“We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Not a lot of equivocation there. Thomas Jefferson declared the words that followed could only be refuted by someone with their head in the sand. “All men are created equal.”
The man who wrote those words was definitely an enigma. Jefferson, along with 41 of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence, was a slave owner. Unlike many of the Founding Fathers, Jefferson never freed his slaves, some 600 of them, including a woman he supposedly loved and fathered six children with, Sally Hemings.
A renaissance man and prolific author, Jefferson was a poor manager of his money. He had a taste for expensive original manuscripts and fine imported wine. Monticello was mortgaged to the hilt. Jefferson’s slaves were just about the only fluid capital he had. Yet, Jefferson described slavery as a “moral depravity” and an “abominable crime” and, as president, sternly opposed the spread of slavery to the newly acquired western territories.
The Constitution, written 11 years after the Declaration of Independence, is as remarkable for what it didn’t say as it is for what it did. It didn’t found Christianity as the state religion, capitalism wasn’t set as the operative economic policy and English wasn’t established as the official language.
Tragically, what else the Founders didn’t do was abolish slavery as Mexico did after it won its independence from Spain in the 1820s. Southern enslavers would never have stood for that. The United States would pay dearly for that omission four score and seven years later.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said slavery was good for the Africans because they learned a trade that would serve them well when they got their freedom. That’s a classic example of why we need to examine American history — warts and all.
Of the 12.5 million native Africans ripped from their homeland between 1501 and 1866, slapped into chains and loaded like cordwood into ships, 1.8 million died in transit from disease, malnutrition, dehydration, violence or despair.
Once in America, they were forced to do intense, physical labor white men were too lazy to do for no pay. Bullwhips were used for motivation. Family units were torn asunder. Slaves were bred like livestock. Fresh young slave girls were taken advantage of by the “masters” and overseers. After emancipation, the Jim Crow era produced lynchings, church burnings and the denial of all rights.
As bad as the white American treatment of African Americans was, how the Native Americans were dealt with was almost worse. It was their land the whites stole. What followed amounted to a genocide, as the indigenous people were eliminated by diseases they weren’t immune to, bullets when they tried to defend their land and starvation due to the wiping out of their primary source of sustenance: buffalo.
So, on the 250th anniversary of Jefferson’s inspiring words, how far have we come in granting full equality to people of color? The current administration is welcoming white Afrikaners from South Africa, while vigorously resisting nonwhite immigrants from anywhere.
Dark-complected immigrants without documentation are brutally seized and locked in concentration camp-like detention centers. Seventy-five-percent of them have committed no crime at all, 20% are guilty of minor infractions like traffic violations, shoplifting, or trespassing and 5% have perpetrated serious, violent offenses.
The current form of slavery is the prison system. Forty-percent of the incarcerated population is Black, while only 13% of the general population is.
There’s an all-out assault on Critical Race Theory, a strictly intellectual movement that’s nowhere present in our schools, Affirmative Action and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, efforts to level the playing field for minorities. These are described as reverse discrimination. So what? We owe these people.
Our present president began his political career with the blatantly racist birther movement, claiming President Barack Obama was born in Kenya. In 1973, Trump and his father were fined by the Justice Department for prejudicial rental practices. Trump’s father was a heavy contributor to the Ku Klux Klan.
After Trump won the 2016 election, he thanked Blacks for not voting. In response to the 2017 Unite the Right protest by white supremacists and counter protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump said, “There were fine people on both sides.”
“I won the 2020 election” is Trump’s biggest whopper, but right up there is the one he told in a 2016 debate. “I’m the least racist person you will ever meet.”
Perhaps the most notable former slave was Frederick Douglass. In his famous Fourth of July speech in 1852 “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” Douglass said, “American slavery is inconsistent with America’s founding principles and with Christianity. It is terrible for the nation and endangers the Union. You should get rid of it.”
Or, as Richard Pryor put it at the nation’s bicentennial in 1976, “We’re celebrating 200 years of white folks kicking ass.” White people seemingly have to put their race above others. Equality just isn’t in their DNA.
Yes, there’s been progress. We don’t see a lot of chains, bullwhip and nooses these days. I voted for third party candidates in 2008 and 2012, but I cried tears of joy when I saw Obama and his family come out on the stage in Grant Park in Chicago after winning in 2008. I couldn’t believe the most racist nation in the world had just elected a Black president.
The Founders set a high bar in the preamble to the Constitution when they sought “to form a more perfect Union.” What we have is far from perfect, but maybe it’s the best there ever was. If the American Revolution was a seminal event, it didn’t end in 1783. A continuing revolution that extends the principle that all men are created equal is our responsibility.