- Hi, I'm Susi Elkins, General Manager and Director of broadcasting at WKAR.

I'm excited to share with you a special presentation an evening with US Representative James E. Clyburn.

From his humble beginnings in Sumter, South Carolina, as the eldest son of an activist, fundamentalist minister, and an independent civic-minded beautician to becoming the Majority Whip and the third ranking Democrat in the United States House of Representatives.

James Clyburn has remained grounded securely in family, faith and public service.

When he came to Congress in 1993, Representative Clyburn was elected co-president of his freshmen class and quickly rose through leadership ranks.

He was elected Chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and Chair of the House Democratic Caucus, Former Michigan Governor and MSU alumni, Jim Blanchard, sits down with Representative Clyburn for a candid and engaging conversation.

And now you can hear his story recorded live from Wharton Center as part of the Jim Blanchard Public Service Forum, enjoy.

(audience applauding) - I'm wondering as a young man, did you ever think you'd become a member of Congress much less one of the leaders of Congress?

- Always dreamed that I would When I was a kid, my father had two rules that we had to live by.

He had a lot of rules we had to live by but.

(audience titters) - He was a preacher.

- He's was a fundamentalist minister.

My mother was a beautician.

And if you really want to learn politics, (audience titters) go to a beauty shop.

(audience applauding) At a beauty shop, you'd be surprised at what they discuss in beauty shops.

- [Attendee] Tell them, tell them.

- And I used to eavesdrop on a lot of it, but two rules that was in my house, was that every morning we were required to recite a Bible verse at breakfast and you were not allowed to say the same one twice.

And on the day that my dad there laid down the rule, He took Jesus wept off the table.

(audience titters) But the second rule was every evening before retiring to bed, we had to share with him and my mother, sometimes both, we had to share a current event.

Now we didn't have television, but every day The Sumter Daily Item was delivered to our home, which meant that I had to read that newspaper in order to get a current event.

And my dad grew up in a county in South Carolina, the Kershaw County, that did not provide education for blacks beyond the seventh grade.

So he never got a high school education.

He was not allowed to by the state of South Carolina, but he read voraciously.

He educated himself to the point that he could pass a college entrance exam and he did.

He got admitted to college, went to college for three years.

And after the third year, he was called into the President's Office and was told that under state law, he could not get his college degree until he produced his high school diploma and it was not in his record and he was not going to allowed to go into the senior year until he could produce their record.

He could not and therefore, he never got to his senior year.

Now I did not know that story until my dad was within three or four months of death.

And I found out about it from someone who was in college with him, who I ran into when I was running for Secretary of State.

And this man told me that he was enthralled with my name 'cause he had only heard at one time before in his life and it belonged to his classmate in college and told me he said, "I never knew his name, but we all called him E.L., do you know him?

I said, "Yeah, that's my daddy."

And then he told me, "Well, something happened because he didn't show up for his senior year" and that night when I left that meeting I was in, I went straight to Sumter, got my dad out of the bed and I told him what I had just heard.

And that's when he told me, he said, "I never told you this because I never wanted you all to think there was any value in dropping out of school."

So equipped with that kind of background.

I started studying Harry Truman when I was eight years old and I've read and I still read everything I can about Harry Truman.

I keep two books at my bedside and one is the Bible and the other is McCullough's book on Truman.

- [Jim] Great book.

- It's a great book that thick.

So I use it as a reference book.

(audience titters) So every now and then I asked, "What would Jesus do?"

And sometimes I asked, "What would Harry do?"

(audience laughing) (audience applauding) And so that's been my background, but here's the thing I learned from him, those of you who have studied Harry Truman, you would know that Harry Truman had a very difficult time breaking into politics in Missouri.

The Pendegast Machine kept him locked out for a significant part of his time.

And so I ran for State House of Representatives and won the primary, lost the general, I ran statewide for Secretary of State twice and lost.

After the third time, a friend of mine said to me, "What are you gonna do now?

You know what they say, three strikes and you out."

I said to my friend, and I want to say this to all the students here tonight, I said to my friend, "That's a baseball rule (audience laughing) (audience applauding) and nobody should live their lives by baseball rules."

(audience laughs) So no matter how many times you try, just remember what your parents and your grandparents, your guardians have always said, "If at first you don't succeed."

They didn't say one more time or two more times or three more times, try and try again.

No numerical limit is on that.

So to all you young people here tonight, no matter how many times you try and fail, don't ever give up, so I never gave up.

(audience applauding) - Now, when you were young, your friends called you Windy and Senator, they must have been onto something.

- That is true, boy, you really have been reading my book.

(audience laughs) For some reason, that was a nickname I got in high school, Windy.

And I asked somebody one time, "Why are you calling me that?"

They said, "Because you will change your mind on a dime."

(audience laughs) And you know, I think that's why I said, to a lot of people who says, "Well, that's the way I am and I'm not gonna change."

And now I say, "Now you're gonna have a very miserable life if you can't ever change."

We get educated, we learn and the reason you study is to chart a course for yourselves.

So if you learn more on Tuesday than you knew on Monday, it may require that you make some adjustments.

But I used to say all the time when I was a student (indistinct) your life is but a series of adjustments.

That's all life is.

You go through it and you adjust here, you adjust there.

I stayed married to the same woman, 58 years.

- Emily, right?

- Emily.

- Emily - Emily and I met in jail, so jail sometimes work.

(audience laughs) You know, but I'm going to tell you, I was in jail challenging the system I was not in jail for driving too fast or something.

I went to jail for sitting in and that's when we met.

But I learned early that our backgrounds were different.

She grew up on a little 22 acre farm.

She grew up walking two and a half miles to school every morning and two and a half miles back home, every evening.

A little county of Berkeley County, South Carolina, down near Charleston.

She came to college in a pickup truck with a footlocker on the bed of that truck.

They didn't have a car.

I grew up three blocks from my elementary school, six blocks from my middle school.

And I'm a graduate of Mather Academy that we called in those days a boarding school.

So I didn't know what it was like to have to walk to school in the mornings.

I didn't even know what it's like to ride a school bus.

So when we got married, you can imagine it wasn't long before I knew some adjustments had to be made.

(audience laughing) And I made them and it worked well for 58 years and then she finally lost her battle to diabetes two years ago.

And so, yeah, I didn't know.

I knew what I wanted out of life and I have no idea of when we got married, that that might've been the best thing that ever happened to me, marrying somebody who was close to the earth and kept my feet planted in that soil, sometimes.

- Now I, again, read your autobiography, we could call this kind of a hamburger marriage couldn't we?

- Yeah, that's interesting.

- I'm being a little facetious, but tell us about it.

- Well, the first day that I was arrested, many of you recall, the sit-ins started on February 1, 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Four students sat in at the lunch counter.

And I was on the campus of South Carolina State down in Orangeburg at the time and John Lewis was out in Nashville.

And so, I along with six other students decided we were gonna organize a sit in, in Orangeburg, South Carolina, which we did.

Except when we got down to the S.H.

Kress, five and dime as we would be calling it.

They had removed the tops from all them stools and so that was gonna make an unpleasant sit down.

(audience applauding) So we went back to the campus, but then we decided to organize a massive demonstration, and we did.

So we organized the student body of two colleges, South Carolina State and Claflin University and we marched on the town square.

I got arrested that day and they separated those who had been identified as leaders and took us to a county jail and they fill up all the jails And we got arrested like 10:30, 11 o'clock in the morning and we'd been down there all day without eating and the students who had not gotten arrested that day had been herded it back to the campus and they figured out a creative way to get into the cafeteria, to bring us some food.

And so late that afternoon, early evening, while waiting to get bailed out of jail, this little 92 pound that came toward me with a hamburger in her hands and I reached for the hamburger.

She pulled it back, broke the hamburger in half.

gave me half, she ate the other half.

I was so grateful for that half hamburger, I married her 18 months later.

(audience laughing) (audience applauding) Now there's a sequel to that.

I want to say to all you men here, especially college students.

I learned on our 10th wedding anniversary that that was not exactly a chance meeting, I thought it was.

We were on the same campus, I had never met her and I thought this was just a chance.

Well, on our 10th wedding anniversary, we were all down in Charleston and invited some of our friends to come down to celebrate our 10th anniversary with us.

And after dinner, we all went to our house down there and we were sitting around, all the guys had gravitated to one level of the house and our wives were on the other level.

And of course, as you can imagine, we'd been out for dinner and some libations and therefore I was a little bit loquacious.

(audience titters) And so I started telling these guys, I said, "You know guys, we were really lucky in the spouses that we chose."

And I noticed no one is saying anything and I looked and Emily was standing in the door and then she looked at me and she says, "That's what you think."

(audience laughing) "Cause I had shared the story about the hamburger with them.

And I said, "What do you mean that's what I think?

That's how we met."

And then she told me the rest of the story.

She told me that one day she was standing in her dormitory room with a roommate and she saw me walking across the campus with a young lady I was dating at the time.

She told her roommate, "They do not make a good couple.

(audience laughing) He is going to be my husband."

(audience laughs) I found out that she had been let's just say, stalking me.

(audience laughing) (audience applauding) - I mentioned at the outset, and so many people are aware of about the importance and it really was a president-maker endorsement of Joe Biden.

But I want you to share the backdrop of why you did that because you had not endorsed in earlier presidential primaries.

You tried to let them do their campaigning and show their stuff, but this was different.

And Joe Biden had run for president, twice.

He'd never won a single primary.

He lost an Iowa Caucus.

He got hammered in the North New Hampshire primary.

I was up there by the way, helping campaign for him.

He ran a distant second in Nevada and he came to South Carolina and of course that was his hope and strategy was to run well there.

I don't think he had a dream that he would run as well because of your endorsement, but give us the backdrop because it really was pivotal in the selection of our current president.

- Well, I suspect a lot of you have heard of this so-called world famous Jim Clyburn fish fry.

I started having that fish fry before I ever came to Congress and I'm in Congress now, 29 years, I started having a fish fry to honor the men and women who work in campaigns, make the phone calls and do all the called the real day-to-day work and cannot afford these big fundraising dinners that we have.

So I started having this fish fry, so they would have something to do the night before our state convention every year.

So the fish fry got to be really a big thing.

In 2019, the fish fry was attended by 21, 22 people running for president.

It got so big, the fish fry did until police and fire departments shut it down and wouldn't let anybody else come in.

Well, Emily at the time had suffered with kidney failure and she was doing a procedure called peritoneal.

The procedure takes place overnight.

- This is Emily, your wife?

- My wife, so she could not come to the fish fry.

So that night after the fish fry, I went to her bedside and I said to her, I says, "You know, there was a great fish fry, we had over 7,000 people there, but we got a real problem."

And she says, "What's that?"

I said, "Well, we got 20-some odd people running for president, several of them are good friends of ours and we gonna have a tough time trying to make a decision as to who the support, if anybody, in this race."

And she said this, she said, "I don't care how many people are running or how many of them are friends of ours.

If we wanna win this election, we had better nominate Joe Biden."

(audience applauding) That's what she said to me.

(audience applauding) Now the reason that carried so much weight with me is because she had never missed calling the election, never.

Emily was a medical librarian at the VA Hospital and she would work the watch carrying books to people in the watch.

At the time, there was only one VA hospital in South Carolina.

It was in Columbia and people from all over the state came to that hospital.

She would go to them, read to them and listen to them and she could always tell me who was gonna win this election.

And even when I was running, I'm running for Secretary of State.

One night, we were sitting there and she said to me, "Now Clyburn, you running a good campaign."

She never knew my first name by the way.

(audience laughing) She says, you running a good campaign.

I want you to keep doing so, however, you're not gonna be able to win this race.

It's a heck of a thing when your wife tells you, keep running, but you ain't going to win.

(audience laughing) Well, that's just the way she was and she would say this person, that person, she could always call it.

So when she told me that Joe Biden was who we needed, if we wanted to win, I took it to heart.

This is in June, she passed away in September.

So now we're getting ready for the primary.

That Thursday, before the South Carolina debate, I went home that Thursday night.

On Friday morning, there's going to be a funeral service for my long-time accountant, who was also a good friend of hers.

And the service is gonna be at noon Friday.

So when I got the notice, I says, "Well, I could go to the service on my way down to Charleston," and that was the plan.

I go to the service, when I got to the church about 30 minutes before.

I walked down the center aisle of the church, paid my respects at the coffin.

As I turned to leave, I just turned and there was a elderly lady sitting on the front pew on the far end and she did this to me.

I had never seen that lady before in my life, but I knew what that meant.

(audience laughing) So I walked over to her and she looked up, she says, "I need to ask you a question and if you don't want anybody to hear the answer, lean down and whisper it in my ear.

I said, "Yes, ma'am."

She says, " I need to know who you are voting for in this primary."

And I leaned down and said, "I'm gonna vote for Joe Biden."

She snapped her head back and she looked at me.

She said, "I needed to hear that and this community is waiting to hear from you."

And so when I left that funeral, all I could think about was her, the look in her face, what Emily had said to me, and I then call my communications person who handles stuff on my campaign.

I said, "Okay, guys, I want you to get ready, let's reserve some time for radio.

Let's get ready to do some robo calls.

I'm gonna make the endorsement Wednesday morning right after the debate and this is the way I wanna do it."

It just can't just be an endorsement, we got to create a movement," and that's the backdrop to it.

Now the Washington Post and New York Times did not believe that story, they really thought I had made it up.

And so they kept calling me,.

"Who was this lady, we'd like to know that.

I said, "I don't know who it was."

I said, "I'd never seen that lady before."

So I said to my staff, I says, "We gotta find this lady because these people don't believe me."

(audience titters) And so I told them the name of the church, the funeral, and they found the pastor of the church.

And so the pastors said that could only be one of two people and so he gave them names of the two people he thought it could be.

They went to the first person and it was not that person.

They went to the second person and Ms. Janie Jones said, "Yes, that was me.

I needed to hear from him," and she just went on to tell them why.

So then I called the New York times and the Washington post and they sent reporters and photographers to her house (audience laughing) and she gave them an AFO.

(audience laughing) (audience applauding) - Well, we have a lot of good candidates, as you know, but within a matter of a few hours, it was such a huge landslide.

Amy Klobuchar, Beto O'Rourke and Pete Buttigieg dropped out and then a few days later it was Cory Booker and Vice President Harris, several others.

By the time we got to Michigan, oh, Bloomberg dropped out, by the time we got to Michigan, the only two people in the race other than Joe, were Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Sanders had won here before, but Joe ended up carrying all 83 counties.

So I wasn't exaggerating about the difference it made.

(indistinct) Now I'm gonna reflect back on January 6th.

It's an unpleasant time, during that insurrection and I was wondering what you were thinking about, what was running through your mind on January 6th?

- January 6, reminding me of a little bit of the history of various times in our country.

I was sitting there on the house floor, the Vice President had started a roll call and we had talked the day before because a lot of people felt that something was amiss.

I have to admit, I never detected it.

I mean, I knew that nerves are on edge and I knew what was being said, but I never sensed that day was gonna get that way, a lot of people did and they had asked Nancy Pelosi not to preside, to have somebody else in the chair, 'cause she was always the object of this foolishness but she was insistent that she was gonna preside.

So she ascended to a podium to preside.

I sat in my assigned seat, Steny Hoyer was in an assigned seat in front of me.

And I looked and all of a sudden I saw Nancy coming down off the podium and I knew that wasn't in the script 'cause I knew what was supposed to happen.

And I looked and I saw one of her security people leading her and (indistinct) with one of my security people, who happened to be backstage.

She was standing by the door and she beckoned me.

Now I went over to her and said what's up, she said, "We gotta get outta here, the building has been breached.

And so then I was asked, "Did I wanna go home or to so-called undisclosed location?"

I said, "Well take me home," About three or four blocks away and I'm thinking all the time, "What is this?

Something is amiss.

This cannot be happening in this country."

You know, we have disagreements, but it can't be coming to this We got about a few blocks from the Capitol then they were told, "Don't take him home, go to the non-disclosed location."

Now I knew this is really, really serious.

So we get to this place and the TV's there and we were looking.

And when I really realized something bad was wrong is when we could not get the National Guard to respond.

It was hours, five or six hours before the National Guard ever responded and I said, "Then there is something really bad."

This investigation is taking place.

This investigator has got to be thorough, has gotta get to the root of this because this is much more serious than meet the eye, even to this moment.

And so I thought that we were about to experience a real insurrection, which I thought had a good chance to succeed and I still think we are not out of the woods yet.

- A lot of people wanna know.

First maybe a quick reaction to that last Tuesday's election.

But the real question I think we all have is how do you and Nancy Pelosi, Speaker put up with all these nitpickers that try to make the perfect, the enemy of the good.

How do you have the patience to do that?

(audience applauding) - Well, when I told my dad, after I was getting out of jail for about the third time.

(audience laughs) And my father and I always talked about me following him into the ministry and my plan was to go to get a bachelor's degree and then I was going to the seminary, but I was always told that you had to be called into the ministry and I kept listening for the call (audience laughing) and I just never heard it.

(audience laughing) And I don't know whether or not I was called I had never heard it, so I went on to tell my dad that I'd changed my mind and I was not going to go to the seminary.

And I thought he would be disappointed but my dad said to me on that day, "Well, Son," he said, "I suspect the world would much rather see a sermon than to hear one," and that is what has guided me.

(audience applauding) So when I'm sitting there in the room, interacting with our Caucus members and I want you all to think about this a little bit.

In the Democratic Caucus, you got 58 people who are members of the Congressional Black Caucus, 58.

Only two African-Americans on the other side.

You've got a very vibrant and active Hispanic caucus.

We have the Asian-Pacific Islanders.

You've got what we call the New Dems.

You got the Progressives, you got the Moderates, you got the Blue Dogs, the very conservative Democrats.

There are 10 significant vibrant caucuses that make up our caucus.

That's what this country is all about.

Now in each one of those groups, they meet regularly.

The Black Caucus meet every Wednesday.

We have lunch together every Wednesday, we get very comfortable with each other.

The Blue Dogs are very comfortable with each other, New Dems, Progressive, each one of us has a certain comfort level within our caucus.

And so when I sit there, I listen and I try to figure out how I can find common ground by appealing to what is definitely important to each one of these caucuses.

And so my plea to them always, as I did, when we were trying to pass this Bill.

Last Friday morning at eight o'clock, I met with the so-called moderates and I says, "It's this is time for us to get outside of our comfort zone.

And nine o'clock, I met with the Congressional Black Caucus, and I said the same thing to them, "It's time to get outside of our comfort zone, and we got to find a common ground upon which to meet.

Now in my caucus meetings, I'm always referring to history.

I'm always letting history be my guide.

And I'll just give you one example and this got to be pretty touchy.

Now, when we were trying to come out of the Great Depression.

We came out of the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt is credited with having done a great job getting us out of the Great Depression.

One of the biggest tools that came out of the Great Depression was social security and social security is credited with having lifted a lot of seniors out of poverty, but guess what?

Most people don't realize this when social security became law, it did not cover farm workers, it did not cover domestic workers and 65% of African-Americans in this country were in those two categories.

So social security did not cover 65% of black folks in this country and a lot of people don't realize that.

And so my whole thing in going round to the caucuses was trying to educate them.

We've got to do this part of this Bill because we can't afford to do this this time and make the mistakes that were made coming out of the Great Depression.

And you I can take you through Civilian Conservation Corps, Works Progress Administration.

When those programs came South, they had a little tag hung on them, white-only.

Those programs were great in Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, but in the South, that's how we created such pockets of poverty throughout the South.

They never got advantage of those programs.

You take coming out of World War II when we had the GI Bill.

The GI Bill had all kinds of loans, mortgage loans for veterans.

In Mississippi, we've done the research on this and this has kind of stuff I have to share with you.

In Mississippi, 3,000 veterans got loans out of that GI Bill, the first iteration of it.

Only two black veterans, not 200, two.

One, two.

Only two black veterans got loans.

So they were not able, the black veterans did not get the GI Bill for education or for houses.

What's the quickest way to build wealth in this country.

Home ownership is the biggest way to do that.

You build equity, you pass it on to your children.

They never got the loans.

So I had to share this kind of history.

Now I remember the day that I talked about social security.

I was walking down the hall and a member came over to me and says, "I need to talk to you about something."

And he says, "Tell me more about this social security thing.

I never knew that."

So I think that you stand a good chance of getting people to a better place if you can give them the facts of why you doing it and why you need to do it, you just can't do it on your emotions you have to sit down with them and get them to see, we need to do this because here's a mistake that was made in the past, let's not make that mistake this time.

Let's make sure that we cover things like, you know, we got 12 states that have refused to expand Medicaid.

Eight of those 12 states are Southern states and we've been joined by Wisconsin.

I don't know what's going on up there but, Wyoming and the other states, but eight of them are Southern states they're the same states, where their folks were that didn't get social security because their fore bearers, they were farm workers and domestic workers.

So my whole thing is, we cannot afford to do that this time and so that's what made it so hard to do this Bill is getting people to a place where they can understand that you are trying to break their back.

You know, he told me, "Well, I don't know if it's paid for."

We did a $1.9 trillion tax cut for the upper 2% and didn't pay forward one penny of it and nobody worried about whether or not it was adding to the deficit.

The whole thing got added to the deficit and nobody said a word.

So you know you aren't gonna beat those arguments, so what you have to do is get people appeal to their sensitivities, and that's the first thing and you might be able to break through their sensibilities.

(audience applauding) - Have a huge number of questions from students.

I've incorporated some of them in what I've asked you.

But one, if there's a way to briefly, I don't know that there is, talk about, I know you met Martin Luther King, Jr. Did you ever meet Bobby Kennedy, John Kennedy, Malcolm X, LBJ, Hubert Humphrey?

I'm just wondering, you've been around a while, so tell me.

- Oh yeah, I've been around a long time.

Yeah, I met all of those people.

I met Martin Luther King Jr., the weekend of October 15th, 1960, the same weekend I met John Lewis and John Lewis and I became friends we were 19 year old college students.

We had a presidential race going on in 1960 Kennedy versus Nixon, and Kennedy, well, Martin Luther King Jr. had been preaching nonviolence, but King had never been to jail and that caused some friction between SELC and SNIC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

And so King had to come to the campus, we were on the campus of Morehouse College.

We sent for him and he came to try to reconcile those differences.

He agreed to meet with us for an hour and we met at 10 o'clock in the evening.

We did not leave that room until four o'clock the next morning.

And it was during that period that I had what I call my Saul to Paul transformation.

I don't remember exactly what I was when I went in that room, but I was a totally different person when I came out and that's when I made my commitment to this movement.

Now, I always tell people that most of us in that movement accepted King's teachings as a tactic.

John Lewis internalized it, that's what he became.

And John and I carried that relationship, he had no idea, we used to talk about this all the time that we would end up being in Congress, serving together.

I married a professional librarian, his wife, Lillian, a professional librarian, and the two of them became fast friends.

And so I got to meet all these people.

Julian Bond and I, not long before he passed away, we sat down together.

I played football against Jesse Jackson in high school.

He was up at Sterling High up in Greenville, South Carolina and I was at Mather Academy.

So all of these people, Martin Luther King Jr.

In fact eight months before he was assassinated, he and I had dinner together or lunch really in the home of Septima Poinsette Clark, I don't know if anybody here know enough about the movement.

You know Septima Poinsette Clark?

Septima Poinsette Clark is who Martin Luther King Jr always called the mother of the movement.

The media decided it would be Rosa Parks, but King always called Septima the mother of the movement.

She was from Charleston, one of my best friends, helped to get me where I am today.

And King was in Charleston, July 6 or 7, just before the assassination and we sat down for two hours over lunch at Septima Poinsette Clark's house.

I was never, what you might call, or even during the sit-ins, they always called on me to pray.

I was the preacher kid, I was not the firebrand, but every time they wanted somebody to sit down and negotiate, they always got me to come and sit down and negotiate and try to get the thing settled.

And I always had pretty good luck at that and I suspect I was being trained for being a Whip through all of that.

(audience laughing) - Here's a question from students.

How do we stop the harmful misinformation spread through social media?

Often, of course it's hate-filled and overwhelmingly false.

This is a tough one, what do we do about this?

- Now I know this is not gonna meet with favor with a lot of people, but I'm convinced that where we went wrong in all of this is getting rid of the fairness doctrine.

(audience applauding) Yeah, I'm convinced of that.

You know, when people have license to say anything they wanna say about anybody they wanna say about it and do it in the cover of free speech and that sort of thing.

You know, that's why we have so many media running away with all this false information and they give credit to it.

The fairness doctrine kept a certain lid on all of that.

That's been removed.

And there are some people who are now beginning to have a discussion about whether or not we ought to bring back the fairness doctrine.

I don't think that we're gonna get this under control without, if not the fairness doctrine, something akin to it.

We've got to do this.

This plethora of media, now way back in the day, it was ABC, CBS and NDC and that was it.

Now they got so many Cs and Bs and none of them having any kind of regulation at all.

You've got politicians who've spent more time trying to figure out how to make a headline than how to make headway you're gonna have a problem.

(audience applauding) - Question, how broken is our election system or process?

I guess I would add to that, how fragile do you think our democracy is?

- It's extremely so.

You know, when you think, all the historians here, I'm gonna call myself a historian, I studied history.

I used to teach it at the high school level, but I know this, all of the great empires decayed from within, that I do know.

When too much decadence, disinformation, when you allow these kinds of things to go unchecked, you may not recognize when it's gone a little bit too far.

It might be over with, I would really be willing to bet that not a single one of us thought that January 6 could occur and be so close to succeeding.

January 6 came very close to succeeding.

I think that the only way for us to really get a check on all of this is if we visit those things that worked for so long, so well, and there's nothing wrong with them updating a legislation that was so effective.

I just think we're gonna have to do that.

- You've had a history of working well with Republicans actually.

You even had some good dealings with one of my predecessors, Republican, Michigan, Governor George Romney, but there were others as well.

Do you care, 'cause I want to make sure the audience understands it as committed as you are to what would be Democratic Party candidates and values, that doesn't mean you don't work across it all.

When you say you work with people, you really mean it.

- Yeah, George Romney, quite frankly, was one of my favorite governors, believe it or not.

You didn't know it Governor Blanchard but I've been studying you a long time.

(audience laughing) I stay in close touch really with Michigan politics.

Yeah, I don't come up here that often, but I watch what's happening in Michigan.

I've been on this campus before.

I've been here in Lansing before.

In fact we were just talking about a very good friend of mine with the Governor called Dick Letts.

Many of you here may remember Richard Letts.

(audience applauding) Richard and his wife, Olivia just before she passed away.

She called her daughter living over in Chicago to come and get her.

She wanted her to bring her to Washington, to sit down with me as she knew the end was near.

She and my wife were very good friends.

So I've been in and out of Lansing I've been on this campus.

I've been at Western Michigan or Center.

I've been to another Michigan school here where they've got a pilot school there, I remember being there.

So George Romney, if you remember, you won't remember.

You may have read about Romney leaving Lansing, going down to Detroit after the riots, after King was assassinated, the Detroit riots and he walked the streets of Detroit stopping and talking to people, to find out, why would they burn down their community this way?

And Romney started asking people questions like, "Well, how long have you been living here?

Where are you from?"

And Williamsburg County, South Carolina kept popping up in his answers.

So when he made his ill-fated run for President, before he made the ill-fitted statement, of having been brainwashed about the Vietnam War, he came to South Carolina.

Strom Thurmond brought him to Winnsboro County.

And so my parents were Republicans.

They were members of the party of Lincoln.

So I didn't grow up hating Republicans, I still don't hate Republicans.

Yeah, I know Fred very well.

Fred and I served on the so-called select, what was that committee called?

The special committee trying to fashion a budget deal and we used to talk with each other every day.

Fred, I considered to be a reasonable guy.

He just caught up in the party that has lost it's way that's all, I mean that.

I don't have anything against the Republican party.

I do have a whole lot against this tolerance for things that are detrimental to the future of this great country.

And this is a great country as I said earlier.

What we've gotta do is figure out how to make the country's greatness accessible and affordable for everybody.

It doesn't have to be made great, it is great.

Got solid underpinnings.

And we cannot tolerate these underpinnings of this great democracy being destroyed by any one person, least more, any group of people.

(audience applauding) - Would you have liked to played football for Michigan State University?

(audience laughing) Well, I'll tell you what, I'm sort of an athlete.

Baseball was my sport.

I still play golf.

I understand you got two golf courses connected with this University now, but I used to play golf.

Dick Letts was a great golfer and we used to play the Michigan State course a lot.

So I don't know if I would put play football for anybody (audience titters) but I know this, I did play football in high school.

I played on the College's team for a short period of time.

Just know Deacon Jones was my classmate at South Carolina State and I was a running back.

Now you just imagine me in scrimmages against Deacon Jones that will change your mind about football very quickly.

(audience laughing) (audience applauding) And that's what it did to me.

Deacon and I were great friends and I'll never forget, he came to visit with me came down to South Carolina 'cause he in the South Carolina Athletic Hall of Fame.

So he used to come down and we would visit the other.

And Deacon said to me, when he found out he had cancer to watch him, he sat in front of my desk and he wept, because he said "This one I can't beat."

And so Deacon and I were very good friends.

But I have done something though, I got two former staffers in here, John Samuel, where are you, John?

John Samuel is a graduate of Michigan State.

(audience applauding) Mike Hacker, where are you?

(audience titters) He is from University of Michigan.

(audience applauding) (Jim laughing) Okay and the two of them are sitting together, go figure.

(audience applauding) So Governor that's the kind of guy I've always been.

I'm able to bring warring factions together.

(chuckles) (audience applauding) - We're over our time.

That's a great way to end, but I don't wanna end that way.

(James chuckling) (Jim chuckling) I want you to talk about as we conclude, 'cause we could go on all night, you all know that, what's your hope for this coming year?

I mean, other than we want people to get along, as you pointed out, you figure you're the one that can bridge the differences, but do you have any special hope or wish for our country, for our people, for the world?

Anything you'd like to say to our viewers 'cause this will be aired on WKAR.

Thank you again, Susi Elkins of WKAR, but what's your thinking?

(audience applauds) - Well, let me answer your question by using this environment as an example, to make this point.

Now look up at all of these lights and see how well illuminated this room is.

I think about the way all of us were taught.

And I think about the fact that we're all taught that one of, if not the greatest inventor in American history is Thomas Edison who gave us the light bulb.

But the fact of the matter is, Thomas Edison, could not get the light bulb to work effectively.

He could get it to come on, but he couldn't keep it on.

But then Thomas Edison was told about a guy up in Boston, Massachusetts named Lewis Latimer, the son of former slaves who had escaped to Boston, Massachusetts escaped from slavery.

Lewis Latimer had invented something called a filament and Thomas Edison had enough good sense to get outside of his comfort zone.

Thomas Edison, the white guy went up to Boston, Massachusetts and sought out the black guy and the two of them brought their intelligence together and they have lit the world.

Now, when you hear all of this stuff about critical race theory, that's nothing new.

How many of you, I won't ask you to raise your hands ever heard of Lewis Latimer before tonight?

Most people I talked to never heard of Lewis Latimer, but that is because we have not taught our history accurately.

(audience applauding) Just imagine what it would be like if every student from every high school that's represented on this campus, had learned from an early age about Lewis Latimer, what an impact it would have on their lives, feeling that they could emulate a Lewis Latimer.

I think that what I would like to see going forward for us to get above or beyond this whole notion that we are competing against each other.

We are all Americans.

As John Lewis, if he were here tonight, John Lewis would say, "We are all one big family."

We all came over on different ships, but we're all in the same boat now and we need to row the boat together, thank you.

(audience applauding) - James Clyburn.

Thank you very much.

(audience applauding) (men chattering) - Thank you.

- President Barack Obama has said of James Clyburn.

He's one of a handful of people, who when they speak, the entire Congress listens.

It's been our pleasure to listen to Representative Clyburn, speak about his life and his decades of public service.

WKAR thanks the Governor Jim Blanchard Public Service Forum for sharing this special conversation with us so that we could share it with you here on WKAR.

Thank you for watching.

(gentle music)