President Bill Clinton: Common Humanity Matters More

At the dedication Friday of the planting of a sapling coming from a tree outside Anne Frank’s hiding place, former President Bill Clinton today said children must be taught “that our common humanity matters more than our interesting differences.”

Clinton spoke at the grand opening ceremony of the Clinton Presidential Center’s new permanent installation, The Anne Frank Tree, located in front of the center.

“The sapling will grow. People will come. But the children can never be allowed to forget,” Clinton said. “And we can’t forget something else. We shouldn’t have to have a killing to be reminded of our common humanity.”

The sapling came from a white horse chestnut tree visible from the attic window where the author of “The Diary of A Young Girl” and her family hid from the Nazis during World War II.The tree died in 2010, but dozens of saplings came from it.

The Clinton Foundation and the Sisterhood of Congregation B’Nai Israel were granted the sapling in 2009 as part of the Anne Frank Center USA’s Sapling Project. Eleven entities in the country were awarded saplings, including Little Rock Central High School.

Clinton said that as a young man he spent time on the Trail of Tears, where he memorized the names of Native American tribes forced from their land.

“To get away with doing that, they had to be viewed as subhuman,” he said. “The truth is, greedy people wanted the land.”

He said that ISIS, the Islamic extremist group in Syria and Iraq known for its brutal killings, is a “replay of what cost Anne Frank her life.”

But he recounted instances where enemies have come together. Those included the mayor of Srebrenica in Bosnia, whose father, brother and all male classmates were killed by Serbs, but who welcomed the prime minister of Serbia during a recent ceremony Clinton attended. They also include the country of Rwanda, torn apart by civil war in the 1990s but now coming together; and Nelson Mandela, who forgave his South African captors and invited them into his government; and Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister of Israel who signed a peace agreement with the Palestinians and then was assassinated a year later by a Jewish law student.

Clinton said that perhaps his biggest achievement as president was the mapping of the human genome, which led to economic activity and important medical research.

“But the most important lesson of the sequencing of the human genome is underappreciated,” he said. “It is that every single difference you can see in this crowd that is not age-related – your race, your gender, the color of your eyes, the color of your skin, the shape of your body – it’s all rooted in one-half of one percent of your genomic makeup. Otherwise, we are 99 and a half percent the same.”

The installation consists of the tree and five etched glass panels, two of them featuring quotes from Frank and Clinton. Frank’s quote comes from her entry on Feb. 23, 1944: “From my favorite spot on the floor, I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind. … As long as that exists, I thought, and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies, while this lasts, I cannot be unhappy.”

The other three panels mark other periods of injustice in Arkansas’ history. One marks the Indian Removal Act of 1930 and features a quote from Chief Heckathon, hereditary chief of the Quapaw during that period. Another marks the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and features a quote from actor George Takei, “Mr. Sulu” from “Star Trek” fame, who was interned at the Rohwer Relocation Center in Desha County. The third marks the struggle to integrate Little Rock Central High School and features a quote by Melba Patillo Beals, member of the Little Rock Nine.

Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, spoke about the need for tolerance and connected Anne Frank’s history with that of Central High. Like Frank, Beals was 15 when she endured injustice, he said.