The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

MR. MacNeil: Good evening. I'm Robert MacNeil in New York.

MS. WARNER: And I'm Margaret Warner in Washington. After the News Summary, we go first to an extended look at black on black violence. Next, we continue our look at modern China: Tonight, life in the countryside. And we close with a remembrance of former House Speaker Tip O'Neill.NEWS SUMMARY

MR. MacNeil: President Clinton went home to Hot Springs, Arkansas, this afternoon to begin funeral arrangements for his mother, Virginia Kelley. Mrs. Kelley died in her sleep last night at the age of 70. She was diagnosed with breast cancer several years ago but led an active life to the end. She spent Christmas at the White House then returned to Arkansas with the President and First Lady and later traveled to Las Vegas for New Year's Eve. Mr. Clinton was notified of his mother's death in a phone call from his stepfather, Dick Kelley, shortly before 2:30 this morning. Mrs. Clinton escorted the President to his helicopter for the trip to Hot Springs. She is expected to join him there tomorrow. Former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill died last night after suffering a heart attack at a Boston hospital. He was 81. The Massachusetts Democrat represented his suburban Boston district for 34 years beginning in 1952. He was known for his attention to constituent needs and for his observation that all politics is local. We'll have more about Tip O'Neill later in the program. Margaret.

MS. WARNER: Attorney General Janet Reno is still rejecting Republican calls for an independent counsel to probe President Clinton's involvement in a failed Arkansas land deal known as "Whitewater." The Justice Department is conducting the inquiry. White House Spokeswoman Dee Dee Myers said about half the President's Whitewater related files were sent to the Justice Department today. The President's personal lawyer insisted that the Justice Department subpoena the papers in hopes that would diminish the danger of leaks. This morning, Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole charged that the White House, not the Justice Department, was controlling the investigation. He said, "It's mind boggling to think that the White House and the Justice Department would work together in a matter that might involve some criminal activity." At a news conference this morning, the attorney general explained why she would not appoint an independent counsel.

JANET RENO, Attorney General: I mean, if I appoint somebody, I'm going to get blamed for what that person does or doesn't do. If in this situation the Department of Justice has to review the expenditures, it is not a truly independent counsel. Thus, in the current state of the law with respect to the Whitewater case, I'm going to be damned if I do and damned if I don't. And if that's what's going to happen, then I want to try to do it in what is in the best interest of the case so far as I can determine it. To that end, career professional prosecutors who are experienced, who know what they're doing, are conducting the investigation.

MS. WARNER: Reno urged Congress to reenact the independent counsel statute which Congress let expire in 1992. It provided for a special three-judge panel to appoint an independent counsel when allegations were leveled against officials of the Executive Branch.

MR. MacNeil: Vice President Gore delivered a foreign policy speech today that President Clinton had planned to give before he learned of his mother's death. Mr. Gore said the U.S. should be concerned by the strong showing of anti-reformers in Russia's recent parliamentary election. He said, "It is our duty to condemn the voices of racism and intolerant nationalism." He also defended President Clinton's so-called partnership for peace program designed to create closer political and military ties between NATO and the countries of the former Soviet Bloc. Mr. Gore said the U.S. must support democracy in these nations. He spoke to the Institute of World Affairs in Milwaukee.

VICE PRESIDENT GORE: The success of these new democracies, like the ones in Poland, Hungary, the Czech republic, and Slovakia, is important to our nation and our security. We must help them succeed. We didn't spend years supporting solidarity just to lose democracy in Poland. We didn't celebrate the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia just to see that birth of freedom die from neglect. We prevailed in the Cold War for their sake and ours. And now we must prevail for their sake and ours in building a broader democratic peace throughout Europe.

MR. MacNeil: The partnership for peace plan is expected to be approved by President Clinton and other NATO leaders at their summit in Brussels next week. The civil war in Bosnia will be a major topic of discussion at the summit. At least eight more people were killed today in Sarajevo as a brutal bombardment of the Bosnian capital continued. Louise Bates of Worldwide Television News narrates this report.

MS. BATES, WTN: It's said to be the heaviest fighting in Sarajevo in months. There were fierce exchanges between Serb and Bosnian government forces. Thousands of mortar shells landed in city centers, hitting civilian rather than military targets. With fighting spread across Sarajevo, even grieving relatives had little time to mourn the dead. Six members of one family were buried in the city's Lion's Cemetery. They were killed when a single mortar shell slammed into their apartment while they were eating lunch. So many people have been killed in the siege of Sarajevo that this cemetery has been extended to include a nearby soccer field. At least five more people died in the latest fighting. In a now familiar routine, injured civilians were rushed to the over-stretched city hospital. Sarajevo is supposed to be enjoying a cease-fire. In December, the warring factions agreed to a Christmas truce. It was to last until January the 15th. But the truce was ignored, and nearly 200 people have since died. More peace talks are planned, but mediators say there seems to be little will on any side to reach a settlement.

MR. MacNeil: Another State Department official resigned today to protest the U.S. policy in Bosnia. The head of the Office of Refugee Affairs, Warren Zimmerman, became the fifth and most senior official to take the action in the past 17 months. Zimmerman is a former ambassador to Yugoslavia.

MS. WARNER: Clinton administration officials say they have a plan to revive the domestic airline industry. The proposal announced today by Transportation Sec. Federico Pena includes a massive overhaul of the Federal Aviation Administration. Pena said the FAA should become aquasi-independent corporation similar to Amtrak. Airline officials are pleased. They say the plan could save the airlines billions of dollars by reducing flight delays through more efficient air traffic control. But the plan does not include another feature the airlines wanted, the cut in the airline ticket tax. The administration is slashing its import quota for textiles and clothing from China. U.S. Trade Rep. Mickey Kantor said today the move was in retaliation for massive elicit shipments of Chinese textiles to the U.S. through third countries.

MR. MacNeil: Underfunding of American workers' pensions has jumped according to new government figures. The federal agency insuring pension plans said 65,000 were underfunded and the amount of underfunding grew in 1992 by 40 percent to 53 billion dollars. The gap is the difference between what the plans have promised to pay workers and the amount of money available to do so. The agency cautioned that the pension funds of most workers remained healthy. U.S. figure skating champion Nancy Kerrigan was attacked today after a practice session in an arena in Detroit. It's not known whether the attack will prevent her from competing in an opening round of the championships tomorrow or in the Winter Olympics next month. Witnesses said a male assailant hit Kerrigan in the leg with a metal bar after she left the ice. He was taken to a hospital for x-rays and released but there was no immediate word on her condition. The assailant fled and is being sought by police.

MS. WARNER: The U.S. and Vietnam have begun their largest joint search ever for Americans missing in action from the Vietnam War. Eight teams will spend three weeks searching for clues to the fate of the remaining MIAs. The Clinton administration wants to lift its economic embargo against Vietnam but is insisting first on a fuller accounting of the 1600 Americans who are still missing.

MR. MacNeil: The Mexican army today appeared close to crushing the Indian rebel uprising in the impoverished southern state of Chiapas. The army has attacked, using 12,000 heavily armed troops backed by tanks and planes in fighting that has claimed at least a hundred lives. The rebels have been driven from the half dozen towns they seized New Year's Day but have reportedly vowed to fight on. They said they're fighting for improved living conditions for the mainly Indian population of Chiapas. That's our summary of the news. Now it's on to black on black violence, rural China today, and remembering Tip O'Neill. FOCUS - ENDING THE VIOLENCE

MS. WARNER: Up first tonight, black on black violence and what the black community can do about it. Black and white violence alike have skyrocketed in recent years, but the mayhem has taken a far heavier toll in the smaller black community. In Washington today, many African-American organizations began a three-day conference to examine why blacks are committing so much violence against other blacks and what black leaders can do to stop it. We'll talk about this with some of the participants but first this background report from Correspondent Kwame Holman.

MR. HOLMAN: Widespread violence continues to plague many of the nation's black communities. In most cities it is concentrated in low income neighborhoods, many of which are virtually isolated. And in almost every city there is one pivotal event that sparks an outcry over the black-on-black nature of nearly all the violence. In predominantly black Washington, D.C., that event was the death last September of four-year-old Launice Smith.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: This was a vicious animal that shot Launice down like he did. No remorse, none whatsoever. So my thing is this, Miss Kelly, I have the opportunity to ask you, heat up the electric chair; bring it back.

MR. HOLMAN: Launice Smith was killed by a stray bullet fired by one of several gunmen who eventually killed this man as he fled a crowded neighborhood football game. As the carnage mounts in Boston, in Chicago, in Denver, black-on-black violence is drawing sharpened attention. In November, in a speech devoted entirely to the problem, President Clinton speculated on what Martin Luther King would say if he were alive today.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: He would say, "I fought to stop white people from being so filled with hate that they would wreak violence on black people. I did not fight for the right of black people to murder other black people with reckless abandon."

MR. HOLMAN: And the President issued a tacit challenge to blacks who deal with violence.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Sometimes there are no answers from the outside in. Sometimes all the answers have to come on the values and the stirrings of the voices that speak to us from within.

MR. HOLMAN: Black-on-black violence is not new. The FBI reports that traditionally blacks and whites overwhelmingly commit homicides, for example, against members of their own group. But in 1992, blacks killed other blacks a near uniform 94 percent of the time in cases where the attacker's race was known. That's the highest rate of any ethnic group. More striking is the wildly disproportionate number of blacks who are the victims of the nation's consistently high murder toll. In 1992, the most recent year analyzed by the FBI, blacks were 12 percent of the population but accounted for nearly half, 47 percent, of the 23,000 homicides that year. Current indications are that trend is continuing. Adding to the concern is the changing motivation for violence. Once, it was primarily drug gangs fighting over turf. Now, young black males in poor neighborhoods frequently use guns to settle simple disputes.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: At night, you hear, bang, bang, bang, bang. You don't know who's going to get hit, so it's horrible how kids are just dropping.

MR. HOLMAN: Fueling the violence is the flood of guns. These young men were stopped by police and found to be armed. Twenty- year-old Kofie Bryant of Washington, D.C., says five of his friends have been murdered in the last few months.

KOFIE BRYANT: I overheard a conversation on a bus that terribly disturbed me. It was a couple of black young males bragging about they bust off, how they shot somebody, and it's like a game. It's like a basketball thing. It's like a sport. It's no longer, I take your life, you're never going to be here again; it is, ha, ha, bang, bang. And, and that hurt me, okay.

MR. HOLMAN: In an interview with the NewsHour's Betty Ann Bowser, Bryant described the thinking of some of his peers.

KOFIE BRYANT: They don't respect themselves, and I find with a lot of youth that if you don't respect yourself, you can no longer respects anyone who looks like you. That's why it is so easy to just pull out a gun and shoot you because I'm unhappy with me, and really I'm shooting me right there, but it doesn't matter to me. Now if you, if I saw you, unfortunately, I would hesitate to shoot you if I was a black male out there, I would hesitate to shoot you before I would shoot my own color. I would rather shoot them because they look like me, and the media has taught me to reverence you.

MR. HOLMAN: For several months, a group of black leaders, including Jesse Jackson, has worked on strategies to reduce black- on-black violence, culminating in a conference that opens in Washington, D.C., tonight. While some blacks are leery of a negative backlash from confronting the issue, others say try anything to stem the rising body count.

MS. WARNER: Now, five different perspectives on this troubling issue. Jesse Jackson is president of the Rainbow Coalition and host of today's conference. Ramona Edelin is president of the National Urban Coalition. Robert Woodson is president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise. Clementine Barfield is the founder of a group called Save Our Sons and Daughters in Detroit. She started this support group for families of murder victims after her own son was killed in 1986. Matsimela Mapfumo is a student at the University at the District of Columbia. He's also a spokesman for the Pan African Student Union on campus. Welcome to you all. Thanks for joining us. Rev. Jackson, why are you convening this conference? What do you think it can accomplish?

REV. JACKSON: Well, the number one and number two forms of death in black America is homicide or fratricide and AIDS. Both are self- destructive, preventable forms of behavior. It's a kind of spiritual surrender scenes born of long years of neglect and permissiveness. We have the psychology of it; we must break the cycle. [A] You add up the number who are dying, very expensive, traumatic medical care. Those who are injured several times more than die, plus AIDS often transmitted through drugs or unloving, exposed sex, plus those in jail, it is an enormous cost of lives and money and driving the politics of fear. We've sought to bring some leaders together to try to figure out some way to break this cycle, to address it with some meaningful urban policies that at least can provide for our youth hope where there is so much despair and recreation and the arts for the youth and jobs for parents, and so often neither recreation nor arts are building for the youth no economic opportunity, like jobs for their parents. Lastly, there was a story in the Washington Post a few days ago. It showed a map of the city of the Washington. And up around the third ward, about 1.2 percent unemployment, as I moved on toward the eighth ward, as you followed the trail of pain and deprivation, one could see the self-destructive behavior. So we cannot really separate this pain from some real need now and begin to address in breaking the cycle that can heal this condition.

MS. WARNER: But is this something the black community, the traditional black leadership can do?

REV. JACKSON: It must take a major role. For example, every time you have ever broken a cycle of pain, it always came inside out. And slave masters and segregators never, never recanted. The enslaved, the oppressed, always had to break it. One thing we're going to do in this camp conference I suppose to, a vast body of judges and ministers, elected officials and parents, if you will, we want to get 100 churches that will seek to mentor at least 10 youth each year. That's a thousand, times fifty cities, that's fifty thousand alternatives to unnecessary jailing. Maybe those same churches on Saturday morning can teach those youth computer technology and just basic business acumen. And so that is "a" thing. The biggest thing, I think, is also to challenge our President to honor his urban policy covenant, which involved youth initiative, it involved an economic stimulus, it involved a jobs policy that does not presently exist.

MS. WARNER: But the white communitycertainly regards white-on- white violence, which has been skyrocketing as well, as we know, as essentially a law enforcement problem. Why is black-on-black violence difference?

REV. JACKSON: You know, that's what's wrong with the -- 400 young blacks in New York killed each other last year. It hardly was a ripple, and yet, a black shot four whites on Long Island Railroad, and USA Today did a 22-page story on guns and violence. And so the editor was asked on CNN, why the 22-page outlays, great journalism? He said, well, I think it was the Long Island Railroad, which is to say that if it's black-on-white, then there's a call for revenge and punishment. If it's white-on-black, the condition to riot; if it's black-on-black, the kind of zone of permissiveness, it's kind of like it's all right. It ain't all right, and we must break that cycle.

MS. WARNER: Ms. Edelin, do you think this is the way to try to break the cycle, by having a conference like this and getting the black leadership involved?

MS. EDELIN: Well, what Rev. Jackson does so well and has always done so well is to call us together. I think there's no question that unified leadership will make an enormous difference. The African-American community has been struggling towards a cultural renewal within our group, which I think gets back also a little bit to the question you asked Rev. Jackson just before, why do we feel that we need to respond to this as a group. I think one of our biggest problems has been that we have been fragmented within our group, the heinous slave trade, the whole experience of American apartheid that has existed since that time, so much so that even though many public officials within our group and outside our group embrace the, the phrase, the African proverb, "It takes a whole village to raise a child," very few of us have really come to grips with the fact that you don't have any villages anymore. We don't even have extended families of the kind that we used to have. And I think the African-American cultural initiative seeks to regenerate a real village, and the National Urban Coalition explicitly and literally is looking to recreate urban villages in this day and time which will be physical infrastructures, learning, and job training, and employment centers, also residential plants which would provide alternatives to incarceration, and also homes and support systems for foster children. Half of African-American children who are elementary school age are officially in poverty. We have got to come to grips with some of those basic issues by getting a grip on the environment again. And what this summit does, what this call, this convening us together again, does is bring that to the table, give us the chance to discuss it with one another. What we have to make sure is that it's not a one-time event with no outcomes but that, in fact, we draw up the kind of agenda, go out and work together, in order to implement something that could be literally life altering for our young people.

MS. WARNER: Do you agree, Mr. Woodson?

MR. WOODSON: No, I don't. I think this is an exercise in, in irrelevant authority. The people convening have met for the past 20 years with one another. Two years ago it was called a 20th Century Commission on the Black Men. Foundations were mobilized, money poured in, consultants were hired, conferences, people poured in. Now, the consultants have their money. The panelists have gone. We don't hear anything about what happened as a consequence of this convening, and I'm saying that there's little that Hollywood has to teach inner city grassroots leaders about what to do about this problem. I love Bill Cosby and Spike Lee. I don't think --

MS. WARNER: They're both participants.

MR. WOODSON: They're both participants, but I don't think they have anything to offer. It seems to me that this group could play a constructive role if, if they would look to the natural antibodies that are in grassroots communities. In 1983, I was involved with an effort in Philadelphia with Sister Falaka Fatah Houser Moser. Groups of black youngsters were attacking shoppers on buses, knocking them down. The civic center closed down. The theater district just about closed down. The police increased patrols. Nothing seemed to stop it. Social service professionals, and preachers, no one. It was only when Sister Fatah and we went to the prisons and called on the leadership there and convened kids that they identified and brought 200 youngsters to the prisons those violent attacks stopped overnight. So there's the real system of antibodies. Yet, as soon as the violence stopped and the crisis was over, funding continued to go to middle income black service providers, civil rights leaders, none of the people that played any critical role. And I'm saying that unless we bring to the table the real leaders of grassroots and low income people, then we're just playing games with the lives of these youngsters.

REV. JACKSON: You know, it ought to be said that there are no foundation grants here. There are no paid panelists here. Our attitude is that it's not a quick fix. It's going to take the sum whole of all of our efforts, plus some. So we need not count on each other in some infinitive sense but turn to each other to search for ways. There are a lot of successful models out here. We need to pull them together and have a collective force. The group of which I'm connected, when we have met through the years, we want a public accommodation bill one day. We've won. We want a Voting Rights Act one day. We want an Open Housing Act one day, and so we have known winning before, and we're going to win again.

MS. WARNER: Ms. Barfield, do you agree with Rev. Jackson that essentially the traditional civil rights community can and should now turn to this black-on-black violence issue as its issue and can be effective?

MS. BARFIELD: I think it's bigger than just the civil rights activists or the civil rights movement. It's bigger than, I think, anything that we have ever had to deal with in our history, because we're talking about the harm that we do to one another. We're talking about hurting, killing one another, thus, destroying whole families and sometimes whole communities, ultimately whole cities and this whole country. And these are the kinds of things that we can't continue to do, and we need everybody's input and support. Those of us that work at the grassroots level don't normally get support from the Rev. Jesse Jacksons or people in the political arena or even the ministers. But it is time that we stop that. You know, we can't solve our problems by some of us working in one area and some in another. And that's why this conference is so important today because it is people coming together from all areas. And it is when we come together that we come up with a common solution because love is a common solution. Peace is a common solution. And as we move forward, we have to go back to the things that are very basic to us as human beings to find solutions. And I see that happening this week, and I, I'm encouraged. I've been very discouraged over the years because we haven't been able to get the kind of support that we needed out here, and it's so sad. It's not a group in Detroit. We're not just a support group. We do do that as well. But our focus is crisis intervention. It's violence prevention, and it's peaked because we know that ultimately we must have peace if we are to survive as human beings.

MS. WARNER: Mr. Mapfumo is the person here at this table who's closest certainly in age to, to the young people that you're all trying to reach. Do you see any signs of encouragement in this kind of an effort?

MR. MAPFUMO: Well, I think so. I think we ought to be careful here that even in this discussion we don't participate in the very same thing that is going on in the street, where we somehow or another think one another is the enemy, and we do have to compete with one another. It's encouraging I think any time we can have any kind of discussion about our problems and solutions to our problems. But we do want to be sure that the discussion that we have is a fruitful one and it is also a truthful one. When we talk and we use the term "black-on-black violence," it's a term in the vernacular, and everyone seems to understand it. But frankly I'm of the opinion that that term in and of itself is a useless term and continues to perpetuate the problem. You never -- you're the first person I've ever heard say "white-on-white violence" hear tonight. You never hear Asian-on-Asian violence or Jewish-on-Jewish violence, or anything else. If you look back in, in our history, there's a propensity for constantly trying to criminalize our race and to portray as inherently predisposed to violence or criminal behavior. I mean, that's the first thing we have to stop. We also might see that in some of the so-called "gangster rappers." The media tends to put them on the cover of Time Magazine before they'll put an Arrested Development or Public Enemy or someone with a positive message out there because it's important for us to continue this cycle of self-hatred. I prefer to use the term "economic warfare" because much of the violence that we see in our community is directly related to the drug industry, the gun industry, and which ultimately leads to the prison industry. So there we have a situation of economic warfare. It's about money on the streets, first of all. It's about money for gun manufacturers, and it's about money for a prison industry and a court system that for centuries, for blacks and Africans born here in America, has locked us up and kept us in prison at a rate higher than any other race of people here in America. And then finally I also don't think it's any coincidence that the escalation of violence in our community and the related drugs that have been in our communities began to really grow around 1968, around a time after the assassination of Martin Luther King, around the time towards the plethora of struggle for human rights of people in this community. You began to see heroin and other drugs on the rise in our communities, and I think we ought to look at that and look at the fact that our common enemy are those who would bring the drugs, bring the guns into our community because we definitely don't produce guns or import guns into our communities, ourselves.

MS. WARNER: Do you agree, Mr. Woodson, with this diagnosis?

MR. WOODSON: Well, somewhat. I think that, first of all, our progress is also related to the quality of the debate within our own group, and the debate about solutions. And the questions that we, I think black America's character is on trial, and that the, the jury is our young people looking at us.And what they're looking for, a moral consistency, and when they look at us sometimes they see when black elected officials and celebrities commit crimes against society and against their own people, then they're defended in the name of civil rights, they're given special exemption from responsibility. When a judge takes money, marked money, for lowering the charges of a drug dealer or a Congressman attacks a black woman on the back seat of a car and does these kinds of things and people rush in and defend them in the name of civil rights and then turn to these young people and say, although we want you to be -- change your behavior -- there is a credibility problem. That's why I think that it would be useful to look at grassroots leadership who have solutions because they are morally consistent. Grassroots leaders practice what they preach, and that's why the young people reach out to them. And so I think a conference like this or any other conference could serve the interest well if we were to do an inventory of what's already working in low income neighborhoods. We should ask about Arita Jackson in Northeast, about W.W. Johnson, or Rev. Sories in Jersey. We need to, first of all, survey what's already working in our communities, instead of calling upon leadership to come in and design something for us. That's --

MS. WARNER: Well, Rev. Jackson, what I hear -- let me just -- what I hear both from Ms. Barfield and Mr. Woodson saying is that really it's the small scale community-based operations that are the successful ones. Would you agree with that?

REV. JACKSON: It's both, and it's not either/or. When you have a pastor of the church, that pastor's called by the grassroots members of that community and they make a judgment. When we have mayors coming here from Kansas City or mayors who come here from other cities, they've been elected by the people. They have a place. Tonight's session has to do with violence against women. Many women are upset about being devalued, being called "bitch," being called "whore," being discriminated against, so many women are drawing the line. That's a segment of it, and one other session on the causes, what's happening psychologically. Well, there are social scientists who understand that dynamic and they have a platform. There's another session on the cause of ignoring the drug and gun crisis, now in the neighborhood of $450 billion a year, according to U.S. News & World Report, another session on the Crime & Welfare Bill, and alternatives to it. Tomorrow night -- one reason why Bill Cosby and Spike and others are in is the impact of media upon our psychology. They are the best in the country at that. The session Saturday morning with judges and mayors and police and parents and victims and some prisoners from Lawnton will be there on what do we do to turn the prison system that, that vast amount of time, into moving from illiteracy to literacy.

MS. WARNER: Let me ask --

REV. JACKSON: So the broad base of range of people searching for solutions. We don't have the truth; we're searching.

MS. WARNER: Ms. Edelin, Mr. Mapfumo seemed to be saying though that he felt having this debate out in public that there were risks in that. Do you agree?

MS. EDELIN: There's always a risk in being completely honest about what you're facing within the African-American community because racial, class, and gender bias are real. There are people out there for whom the cruel irony of blaming the victim is a delight and a joy that they relish and do all the time and every chance they get. And so to have us say frankly that something is wrong within our community and that some steps need to be taken only plays into some people's hands. They say, ah ha, you know, and they use it very negatively against us. But to say that is not to say that a meeting among us -- the bottom line for me is that no matter how noble and successful small, tiny efforts are, we cannot turn this situation around one by one. We have finally got to get it through our heads that only unified, serious, strategic, systematic, unified action and leadership will prevail. This --

REV. JACKSON: We cannot separate this --

MS. EDELIN: -- is an opportunity for us to get together.

REV. JACKSON: -- from policy. Even with our many efforts tonight there is not assistant attorney general for civil rights, there is not a chair of EEOC, there is not a chair of Office of Contract Compliance, there is not a youth stimulus for recreation and arts for our youth, there is not a comprehensive job training program. There is not the community development banks that were promised. There is a combination of people fighting but people -- if it's our government, if it's all for and by the people, and we --

MS. EDELIN: And we pay taxes.

REV. JACKSON: -- pay for taxes for it, then we have an obligation to expect that government to respond to the consent of the governed.

MR. WOODSON: I want to know -- see, we have to face some very touchy questions that we must confront in our community, and that is, why is it that prior to the 60s, even during Depression, we didn't kill ourselves and, and maim and kill or shoot or take drugs and our families stayed together up until the 1960s, precisely at a time when we began to spend the $3 billion on poverty programs, urban renewal wiped out more black commercial centers in two years than the Klan ever thought about doing in a lifetime, supported by our black politicians? The fact that blacks have been running some of these major cities like Newark and Atlanta for 20 years, and yet, conditions are still deteriorating while 1/3 of black America during this time, their condition has improved, and while 1/3 of black America has deteriorated, the question that has to be raised is whether or not in the civil rights struggle in some of these other movements, whether there are unintended or adverse conditions that were produced that are exacerbating the problem, and, if not, don't we have half of all blacks with college degrees work so the industry that serves poor people, therefore, do they not have a proprietary interest in the perpetuation of the problem.

MS. WARNER: I'm afraid we're going to have to --

REV. JACKSON: If you could go to the League of Cities, what you'll find out, this $260 billion --

MS. WARNER: Rev. Jackson, I'm sorry.

REV. JACKSON: -- cut in urban policy is hurting everybody.

MS. WARNER: I'm going to have to leave that question to your conference and to another discussion. Thank you all very much. Robin.

MR. MacNeil: Still ahead on the NewsHour, a documentary look at rural life in China and remembering Tip O'Neill. SERIES - TRANSITION IN CHINA - UP ON THE FARM

MR. MacNeil: Next, the last in our series of documentary reports on the dynamic changes in the world's most populous nation. Tonight: rural life in modern China. China's agriculture has made two significant strides. It is now able to feed all of its 1.2 billion people, and it was agrarian reform that detonated China's current economic explosion. Our special correspondent for the series is Robert Oxnam, president emeritus of the Asia Society, now with Columbia University and the Bessemer Group, a New York banking and investment firm.

MR. OXNAM: China's peasants farm much as they have in the past, with simple hand tools and back breaking labor. They carry water to their crops. They hack at grain with scythes. They thresh with a foot-operated machine and rake unhusked rice to dry in the hot sun. The most sophisticated farm implement is the hand tractor, many ingeniously outfitted to carry loads as well as passengers. But despite the lack of huge combines and other advanced farm machinery, China's farmers have managed to boost food production dramatically. The episodes of starvation that plagued parts of the country in the last 50 years are only a memory for most Chinese. In the rural areas we visited last summer, around the major cities of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, there was a lush fertility to the land. Cornfields, apple orchards, rows of melons and vegetables, rice paddies all conveyed a sense of abundance, as did large numbers of produce stands along roads and highways and in the inner cities. Still, the collectively voracious appetite of 1.2 billion people is unnerving to Chinese officials like Ji Xiaozhu who are proud of China's agricultural achievements. He is a former ambassador, now serving at the United Nations in New York, and is an expert in rural development.

JI XIAOZHU, U.N. Official: We are feeding 22 percent of the world's population on 7 percent arable land. We are able to feed them and quite well. But if the population growth increases, it will become more and more difficult, because we're not just trying to feed them, we're trying to feed them well, to eat well, and to clothe them.

MR. OXNAM: Amb. Ji acknowledges some rural poverty in parts of China where the countryside still has a third world appearance. Another observer of rural China is Edward Friedman of the University of Wisconsin.

EDWARD FRIEDMAN, Professor, University of Wisconsin: Even today in China, 8 percent of the rural population about, which means something like 60 million people, the size of a good European country, are still living in what you might call middle -- medieval conditions: malnutrition, not enough food for a kid to grow up healthy and strong and so on.

MR. OXNAM: The government in Beijing keeps a wary eye on its peasant population, ever mindful that the Communist Revolution of the 30s and the 40s was at its core a peasant uprising. The leader, Mao Zedong, capitalized on the brutal life of farmers to launch and sustain his movement. With an army of peasants, Mao used the countryside as a base to conquer the cities. Mao's famous slogan, "The countryside will surround the cities," takes on new significance today. Here's where urban China meets rural China. But today it's far less than a confrontation and more a blurring at the edges. Many farm parents have children who work in towns and cities. Income levels are rising but so are expectations. How the government handles its rural sector where 80 percent of the people live will be crucial to China's future. In fact, the new wave of economic reform began in agriculture. Farmers, once collectivized into huge production units, were given new incentives more than a decade ago.

JI XIAOZHU: The reforms in China which has now turned China into the fastest growing economy in the world started in rural China back in the early 80s when Deng Xiaoping broke up the people's communes and in effect gave land back to the tiller. Of course, legally speaking, the peasantry do not get the land as their personal property -- it was contracted out to the peasantry -- but in effect, it was theirs. And that very quickly, in a matter of six or seven year s-- production doubled, literally doubled.

MR. OXNAM: Another innovative measure the government devised was the creation of so-called "TVEs," Township & Village Enterprises. This furniture factory on the outskirts of Beijing employs many from rural areas.

JI XIAOZHU: Much of the income generated in the countryside came from these so-called "township industries." This doubling of income in six or more years time was thanks to these township industries, and then they kept on growing very rapidly until now they take up more than one-third of the total industrial production of the country, and most of the exports from China come from these township industries.

MR. OXNAM: Of the 800 million people in China's countryside, it is estimated that 100 million of them are now employed in these local enterprises. In Stone Horse Village, north of Beijing, we visited the home of Xiao Zhengong, a 64-year-old farmer, and the father of six grown children. His second son is the designated head of the family farm even though he no longer works the land.

XIAO ZHENGONG, Farmer: [speaking through interpreter] He has the land but he works in the garment factory. Actually he is one of many at a garment factory TVE, Township-Village Enterprise. Starting in 1973, he began carpet weaving. Then in 1983, they made it a rural industry, making clothing.

MR. OXNAM: Mr. Xiao explained that before the rural industries came a decade ago, his village was poor. Much of the surrounding farmland had been flooded in the 1950s to create the reservoir that supplies water to Beijing. So today, with only limited land, villagers consume most of what they grow and supplement their income and their diet by fishing. A fish hatchery also provides jobs for local residents. Mr. Xiao says he earns $300 a year from his wheat crop. His children are expected to contribute another $40 a month to the household income. That's allowed them to purchase such luxuries as a television and a refrigerator. They're saving for an automobile.

EDWARD FRIEDMAN: The household is now an economic unit again and people try to organize their life in terms of a household economy with a division of labor, one person in the family does this, another person in the family does that, you try to get one person on to a state payroll so that they can get medical insurance and a pension because rural people never have had free medicine or free pension in Communist China and still don't.

MR. OXNAM: In the southern coastal province of Guandong, we gathered around the table of the He family the rural area of Panyu. The patriarch, Mr. He, was at his job as an administrator in the local county government office where he's worked for 33 years. It has been his wife's job to work their plot of land, growing produce for local markets to supplement the family income. Because of the warm climate, she can harvest four to six crops of vegetables each year. At lunch, the three male children explain their job. The eldest works at government bureaucrat, the second for a private developer, the third in a power plant. The total family income amounts to more than 60,000 yuan, about $10,000 a year, an exceptional amount by Chinese standards.

SON: [speaking through interpreter] We were the first house in Panyu to have a TV set in about '83 or '84. Now our house already has three TV sets, but we do have some problems. Our house is still relatively backward. We have some electronics but still we cannot afford a car.

MR. OXNAM: The eldest son, his wife, and their infant live comfortably in their own flat across the street from his parents. While we visited, he was notified by beeper to call his office, which he did on a cordless phone while operating his television set with a remote control. The senior Mr. He says life began to improve for him in 1986 when his sons got old enough to contribute to the family income. That and the market reforms have given him a lifestyle he never dreamed he would have. In a nearby community, a village elder told us how China's commercial revolution is transforming the countryside. Then he took us on a tour of sites being prepared for new apartment complexes financed by wealthy local residents and success expatriates. In fact, much of the boom in southern China has been underwritten by former residents who have made money elsewhere in Southeast Asia but have loyally invested back home. In today's China, billboards no longer spout Communist slogans. Instead, they tout products and property. The signs around a traffic circle outside Beijing explain what's happening to much of the surrounding area. As countryside and city converge in parts of China, there are serious new problems. One is the so-called "floating population," migrants from rural to urban China lured by the prospect of high paying jobs. Some succeed, a few even find clean inside jobs in air conditioned factories, but for many, the dreams end in frustration on employment and homelessness. Another problem erupted in the past two years, local officials tried to buy up the produce of hard working farmers with IOU notes rather than cash setting off riots in some provinces. The most common explanation is that government officials together with local banks invested farm funds in get-rich-quick deals.

JI XIAOZHU: And so in many places the bubble burst, and these local banks after having invested let's say that billion yuan into real estate was only able to get back 30 percent, 40 percent, 50 percent of what they put in. So they could only give IOUs to the peasantry, and that really caused major problems. But what we did was starting from the summer, this has been stopped. The IOUs have been stopped.

MR. OXNAM: In addition to grievances about government payments for produce, farmers complain that rural officials have levied additional fees in order to build the infrastructure necessary to attract developers. The government in Beijing has declared that all assessments on farmers should not exceed 5 percent of their total income. But local officials find ways of getting around the rules in order to meet the goals they've been assigned by higher authorities.

EDWARD FRIEDMAN: Build roads, get schools which have good agricultural science in it, pay your teachers a proper salary. The local official says, where's all the money to do this, and there isn't money to do this. And so you're left in a situation which in order to survive in their career, they're forced to try to extort money from the peasants, and they're really caught in a bind, a rock and a hard place, and the peasants, therefore, are under tremendous pressure to pay money for things which they see as totally corrupt. And yes, there, therefore, is in the countryside an extraordinary amount of tension. It explodes in violence quite regularly.

MR. OXNAM: The government says episodes of violence are sporadic and quickly defused. For the most part, the countryside appears tranquil, relentless chores consuming more time and attention than government policy. But what of the future for China's farmers? Some agricultural experts worry that an ill-defined patchwork of landownership rules will lead to depleted resources.

EDWARD FRIEDMAN: There's tremendous uncertainty about property in the future, and this leads to very short-term calculus. If you have a piece of land and you don't know it's going to be yours tomorrow, you put more chemical fertilizer on it today than you ever should. You might destroy the land but you'll get the maximum crop out of it today.

MR. OXNAM: Regardless of who owns the land, China faces daunting challenges in the years ahead. It must preserve and protect the land it already has under cultivation, but more important, it must realize its stated goal of zero population growth by the 21st century. In the end, it must continue to expand its food production to keep pace with the current population which is still growing by 20 million people each year. FINALLY - REMEMBRANCE

MR. MacNeil: Finally tonight, we remember Tip O'Neill, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives who died last night in Boston at the age of 81. His former colleagues hailed him today as "an American original," "the Congressman's Congressman," and "a giant in every way." The Massachusetts Democrat was elected to the House in 1952 and served 10 years as Speaker before retiring in 1986. At that time, Jim Lehrer asked him to describe how Congress had changed in the 34 years he'd been there.

REP. THOMAS ["TIP"] O'NEILL, Speaker of the House: [Dec. 1986] There's more talent as far as knowledge is concerned. You know, when I first came to the House -- how many people -- when I first entered politics, you know, the farmer used to say, I liked to say I was born in a log cabin or something like that, you know. I'm highly, you know, I haven't got any sophisticated education. Take John McCormack, who was Speaker of the House, he went to the eighth grade. He later studied to become a lawyer. Lyndon Johnson, you know, he went to a one-room school. He was born in a log cabin. Those days are all gone by. With the advent of the '74 election, we came to the most highly sophisticated, educated group in the history. We have I don't know how many Sorbonne graduates and Rhodes scholars and doctorates and masters degrees and less people who have gone through the road of public life. When I first got elected, I was a member of the state legislature. I became Speaker and took Jack Kennedy's place and went to the Congress. 80 percent of the people in the old days came up through the system, and so there was a party loyalty and there was a party discipline. Today there's no party organizations on either side, either the Democrats or Republicans, and so you don't come up through the system. I think the majority of the members of the House came directly to the Congress right now. This is a very, very unusual situation.

MR. LEHRER: Is that bad?

REP. O'NEILL: Well, they came in, as I say, without the, without coming through the system and without any discipline, and they wanted to be part of the action. In the old days, the deans of the House, the leadership, and the, the cardinals, the chairmen of the various committees whom we used to call the cardinals of the Congress, they pretty nearly ran things, and they ran things pretty well. And now the young fellow comes in, he says, hey, I got elected, nobody supported me, I didn't get much help from the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, I had a small "d" behind my name, we want to be part and parcel of a power. And consequently, now I think we got 164 subcommittees out there, everybody, and freshmen. You look at -- well, you are pretty safe in Washington if you see a member of Congress and just say hi, Mr. Chairman, how are you, because there are that many chairmen out there.

MR. LEHRER: Are you proud of the fact that you're a politician for 50 years?

REP. O'NEILL: Absolutely. You know, there's a full life, and I travel all over America, you know, always for the Democratic Party and always for the principles and the things that I believe. I was hammered from pillar to post back in '81 and '82 and all of a sudden I go to all these colleges around America and jam packed crowds, and I tell 'em what America was like and what I stand for, and the feeling is pretty good, and I know that I'm going out -- according to the Harris Poll 67 percent, the highest in America, with the President down to 46, makes an old man feel pretty good.

MR. MacNeil: President Clinton ordered American flags flown at half-staff today in tribute to Tip O'Neill. RECAP

MS. WARNER: Now for a recap of the day's top stories. President Clinton went home to Arkansas to make funeral arrangements for his mother who died last night, Attorney Gen. Janet Reno again rejected Republican calls for an independent counsel to probe the President's involvement in the so-called Whitewater land deal. White House officials say they've begun transferring Whitewater- related files to the Justice Department. Good night, Robin.

MR. MacNeil: Good night, Margaret. We'll be back tomorrow night with our regular political commentary featuring Mark Shields and others. I'm Robert MacNeil. Good night.