Hillary Rodham Clinton wants to be the next President of the United States and she wants Black voters to know that if they support her, she will return that support when she’s in the nation’s highest office. To that end, she talks to the Tom Joyner Morning Show for an unprecedented conversation with news correspondents Jacque Reid and Roland Martin along with Don Lemon.
On HBCUs:
“I was on the campus of Philander Smith College in Little Rock and I was talking to the new president there because I know, as you all do, how important HBCUs are in our higher education system. They have closed the opportunity gap and have been in the frontline of producing leaders. In my New College Compact, we’re going to support, encourage and reward HBCU’s that help our student succeed so that students can’t complete college without cost being a barrier or debt holding them back. I believe that for my We’re going to have new federal funds to investing in the public HBCU’s provide support and that the Pell Grant can be used for living expenses, and for the private HBCU’s, we’re going to have a dedicated $25 billion dollar fund to provide support to them. I, like you, admire and respect the role that HBCU’s play. I have a lot of friends and former and present colleagues that are products of HBCU’s, and we’re going to help kids get into school and stay in school and cut interest rates on the loans that students take out.”
On helping provide capital to small Black businesses:
“I’ve said all over the country that I want to be the small business President and I particularly want to be the small business president for women and minority-owned businesses. For a variety of reasons, a lot of it related to the financial crisis, we have not been able to keep up with the pent-up demand. Particularly for African-American women, that’s true. I know from traveling around the country, they can’t get access to capital, they can’t get access to the the mentoring and support they need to go to the next stage.
So here’s what I want to do. I want to make the Small Business Association once again a really aggressive and vigorous agency, reaching out to people not just waiting for someone come to them. I want to do more networking so literally we have a network of people available 24-7 to counsel and support and then send on their way people with good ideas. I had and African-American woman say to me once that more good ideas die on in the parking lots of banks than anywhere in America. What we’ve got to do is reverse that. There’s a lot of programs already in place but they’re not being given the emphasis, the funding, and the support that they need. Most new jobs in America are started by small businesses.”
On rumors that Hillary Clinton started the ‘birther’ (that alleges that President Obama is not a ‘natural-born American’) and once had a confrontation with Senator-elect Obama about it.
That is so ludicrous. It’s totally untrue and the President and I have never had any kind of confrontation like that. This is such a bad example of what’s wrong with instantaneous reactions and Americans getting all worked up and people feeding prejudice and paranoia like Donald Trump. Obviously, we have to stand against it. I have been blamed for nearly everything, but that was a new one.
On Planned Parenthood:
“Planned Parenthood has been taking care of women for years. What I really resent is that when these people go after Planned Parenthood they are saying, in essence, they want to deprive women cancer screenings, HIV testing, getting help with family planning and contraceptives. It is a mean-spirited, partisan attack on a place that has been there for women, often the only place that young women, that lower-income women are able to go and get treated with respect and get the kind of health care they deserve. What you see is the ongoing debate about abortion. Everyone can have their own opinion about that. It is legal.
And in those facilities, which are a minority of the facilities of Planned Parenthood, where abortion is provided, and not using one federal dollar is used to do it, the Republicans want to basically destroy the entire program that Planned Parenthood stands for. I am adamantly opposed to that. I’m going to be fighting that. 500,000 breast cancer screenings every year [are done at Planned Parenthood]. When Jeb Bush says we don’t need $500 million in the federal budget for Planned Parenthood, I don’t know who they are talking to. They’re not talking to the women that grab my hand in the rope line or stop me on the street to tell me that that’s where they found out they had breast cancer or got the family planning support they needed.
On Social Justice:
I’m really honored to have Andy Young’s support. He’s somebody I’ve known for a long time. He said something to me a long time ago that I never forgot. Back in the late 50’s when the South was roiled by civil rights challenges and conflicts and places that were trying to change and some resisting change, he said Atlanta adopted the slogan ‘The City Too Busy To Hate’ and I wish we’d get back to saying ‘America Is Too Busy To Hate’ and back to working together and having each other’s backs and that goes for criminal justice reform and mass incarceration and getting rid of the privatization of prisons that have turned incarceration into a for-profit industry.
We ought to be looking at what we are going to do with social justice by admitting and taking on the systemic racism that we still face in this country. Just look at how President Obama has led us through some difficult times and faced unrelenting opposition and obstruction and in this campaign, we’re seeing a lot of those same voices and forces trying to turn the clock back. I hope we can come together around reforming criminal justice and not just reforming the inequities that unfortunately persist but in trying to close the opportunity gap and help young people, particularly young men, to have different choices because they have different opportunities. I want folks to know they can count on me to address this and count on me to work hard with the communities that are really focused on this to make a difference.
Clinton shares two initiatives of particular concern to the African-American community – her plan for continued support of HBCU’s via The New College Compact and the rising costs of prescription drugs, which impact a disproportionate amount of African-Americans. Listen above and check out more details of her proposed initiatives on the next page.
EXCLUSIVE: Hillary Clinton Talks HBCUS, Capital For Black Women Business Owners & More was originally published on blackamericaweb.com
