The Read Online Free
  • Latest Novel
  • Hot Novel
  • Completed Novel
  • Popular Novel
  • Author List
  • Romance & Love
  • Fantasy
  • Science Fiction
  • Young Adult
  • Mystery & Detective
  • Thrillers & Crime
  • Actions & Adventure
  • History & Fiction
  • Horror
  • Western
  • Humor

    Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology

    Previous Page Next Page

      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.

      192

      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.

      193

      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.

      194

      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.

      195

      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

      196

      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.

     
    Previous Page Next Page
© The Read Online Free 2022~2025