Editor’s Notes: A long climb to equality
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I do enough driving to have a few favorite podcasts that go along for the ride. One of the best is a BBC production that features a historian, a comedian and a moderator, to take a look at historical figures and such and reveal little known facts in combination with a little humorous modern perspective.
Last week the episode I caught was about Frederick Douglass. It was a fascinating program, filled with plenty of things I had not been taught in school. At the end, the historian read an excerpt from Douglass's 1852 speech "What, to the slave, is the Fourth of July?"
As we approach Martin Luther King Day, I feel compelled to share the piece she read:
"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy--a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.
"Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival …"
Those words were spoken more than 171 years ago. It took another 11 years for Douglass to help convince President Abraham Lincoln to sign the Emancipation Proclamation.
Then, another full century later, another great man, still railing against the injustices that prevailed in the Land of the Free told the world about his dream.
This speech, we all know a little better:
"When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men -- yes, Black men as well as white men -- would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note ..."
Much later in that 1963 speech, King said:
"And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. But not only that, let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
"And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last."
"When this happens," King said then. That was more than 60 years ago. One cannot help but wonder whether he would believe, today, that we had made it to "the promised land," now; or whether he would still be fighting.
I've borrowed words from two great men for this column. There's almost nothing I could add to what they had to say on the matter -- except that, for goodness sake, maybe we could all spend Monday thinking about whether we are helping or hurting the effort for which Douglass risked his life and King died.
Christina Myer is executive editor of The Parkersburg News and Sentinel. She can be reached via e-mail at cmyer@newsandsentinel.com