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Ladies and gentlemen, I'm privileged and delighted to present our lecturer for the afternoon, Gregory Keith Spence, who is currently Vice President and General Counsel of Brandeis University. He is a Chief Legal Advisor to the President, the Board of Trustees, and the University's

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senior management officials, including those responsibilities for administrative affairs, business and finance, development, public relations, and student affairs.

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He advises the university provost and academic department chairman on educational policy matters which have legal implications. I was very much pleased to learn

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that he's a native of Nashville, Tennessee, and had the occasion of meeting the late Kelly Miller Smith, who was a graduate of Morehouse, during those days of the student protest movement.

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He graduated from Fisk University, Phi Beta Kappa. And while at Fisk, he attended a special study program at Yale University and was an exchange student at Dartmouth College. He graduated from the Harvard Law School in 1971.

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We are indeed privileged and delighted to have this great legal mind who will speak to us on changing legal and ethical definitions of behavior. Hear ye him. Thank you very much. I usually start off my speeches with a joke which I tell over and over again and for which I can never get a laugh.

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And I knew that with Reverend Carter here, I just had to tell this joke just one more time and I'm going to do it and you all just have to forgive me. The joke relates to two young boys who, one's a Catholic boy and one's a Baptist boy, and they decided that what they'd like to do is they would go to each other's churches and

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try and determine and see what they could learn about the culture and the religious tradition of the other. And so they went to the Catholic church first and little boys were sitting up in the pews and they saw the priests come by waving the holy water and throwing it on the people and

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the little Baptist boys leaned over and said, "What's that?" And a little Catholic boy says, "Oh, that's the Holy Eucharist, the sacraments. It's the holy water, the blessed water." And I said, "Okay."

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So later on the next week, they went to the Baptist church. And quarter of 11, the service started. On the dot, there was a series of opening hymns, an organ prelude of one or two. were the announcements, the mother's board report, the trustee report, there

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was testimony, four offerings, one statement from the governor, and at two in the afternoon the minister stepped into the pulpit. At stepping into the pulpit he reached to get his pocket watch, pulled it out, looked at it, said it on the lecture. A little Catholic boy turned to a little Baptist boy and said,

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"What does that mean?" And the little Baptist boy said, "Absolutely nothing." I never get a laugh from that joke. No, you won't be here until four in the afternoon. Okay. My topic has to do with changing legal and ethical standards of behavior in the context of black males and young black males, particularly in this country.

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Mr. Joshua Smith has already begun the litany of statistics that you will probably hear this morning about the plight of black males. We all come armed with the astonishingly small levels of their participation in so many places in our society.

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There are figures coming out suggesting tremendous declines in the number of black males attending colleges and universities in the country. There are numbers of staggering proportion to the numbers of young black men who are finding their way into the criminal justice system, either directly in jail or finding

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themselves counted as part of the probationary and other programs. Just yesterday I picked up a copy of the most recent Chronicle of Higher Education, which cited a study that identified over the last two years that of those black males who have attended college, four-year colleges, the numbers who graduate from colleges are dropping

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radically. In fact, of the numbers of black males who attend colleges, within six years of that attendance, 63% have dropped out and will not complete a college degree. The numbers of going from state to state and looking at the prison populations are just as startling. In Massachusetts, a state not well known for its overwhelming black population, something

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on the order of between 4 to 5 percent of the state's population, 40 plus percent of the prison population in Massachusetts is comprised of young black men today. Not historically, not 10 years ago, not five years ago,

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but today. And the first premise of my presentation by telling you about the litany of these particular facts and figures is to give you some bad news.

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And the bad news is that it's serious business out there. That this society and this country is continuing the serious business that is having negative effects on black males

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and on the black community. And some of the items of behavior that I want to talk about address the question of why so many young men are finding themselves in jail because the effect of the way in

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which the system is operating is very clear and it's not going to change. If anyone is going to be prosecuted, if anyone is going to be found guilty, if If anyone is going to do substantial time in this country for criminal activity, it is going to be black males. Anyone who believes that they can avoid that fact

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is really behind the eight ball. There is no other reality about that fact. Therefore, an analysis of behavior, an analysis of behavior that implicates the violations of law is important serious business

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because in your futures, it will be the opportunity to make the mistake that can result in that particular system taking that particular action. And there will be no explanations.

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there will be no justifications, there will be no exemptions, there will be no understandings that our situation or the overall circumstances of Black America

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can bring to bear to keep that from happening. So the sobering news is that is the world outside, and to presist some of my biblical quotes, that world eateth up the inhabitants thereof.

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One of the important changing policies in law today, in case people don't talk about it enough, is changing civil rights policy. Many of you have studied and many of you may look back in retrospect,

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whether it be eyes on the prize, whether it be the multiplicity of opportunities in this great city to see the living and the past of the civil rights movement and the edifices and

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the statues and the great words that were brought about through that struggle talking about the great statues, the great laws, and the great judicial decisions which are available. In case you have not heard,

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there has been and continues to be a serious erosion in civil rights law in the United States. As we speak today, literally as we speak today, hearings in the United States Senate are being held in an attempt to rewrite and write additional civil rights legislation to undo the actions, the most recent actions of the United States Supreme Court.

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Two days ago, as I was trying to eat dinner late, I turned on C-SPAN and happened to see Senator Edward Kennedy listening to a panel, a presentation from a variety of sources.

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I saw outstanding lawyers like William Coleman and others making presentations and analyses regarding civil rights statutes and the effect of the Patterson decision in abrogating certain rights to employment which had been previously recognized by the Supreme Court. You may

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recall that we live daily waiting for the announcement that the Supreme Court has finally and unalterably struck down affirmative action. Ever since the Diffunes case, the Bakke case, the Weber case, the Grove City's decision that narrowed the applicability of federal statutes, and indeed as I suggest the

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Patterson case, the city of Richmond case which struck down the set-asides in the city of Richmond on the interesting theory that they had failed to establish in the heart of the Confederacy, in the capital city of the Confederacy whose history of black participation was unbelievable in terms

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of the data and the statistics and the Supreme Court struck down the set-aside program on the grounds that they had failed to establish the history of wrongs necessary to require the remedy of set-aside programs for black people in the heart of the Confederacy.

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As a result, civil rights lawyers and analysts have been scurrying for the last year, trying to explain the case and trying to explain the meaning. But the point is,

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is that we still wait for the day and we still are worried for the day when unalterably the Supreme Court will say, affirmative action, remedies of this type, Remedies for race-based discrimination cannot and will not be provided for.

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So you are living and will live in a time when you cannot sit back and say, "Well, I'm going to have certain rights and if anybody turns me down for a job, or if anybody doesn't get me a promotion, or if I don't get hired to do this,

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or if my company does not get this particular contract, I'm going to very easily be able to file a lawsuit against them and go to court. That backdrop, that view of the law, that certainty that that is going to be there, young men and ladies and gentlemen of the audience, I submit is changing and has been

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changing and will continue to change as we move toward the 21st century. So don't sit and say, "Oh, no problem. I'm going to get my Morehouse degree. I'm going to get my Spelman degree, my Clark, my Morris Brown degree, and I'm just going

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to go out there and there's this whole apparatus of legal protections which are just set there to give me the opportunities that I deserve to become the entrepreneurs that Mr. Smith talked about." No, that is a changing period.

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We live in the post-Reagan years when the Justice Department, Civil Rights Division took on the cities and attacked the consent decrees and attempted to roll back the agreements that had already been made to accommodate a long history of race discrimination. And in the individual cases, there has been effective change in the ways in which courts

00:15:07.600 - 00:15:29.760

are looking at and appreciating the rights of individuals in bringing actions against institutions, employers, and government. So that backdrop is not there to protect you. One rather interesting feature of this sense, this isolation I submit you will live to,

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I'm not speaking to the merits of the difficulties of former HUD Secretary Pierce. I can't do that or to use a legal term, I'm not competent to do that. I wasn't there. I don't know what he did.

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But I do know this, when he showed up for his congressional hearing, this former Secretary of HUD, this first and only cabinet member of the eight-year Reagan administration, this lawyer, former law review, Cornell, outstanding tax lawyer from New York, was standing there by himself.

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I didn't hear that the president, former president, called anybody in Congress to say, "Now Sam was doing what we wanted him to do, and you all try and help him." I didn't hear Pat Buchanan on the conservative radio station talk about how he was being railroaded and how this was all another ploy of the partisan Democratic majority to embarrass

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the administration, I didn't see the big name criminal lawyers that we expect to see in these cases coming forth representing Mr. Pierce. I saw him by himself. I didn't see the support one would have expected.

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to realize when it comes your time you're alone. Okay, we live in a changing world of ethical wasteland. The yuppie generation, I was very excited to see, I hope many of you all did too because it'll help in the explanation, how many people saw the movie Wall Street? How many people were all excited with

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Michael Douglas, Mr. Gecko, wasn't that exciting? They gave him an Oscar for that routine. Greed is good. Information, however you get it, is good.

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Beat the other guy to the punch is good. And everybody has been bathing in this generational, yuppie generation of consumerism and individuality. and all of this excitement.

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And you know something? Black people aren't immune either. We've been reveling in it ourselves. We talk about money, and we talk about dress,

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and we talk about big homes, and we talk about fine vacations, and we talk about expensive articles for ourselves as the only measure-- the only measure of a quality life.

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Nobody seems to be able to talk about values as a measure of a quality life. How many times do you hear people talking about character as the measure of a quality life?

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How many times do you hear people talking about the quality of behavior as the measure of a quality life? The other day, and I'll take a moment to be personal, Dr. Carter and others have indicated that I've done pretty well in my career,

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and I like to wear suspenders and a pocket watch and stand up straight and feel that I finally beginning to arrive after all this hard work. My wife was looking at Mandela and she said, Gregory, she said he talked about when he got out of prison that in his first

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interview, the Ted Koppel interview, the long one, the hour and a half one, he said when he went into the prison he told them the first thing we're gonna do is have to be prepared to be here for a long time. And that means we are going to have to get along with our jailers. And that means we are going to have to meet

00:20:02.880 - 00:20:34.720

these men, these Afrikaners, and these English at the human level and let them know that our struggle is not with them but with the system, the unacceptable genocide of apartheid. And he talked about the fact that he had developed certain relationships as a result of that. That they understood how to relate

00:20:34.720 - 00:20:58.280

differently to the warden and relate to the man who brought the blankets. Because the guard who brought the blankets, if you went to the warden and said it's very cold, we need three blankets, he said the warden would report to you that the regulations say one blanket per prisoner. But if you went to the guard who opened

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and closed the gate each evening and said Harry I need another blanket, Harry would go to the cupboard and get you a blanket. And since you were going to be in jail for a long time, it was important that Harry understood that you can relate to Harry at that level. And I said I cannot believe that this man could

00:21:27.580 - 00:22:02.740

come out after all those years. I could not, it couldn't be that he could have that kind of humanity and character, that he could see that and implement that and make that reality and walk out of that prison and say he still will be in touch with old Harry who took care of him for 26 years in that prison. And I sat back

00:22:02.740 - 00:22:32.360

in my chair and I said one thing, they had to lock this man up. There's no doubt they cannot deal with this. I thought of Gandhi and I thought of Dr. King. I said there's something here, this humanity, this character, nothing that I had read or had heard about Mandela prepared me for that monster of a character coming

00:22:32.360 - 00:22:57.640

through. All I had heard about his power and his force and his brilliance and he was a lawyer and he was an advocate and a leader but nothing, no humility like that could move people, could move people in a place like South Africa and move the prison guards of all people. And so I immediately said Gregory you've been on

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the wrong kick. You've been on the gecko kick. You got the biggest suspenders, the biggest pocket watch, your shirts have to be made in a certain fashion, you have to have a certain cuff link size in order to accommodate your wrist, and you have been focusing on the wrong approach.

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Your character, not your clothes, not what you own, but what you possess and you give away, your relationships to people are going to be what moves them, not how you look, not how you dress, and not a repetition of your resume. And I'm saying that to you young men and women who are going to graduate from college, because

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Morehouse believes in graduating people from college. So you're going to graduate from college and you're going to get out in the world. And I'm telling you, don't pick up double-breasted suit only. Don't pick up cufflinks and cumble bun only.

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Pick up character. I'll come back to that. As I said, we've been in an ethical wasteland. Milliken and Boesky have led us down the primrose path.

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Notwithstanding the great statements of Joshua Smith concerning our entrepreneurial situation, it's terrible. Look at the collapse of Drexel Burnham, the junk bond market, the fallacious market in futures

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that has been perpetrated on this country, that resulted and helped to cause what they are calling Black October and still carries on today. Our brightest businessmen and business graduates

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spend more time learning leverage buyouts and how to use information than how to create new industries and new businesses at the initial level. The smart way to get ahead is to leverage buyout something,

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to use credit and to use false promises, to make announcements about drug products and their curative value before they get the approval of the government so that your stock jumps up

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and therefore you can sell your particular stocks and make a big return. So the world out there is not a world of easy ethical, a world of straight ethical situations.

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We're involved in a massive change in the ways in which men and women relate to one another. Massive change. At my university, as at any other university,

00:26:15.880 - 00:26:31.440

sexual harassment and sexual discrimination are important legal principles that are constantly the touch word of the interaction between young men and women on colleges, campuses,

00:26:31.440 - 00:26:42.540

students to students, and faculty to faculty, and students to faculty and staff. And the law has changed. But it isn't just that the law has changed.

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It is the mores have changed. The idea of the ways in which men can deal with and treat Women have changed and they are now creating new laws and new statutes recognizing women's rights.

00:27:01.880 - 00:27:22.960

Adding particular support for women who are the victims of batterings and assaults and batteries. Some states are even considering statutes providing for wife rape, the idea that the husband no longer has the right

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to engage in certain activities without the consent, even of his spouse, in law as a principle. And the implications for black Americans, and black men in particular, are important.

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Remember at the top of the speech, If anyone is going to go, if anyone is going to be prosecuted, if anyone is going to do time, then you and I will do it. There has been much discussion about teenage pregnancy

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and much discussion about the failure of marriage in young people, but it's important, it seems to me, at both this college of ministers and as a basic principle, that we return,

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we return to the humane and thoughtful treatment of our women as a ethical principle, not because the law is forcing us in that direction. as an ethical principle.

00:28:43.560 - 00:28:56.040

In recent times, I've said in speeches, the discussion of, well, the notion so-and-so, let me put it this way. I can remember when they used to have

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the black exploitation films. That's back in the '70s. Shaft, Superfly, Troubleman, and so forth. And the basic premise of those things

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was that the hero always was single, always had multiple women, and always was treating them bad. He was constantly lying to them,

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not telling them that he had other relationships, constantly on the lookout for new relationships, and constantly in control of his situation. That was the thing, and wasn't it exciting?

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And we went in droves to those movies, kept the movie industry going until the disaster films came along because we were that excited. And the hardest thing to realize about those films was what they didn't ever seem to have. They never seemed to have a husband as a hero.

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They never had a guy who had a family as a hero. They never had a guy who had a lot of children as a hero. they always had the single guy who was running the game on the women as that was the hero. And I think that without being critical of people around the issue of teenage and early

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pregnancy, part of the critical problem that we have got to address is a change in the expectations of manhood among us African-American men. Fatherhood is a blessing and a responsibility. It is a requirement that we do something about it, that we not turn our backs on it, that

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Do not allow financial situation or personal convenience or other considerations to make you turn away and say, "I've got something better to do. It's not my problem." Or, "My career is so important, I really can't get into it now."

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The result, the experience is more and more families of young black-- with young black men without male leadership. More and more situations where the women

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are left to create the parroting structure. And more and more situations where the poverty, as a result of the absence of that additional income, causes the whole circumstance to be more difficult and more problematic.

00:31:46.820 - 00:32:20.340

The statistics coming out, quoted in the most recent survey on higher education, eighth annual status report of minorities in education is starting to break, break out dependent situations and one-parented family situations to show the startling results. The information that I gave you in the beginning skews even more when the young man is coming

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from a single-parent situation or a poor situation without a full family complement. dropout rates are greater, the numbers who don't apply to college and don't get in whether two-year or four-year are greater, and the percentage that are finding their way in the criminal justice system, the density of that group

00:32:45.720 - 00:33:05.320

is coming there. So it's some sobering times in terms of the ethical as well as as the legal behavior. And as you think and concern yourself with African values and infusion of African curriculum,

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and as we pat ourselves on the back for a growing and new for many cultural awareness, don't forget the obligations and responsibilities that come with that awareness.

00:33:20.320 - 00:33:47.280

Don't walk away from what it really does mean to be an African man. Don't walk away from what it does mean to be father in an African setting. Don't walk away from what it will mean if we do not take seriously our obligations. Once again, as As the biblical quote will suggest,

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the facts are the land eateth up the inhabitants thereof. These forces will eat you up. Drugs as a behavioral problem. You probably have heard numerous people talk on the drug issue,

00:34:12.240 - 00:34:27.040

what not to do, what to do, what to do. My slant is basically this. I just want somebody to show me an old drug dealer. You know, a 55-, 60-year-old drug dealer.

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I don't ever see any. OK, that's one in Atlanta. How many people here? You know one?

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You know two? But what, five? Anybody got five? 60-year-old drug dealers.

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They've been dealing in drugs for 25 years? 40 years? OK. My premise is that there are not very many,

00:34:54.580 - 00:35:04.780

because you don't live that long. I come from Boston. They're shooting people every single day. They're shooting 14-year-olds and 12-year-olds.

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They're shooting each other. They're shooting anybody that's watching. They're shooting the police. They're shooting newsmen.

00:35:12.100 - 00:35:19.140

They're shooting the ministers. They're blowing up the churches. They're shooting cars. They're shooting inanimate objects

00:35:19.140 - 00:35:30.860

that are watching sitting on the sideline. And people are dying. And the reality is, you can fool yourself. You can tell yourself, oh yeah, old Schlo there

00:35:30.860 - 00:35:38.880

has been doing it for 25, 30, 40 years, no problem. If he can make it to 60, I can make it. But let me tell you something. The truth of the matter is,

00:35:38.880 - 00:35:55.720

is that folks ain't living past 22, 24, 26, 29. You can duck and hide so long as Joe Louis says what? You can run, but you cannot hide. Sooner or later, you're going to step on somebody's toes.

00:35:55.720 - 00:36:09.920

Sooner or later, you're going to undersell the wrong guy. Sooner or later, you're going to run up against the wrong group. Sooner or later, you're not going to pay off the right gang. and someone is going to get you.

00:36:09.920 - 00:36:20.960

Now, you don't have to believe it, but the statistics are there. People are dying. And the numbers of black males dying

00:36:20.960 - 00:36:45.860

between the ages of 18 to 28 from homicide are staggering. More people die, you know, more black folk die from homicide and stuff than they do from diseases. They don't live that long.

00:36:45.860 - 00:37:03.560

Ain't no heart attacks between 18 and 28. People ain't getting cancer doing that. So you can save yourself that one if you want, that you and Oslo, you know, gonna be around 60

00:37:03.560 - 00:37:18.840

selling drugs for 40 years, but I'm going to tell you something. If the police don't get you, the drug dealers will. And if the drug dealers don't get you, you're going to shoot somebody's child and they're going to get you.

00:37:18.840 - 00:37:26.960

Because it is a business, as they say. You know, business, serious business. Ain't no jive, man. You pay up now or you dead.

00:37:26.960 - 00:37:37.480

That's the drug business. Ain't no fun. Ain't nobody giving you no credit. Ain't no credit cards in the drug business.

00:37:37.480 - 00:37:57.200

So the point is, you can play that game if you want. The narcotics people, the DEA and stuff will lock you up. 46% of the folk in Massachusetts and they ain't but 4.5% of the population. But they're doing time at Walpole and they're doing time at Bill Rucker and they're doing

00:37:57.200 - 00:38:23.980

time at all the prisons everywhere. They cannot build enough prisons to put the people in drug-related crimes in jail. I'm on the Council of the Boston Bar Association and we listened to the sheriff plead with the court to let him double and triple bunk the people who are being incarcerated in the

00:38:23.980 - 00:38:42.020

Suffolk County Jail awaiting trial because he is under a court order relating to the constitutional rights of individual prisoners not to double bunk them and under the court order to incarcerate them and there's no other place in the state because he has gone to five different places to try and put

00:38:42.020 - 00:39:03.420

them in armories and in high schools and in other buildings and they are filled up and the numbers of drug-related crimes double and triple what the system had previously been holding. The brand-new Charles City Jail in Massachusetts that was built at a cost of 55 million dollars was obsolete

00:39:03.420 - 00:39:22.300

before they had finished drawing it up because the numbers of prison cells in which they were presented couldn't meet the demand. And meanwhile the black community leaders, the churchmen and so forth are screaming to the police, "Get them off the street." I don't care. Don't worry about their civil rights. Don't

00:39:22.300 - 00:39:45.460

worry about the stop and frisk policy. There's a fight in the black community in Boston today over whether or not we ought to allow the police to suspend the civil rights of individual people just to get them off the street because they're killing so many kids and mothers and brothers. This is serious stuff and

00:39:45.460 - 00:40:11.820

that's back to the criminal justice system because when you get the police when you get the police involved in suspending civil rights in your community. When it's all right, they're helping you now to pick up all these young black males on the street, the ones that they distinguish so well. You know

00:40:11.820 - 00:40:39.340

they distinguish us very well. All the guys with the Gucci bags stand on the left. They figured that picked them out real quick. All the guys with, you know, with the jeans stand over here. Or do they just jump up and say it's late, we got, there's one, let's get him. Oh he's back from Morehouse, oh don't believe that.

00:40:39.340 - 00:41:01.260

He ain't visiting Boston from Morehouse, lock him up now. He's not visiting, he got a suit and tie on? Oh he's an old drug dealer. Don't listen to him, he's no lawyer. He's not a minister, he's just a black man out here on the street and we got we got to get ours so we can get them off the street.

00:41:01.260 - 00:41:17.620

And the community is behind us. And then Boston goes through the scourge of the steward problem. When a white man says a black man killed my pregnant wife

00:41:17.620 - 00:41:37.180

and shot me and the police department declares war in a mixed community looking for any black man they can find. Because we all know each other and it doesn't matter whether you did it or not.

00:41:37.180 - 00:41:49.720

If we take you around the corner, you gonna give us somebody's name. And so the young nephews start saying, well, maybe it was my uncle Bennett.

00:41:49.720 - 00:42:00.140

Maybe he did it. He was bragging about it. He must have done it. And the police completely overlooked

00:42:00.140 - 00:42:17.340

the most rudimentary, absolutely traditional approach to a murder when one spouse is involved. It is textbook criminal procedure to completely review the living spouse,

00:42:17.340 - 00:42:31.600

to check their contacts and to see what they were doing, to see what they stood to gain in the insurance policies and to determine if they may well have had an interest because the statistics are that you are more likely

00:42:31.600 - 00:42:42.960

to be shot and killed by a family member or someone you know than the random violence of someone you don't. That's the statistical information,

00:42:42.960 - 00:43:03.660

white and black in the country. So, this is serious business, suspending several rights in behalf of getting drug dealers off the streets, and condoning and supporting drug use will kill you if you use it, and you will be killed if you distribute

00:43:03.660 - 00:43:17.900

it. All right. The next point. I've talked a bit about treatment of the men, men treating the women and children.

00:43:17.900 - 00:43:47.140

Dr. Carter asked me, he said, "Why don't you speak a bit about college students on campus, what the experience is?" The displaced anger and frustration and downright despair of many of the black men on college campuses, majority and maybe even predominantly black campuses is a

00:43:47.140 - 00:44:18.020

disturbing fact. I sat down the other day and talked to these young men who protest. They blocked up the boycotted the bookstore and said that they were going to start a nationwide strike but their anger and frustration was about the absence of policies, they said, relating to discrimination and racism, and the absence

00:44:18.020 - 00:44:45.180

of a multicultural center, which they were calling the center. And the more I heard them talk, the more I could keep hearing that they wanted affirmation they didn't find in the institution. They didn't see any policies that affirmed their presence. They didn't see any statements that they could point to and

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show people who [BLANK_AUDIO]