Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology

  David Walker was found dead near the doorway of the shop where he sold old clothes. The

  cause of death was not clear.

  From the 1830s to the Civil War, antislavery people built a movement. It took ferocious

  dedication and courage. White abolitionist Wil iam Lloyd Garrison, writing in The Liberator,

  breathed fire: "I accuse the land of my nativity of insulting the majesty of Heaven with the

  greatest mockery that was ever exhibited to man." A white mob dragged him through the

  streets of Boston in chains, and he barely escaped with his life.

  The Liberator started with twenty-five subscribers, most of them black. By the 1850s, it was read by more than 100,000. The movement had become a force.

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  Black abolitionists were central to the antislavery movement. Even before Garrison published The Liberator, a black periodical, Freedom's Journal, had appeared. Later, Frederick Douglass, ex-slave and abolitionist orator, started his own newspaper, North Star.

  A conference of blacks in 1854 declared "it is emphatical y our battle; no one else can fight

  it for us."

  The Underground Railroad brought tens of thousands of slaves to freedom in the United

  States and Canada. Harriet Tubman, born into slavery, had escaped alone as a young

  woman. She then made nineteen dangerous trips back into the South, bringing over 300

  slaves to freedom. She carried a pistol and told the fugitives, "You'l be free or die."

  When the Fugitive Slave Act was passed by Congress in 1850, blacks, joined by white

  friends, took the lead in defying the law, in harboring escaped slaves, in rescuing captured

  slaves from courtrooms and police stations. After the act was passed, Reverend J. W.

  Loguen, who had escaped from slavery on his master's horse, had gone to col ege, and had

  become a minister in Syracuse, New York, spoke to a meeting in that city:

  The time has come to change the tones of submission into tones of defiance—

  and to tel Mr. Fil more (President Mil ard Fil more, who signed the law) and

  Mr. Webster (Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, who supported the

  law), if they propose to execute this measure upon us, to send on their

  bloodhounds … . I received my freedom from Heaven, and with it came the

  command to defend my title to it … . I don't respect this law—I don't fear it—I

  won't obey it! It outlaws me, and I outlaw it … . I wil not live a slave, and if

  force is employed to re-enslave me, I shal make preparations to meet the

  crisis as becomes a man.10

  No more shameful record of the moral failure of representative government exists than the

  fact that Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, the president signed it, and the Supreme

  Court approved it.11

  The act forced captured blacks to prove they were not someone's slave; an owner claiming

  him or her needed only an affidavit from friendly whites. For instance, a black man in

  southern Indiana was taken by federal agents from his wife and children and returned to an

  owner who claimed he had run away nineteen years ago. Under the act more than 300

  people were returned to slavery in the 1850s.

  The response to it was civil disobedience. "Vigilance committees" sprang up in various cities to protect blacks endangered by the law. In 1851 a black waiter named Shadrach, who had

  escaped from Virginia, was serving coffee to federal agents in a Boston coffeehouse. They

  seized him and rushed him to the federal courthouse. A group of black men broke into the

  courtroom, took Shadrach from the federal marshals, and saw to it that he escaped to

  Canada. Senator Webster denounced the rescue as treason, and the president ordered

  prosecution of those who had helped Shadrach escape. Four blacks and four whites were

  indicted and put on trial, but juries refused to convict them.12

  Federal agents were sent to Boston right after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law to

  apprehend Wil iam and El en Craft, who were famous escapees from slavery. They had

  disguised themselves as master and servant (she was light skinned and dressed as a man)

  and had taken the railroad north. Boston was ful of defiance. White abolitionist minister

  Theodore Parker hid El en Craft in his house and kept a loaded revolver on his desk. A black

  abolitionist concealed Wil iam Craft. He stacked two kegs of gunpowder on his front porch.

  The local vigilance committee warned the federal marshals it was not safe to remain in

  Boston, and they left town.

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  In Christiana, Pennsylvania, in September 1851, a slave-owner arrived from Maryland with federal agents, to capture two of his slaves. There was a shoot-out with two dozen armed

  black men determined to protect the fugitives, and the slave-owner was shot dead.

  President Fil more cal ed out the marines and assembled federal marshals to make arrests.

  Thirty-six blacks and five whites were put on trial. A jury acquitted the first defendant, a

  white Quaker, and the government decided to drop the charges against the others.

  Rescues took place and juries refused to convict. In Oberlin, Ohio, a group of students and

  one of their professors organized the rescue of an escaped slave; they were not prosecuted.

  A white man in Springfield, Massachusetts, had organized blacks into a defense group in

  1850. His name was John Brown. In 1858, John Brown and his band of white and black men

  made a wild, daring effort to capture the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, and set

  off a slave revolt throughout the South. Brown and his men were hanged by the

  col aboration of the state of Virginia and the national government. He became a symbol of

  moral outrage against slavery. The great writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, not an activist

  himself, said of John Brown's execution: "He wil make the gal ows holy as the cross."

  What Garrison had said was necessary—"a most tremendous excitement" was shaking the

  country. The abolitionist movement, once a despised few, began to be listened to by

  mil ions of Americans, indignant over the enslavement of 4 mil ion men, women, and

  children.

  Nevertheless when the Civil War began, Congress made its position clear, in a resolution

  passed with only a few dissenting votes: "This war is not waged … for any purpose of …

  overthrowing or interfering with the rights of established institutions of those states, but …

  to preserve the Union."

  As for President Lincoln, his caution, his politicking around the issue of slavery (despite his

  personal indignation at its cruelty) had been made clear when he campaigned for the

  Senate in 1858. At that time he told voters in Chicago: "Let us discard al this quibbling

  about… this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be

  placed in an inferior position."

  But two months later, in southern Il inois, he assured his listeners: "I wil say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political

  equality of the white and black races … . I as much as any other man am in favor of having

  the superior position assigned to the white race."13

  The abolitionists went to work. To their acts of civil disobedience and of armed resistance,

  they added more orthodox methods of agitation and education. Petitions for emancipation

  poured into Congress in 1861 and 1862. Congress, responding, passed a Confiscation Act,

  providing for the freeing of slaves of an
yone who fought with the Confederacy. But it was

  not enforced.

  When the Emancipation Proclamation was issued at the start of 1863, it had little practical

  effect. It only declared slaves free in states stil rebel ing against the Union. Lincoln used it

  as a threat to Confederate states: if you keep fighting, I wil declare your slaves free; if you

  stop fighting, your slaves wil remain. So, slavery in the border states, on the Union side,

  were left untouched by the proclamation. The London Spectator remarked dryly, "The

  principle is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him

  unless he is loyal to the United States."14 Stil , the moral impact of the proclamation was

  strong. It came from Lincoln's military needs, but also from the pressures of the antislavery

  movement.

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  By the summer of 1864 approximately 400,000 signatures asking legislation to end slavery had been gathered and sent to Congress. The First Amendment's right "to petition the

  government for a redress of grievances" had never been used so powerful y. In January

  1865 the House of Representatives, fol owing the lead of the Senate, passed the Thirteenth

  Amendment, declaring slavery unconstitutional.

  The representative system of government, the constitutional structure of the modern

  democratic state, unresponsive for eighty years to the moral issue of mass enslavement,

  had now final y responded. It had taken thirty years of antislavery agitation and four years

  of bloody war. It had required a long struggle—in the streets, in the countryside, and on the

  battlefield. Frederick Douglass made the point in a speech in 1857:

  Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reforms. The whole history of the

  progress of human liberty shows that al concessions yet made to her august

  claims have been born of struggle … . If there is no struggle there is no

  progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation,

  are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain

  without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of

  its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical

  one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power

  concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never wil .

  A hundred years after the Civil War, Frederick Douglass's statement was stil true. Blacks

  were being beaten, murdered, abused, humiliated, and segregated from the cradle to the

  grave and the regular organs of democratic representative government were silent

  col aborators.

  The Fourteenth Amendment, born in 1868 of the Civil War struggles, declared "equal

  protection of the laws." But this was soon dead—interpreted into nothingness by the

  Supreme Court, unenforced by presidents for a century.

  Even the most liberal of presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt, would not ask Congress to pass a

  law making lynching a crime. Roosevelt, through World War II, maintained racial

  segregation in the armed forces and was only induced to set up a commission on fair

  employment for blacks when black union leader A. Philip Randolph threatened a march on

  Washington. President Harry Truman ended segregation in the armed forces only after he

  was faced with the prospect—again it was by the determined A. Philip Randolph—of black

  resistance to the draft.

  The Fifteenth Amendment, granting the right to vote, was nul ified by the southern states,

  using discriminatory literacy tests, economic intimidation, and violence to keep blacks from

  even registering to vote. From the time it was passed in 1870 until 1965, no president, no

  Congress, and no Supreme Court did anything serious to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment,

  although the Constitution says that the president "shal take care that the laws be faithful y executed" and also that the Constitution "shal be the Supreme Law of the land."

  If racial segregation was going to come to an end, if the century of humiliation that fol owed

  two centuries of slavery was going to come to an end, black people would have to do it

  themselves, in the face of the silence of the federal government. And so they did, in that

  great campaign cal ed the civil rights movement, which can roughly be dated from the

  Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 to the riot in Watts, Los Angeles, in 1965, but its roots go

  back to the turn of the century and it has branches extending forward to the great urban

  riots of 1967 and 1968.

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  I speak of roots and branches, because the movement did not suddenly come out of

  nowhere in the 1950s and 1960s. It was prepared by many decades of action, risk, and

  sacrifice; by many defeats; and by a few victories. The roots go back at least to the turn of

  the century, to the protests of Wil iam Monroe Trotter; to the writings of W. E. B. DuBois; to

  the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); to

  the streetcar boycotts before World War I; to the seeds sown in black churches, in black

  col eges, and in the Highlander Folk School of Tennessee; and to the pioneering work of

  radicals, pacifists, and labor leaders.15

  It is a comfort to the liberal system of representative government to say the civil rights

  movement started with the Supreme Court decision of 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education

  of Topeka. That was when the Supreme Court final y concluded that the Fourteenth

  Amendment provision of "equal protection of the laws" meant that public schools had to

  admit anyone, regardless of color. But to see the origins of the movement in that decision

  gives the Supreme Court too much credit, as if it suddenly had a moral insight or a spiritual

  conversion and then read the Fourteenth Amendment afresh.

  The amendment was no different in 1954 than it had been in 1896, when the Court made

  racial segregation legal. There was just a new context now, a new world. And there were

  new pressures. The Supreme Court did not by itself reintroduce the question of segregation

  in the public schools. The question came before it because black people in the South went

  through years of struggle, risking their lives to bring the issue into the courts.

  Local chapters in the South of the NAACP had much to do with the suits for school

  desegregation. The NAACP itself can be traced back to an angry protest in Boston in 1904 of

  the black journalist Wil iam Monroe Trotter against Booker T. Washington. Washington, a

  black educator, founder of Tuskegee Institute, favored peaceful accommodation to

  segregation. Trotter's arrest and his sentence of thirty days in prison aroused that

  extraordinary black intel ectual W. E. B. DuBois, who wrote later, "when Trotter went to jail, my indignation overflowed … . I sent out from Atlanta … a cal to a few selected persons for

  organized determination and aggressive action on the part of men who believe in Negro

  freedom and growth."16 That "cal to a few persons" started the Niagara Movement—a

  meeting in Niagara, New York, in 1905 that led to the founding of the NAACP in 1911.

  Many years later, with the legal help of the NAACP, the Reverend Joseph DeLaine ral ied the

  black community in Clarendon County, South Carolina, to bring suit in the Brown case.

  Because of this, Reverend DeLaine was fired from his teaching job. So were his wife, two of

  his sisters, and a
niece. He was denied credit from any bank. His home was set ablaze,

  while the fire department stood by and watched. When gunmen fired at his house in the

  night, he fired back, and then, charged with felonious assault, he had to flee the state. His

  church was burned to the ground, and he was considered a fugitive from justice.17

  It seems a common occurrence that a hostile system is made to give ground by a

  combination of popular struggle and practicality. It had happened with emancipation in the

  Civil War. In the case of school desegregation, the persistence of blacks and the risks they

  took became joined to a practical need of the government. The Brown decision was made at

  the height of the cold war, when the United States was vying with the Soviet Union for

  influence and control in the Third World, which was mostly nonwhite.

  Attorney General Herbert Brownel , arguing before the Supreme Court, asked that the

  "separate but equal" doctrine, which al owed segregation in the public schools, "be stricken down," because "it furnishes grist for the communist propaganda mil s, and it raises doubt, even among friendly nations, as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith."18

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  In outlawing school segregation, the Supreme Court declared that integration should proceed "with al deliberate speed," and indeed, the executive branch was very deliberate in enforcing the decision. Eleven years later, by 1965, over three-fourths of the school districts

  in the South remained segregated. It was not until the urban riots of 1965, 1967, and 1968

  that the Supreme Court final y said the "al deliberate speed" injunction was no longer

  "constitutional y permissible" and then desegregation of schools in the Deep South began to speed up.19

  By the provision of the Fourteenth Amendment for equal protection, there should have been

  no segregation of the buses in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. If the amendment had

  meaning, Rosa Parks should not have been ordered out of her seat to give it to a white

  person; she should not have been arrested when she refused. But the federal government

  was not enforcing the Constitution. The checks and balances were checkmated and out of

  equilibrium, and the black population of Montgomery had to get rid of bus segregation by

  their own efforts.