations, particularly workforce quality, led us to retain Professor Michael Porter from Harvard who, by the way, grew up in South Carolina, right below the state line in Chesterfield County. His research told us we had to change our focus from our traditional approach to economic development of recruiting foreign industries with promises of abundant low-cost labor, low taxes, and high financial incentives to an approach of building upon our own assets through industry clustering. We needed to find ways to add value to our products and services. We had to look to ourselves to find new and innovative approaches to building our economy. As a result of the research, Professor Porter helped us develop a long-term strategy for economic development. The Council on Competitiveness has been established to help with its implementation. But, that has been just the beginning of our work.
The Institute also has done research on the need for a four-year-old kindergarten program and the need to strengthen commercialization of research at our research universities. The Institute commissioned a comprehensive review of our state’s revenue system to determine how it can better support our focus on getting people and industries to live, invest, and grow in South Carolina. We are currently working on a study of our workforce investment assistance programs and how we can strengthen these programs to help improve on workforce quality.
I mention these projects just to give you a little background on the Institute, but I really want to focus on the issue we struggle with daily and one that I believe you will face as you attempt to expand the successes you have experienced to a larger community. How do you take programs that have proven to be successful at the local level and expand them regionally and, ultimately, statewide? More to the point for us in South Carolina – how can the Palmetto Institute and other organizations partner with groups such as yours to help sustain the programs and expand them? Certainly the approach you have taken to accomplish your successes will work in other areas. So what do we do to help you? Well, the easy answer is to invest more funds in these programs. The problem is, everywhere I go there is talk of reducing taxes, which means expenditures also will be reduced and the availability of new funds will be limited. But, let’s talk about things we can do now.
First, we should not continue to fund programs that are not working. We have to make tough decisions about priorities. To me, that means I want to invest in programs like the ones you are doing that have proven to be successful based upon sound research and measurable results. Such results take strong leadership, and if I only leave you with one thought today it is, “demand more of your leaders.” Do not allow them to make the same old arguments they have made in the past; do not allow them to hide behind excuses. We cannot accept the economic indignity of those left behind in our rural communities today. We have to address the problems now and if your leaders are not willing to support new, innovative programs, get new leaders.
Second, you have to find ways to partner and collaborate with existing organizations as well as create new organizations if the old ones do not work. That means, you must look beyond your own communities. Do not be parochial in your views. If you do not have a sustainable economic engine in your community and, unfortunately, many rural communities do not, find ways to work with larger communities that do have better opportunities. This will mean you will also have to address such issues as public transportation and child care to allow your citizens to commute for better training and job opportunities.
Do not compartmentalize your efforts. Too many times I have heard, “education is the responsibility of the educators; it is not our responsibility.” The same can be said about health care and economic development. Hogwash!! Show me a vibrant community with strong economic development, and I will show you a community that is closely involved with the education system as well as the health care of its citizens. As MDC has said, “…the only road out of poverty runs by the schoolhouse.” I could not agree more.
My last point is one that, if not addressed, will continue to hold us back. Leonard Pitts, a Pulitzer Prize winning African American columnist, summed it up remarkably in one of his columns. He stated that, “Blacks seldom publicly concede some of the dysfunction suffered by the black underclass is self-inflicted for fear of giving aid and comfort to bigotry. So, when analyzing racial progress or the lack thereof, black folk tend to emphasize racism. Whites, on the other hand, are often loathe to concede racism remains the great ball and chain of black life for fear the admission will besmirch their benign self-image or be used to make them feel guilty. So they tend to emphasize dysfunction instead.” He illustrated his comments by making the point that, for some, a white boy on crystal meth is “troubled,” while a black boy on crack will be described as proof that 37 million people are “unredeemable.” Pitts went on to make this point which I want to emphasize today: “Much as some white folk pretend otherwise, racism did not vanish one fine day long ago. It lives here, now, still. And it is, by definition, not something black people can cure through self-improvement…And yet, this also is true: For all the woes it brings, racism is not the proximate source of all the ills that beset the black underclass.”
On this persistent, nagging topic, I offer you the very, very wise words of Jewell Jackson McCabe, Founder of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women, who said, “You factor in racism as a reality and you keep moving.”
For me, the efforts you are making and the efforts of the Palmetto Institute to find ways to increase the quality of life are personal. As a female growing up in Lake City I not only came to understand “cropppin’, suckerin’ stringin’, handin’, tyin’, gradin’, heisin” and all the skills involved in “puttin” in, I also came to understand discrimination. I understand not having opportunities equal to one’s abilities. So, I left South Carolina because I had no choice. I do not want those barriers to continue for this generation. There actually should be a natural alliance between African Americans and the business leaders. Look at the demographics. In the next ten years, African Americans and Hispanic Americans will represent the core of our young workforce in the South; therefore, we both should want higher educational attainment and a better workforce. That is why I am here today. We have to find ways to build and strengthen our alliances. We must find ways to build upon your successes so our rural communities do not count high school graduates as their biggest export.
We have already asked Senator Matthews to create a leadership group in the African American community to work with us and the Council on Competitiveness to find ways to meld the needs of the African American community with the overall strategies to make our state more competitive. In the same way, we need you to also partner with us and similar organizations in North Carolina to meld your successful programs into our overall economic strategies. The failure not to make this effort is simply not acceptable. We can build on our successes. It is not a sprint but a marathon, but we can make it work. It will take collaboration and alliances; it will take commitment; we will have to seek the advice of experts rather than allow short-term, ill-advised political solutions; and, most important, we will have to overcome the divides that have so cruelly separated us in the past. It is our mission. It is our calling.
As I close, let me leave you with the incredible charge given to all of us by Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mayes.
"It must be borne in mind that the tragedy of life doesn't lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach. It isn't a calamity to die with dreams unfulfilled, but it is a calamity not to dream. It is not a disaster to be unable to capture your ideal, but it is a disaster to have no ideal to capture. It is not a disgrace not to reach the stars, but it is a disgrace to have no stars to reach for. Not failure, but low aim is a sin."
I thank you for the opportunity to be here today. I look forward for those of you in South Carolina to work with the Institute. I applaud your efforts as well as the excellent work of MDC. As I said at the beginning, your really are my heroes.
Thank you.