Jay Holloway
Hello and welcome to Black Issues Forum. I'm Jay Holloway. Today we're in Charlotte and we'll be talking with Harvey Gantt on Black Issues Forum. We'll talk to him about race relations, economics, and education. But first let's welcome feature reporter, Corrine Hampton, and let's find out what Mr. Gantt is doing now, what went wrong in the 1996 election, and what are his plans for the future.

Corrine Hampton
Harvey Gantt, former mayor of Charlotte and former U.S. Senate candidate, still believes that change is possible. I'm Corrine Hampton and here's a look at the man and his vision. [MUSIC]

Corrine Hampton
Harvey Bernard Gantt was born in 1943 in Charleston, South Carolina. He is a living example that one person can bring change. Of very humble beginnings attending segregated black schools, Gantt gained admission to Clemson University in South Carolina under court order in 1963. The country held its breath and anticipated violence, as the determined young man integrated the all white university. Instead, the campus was peaceful. Gantt says he has a great deal of confidence n his ability to meet people and overcome racism with love. His desire to study architecture close to home gave him the courage to break down racial barriers. Gantt became the first black elected mayor of Charlotte in 1983. The two-term mayor cut yet more political teeth as he ran for the U.S. Senate against conservative Republican Jesse Helms in 1990. Helms proved a tough opponent to beat. Gantt lost the election by five percentage points but made a second bid for the U.S. Senate in 1996. He was uns uccessful once again.

Harvey Gantt
We can explain the loss a thousand different ways but that's what it boils down to. Not enough people voted for you. You can blame yourself for not making the case strong enough, and I do. Maybe I didn't make the case compelling enough.

Corrine Hampton
We asked if he will run in the 2002 election.

Harvey Gantt
But the likelihood of my running again are fairly slim, almost no chance of me doing that. But more of a chance you might be seeing me trying to push other folks to continue their progressive agendas: dealing with education, poverty, improvement of the environment, just making this a better place to live. I admit that I'm a little bit worried because I think the prevailing trend seems to be away from that agenda, but I'm a big believer that the pendulum swings and we will see in due time, if we continue those of us who are faithful to that agenda, keep pushing. We will see it swing back in our direction.

Corrine Hampton
For the successful architect it's back to business as usual. Outside of the office Gantt plans to spend more time with his family, especially his granddaughter, Gabrielle.

Harvey Gantt
Cindy and I, my wife, are getting back to normalcy. I never got a chance to really enjoy my granddaughter, who people got familiar with during the campaign because they saw her in commercials. So we're spending time re-establishing a relationship with my children and more particularly enjoying my granddaughter.

Corrine Hampton
Gantt says he will remain active in the community by serving on local boards and is interested in children's issues, particularly education.

Harvey Gantt
So I see and I support Smart Start and early childhood education programs and any kind of method we can to keep youngsters in touch with the educational system and get them to do well.

Corrine Hampton
Gantt refuses to accept race will keep him from doing anything. He says he is hopeful of a future where there is continued social change and a common vision between blacks and whites.

Jay Holloway
Tonight we're delighted to have Harvey Gantt on Black Issues Forum. A gentleman who remains hopeful in finding new approaches to motivate all peoples in North Carolina. And ways we can get together to improve our communities. Mr. Gantt, thank you so much for being with us.

Harvey Gantt
Thank you, Jay. I've been looking forward to it.

Jay Holloway
All right. Let's talk about race relations.

Harvey Gantt
I think there is in some ways a different perception between how life is between blacks and whites in this state and in this country, for that matter. People like myself who run for public office and try to build coalitions part of what we're trying to do is build a common vision that both blacks and whites can buy into. Clearly, racial tension in a society produces all kinds of problems. And, clearly, we have had racial problems that exist in this state. I don't know that th y are worse off than they were 100 years ago or 50 years ago or 25 years ago. But we still have the problem existing. One of the things I've noticed is that we don't as a general community want to talk about it. We don't want to talk about it in political campaigns. I'm guilty of that. We don't talk about it in social settings. WE don't talk about it in the work place. We used to talk about race a lot more often back when desegregation was being introduced to our society. There were more interracia l groups that said, "What is this going to mean? What is this going to be all about?" Then we quit talking about 1970 and we really haven't talked since the so-called demise of desegregation laws. And the fact is that need to do more talking to each other, more bluntly, more commonly. A few years ago in Charlotte before the last Senatorial race I was part of a group that tried to put together something called common ground in Charlotte where we asked leaders from all sectors of the community to come together for the specific purpose of talking about our problems along cross-racial lines. We wanted to create an environment that was not intimidating so that people would express their feelings and not just simply be politically correct, so that we could open up and examine the wounds that exist in communities with the hope that we could find a solution. If we in fact respect each other across the conference table. That went so far and then we discovered that a lot of people didn't want to talk about it. A lot of the people we needed to bring around the table didn't address it. And as long as we ignore it, it will grow like a cancer in our community and affect every aspect of the community. It'll affect education policy and it does today. It affects housing policy in the community. It affects economic development in the black community particularly. Race is an issue that we have to put up on the table and try to deal with almost community by community. It is clear now that the federal government is not going to address it from some broad-based way. As a matter of fact, they are backing away from aggressive affirmative action programs, and we're seeing that in the work place and in selection processes with colleges and universities and things of that nature. But simply because we're not going to address it at the national level does not mean that we back away from dealing with the problems. My take on this is that communities have to grapple with this issue locally right now and it really needs leaders stepping to the front, both black and white, wherever they are and addressing the fact that we have one. Here in Charlotte just a few days ago we had some leadership in the black community step forward and say, "We need to have a forum on this." And we are going to have one later in the year, at which time we bring the whole community together. We're going to try again to get conservatives and liberals and blacks and whites and young and old to get to a table, to a forum, or to a setting in which we talk about our real problems and then go further and try to resolve some of those problems.

Jay Holloway
In particular in the African American community, more often you see that initiated initially, if I can say, from the African American community. Do you have any thoughts that you would say to this community on its responsibility for encouraging that? Or perhaps to a larger community?

Harvey Gantt
I think black leadership still has to stand up and be the conscience for a community sometimes that is reluctant to speak out. But I don't think these things work unless you get business leadership acknowledging that we have a problem that needs to be addressed. Often you see them coming to the front when there's a crisis and when some policeman shoots a black child or someone is just blatantly discriminated against and it produces an uproar, then we see all aspects of leadersh ip trying to do something about it. Now I'm saying in that kind of environment you don't always get the best solutions. That what we need to do is to have more than just the black minister or the civil rights leader step forward and say, "Look, it's time to deal with this." If we end up being the only ones that wanting to deal with the problem we don't get it resolved. But someone has to initiate it and I'd just as soon that could be anybody. In this community, Bill Simms, who is head of the Trans American Units here in Charlotte, got up, highly respected man in the business community in Charlotte and in the black community and said that we needed to do something about it. And he's got a number of other people -- the mayor and other folks to say yes we do have a problem here. And I think it's going to take off.

Jay Holloway
And when viewers hear of Bill Simms and Harvey Gantt, they say that you guys can speak and get that kind of action. But what can an average person do to take action?

Harvey Gantt
You know, what can any average person do? You have opportunities in the workplace. Most people who work today outside of some very well defined institutions work in interracial settings. You agree with that?

Jay Holloway
Yes.

Harvey Gantt
Most of us work next door to somebody that is of a different race and it is amazing how we don't even talk to people. And it's a two way street. It's not a case here now of white folks got to reach out and talk to me. It is a need for us to bridge a gap of understanding that is there. So each of us has a task individually to say, "What am I doing to at least communicate clearly what I feel about this person?" I think we can do that in settings that don't in fact cause one's job to be threatened. If nothing more than simply going out to lunch more often or trying to make an attempt. Let's go eat lunch together or let's go have a beer after work or some such thing. One Nations Bank executive you may have heard of came forward with the idea of Race Day, which is an interesting way to put it but his notion was why don't we set aside Thursday to simply go and make it a point, all of us, black and white, to find somebody of a different race that we will go have lunch with. Not to just say, "I got to go have lunch with this person." But to really talk and try to get to know this person. Not to solve the racial problems of the world, but just to try to deal with each other honestly.

Jay Holloway
One person at a time.

Harvey Gantt
One person at a time. Those kinds of efforts individually can be done. But clearly there have got to be some collective things done in the community too. There's got to be ways that we focus attention on some of the problems. Perceptions that black people have that they're bumping up against glass ceilings. Whether one is coming out of the lower stratum of economic life in our community or whether one has completed all the college training and is working his way up the corpo rate ladder. At some point we have as black people a perception that we can't go any further. And that produces a rage sometimes within us or a simmering kind of feelings suggest that things are wrong and not right here. The sin of it is that we often stay quiet about it and develop all kinds of neuroses as a result of that. And then on the other side of the fence there are white folks who see blacks are dancing and say, "Oh they're doing that because of some affirmative action program. They don't merit it." So here you've got these folks working side by side sometimes in the work place and they're both thinking two different things. And neither group is being honest with the other. And until we start figuring out a way to communicate, no amount of laws we can pass, no politician that we can run for office is going to resolve that. I mean, we have to find ways to say, "Look I'm going to be honest." I made a vow to myself some years ago that I would never leave a human encounter with somebody, whether black or white, without making sure that the person understood where I was coming from. I don't want to mislead you about what my intentions are in any kind of human encounter. If more of us could just work on that little simple thing, you know, we we'd be all right. But a lot of us go around signifying all day long. We smile, we're embarrassed, or we are insulted by something somebody says but we keep it to ourselves. We take it back to our private living rooms and our country clubs or our clubhouses or our fraternity or sorority groups and we talk about what so and so did to us today. But we never talked about maybe I ought to deal with that person.

Jay Holloway
Let's talk about the economic disparity. There is an economic disparity, not only in North Carolina but in America between black and white, wealth as well as income and then there's a greater difference in understanding between wealth disparity versus income. Would you care to address that? And what should be done about that? What can be done?

Harvey Gantt
People have to keep working hard. In wealth disparity as well as the income disparity that you talk about. Let me just say this. One of the things that I've been harping on with a lot of young black professional groups today is our need to be aggressive about becoming entrepreneurs again. Many of us with MBA degrees find ourselves languishing in big corporations hoping one day to get to be CEOs. Some of us will or a few of us will. I'm impressed to see Ken _______________ r ise to the top or about to rise to the top of American Express. That's great, but he's one of probably three or four thousand people that started off at American Express that were people of color some years ago that's going to make it there. What happened to the others of us who trained for business? One of the things that I think can address economic disparity is more of us need to think entrepreneurially. But not to get so comfortable with the eight-hour day job or the set situation where every two weeks we get a paycheck, but to use the skills that we developed, that we learned formally in business schools and other places to come out and reinforce and help existing black businesses. Where are the next core leaders that will address and lead mechanics and farmers to the next level as a black man? Or any other black institution that may exist now that started off with rather humble beginnings that have done well but need to be taken to the next level into the 21st century. Where are the black entrepreneurs that will do that? How much training do our kids get even in the grade school levels on entrepreneurship? And the free enterprise process, which often times we run away from. If you think about it, in our own communities we place less emphasis on business than we do on other professions or on other areas that have been traditionally considered to be the high status in our community. So I'm talking about an education thing. I'm talking about a mindset that takes us a little higher. Now you say well, everybody can't be an entrepreneur so how are we going to address this income disparity? The fact is that income disparity has been narrowing. That in the last 25 to 30 years through affirmative action, through education, through civil rights laws. We have seen the growth of a substantial middle class. The argument to make that we've been lagging there is really not a clearly good one. But the welfare argument is a different one and that is assets of the black community and whether we have built up that kind of thing and we have not done. And I don't know how we do it unless we become the engines, the participants in the free enterprise process in a more aggressive way. We have to own businesses to be able to hire people and then to teach them how to be owners. The mindset has to be that we can strike out and develop products and offer services just as well as the majority of the community has been doing. Strangely enough we did more of that when we were segregated than we do in this more integrated society today. We had more businesses back then but as a percentage of the total population of the African American community than we do today. And it is because I think we've sort of changed our opinion about what constitutes success and areas that we need to address. Now that's a little different from the argument you expected me to say which is that discrimination has kept us down. Of course it has. But it's been keeping us down. If we use that argument then let's just forget it. We're not going anywhere. We've got to resolve that racial thing and we may be waiting for the millennium for that to happen or the next millennium, the one after this one because four years from now we'd be at the millennium. My argument is that we cannot use the excuse of racial discrimination solely as a reason to say that is why we are not on par economically with the majority of the community. That's part of it, but it cannot paralyze us in such a way that if we don't find ways to move forward. One of the things that I'm proudest about in my own personal life is the fact that I'm a primary owner of two businesses in this community that collectively hire over 100 people, many of them African Americans, who will leave and start their own businesses out of this architectural firm and so forth and so on. And they are developing an attitude about how they think about the prospects of being an entrepreneur or a business person. We need to do more and more of that and to encourage it from the earliest years.

Jay Holloway
That's a good transition to our next category of education. There is a lot to be said that one of the most common denominators for success economically is education and talking about these early years the governor of our state has talked about Smart Start and starting at the earlier years. Can you elaborate more on the need for that and getting African American kids prepared to come to school ready to learn?

Harvey Gantt
Well, I can't tell you how much -- I've been on two campaigns that talked about education as a centerpiece. I don't know any other way we can go. We can't become entrepreneurs without getting in touch with ourselves and learning and being educated. We also know today that high school education is not going to get you very far in the 21st century. So we need to emphasize this whole business of keeping kids in school and making sure that we don't render them developmentally dis abled in the earliest years of their growth and development. And what I mean by that is that programs like Smart Start are right on target. I talked about in the senate campaign this need for early childhood education because I really do believe that we have to intervene and address situations that have come from out of poverty and discrimination that have a negative impact on the educational development of very young children in our society, particularly African American children. I came out of a poor family. I grant that most people of my generation came out of poverty and that none of us were swinging in middle class families back in the 40s. But we did have this kind of strange hope in the segregated society that if our kids get to go to school and go farther than we did -- that's what the parents then said -- that they're going to be something. We had more of that back then than we have today in poor communities where black families have been devastated in many ways because of the welfare system that doesn't allow many two-parent households. It doesn't allow the opportunity for the nurturing that often occurs. It doesn't allow children to get the opportunity to see black people striving up the ladder. Because of integration most of those middle class folks that I used to see as a child growing up as the object of my admiration as a child growing up, a lot of kids today don't see that. They might see an athlete on television or an entertainer or a drug dealer who in fact are people that they would admire. But they don't see average every day doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs, in the sense of folks who have just achieved. Well, when I was growing up we got the _____________ in the family plus segregation produced in our community ample opportunities for us to see the preacher, doctor, lawyer, and education then had a meaning for us when our parents said, "You know if you want to be like Lawyer Brown you've got to go to school." And if Lawyer Brown drove a big Cadillac and we thought that was great then we wanted to be like Lawyer Brown. We wanted to talk like Lawyer Brown. We wanted to preach like Preacher Green or something, you know? My point is that there was a lot of reinforcement even in the early years. What I've seen serving on some boards here in Charlotte and in the State is that poverty has produced a kind of interesting retrogression in the 80s and the 90s in which a lot of young children don't get that kind of stimulation either because their parents have lost hope, don't believe in the promise of America again, and that transferred to the child produces a crippling paralysis that hurts down the road. And I think that explains more than anything else the gap in test scores for fourth and fifth grade and the widening gap at ninth grade and the lost cause at 12th grade. We've got to address than early on and aggressively. So I see and I support Smart Start and early childhood education programs and any kind of method we can to keep youngsters in touch with the educational system and to get them to do well with it.

Jay Holloway
What would you say to the parents out there of these students that are underachieving in our K-12 schools because if they missed it in the early years they are still in the school system now. And you talked about this disparity and these test scores and we had a show recently on that. What is needed to be done to support these teachers? And would you encourage parents to get more involved with the schools?

Harvey Gantt
First of all, somehow I think as community leaders we have to take our youngsters from this mentality of being victimized. Certainly we've been victimized by discrimination but we don't have to have the victim mentality. So if I haven't done well by the time I reach sixth grade, and they're saying that I'm disadvantaged somehow we've got leaders, institutional leaders, preachers, civil rights leaders have got to say we can make it, you can make it. Even though you haven't done well the first six years of your schooling, you can do a whole lot better. Now kids will do a whole lot better, I think, when parents get involved and not enough adults -- sometimes because of the negative experience they've had in the school -- don't follow their kids into the school house. I don't mean to cite you statistics of how much we, African Americans, participate in PTA meetings and events in schools or stay behind our kids. And I've heard us use all kinds of excuses as to why we don't even go to the schools any more. You know, "School is across town and I'm too tired when I get home from work." I think that's a cop-out. We need to say, "Hey, if we care about our kids, we'll stay after them. We'll make sure they do the homework. We'll go to school to find out what's going on in the classroom." If they're going to be somebody, they're going to have to be educated. See, folks are looking for some magic formulas. Somebody wants to come up with a new technique of teaching black kids or the whole business about Ebonics is going to make it better. The fact is parents who stay after their kids have proven to be most successful in seeing their children do well in school. In other words, they've got to care and let the child know they care.

Jay Holloway
Harvey Gantt, thank you so much for spending time with us. Time has run all the way out already.

Harvey Gantt
I talk too much.

Jay Holloway
Well, that concludes another episode of Black Issues Forum. I'm Jay Holloway. I certainly hope you've enjoyed that interview and feature with Harvey Gantt, who leaves all of us a little more hopeful that things are still possible for good race relations, education, and economics in North Carolina. Well, we certainly also hope that you will visit us on the World Wide Web at www.unctv.org/bif for more information on this program and other related topics. On behalf of the entire Black Issues Forum team, have a pleasant good evening and a good night.