< Bill Clinton Gets Into Heated Exchange With Black Lives Matter Protester

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

You know, so much has changed since the Clintons lived in the White House. And those changes complicate Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. Bill Clinton presided over tremendous economic expansion. He also signed a 1994 crime bill, praised at the time but criticized by the protesters who confronted President Clinton yesterday. Here's NPR's Sam Sanders.

SAM SANDERS, BYLINE: When he's on the stump for his wife, Bill Clinton often just riffs - no notes, no teleprompter, just the man himself. But yesterday, that ability to improvise - it was tested.

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UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Shouting).

BILL CLINTON: Wait a minute; wait a minute.

SANDERS: A few minutes into speech in Philadelphia, a small group of black protesters interrupted Clinton.

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B. CLINTON: OK, I heard it. Can I answer? No, you see, here's the thing - I like protestors, but the ones that won't let you answer are afraid of the truth. That's a simple rule.

SANDERS: This back-and-forth went on for about 10 minutes, mostly about the impact of Bill Clinton's 1994 crime bill. Critics say it hurt black communities and put a lot of black people in jail for nonviolent offenses. But Clinton said there was actually a lot of good in the bill.

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B. CLINTON: I had an assault weapons ban in it. I had money for inner-city kids for out-of-school activities. We had 110,000 police officers so we could put people on the street, not in these military vehicles, and the police would look like the people they were policing. We did all of that.

SANDERS: Clinton said the bill helped lead to historic lows in crime rates, and that a lot of black voters supported it. He also took time to address what's become a lingering critique of his wife. In 1996, Hillary Clinton said this about some of the young criminals that crime bill with targeting.

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HILLARY CLINTON: They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called super predators

SANDERS: Hillary Clinton has since said she regrets her use of that word - super predators - but on Thursday, Bill Clinton seemed to stand by it.

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B. CLINTON: I don't know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack and sent them out onto the street to murder other African-American children. Maybe you thought they were good citizens. She didn't. She didn't.

SANDERS: That visual could be problematic - Bill Clinton at a podium looking down at a black woman, wagging his finger at her. Paul Butler teaches criminal law and race relations at Georgetown Law School. He says for black voters, what they saw in that moment might depend a bit on their age.

PAUL BUTLER: Economically, there hasn't been a better time for African-Americans than the Clinton era. So I think a lot of older African-Americans have this romantic view of when Bill Clinton was president - that things were better.

SANDERS: Butler says it's different for young people.

BUTLER: A lot of young folks don't remember that. But what they are very aware of is this air of extreme police violence against African-Americans, mass incarceration and a time when African-American families are actually downwardly mobile.

SANDERS: There was one person in particular I wanted to talk with about all of this.

ERICA MINES: I'm not mad at Bill Clinton. I'm not mad at him as a person. He's a human being.

SANDERS: That's Erica Mines. She was one of those protesters yesterday in Philly.

Did any of that change your mind on how you feel about his policies and his presidency at all?

MINES: No. I still feel the same way about Bill Clinton.

SANDERS: Regardless, the entire interaction was one thing Hillary Clinton does not need right now - a distraction. Sam Sanders, NPR News.

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