Emancipation Proclamation: Forever Free

The silencing of Elizabeth Warren by the U.S. Senate on Tuesday, February 7th as she attempted to read a 1986 letter written by Coretta Scott King challenging Jefferson Session’s nomination to become a a federal judge (which was unsuccessful) has interesting parallels to an earlier freedom fighter who in spite of attempts to silence her, persisted.

In the summer of 1964 Fannie Lou Hamer, a Mississippi wife, mother, sharecropper and activist leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP)  arrived at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City intent on having her multi-racial state party recognized by the Democratic National Party as the official state party, rather than the all white state Democratic Party that refused to accept Black members. At the convention, the national Party’s rules committee considered testimony on the MFDP’s request to be seated.

With the testimony broadcast live on television, after several speakers, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Hamer came to the testimony table and quickly had the audience spellbound as she began chronicling the state-sanction attacks that she endured for trying to register to vote. In the White House, President Lyndon Johnson, concerned about maintaining his Democratic base among segregationists, called a press conference knowing that the television networks would break into the convention coverage, which they did. But Hamer continued to testify, and her story was so gripping that it was later heard in its entirety, most likely by a much larger audience than would have hear her original testimony.  Here is a clip of the testimony:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07PwNVCZCcY&t=1s

On February 1, 2017, at a meeting commemorating Black History Month, Donald Trump noted:

Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.

Perhaps Mr. Trump was thinking of how appropriate observations made by Douglass in his 1857 speech commemorating West Indian independence are for the era that Mr. Trump has ushered in as President. Here is an excerpt from the speech:

Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. 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.

By Kevin McGruder

The summer of 1919 was one of the worst summers for anti-Black violence in U.S. history. In that summer, following the end of World War I, it was as if the nation sought to remind Black people, and Black soldiers in particular, some of whom had been lauded for their valor on the fields of battle in France, that they needed to get Black in their places of subservience. In what became known as Red Summer (because of the blood that flowed in the streets), soldiers were lynched in uniform,  back communities in small towns and big cities were attacked. Chicago exploded in days of anti-Black rioting sparked when a Black boy, who didn’t realize that Lake Michigan was segregated, lost his life while swimming when he was killed by a white rock thrower. In the midst of this, Jamaican poet Claude McKay penned the poem “If We Must Die.” During World War II Winston Churchill used the poem inspire troops to battle, a common interpretation of its message.

In considering the horror of the murders in Orlando, I think we might also use “If We Must Die” to inspire us to a different type of battle, using the weapon of love in response hateful attacks. For us it should mean ending our silence when we hear people expressing hateful messages whether they are politicians, religious leaders, neighbors, family members, or friends. Fight back with love. 

If We Must Die

By Claude McKay (1889-1948)

If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursèd lot. If we must die, O let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

University of Missouri students

Kevin McGruder

The abrupt resignation of Timothy Wolfe, president of the University of Missouri, in the face of mounting criticisms from black students, and the ongoing demonstrations by black students at Yale University have placed the challenges faced by black students on predominantly white campuses in the public eye in a way not seen in decades.  The muted responses of administrators to racial incidents on these campuses has been as troubling as the incidents in which black students were targeted with racial epithets or ridiculed in other ways by fellow students.

Yale University students

Students come and go on campuses, but administrators and faculty are stewards of campus culture. An important part of their charge, whether they realize it or not, is ensuring that a healthy learning environment exists. On residential campuses this is particularly important because where the students learn is also where they live. For the majority of the calendar year, the campus is home.  Given these clear responsibilities, what explanation could there be for the failure of the responsible parties to respond to the concerns of black students?  Some have suggested that honoring the offending students’ rights to free speech prevents intervention. Others have implied that intervening in such incidents would be coddling black students who should learn to make their way on campus and eventually in the world on their own. These arguments do not hold up to scrutiny. Imagine if the tables were turned and, on a predominantly white college campus, black students were hurling epithets at white students, or ridiculing white students in other ways. We can be sure that the full force of the institution would be marshaled to end this behavior, inspired by an instinctive desire to protect students who are in the majority.  A scenario precipitating such action is unlikely because students who are in the racial majority on a campus wield cultural power that is rooted in the assumption that they are true representatives of the student body. Most observers assume that these students are the stewards of campus culture and for their time on campus the majority students do dominate and define campus culture.  When students from the white racial majority on a campus target black students who are racial minorities on that campus, the white students are wielding their power, instinctively engaging in an unfair fight. Their actions illustrate a version of a tyranny of the majority. Expecting individual black students to respond to attacks from white students in a way that can overcome this power imbalance is delusional. Black students understand this, which is why at the University of Missouri, Yale and other campuses they have organized and created coalitions with other sympathetic student allies to amplify their voices. Unfortunately even these efforts have not led to resolutions of the underlying problems. The resignations of University of Missouri president and chancellor are only the beginning of a story that is still unfolding. Yale administrators have not made clear how they plan to respond to student grievances. 

Why such tepid campus responses to incidents that exemplify a tyranny of the majority? Many administrators and faculty do not seem to view the actions of white students from this perspective.  They seem to see each incident as an individual act of wrongdoing rather than acts born of the campus culture, which is derived from American culture.  In the several decades that most colleges have to varying degrees welcomed black students to their campuses, most campuses have done so with the message “join us, learn our ways, adapt and excel.”  Most black students are excited about going to college, expecting to learn and to change as a result of their experiences. But many colleges do not realize that in recruiting students who are not white to their campuses, if they expect these students to feel at home, the campuses also have to be prepared to change in ways that incorporate the perspectives of these non-white students. If they fail to take action many of these black students will endure unhealthy college experiences and some will leave.

University of Missouri students

If colleges are sincerely committed to recruiting black students, and ensuring that they thrive during their college careers, some uncomfortable truths that are barriers to changing campus culture to accommodate non-white students, must be faced.  The enduring power of white supremacy has to be confronted, even though the phrase itself makes many people uncomfortable.  Using a more palatable term disguises the perniciousness of this enduring belief system.  The failure to confront the truth, that white supremacy is alive and well in U.S. culture, and on college campuses, is the only way we can move beyond being mystified by the continuing incidents of racially tinged attacks on campuses. White supremacy is the concept that white people are inherently superior in all ways to other people. The concept dates to the growth of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and was essential to justifying the purchase and sale of millions of people of African descent, from the 1500s through the 1800s, to labor on plantations in the Americas. While many may assume that white supremacy is a relic of the era of slavery, it is important to understand the ways that in the decades after emancipation, white supremacy adapted and endured. In the U.S. the end of slavery in 1865 was followed by decades of segregation laws and other practices limiting the opportunities of black people that are evidence of the desire to maintain the racial hierarchy of whites at the top and blacks at the bottom.  When the successes of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s made such practices illegal, white supremacist tactics became more informal and subtle, but they continue to this day.  People in the U.S., white and black, living in a culture influenced by these centuries of overt and covert white supremacy in action cannot avoid being influenced by these beliefs.

Many white Americans believe in the ideal of racial equality and are not promoters of white supremacy individually.  But white supremacy does not require individual actors to endure, it continues because it has been institutionalized in unseen ways, incorporated into bank lending practices, housing settlement patterns, our unequal education system, employment practices, and as has been made clear over the last year, in the criminal justice system.  White Americans, committed to racial equality, still benefit from white supremacy whether they want to or not, and black Americans, whether they realize it or not, are harmed by white supremacy.

Most of the people enacting white supremacist practices aren’t bad people. While they probably could not explain it, the group of white University of Missouri students who yelled the N-word at their student body president Payton Head, a black man, were most likely motivated by an assumption that a black person should not be in that position. Their verbal attack was an attempt to diminish his achievement. Regardless of his status on campus, they wanted to make clear to him that they still viewed him as below them.  Most white supremacists sincerely believe they are doing what is right. In reality their actions reinforce their beliefs that white people should rightfully be at the top and in power in any given situation. This is the context in which colleges exist today, and this is the legacy that has influenced the interactions between white and black students who are trying to live and learn together on their campuses.

College campuses, with departments of history, psychology, political science, sociology, and philosophy, would seem to be uniquely positioned to engage in discussions that get to the historical root of the contemporary problems facing their campuses.  There are undoubtedly students, administrators, and faculty already engaged in these discussions on these campuses. The fact that the decision makers on the campuses are stumbling in developing an analysis that could lead to a meaningful response suggests an unwillingness to hear and to face the uncomfortable truth behind the tyranny of the majority on their campuses.

Musician J. Rosamond Johnson was born on this day in 1873. He recieved training at the New England Conservatory of Music and, in 1899 J. Rosamond (1873-1954) composed the music to “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and his brother James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) composed the lyrics. The song was first performed publicly in 1900 sung by 500 school children in Jacksonville, Florida. This excerpt from the second verse is particularly relevant today:

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered, Out from the gloomy past, 'Til now we stand at last Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast. 

At the turn of the twentieth century the Johnson brothers, along with their friend Bob Cole composed songs for Broadway shows and performed throughout the United States. A collection of some of their songs has recently been published:

The Songs of Cole and The Johnson Brothers

Series: E.B. Marks Publisher: Edward B. Marks Music Company

Format: Softcover Composers: Bob Cole, John Rosamond Johnson, James Weldon Johnson

                                                                                                                              “Late in his life, composer J. Rosamond Johnson submitted to his longtime publisher, E.B. Marks, a list of songs that would comprise a volume of his best early popular songs written with his pre-1910 partner Bob Cole and his brother, James Weldon Johnson (Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man). That list was never put into print...until now. Featuring an introductionby Dr. Thomas Riis (Just Before Jazz) and several rare photos, this new compilation is the latest legacy offering from the Marks archive, which contains a rich heritage of turn-of-the-century African-American, and thus distinctly American, pre-jazz-era popular song.” Includes: Ain't Dat Scan'lous • Big Indian Chief • The Big Red Shawl • The Bleeding  Moon • Congo Love Song • The Countess of Alagazam • Fishing • I Don't Want to Be No Actor Man No Mo' • I'll Always Love Old Dixie • I'll Keep a Warm Spot in My Heart for You • I've Got Troubles of My Own • The Katy-Did, the Cricket and the Frog • Lazy Moon • Lit'l Gal • Louisiana Lize • Lovely Daughter of Allah • Ma Mississippi Belle • The Maiden with the Dreamy Eyes • Mudder Knows • My Heart's Desiah is Miss Mariah • My Castle on the Nile • Nobody's Lookin' but de Owl an' de Moon • Oh, Didn't He Ramble • The Old Flag Never Touched the Ground • On the Road to Monterey • The Pathway of Love • Roll Them Cotton Bales • Save It for Me! • The Spirit of the Banjo! • Sugar Babe • Two Eyes • Under the Bamboo Tree • When de Jack O'Lantern Starts to Walk About • When It's All Goin' Out, and Nothin' Comin' In • Who Do You Love? View Songlist View Instrumentation                                                     $24.99 (US)                                                       Inventory #HL 00148619 ISBN: 9781495029684 UPC: 888680078515 Width: 9.0" Length: 12.0" 180 pages

Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II

July 13, 2015

http://www.groundswell-mvmt.org/our-nation-is-in-need-of-prophetic-pastoral-counseling-because-it-is-sending-the-message-only-black-deaths-matter/

During my meditation on the messages being sent out from South Carolina this week, three scriptures came to me:

Jeremiah 31:15 – This is what the LORD says: “A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”

John 8:32 – Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

Isaiah 58:1-3 – Shout it aloud, do not hold back. Raise your voice like a trumpet. Declare to my people their rebellion and to the descendants of Jacob their sins. For day after day they seek me out; they seem eager to know my ways, as if they were a nation that does what is right and has not forsaken the commands of its God. They ask me for just decisions and seem eager for God to come near them. “Why have we fasted,” they say, “and you have not seen it? Why have we humbled ourselves, and you have not noticed?”

Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please and exploit all your workers. Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife, and in striking each other with wicked fists. You cannot fast as you do today and expect your voice to be heard on high.”

When the Confederate flag was removed from the South Carolina statehouse Friday morning, Gov. Nikki Haley spoke solemnly of the nine Black churchgoers who were shot to death less than a month ago at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. “We have all been struck by what was a tragedy we didn’t think we would ever encounter,” Haley said of the horrifying massacre. Before signing the bill with nine pens that will go to the families of the victims, she called those who were murdered during Bible Study at the historic church, “Nine amazing people that forever changed South Carolina’s history.” The Governor referenced the “grace” shown by the nine families, when they forgave the white gunman. She said their grace helped usher the state toward this long overdue decision.

Our nation is capable of doing the right thing … but only when Black deaths happen.

The assassinations at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, followed by the public forgiveness from the grieving families, were similarly cited by several South Carolina lawmakers as their reason for voting to remove the flag. What they are really saying is that Black Deaths Matter, not our lives. Black people in the US are only deemed worthy of action in their death, not in their life. In a year that has seen thousands in the streets, young and old, black white and brown, saying to the nation, “Black Lives Matter”, the painful and dangerous message coming from South Carolina this week is:Only Black Deaths Matter. That’s the painful and dangerous narrative being developed out of South Carolina; it’s a narrative that the oppressed of this land have known for a long time: Only Black Deaths Matter. Our nation is capable of doing the right thing – such as taking down the Confederate flag in the year 2015, a flag that represents the racist, immoral, unconstitutional defense of slavery and Jim Crow – but only when Black deaths happen and are met by a response deemed acceptable by those in power. Ever since this flag was raised in 1961, to send the message that South Carolina would not honor equal protection under the law, tens of thousands of small and large protests have not been enough to move the power brokers to take it down.

South Carolina Governor Ernest “Fritz” Hollings presents President John F. Kennedy with a Confederate flag (1961)

In 1968, in Orangeburg South Carolina Highway Patrolmen shot and killed Black college students protesting racial segregation at a bowling alley. No one has ever been charged with those murders. But even this was not enough to bring the flag down.

For 15 years the NAACP has boycotted South Carolina; but that wasn’t enough. In fact for several years, my good friend and brother Dr. Lonnie Randolph, President of the SC NAACP, invited me to stand with him and NAACP’ers from North and South Carolina to raise a prophetic message at the state capitol during King Day at the Dome in front of that same flag, exhorting one and all, even God in heaven, to take it down. My church denomination the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), a predominantly white progressive body, committed to an anti-racism theology, honored the boycott. So I joined Dr. Randolph and all the NAACP warriors who refused to spend a dime in South Carolina for 15 years, with the cautious yet joyful feelings as the flag came down.

Taking down the flag is a good thing. But when we look at the voting and policy records of most of the political leaders who helped to lower it, we should be careful with equating its removal as a history-altering event. Systemic racism is alive and well; they show no intention yet of dealing with the fundamental inequalities racism still causes in our society.

And herein lies a painful reality: Only extreme Black deaths will precede mediocre symbolic steps against past and present racism.

But the power of racism has a strange endurance. This history of refusing to bring down the flag, despite even what happened in Orangeburg, shows that Black deaths alone are not enough to bring change. According to what some politicians and media commentators have implied, knowingly or unknowingly: Only if the murders are caused by someone who had posed for photos of himself surrounded by racist paraphernalia, and only if the deaths are accompanied by acceptable Black love and forgiveness, then it might matter. Then it passes the racist paternalistic standard and tone test. Clearly it has been said without these deaths there never would have been a debate regarding bringing the flag down. And herein lies a painful reality: Only extreme Black deaths will precede mediocre symbolic steps against past and present racism.

We need serious pastoral counseling if we cannot see how ungodly it is to think that a “reciprocal grace” response to nine Black deaths is the removal of a flag. Much has been said about the families’ forgiveness, but in the theological and nonviolent tradition of the Movement I come from, such forgiveness should not be misinterpreted as a dismissal of the greater evil. In fact, the type of Christian forgiveness of Dylann Roof is actually a subversive forgiveness that says the nation cannot place the entirety of the blame on the individual perpetrator alone. The system and culture that produced the climate and perpetrator must also be indicted.

Let us be clear about what’s being said: nine Black deaths may get the flag lowered, but it will not get you one pen to sign Medicaid expansion throughout the South, which would save thousands of Black lives. Black deaths will not get full voting rights, which saves Black political power and produces policies that save black, brown and poor white lives. It will not get criminal justice reform, which liberates Black lives. Nor will it get you full funding for public education, a living wage, or economic empowerment that will lift the lives of black people, minorities, and the poor. It will not get gun reform. Black deaths only get you the lowering of a low-down flag that should have never been up. It will get you nine pens as memorabilia and a signing ceremony at the Capitol. It will get you one final insult in the promise that an undignified flag, a symbol of hate, will be lowered “with dignity and respect” as Governor Haley promised white people still committed to the Lost Cause. And you will get this only if Black people die, and the victims’ families and extended family in the human race behave in a manner declared acceptable and ‘Christian’ by people who have supported un-Christian, immoral public policy that continues to institutionalize economic, racial and political inequality.

We cannot allow this narrative to stand unchallenged. If we do, we are complicit in the furtherance of a chilling truth that Black lives don’t matter . . . only Black death matters. I cannot help but remember in the movie Glory, when Black soldiers had to march to certain death in order for white Union soldiers, their comrades, to salute them! I cannot help but remember how four black girls had to be blown up at 16th Street Baptist Church in order to get certain people to consider that racism and Alabama Gov. George Wallace had gone too far. And it was only after Dr. King was murdered that we won the Fair Housing Act.

Left to right: Denise McNair, 11; Carol Robinson, 14; Addie Mae Collins, 14; Cynthia Wesley, 14, killed in the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. , Sunday, September 15, 1963

But we must refuse to be easily comforted, and not to be tricked by cosmetic fixes.

Medgar Evers, James Earl Chaney, Jimmy Jackson, and scores of other black warriors, along with Andrew Goodman, Viola Liuzzo, James Reeb, and Michael Schwerner — white, but with black liberation in their hearts — had to die to get real action on voting rights legislation to enforce what was already our right from the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments of the United States Constitution. At least, in these cases, the Movement set the benchmarks for the policy changes we wanted. Now staunch adversaries of civil rights are the ones who decide the benchmarks they will “graciously” give in response to Black deaths – that is, IF they approve of how we express our sorrow and grief. This is a kind of desecration and devaluing of even our deaths. Adding insult to injury, while we are having a photo-op next to the “dignified” removal of the flag in South Carolina, their counterparts in US Congress actually debated whether to keep the same flag flying on federal property, of the same government land that the flag sought to overthrow. To some of them, Black lives, Black emotions, Black history, and Black pain don’t matter. Human beings, deeply hurt by death, are the only creatures who don’t have to respond with death. But we must refuse to be easily comforted, and not to be tricked by cosmetic fixes. Our ability to forgive is, in reality, an act of resistance to the attempts to lay the blame for this horror at the feet of one man.

The nine people killed on July 17, 2015 at Mother Emanuel AME Church, Charleton, SC: first row l-r: Cynthia Hurd, Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Rev. Sharonda Singleton;second row, l-r: Rev. Daniel Simmons, Sr., Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders; third row, l-r:Myra Thompson, Ethel Lance, Susie Jackson

Two days after the nine assassinations at Mother Emanuel, I was asked to preach at New York’s renowned Riverside Church a sermon, which I later completed in my own pulpit, and said in light of the arrest of Dylann Roof:

The perpetrator has been caught. But the killers are still at large. The deep well of American racism and white supremacy that Dylann Roof drank from remains. The families of the nine martyrs challenged the schizophrenia of American morality that allowed political leaders to condemn the crime and at the same time embrace the policies that are its genesis. Many of South Carolina politicians and others in the nation are examples. They decry the killings but steadfastly refuse to support efforts to quell their divisive rhetoric and to cease their push for policies that promote race-based voter suppression. They refuse to vote for the Voting Rights Act. They cut funds for public education in ways that foster, re-segregation. They deny workers living wages. They refuse Medicaid expansion. They proliferate guns. They use racialized code words to criticize the president, all in the name of taking ‘their’ country back to ‘prevent its destruction.’ When will they own up to the fact that there is a history of racialized political rhetoric and policies that directly spawn the pathology of terroristic assassinations and carnages, and of violent resistance to constitutional decisions.

—A Message to America in the Midst of Our Mourning, Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II

How many Black deaths will it take to secure restoration of the Voting Rights Act, Medicaid expansion, public education funding, living wages or criminal justice reform? I shudder to think.

If America is serious about this moment we cannot cry ceremonial tears, while refusing to support the martyred Pastor and his Parishioners’ stalwart fight against the racism that gave birth to the crime. Gov. Haley said the people killed in that Charleston church, and the forgiving actions of their families, set the Confederate flag’s removal in motion. If that’s the case, then the actions of Black-led protests don’t matter. Black political power doesn’t matter. Only in the face of nine Black deaths, and a certain acceptable perceived response, will anything be done. If this is the standard, how many Black deaths will it take to secure restoration of the Voting Rights Act, Medicaid expansion, public education funding, living wages or criminal justice reform? I shudder to think. This nation needs counseling and redemption until Black Lives Matters. And when Black Lives Matter, then all lives will matter. The dehumanization of Black Lives dehumanizes all lives.

If the nation gets real sustained pastoral counseling, then, as Denise Quarles, the daughter of Emanuel victim Myra Thompson, said: “On the other side of that tragedy, we see a lot of positives coming out. Maybe people will change their hearts.” Maybe we can be redeemed. Maybe we can do the real work of addressing the catastrophe of institutional racism. Maybe. Let us believe in maybe. This nation needs prophetic pastoral counseling at a time like this. But as any good counselor knows, it will be up to us to do the work, and that is yet to be seen.

Frederick Douglass

July 5,  1852

In 1847 Frederick Douglass  settled in Rochester, New York, where he published The North Star, an abolitionist newspaper. He directed the local underground railroad which smuggled escaped slaves into Canada and also worked to end racial segregation in Rochester's public schools.

In 1852, the leading citizens of Rochester asked Douglass to give a speech as part of their Fourth of July celebrations. Douglass acceptedtheir invitation.

In his speech, however, Douglass delivered a scathing attack on the         hypocrisy of a nation celebrating freedom and independence with speeches,      parades and platitudes, while, within its borders, nearly four million          humans were being kept as slaves.

Mr. President, Friends and Fellow Citizens:

He who could address this audience without a quailing sensation, has stronger nerves than I have. I do not remember ever to have appeared as a speaker before any assembly more shrinkingly, nor with greater distrust of my ability, than I do this day. A feeling has crept over me, quite unfavorable to the exercise of my limited powers of speech. The task before me is one which requires much previous thought and study for its proper performance. I know that apologies of this sort are generally considered flat and unmeaning. I trust, however, that mine will not be so considered. Should I seem at ease, my appearance would much misrepresent me. The little experience I have had in addressing public meetings, in country schoolhouses, avails me nothing on the present occasion.

The papers and placards say, that I am to deliver a 4th [of] July oration. This certainly sounds large, and out of the common way, for it is true that I have often had the privilege to speak in this beautiful Hall, and to address many who now honor me with their presence. But neither their familiar faces, nor the perfect gauge I think I have of Corinthian Hall, seems to free me from embarrassment.

The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable — and the difficulties to be overcome in getting from the latter to the former, are by no means slight. That I am here to-day is, to me, a matter of astonishment as well as of gratitude. You will not, therefore, be surprised, if in what I have to say I evince no elaborate preparation, nor grace my speech with any high sounding exordium. With little experience and with less learning, I have been able to throw my thoughts hastily and imperfectly together; and trusting to your patient and generous indulgence, I will proceed to lay them before you.

This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day. This celebration also marks the beginning of another year of your national life; and reminds you that the Republic of America is now 76 years old. I am glad, fellow-citizens, that your nation is so young. Seventy-six years, though a good old age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation. Three score years and ten is the allotted time for individual men; but nations number their years by thousands. According to this fact, you are, even now, only in the beginning of your national career, still lingering in the period of childhood. I repeat, I am glad this is so. There is hope in the thought, and hope is much needed, under the dark clouds which lower above the horizon. The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times; but his heart may well beat lighter at the thought that America is young, and that she is still in the impressible stage of her existence. May he not hope that high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny? Were the nation older, the patriot’s heart might be sadder, and the reformer’s brow heavier. Its future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its prophets go out in sorrow. There is consolation in the thought that America is young. Great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages. They may sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty, and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. They may also rise in wrath and fury, and bear away, on their angry waves, the accumulated wealth of years of toil and hardship. They, however, gradually flow back to the same old channel, and flow on as serenely as ever. But, while the river may not be turned aside, it may dry up, and leave nothing behind but the withered branch, and the unsightly rock, to howl in the abyss-sweeping wind, the sad tale of departed glory. As with rivers so with nations.

Fellow-citizens, I shall not presume to dwell at length on the associations that cluster about this day. The simple story of it is that, 76 years ago, the people of this country were British subjects. The style and title of your “sovereign people” (in which you now glory) was not then born. You were under the British Crown. Your fathers esteemed the English Government as the home government; and England as the fatherland. This home government, you know, although a considerable distance from your home, did, in the exercise of its parental prerogatives, impose upon its colonial children, such restraints, burdens and limitations, as, in its mature judgment, it deemed wise, right and proper.

Douglass’ address was delivered at Corinthian Hall , one of Rochester’s most prestigious sites for concerts, balls, lectures, fairs, plays and parties. The event was hosted by the Ladies of the Rochester Anti Slavery Sewing Society to commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

But, your fathers, who had not adopted the fashionable idea of this day, of the infallibility of government, and the absolute character of its acts, presumed to differ from the home government in respect to the wisdom and the justice of some of those burdens and restraints. They went so far in their excitement as to pronounce the measures of government unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not to be quietly submitted to. I scarcely need say, fellow-citizens, that my opinion of those measures fully accords with that of your fathers. Such a declaration of agreement on my part would not be worth much to anybody. It would, certainly, prove nothing, as to what part I might have taken, had I lived during the great controversy of 1776. To say now that America was right, and England wrong, is exceedingly easy. Everybody can say it; the dastard, not less than the noble brave, can flippantly descant on the tyranny of England towards the American Colonies. It is fashionable to do so; but there was a time when to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men’s souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers. But, to proceed.

Feeling themselves harshly and unjustly treated by the home government, your fathers, like men of honesty, and men of spirit, earnestly sought redress. They petitioned and remonstrated; they did so in a decorous, respectful, and loyal manner. Their conduct was wholly unexceptionable. This, however, did not answer the purpose. They saw themselves treated with sovereign indifference, coldness and scorn. Yet they persevered. They were not the men to look back.

As the sheet anchor takes a firmer hold, when the ship is tossed by the storm, so did the cause of your fathers grow stronger, as it breasted the chilling blasts of kingly displeasure. The greatest and best of British statesmen admitted its justice, and the loftiest eloquence of the British Senate came to its support. But, with that blindness which seems to be the unvarying characteristic of tyrants, since Pharaoh and his hosts were drowned in the Red Sea, the British Government persisted in the exactions complained of.

The madness of this course, we believe, is admitted now, even by England; but we fear the lesson is wholly lost on our present ruler.

Oppression makes a wise man mad. Your fathers were wise men, and if they did not go mad, they became restive under this treatment. They felt themselves the victims of grievous wrongs, wholly incurable in their colonial capacity. With brave men there is always a remedy for oppression. Just here, the idea of a total separation of the colonies from the crown was born! It was a startling idea, much more so, than we, at this distance of time, regard it. The timid and the prudent (as has been intimated) of that day, were, of course, shocked and alarmed by it.

Signing of the Declaration of Independence, John Trumbull (1817)

Such people lived then, had lived before, and will, probably, ever have a place on this planet; and their course, in respect to any great change, (no matter how great the good to be attained, or the wrong to be redressed by it), may be calculated with as much precision as can be the course of the stars. They hate all changes, but silver, gold and copper change! Of this sort of change they are always strongly in favor.

These people were called Tories in the days of your fathers; and the appellation, probably, conveyed the same idea that is meant by a more modern, though a somewhat less euphonious term, which we often find in our papers, applied to some of our old politicians.

Their opposition to the then dangerous thought was earnest and powerful; but, amid all their terror and affrighted vociferations against it, the alarming and revolutionary idea moved on, and the country with it.

On the 2d of July, 1776, the old Continental Congress, to the dismay of the lovers of ease, and the worshipers of property, clothed that dreadful idea with all the authority of national sanction. They did so in the form of a resolution; and as we seldom hit upon resolutions, drawn up in our day whose transparency is at all equal to this, it may refresh your minds and help my story if I read it. “Resolved, That these united colonies are, and of right, ought to be free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown; and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, dissolved.”

Citizens, your fathers made good that resolution. They succeeded; and to-day you reap the fruits of their success. The freedom gained is yours; and you, therefore, may properly celebrate this anniversary. The 4th of July is the first great fact in your nation’s history — the very ring-bolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny.

Pride and patriotism, not less than gratitude, prompt you to celebrate and to hold it in perpetual remembrance. I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.

From the round top of your ship of state, dark and threatening clouds may be seen. Heavy billows, like mountains in the distance, disclose to the leeward huge forms of flinty rocks! That bolt drawn, that chain broken, and all is lost. Cling to this day — cling to it, and to its principles, with the grasp of a storm-tossed mariner to a spar at midnight.

The coming into being of a nation, in any circumstances, is an interesting event. But, besides general considerations, there were peculiar circumstances which make the advent of this republic an event of special attractiveness.

The whole scene, as I look back to it, was simple, dignified and sublime.

The population of the country, at the time, stood at the insignificant number of three millions. The country was poor in the munitions of war. The population was weak and scattered, and the country a wilderness unsubdued. There were then no means of concert and combination, such as exist now. Neither steam nor lightning had then been reduced to order and discipline. From the Potomac to the Delaware was a journey of many days. Under these, and innumerable other disadvantages, your fathers declared for liberty and independence and triumphed.

Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too — great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.

They loved their country better than their own private interests; and, though this is not the highest form of human excellence, all will concede that it is a rare virtue, and that when it is exhibited, it ought to command respect. He who will, intelligently, lay down his life for his country, is a man whom it is not in human nature to despise. Your fathers staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, on the cause of their country. In their admiration of liberty, they lost sight of all other interests.

They were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men; but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance; but that they knew its limits. They believed in order; but not in the order of tyranny. With them, nothing was “settled” that was not right. With them, justice, liberty and humanity were “final;” not slavery and oppression. You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation. Their solid manhood stands out the more as we contrast it with these degenerate times.

How circumspect, exact and proportionate were all their movements! How unlike the politicians of an hour! Their statesmanship looked beyond the passing moment, and stretched away in strength into the distant future. They seized upon eternal principles, and set a glorious example in their defense. Mark them!

Fully appreciating the hardship to be encountered, firmly believing in the right of their cause, honorably inviting the scrutiny of an on-looking world, reverently appealing to heaven to attest their sincerity, soundly comprehending the solemn responsibility they were about to assume, wisely measuring the terrible odds against them, your fathers, the fathers of this republic, did, most deliberately, under the inspiration of a glorious patriotism, and with a sublime faith in the great principles of justice and freedom, lay deep the corner-stone of the national superstructure, which has risen and still rises in grandeur around you.

Of this fundamental work, this day is the anniversary. Our eyes are met with demonstrations of joyous enthusiasm. Banners and pennants wave exultingly on the breeze. The din of business, too, is hushed. Even Mammon seems to have quitted his grasp on this day. The ear-piercing fife and the stirring drum unite their accents with the ascending peal of a thousand church bells. Prayers are made, hymns are sung, and sermons are preached in honor of this day; while the quick martial tramp of a great and multitudinous nation, echoed back by all the hills, valleys and mountains of a vast continent, bespeak the occasion one of thrilling and universal interest — a nation’s jubilee.

Friends and citizens, I need not enter further into the causes which led to this anniversary. Many of you understand them better than I do. You could instruct me in regard to them. That is a branch of knowledge in which you feel, perhaps, a much deeper interest than your speaker. The causes which led to the separation of the colonies from the British crown have never lacked for a tongue. They have all been taught in your common schools, narrated at your firesides, unfolded from your pulpits, and thundered from your legislative halls, and are as familiar to you as household words. They form the staple of your national poetry and eloquence.

I remember, also, that, as a people, Americans are remarkably familiar with all facts which make in their own favor. This is esteemed by some as a national trait — perhaps a national weakness. It is a fact, that whatever makes for the wealth or for the reputation of Americans, and can be had cheap! will be found by Americans. I shall not be charged with slandering Americans, if I say I think the American side of any question may be safely left in American hands.

I leave, therefore, the great deeds of your fathers to other gentlemen whose claim to have been regularly descended will be less likely to be disputed than mine!

My business, if I have any here to-day, is with the present. The accepted time with God and his cause is the ever-living now.

Trust no future, however pleasant, Let the dead past bury its dead; Act, act in the living present, Heart within, and God overhead.

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future. To all inspiring motives, to noble deeds which can be gained from the past, we are welcome. But now is the time, the important time. Your fathers have lived, died, and have done their work, and have done much of it well. You live and must die, and you must do your work. You have no right to enjoy a child’s share in the labor of your fathers, unless your children are to be blest by your labors. You have no right to wear out and waste the hard-earned fame of your fathers to cover your indolence. Sydney Smith tells us that men seldom eulogize the wisdom and virtues of their fathers, but to excuse some folly or wickedness of their own. This truth is not a doubtful one. There are illustrations of it near and remote, ancient and modern. It was fashionable, hundreds of years ago, for the children of Jacob to boast, we have “Abraham to our father,” when they had long lost Abraham’s faith and spirit. That people contented themselves under the shadow of Abraham’s great name, while they repudiated the deeds which made his name great. Need I remind you that a similar thing is being done all over this country to-day? Need I tell you that the Jews are not the only people who built the tombs of the prophets, and garnished the sepulchres of the righteous? Washington could not die till he had broken the chains of his slaves. Yet his monument is built up by the price of human blood, and the traders in the bodies and souls of men shout — “We have Washington to our father.” — Alas! that it should be so; yet so it is.

The evil that men do, lives after them, The good is oft-interred with their bones.

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap as an hart.”

But, such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. — The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, lowering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”

Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view. Standing, there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery — the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;” I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.

But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, and denounce less, would you persuade more, and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia, which, if committed by a black man, (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgement that the slave is a moral, intellectual and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write. When you can point to any such laws, in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, then will I argue with you that the slave is a man!

For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold; that, while we are reading, writing and cyphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers; that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hill-side, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children, and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian’s God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!

Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for Republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look to-day, in the presence of Americans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom? speaking of it relatively, and positively, negatively, and affirmatively. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. — There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employments for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.

What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is passed.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

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 denunciations 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 these 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.

Take the American slave-trade, which, we are told by the papers, is especially prosperous just now. Ex-Senator Benton tells us that the price of men was never higher than now. He mentions the fact to show that slavery is in no danger. This trade is one of the peculiarities of American institutions. It is carried on in all the large towns and cities in one-half of this confederacy; and millions are pocketed every year, by dealers in this horrid traffic. In several states, this trade is a chief source of wealth. It is called (in contradistinction to the foreign slave-trade) “the internal slave trade.” It is, probably, called so, too, in order to divert from it the horror with which the foreign slave-trade is contemplated. That trade has long since been denounced by this government, as piracy. It has been denounced with burning words, from the high places of the nation, as an execrable traffic. To arrest it, to put an end to it, this nation keeps a squadron, at immense cost, on the coast of Africa. Everywhere, in this country, it is safe to speak of this foreign slave-trade, as a most inhuman traffic, opposed alike to the laws of God and of man. The duty to extirpate and destroy it, is admitted even by our DOCTORS OF DIVINITY. In order to put an end to it, some of these last have consented that their colored brethren (nominally free) should leave this country, and establish themselves on the western coast of Africa! It is, however, a notable fact that, while so much execration is poured out by Americans upon those engaged in the foreign slave-trade, the men engaged in the slave-trade between the states pass without condemnation, and their business is deemed honorable.

Behold the practical operation of this internal slave-trade, the American slave-trade, sustained by American politics and America religion. Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market. You know what is a swine-drover? I will show you a man-drover. They inhabit all our Southern States. They perambulate the country, and crowd the highways of the nation, with droves of human stock. You will see one of these human flesh-jobbers, armed with pistol, whip and bowie-knife, driving a company of a hundred men, women, and children, from the Potomac to the slave market at New Orleans. These wretched people are to be sold singly, or in lots, to suit purchasers. They are food for the cotton-field, and the deadly sugar-mill. Mark the sad procession, as it moves wearily along, and the inhuman wretch who drives them. Hear his savage yells and his blood-chilling oaths, as he hurries on his affrighted captives! There, see the old man, with locks thinned and gray. Cast one glance, if you please, upon that young mother, whose shoulders are bare to the scorching sun, her briny tears falling on the brow of the babe in her arms. See, too, that girl of thirteen, weeping, yes! weeping, as she thinks of the mother from whom she has been torn! The drove moves tardily. Heat and sorrow have nearly consumed their strength; suddenly you hear a quick snap, like the discharge of a rifle; the fetters clank, and the chain rattles simultaneously; your ears are saluted with a scream, that seems to have torn its way to the center of your soul! The crack you heard, was the sound of the slave-whip; the scream you heard, was from the woman you saw with the babe. Her speed had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains! that gash on her shoulder tells her to move on. Follow the drove to New Orleans. Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers. See this drove sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude. Tell me citizens, WHERE, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. Yet this is but a glance at the American slave-trade, as it exists, at this moment, in the ruling part of the United States.

I was born amid such sights and scenes. To me the American slave-trade is a terrible reality. When a child, my soul was often pierced with a sense of its horrors. I lived on Philpot Street, Fell’s Point, Baltimore, and have watched from the wharves, the slave ships in the Basin, anchored from the shore, with their cargoes of human flesh, waiting for favorable winds to waft them down the Chesapeake. There was, at that time, a grand slave mart kept at the head of Pratt Street, by Austin Woldfolk. His agents were sent into every town and county in Maryland, announcing their arrival, through the papers, and on flaming “hand-bills,” headed CASH FOR NEGROES. These men were generally well dressed men, and very captivating in their manners. Ever ready to drink, to treat, and to gamble. The fate of many a slave has depended upon the turn of a single card; and many a child has been snatched from the arms of its mother by bargains arranged in a state of brutal drunkenness.

The flesh-mongers gather up their victims by dozens, and drive them, chained, to the general depot at Baltimore. When a sufficient number have been collected here, a ship is chartered, for the purpose of conveying the forlorn crew to Mobile, or to New Orleans. From the slave prison to the ship, they are usually driven in the darkness of night; for since the antislavery agitation, a certain caution is observed.

In the deep still darkness of midnight, I have been often aroused by the dead heavy footsteps, and the piteous cries of the chained gangs that passed our door. The anguish of my boyish heart was intense; and I was often consoled, when speaking to my mistress in the morning, to hear her say that the custom was very wicked; that she hated to hear the rattle of the chains, and the heart-rending cries. I was glad to find one who sympathized with me in my horror.

Fellow-citizens, this murderous traffic is, to-day, in active operation in this boasted republic. In the solitude of my spirit, I see clouds of dust raised on the highways of the South; I see the bleeding footsteps; I hear the doleful wail of fettered humanity, on the way to the slave-markets, where the victims are to be sold like horses, sheep, and swine, knocked off to the highest bidder. There I see the tenderest ties ruthlessly broken, to gratify the lust, caprice and rapacity of the buyers and sellers of men. My soul sickens at the sight.

Is this the land your Fathers loved, The freedom which they toiled to win? Is this the earth whereon they moved? Are these the graves they slumber in?

But a still more inhuman, disgraceful, and scandalous state of things remains to be presented. By an act of the American Congress, not yet two years old, slavery has been nationalized in its most horrible and revolting form. By that act, Mason and Dixon’s line has been obliterated; New York has become as Virginia; and the power to hold, hunt, and sell men, women, and children as slaves remains no longer a mere state institution, but is now an institution of the whole United States. The power is co-extensive with the Star-Spangled Banner and American Christianity. Where these go, may also go the merciless slave-hunter. Where these are, man is not sacred. He is a bird for the sportsman’s gun. By that most foul and fiendish of all human decrees, the liberty and person of every man are put in peril. Your broad republican domain is hunting ground for men. Not for thieves and robbers, enemies of society, merely, but for men guilty of no crime. Your lawmakers have commanded all good citizens to engage in this hellish sport. Your President, your Secretary of State, our lords, nobles, and ecclesiastics, enforce, as a duty you owe to your free and glorious country, and to your God, that you do this accursed thing. Not fewer than forty Americans have, within the past two years, been hunted down and, without a moment’s warning, hurried away in chains, and consigned to slavery and excruciating torture. Some of these have had wives and children, dependent on them for bread; but of this, no account was made. The right of the hunter to his prey stands superior to the right of marriage, and to all rights in this republic, the rights of God included! For black men there are neither law, justice, humanity, not religion. The Fugitive Slave Law makes mercy to them a crime; and bribes the judge who tries them. An American judge gets ten dollars for every victim he consigns to slavery, and five, when he fails to do so. The oath of any two villains is sufficient, under this hell-black enactment, to send the most pious and exemplary black man into the remorseless jaws of slavery! His own testimony is nothing. He can bring no witnesses for himself. The minister of American justice is bound by the law to hear but one side; and that side, is the side of the oppressor. Let this damning fact be perpetually told. Let it be thundered around the world, that, in tyrant-killing, king-hating, people-loving, democratic, Christian America, the seats of justice are filled with judges, who hold their offices under an open and palpable bribe, and are bound, in deciding in the case of a man’s liberty, hear only his accusers!

In glaring violation of justice, in shameless disregard of the forms of administering law, in cunning arrangement to entrap the defenseless, and in diabolical intent, this Fugitive Slave Law stands alone in the annals of tyrannical legislation. I doubt if there be another nation on the globe, having the brass and the baseness to put such a law on the statute-book. If any man in this assembly thinks differently from me in this matter, and feels able to disprove my statements, I will gladly confront him at any suitable time and place he may select.

I take this law to be one of the grossest infringements of Christian Liberty, and, if the churches and ministers of our country were not stupidly blind, or most wickedly indifferent, they, too, would so regard it.

At the very moment that they are thanking God for the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty, and for the right to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences, they are utterly silent in respect to a law which robs religion of its chief significance, and makes it utterly worthless to a world lying in wickedness. Did this law concern the “mint, anise, and cumin” — abridge the right to sing psalms, to partake of the sacrament, or to engage in any of the ceremonies of religion, it would be smitten by the thunder of a thousand pulpits. A general shout would go up from the church, demanding repeal, repeal, instant repeal! — And it would go hard with that politician who presumed to solicit the votes of the people without inscribing this motto on his banner. Further, if this demand were not complied with, another Scotland would be added to the history of religious liberty, and the stern old Covenanters would be thrown into the shade. A John Knox would be seen at every church door, and heard from every pulpit, and Fillmore would have no more quarter than was shown by Knox, to the beautiful, but treacherous queen Mary of Scotland. The fact that the church of our country, (with fractional exceptions), does not esteem “the Fugitive Slave Law” as a declaration of war against religious liberty, implies that that church regards religion simply as a form of worship, an empty ceremony, and not a vital principle, requiring active benevolence, justice, love and good will towards man. It esteems sacrifice above mercy; psalm-singing above right doing; solemn meetings above practical righteousness. A worship that can be conducted by persons who refuse to give shelter to the houseless, to give bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and who enjoin obedience to a law forbidding these acts of mercy, is a curse, not a blessing to mankind. The Bible addresses all such persons as “scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites, who pay tithe of mint, anise, and cumin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith.”

But the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. It has made itself the bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave-hunters. Many of its most eloquent Divines. who stand as the very lights of the church, have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system. They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; that to send back an escaped bondman to his master is clearly the duty of all the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ; and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity.

For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny, and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke, put together, have done! These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing, having neither principles of right action, nor bowels of compassion. They strip the love of God of its beauty, and leave the throng of religion a huge, horrible, repulsive form. It is a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs. It is not that “pure and undefiled religion” which is from above, and which is “first pure, then peaceable, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy.” But a religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in chains, stay there; and to the oppressor, oppress on; it is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of mankind; it makes God a respecter of persons, denies his fatherhood of the race, and tramples in the dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man. All this we affirm to be true of the popular church, and the popular worship of our land and nation — a religion, a church, and a worship which, on the authority of inspired wisdom, we pronounce to be an abomination in the sight of God. In the language of Isaiah, the American church might be well addressed, “Bring no more vain ablations; incense is an abomination unto me: the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth. They are a trouble to me; I am weary to bear them; and when ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you. Yea! when ye make many prayers, I will not hear. YOUR HANDS ARE FULL OF BLOOD; cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment; relieve the oppressed; judge for the fatherless; plead for the widow.”

The American church is guilty, when viewed in connection with what it is doing to uphold slavery; but it is superlatively guilty when viewed in connection with its ability to abolish slavery. The sin of which it is guilty is one of omission as well as of commission. Albert Barnes but uttered what the common sense of every man at all observant of the actual state of the case will receive as truth, when he declared that “There is no power out of the church that could sustain slavery an hour, if it were not sustained in it.”

Let the religious press, the pulpit, the Sunday school, the conference meeting, the great ecclesiastical, missionary, Bible and tract associations of the land array their immense powers against slavery and slave-holding; and the whole system of crime and blood would be scattered to the winds; and that they do not do this involves them in the most awful responsibility of which the mind can conceive.

In prosecuting the anti-slavery enterprise, we have been asked to spare the church, to spare the ministry; but how, we ask, could such a thing be done? We are met on the threshold of our efforts for the redemption of the slave, by the church and ministry of the country, in battle arrayed against us; and we are compelled to fight or flee. From what quarter, I beg to know, has proceeded a fire so deadly upon our ranks, during the last two years, as from the Northern pulpit? As the champions of oppressors, the chosen men of American theology have appeared — men, honored for their so-called piety, and their real learning. The Lords of Buffalo, the Springs of New York, the Lathrops of Auburn, the Coxes and Spencers of Brooklyn, the Gannets and Sharps of Boston, the Deweys of Washington, and other great religious lights of the land have, in utter denial of the authority of Him by whom they professed to be called to the ministry, deliberately taught us, against the example or the Hebrews and against the remonstrance of the Apostles, they teach that we ought to obey man’s law before the law of God.

My spirit wearies of such blasphemy; and how such men can be supported, as the “standing types and representatives of Jesus Christ,” is a mystery which I leave others to penetrate. In speaking of the American church, however, let it be distinctly understood that I mean the great mass of the religious organizations of our land. There are exceptions, and I thank God that there are. Noble men may be found, scattered all over these Northern States, of whom Henry Ward Beecher of Brooklyn, Samuel J. May of Syracuse, and my esteemed friend (Rev. R. R. Raymond) on the platform, are shining examples; and let me say further, that upon these men lies the duty to inspire our ranks with high religious faith and zeal, and to cheer us on in the great mission of the slave’s redemption from his chains.

One is struck with the difference between the attitude of the American church towards the anti-slavery movement, and that occupied by the churches in England towards a similar movement in that country. There, the church, true to its mission of ameliorating, elevating, and improving the condition of mankind, came forward promptly, bound up the wounds of the West Indian slave, and restored him to his liberty. There, the question of emancipation was a high religious question. It was demanded, in the name of humanity, and according to the law of the living God. The Sharps, the Clarksons, the Wilberforces, the Buxtons, and Burchells and the Knibbs, were alike famous for their piety, and for their philanthropy. The anti-slavery movement there was not an anti-church movement, for the reason that the church took its full share in prosecuting that movement: and the anti-slavery movement in this country will cease to be an anti-church movement, when the church of this country shall assume a favorable, instead of a hostile position towards that movement. Americans! your republican politics, not less than your republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation (as embodied in the two great political parties), is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen. You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants of Russia and Austria, and pride yourselves on your Democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and body-guards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina. You invite to your shores fugitives of oppression from abroad, honor them with banquets, greet them with ovations, cheer them, toast them, salute them, protect them, and pour out your money to them like water; but the fugitives from your own land you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot and kill. You glory in your refinement and your universal education yet you maintain a system as barbarous and dreadful as ever stained the character of a nation — a system begun in avarice, supported in pride, and perpetuated in cruelty. You shed tears over fallen Hungary, and make the sad story of her wrongs the theme of your poets, statesmen and orators, till your gallant sons are ready to fly to arms to vindicate her cause against her oppressors; but, in regard to the ten thousand wrongs of the American slave, you would enforce the strictest silence, and would hail him as an enemy of the nation who dares to make those wrongs the subject of public discourse! You are all on fire at the mention of liberty for France or for Ireland; but are as cold as an iceberg at the thought of liberty for the enslaved of America. You discourse eloquently on the dignity of labor; yet, you sustain a system which, in its very essence, casts a stigma upon labor. You can bare your bosom to the storm of British artillery to throw off a threepenny tax on tea; and yet wring the last hard-earned farthing from the grasp of the black laborers of your country. You profess to believe “that, of one blood, God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth,” and hath commanded all men, everywhere to love one another; yet you notoriously hate, (and glory in your hatred), all men whose skins are not colored like your own. You declare, before the world, and are understood by the world to declare, that you “hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that, among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;” and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, “is worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose,” a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country.

Fellow-citizens! I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies. The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing, and a bye-word to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. It fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement, the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse to the earth that supports it; and yet, you cling to it, as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes. Oh! be warned! be warned! a horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation’s bosom; the venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away, and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty millions crush and destroy it forever!

But it is answered in reply to all this, that precisely what I have now denounced is, in fact, guaranteed and sanctioned by the Constitution of the United States; that the right to hold and to hunt slaves is a part of that Constitution framed by the illustrious Fathers of this Republic.

Then, I dare to affirm, notwithstanding all I have said before, your fathers stooped, basely stooped

To palter with us in a double sense: And keep the word of promise to the ear, But break it to the heart.

And instead of being the honest men I have before declared them to be, they were the veriest imposters that ever practiced on mankind. This is the inevitable conclusion, and from it there is no escape. But I differ from those who charge this baseness on the framers of the Constitution of the United States. It is a slander upon their memory, at least, so I believe. There is not time now to argue the constitutional question at length — nor have I the ability to discuss it as it ought to be discussed. The subject has been handled with masterly power by Lysander Spooner, Esq., by William Goodell, by Samuel E. Sewall, Esq., and last, though not least, by Gerritt Smith, Esq. These gentlemen have, as I think, fully and clearly vindicated the Constitution from any design to support slavery for an hour.

Fellow-citizens! there is no matter in respect to which, the people of the North have allowed themselves to be so ruinously imposed upon, as that of the pro-slavery character of the Constitution. In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? It is neither. While I do not intend to argue this question on the present occasion, let me ask, if it be not somewhat singular that, if the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slave-holding instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it. What would be thought of an instrument, drawn up, legally drawn up, for the purpose of entitling the city of Rochester to a track of land, in which no mention of land was made? Now, there are certain rules of interpretation, for the proper understanding of all legal instruments. These rules are well established. They are plain, common-sense rules, such as you and I, and all of us, can understand and apply, without having passed years in the study of law. I scout the idea that the question of the constitutionality or unconstitutionality of slavery is not a question for the people. I hold that every American citizen has a right to form an opinion of the constitution, and to propagate that opinion, and to use all honorable means to make his opinion the prevailing one. Without this right, the liberty of an American citizen would be as insecure as that of a Frenchman. Ex-Vice-President Dallas tells us that the Constitution is an object to which no American mind can be too attentive, and no American heart too devoted. He further says, the Constitution, in its words, is plain and intelligible, and is meant for the home-bred, unsophisticated understandings of our fellow-citizens. Senator Berrien tells us that the Constitution is the fundamental law, that which controls all others. The charter of our liberties, which every citizen has a personal interest in understanding thoroughly. The testimony of Senator Breese, Lewis Cass, and many others that might be named, who are everywhere esteemed as sound lawyers, so regard the constitution. I take it, therefore, that it is not presumption in a private citizen to form an opinion of that instrument.

Now, take the Constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.

I have detained my audience entirely too long already. At some future period I will gladly avail myself of an opportunity to give this subject a full and fair discussion.

Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world, and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done. Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated. Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic, are distinctly heard on the other. The far off and almost fabulous Pacific rolls in grandeur at our feet. The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved. The fiat of the Almighty, “Let there be Light,” has not yet spent its force. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light. The iron shoe, and crippled foot of China must be seen, in contrast with nature. Africa must rise and put on her yet unwoven garment. “Ethiopia shall stretch out her hand unto God.” In the fervent aspirations of William Lloyd Garrison, I say, and let every heart join in saying it:

God speed the year of jubilee The wide world o’er When from their galling chains set free, Th’ oppress’d shall vilely bend the knee,

And wear the yoke of tyranny Like brutes no more. That year will come, and freedom’s reign, To man his plundered fights again Restore.

God speed the day when human blood Shall cease to flow! In every clime be understood, The claims of human brotherhood, And each return for evil, good, Not blow for blow; That day will come all feuds to end. And change into a faithful friend Each foe.

God speed the hour, the glorious hour, When none on earth Shall exercise a lordly power, Nor in a tyrant’s presence cower; But all to manhood’s stature tower, By equal birth! That hour will come, to each, to all, And from his prison-house, the thrall Go forth.

Until that year, day, hour, arrive, With head, and heart, and hand I’ll strive, To break the rod, and rend the gyve, The spoiler of his prey deprive — So witness Heaven! And never from my chosen post, Whate’er the peril or the cost, Be driven.

From Blue Nation Review June 29, 2015

EDITOR’S NOTE: Over the weekend, a young freedom fighter and community organizer mounted an awe-inspiring campaign to bring down the Confederate battle flag. Brittany “Bree” Newsome, in a courageous act of civil disobedience, scaled a metal pole using a climbing harness, to remove the flag from the grounds of the South Carolina state capitol. Her long dread locks danced in the wind as she descended to the ground while quoting scripture. She refused law enforcement commands to end her mission and was immediately arrested along with ally James Ian Tyson, who is also from Charlotte, North Carolina.

Earlier this week, social justice activist and progressive blogger Shaun King offered a “bounty” on the flag and offered to pay any necessary bail bond fees. Newsome declined the cash reward, asking that all proceeds go to funds supporting victims of the Charleston church massacre. Social media users raised more than $75,000 to fund legal expenses. South Carolina House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford, a renowned defense attorney, has agreed to represent Newsome and Tyson as they face criminal charges.

Newsome released the following statement exclusively to Blue Nation Review:

Now is the time for true courage.

I realized that now is the time for true courage the morning after the Charleston Massacre shook me to the core of my being. I couldn’t sleep. I sat awake in the dead of night. All the ghosts of the past seemed to be rising.

Not long ago, I had watched the beginning of Selma, the reenactment of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing and had shuddered at the horrors of history.

But this was neither a scene from a movie nor was it the past. A white man had just entered a black church and massacred people as they prayed. He had assassinated a civil rights leader. This was not a page in a textbook I was reading nor an inscription on a monument I was visiting.

This was now.

This was real.

This was—this is—still happening.

I began my activism by participating in the Moral Monday movement, fighting to restore voting rights in North Carolina after the Supreme Court struck down key protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

I traveled down to Florida where the Dream Defenders were demanding justice for Trayvon Martin, who reminded me of a modern-day Emmett Till.

I marched with the Ohio Students Association as they demanded justice for victims of police brutality.

I watched in horror as black Americans were tear-gassed in their own neighborhoods in Ferguson, MO. “Reminds me of the Klan,” my grandmother said as we watched the news together. As a young black girl in South Carolina, she had witnessed the Klan drag her neighbor from his house and brutally beat him because he was a black physician who had treated a white woman.

I visited with black residents of West Baltimore, MD who, under curfew, had to present work papers to police to enter and exit their own neighborhood. “These are my freedom papers to show the slave catchers,” my friend said with a wry smile.

And now, in the past 6 days, I’ve seen arson attacks against 5 black churches in the South, including in Charlotte, NC where I organize alongside other community members striving to create greater self-sufficiency and political empowerment in low-income neighborhoods.

For far too long, white supremacy has dominated the politics of America resulting in the creation of racist laws and cultural practices designed to subjugate non-whites. And the emblem of the confederacy, the stars and bars, in all its manifestations, has long been the most recognizable banner of this political ideology. It’s the banner of racial intimidation and fear whose popularity experiences an uptick whenever black Americans appear to be making gains economically and politically in this country.

It’s a reminder how, for centuries, the oppressive status quo has been undergirded by white supremacist violence with the tacit approval of too many political leaders.

The night of the Charleston Massacre, I had a crisis of faith. The people who gathered for Bible study in Emmanuel AME Church that night—Cynthia Marie Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Myra Thompson and Rev. Clementa Pinckney (rest in peace)—were only doing what Christians are called to do when anyone knocks on the door of the church: invite them into fellowship and worship.

The day after the massacre I was asked what the next step was and I said I didn’t know. We’ve been here before and here we are again: black people slain simply for being black; an attack on the black church as a place of spiritual refuge and community organization.

I refuse to be ruled by fear. How can America be free and be ruled by fear? How can anyone be?

So, earlier this week I gathered with a small group of concerned citizens, both black and white, who represented various walks of life, spiritual beliefs, gender identities and sexual orientations. Like millions of others in America and around the world, including South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and President Barack Obama, we felt (and still feel) that the confederate battle flag in South Carolina, hung in 1962 at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, must come down. (Of course, we are not the first to demand the flag’s removal. Civil rights groups in South Carolina and nationwide have been calling for the flag’s removal since the moment it was raised, and I acknowledge their efforts in working to remove the flag over the years via the legislative process.)

We discussed it and decided to remove the flag immediately, both as an act of civil disobedience and as a demonstration of the power people have when we work together. Achieving this would require many roles, including someone who must volunteer to scale the pole and remove the flag. It was decided that this role should go to a black woman and that a white man should be the one to help her over the fence as a sign that our alliance transcended both racial and gender divides. We made this decision because for us, this is not simply about a flag, but rather it is about abolishing the spirit of hatred and oppression in all its forms.

I removed the flag not only in defiance of those who enslaved my ancestors in the southern United States, but also in defiance of the oppression that continues against black people globally in 2015, including the ongoing ethnic cleansing in the Dominican Republic. I did it in solidarity with the South African students who toppled a statue of the white supremacist, colonialist Cecil Rhodes. I did it for all the fierce black women on the front lines of the movement and for all the little black girls who are watching us. I did it because I am free.

To all those who might label me an “outside agitator,” I say to you that humanitarianism has no borders. I am a global citizen. My prayers are with the poor, the afflicted and the oppressed everywhere in the world, as Christ instructs. If this act of disobedience can also serve as a symbol to other peoples’ struggles against oppression or as a symbol of victory over fear and hate, then I know all the more that I did the right thing.

Even if there were borders to my empathy, those borders would most certainly extend into South Carolina. Several of my African ancestors entered this continent through the slave market in Charleston. Their unpaid toil brought wealth to America via Carolina plantations. I am descended from those who survived racial oppression as they built this nation: My 4th great grandfather, who stood on an auction block in South Carolina refusing to be sold without his wife and newborn baby; that newborn baby, my 3rd great grandmother, enslaved for 27 years on a plantation in Rembert, SC where she prayed daily for her children to see freedom; her husband, my 3rd great grandfather, an enslaved plowboy on the same plantation who founded a church on the eve of the Civil War that stands to this day; their son, my great-great grandfather, the one they called “Free Baby” because he was their first child born free, all in South Carolina.

You see, I know my history and my heritage. The Confederacy is neither the only legacy of the south nor an admirable one. The southern heritage I embrace is the legacy of a people unbowed by racial oppression. It includes towering figures of the Civil Rights Movement like Ida B. Wells, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers and Ella Baker. It includes the many people who rarely make the history books but without whom there is no movement. It includes pillars of the community like Rev. Clementa Pinckney and Emmanuel AME Church.

The history of the South is also in many ways complex and full of inconvenient truths. But in order to move into the future we must reckon with the past. That’s why I commend people like Sen. Paul Thurmond for having the courage to speak truth in this moment.

Words cannot express how deeply touched I am to see how yesterday’s action inspired so many. The artwork, poems, music and memes are simply beautiful! I am also deeply grateful to those who have generously donated to the defense fund established in my name and to those who have offered to cover my legal expenses.

As you are admiring my courage in that moment, please remember that this is not, never has been and never should be just about one woman. This action required collective courage just as this movement requires collective courage. Not everyone who participated in the strategizing for this non-violent direct action volunteered to have their names in the news so I will respect their privacy. Nonetheless, I’m honored to be counted among the many freedom fighters, both living and dead.

I see no greater moral cause than liberation, equality and justice f­­or all God’s people. What better reason to risk your own freedom than to fight for the freedom of others? That’s the moral courage demonstrated yesterday by James Ian Tyson who helped me across the fence and stood guard as I climbed. History will rightly remember him alongside the many white allies who, over the centuries, have risked their own safety in defense of black life and in the name of racial equality.

While I remain highly critical of the nature of policing itself in the United States, both the police and the jailhouse personnel I encountered on Saturday were nothing short of professional in their interactions with me. I know there was some concern from supporters on the outside that I might be harmed while in police custody, but that was not the case.

It is important to remember that our struggle doesn’t end when the flag comes down. The Confederacy is a southern thing, but white supremacy is not. Our generation has taken up the banner to fight battles many thought were won long ago. We must fight with all vigor now so that our grandchildren aren’t still fighting these battles in another 50 years. Black Lives Matter. This is non-negotiable.

I encourage everyone to understand the history, recognize the problems of the present and take action to show the world that the status quo is not acceptable. The last few days have confirmed to me that people understand the importance of action and are ready to take such action. Whether the topic is trending nationally or it’s an issue affecting our local communities, those of us who are conscious must do what is right in this moment. And we must do it without fear. New eras require new models of leadership. This is a multi-leader movement. I believe that. I stand by that. I am because we are. I am one of many.

  Kevin McGruder

first row l-r: Cynthia Hurd, Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Rev. Sharonda Singleton;second row, l-r: Rev. Daniel Simmons, Sr., Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders; third row, l-r:Myra Thompson, Ethel Lance, Susie Jackson

As Cynthia Hurd, 54; Susie Jackson, 87; Ethel Lance, 70; Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, 49; Hon. Rev. Clementa Pinckney, 41; Tywanza Sanders, 26; Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr., 74; Rev. Sharonda Singleton, 45; Myra Thompson, 59, the nine murdered members of Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church are laid to rest, commentators seem to have been equally pleased and puzzled by the comments of their family members who have expressed a willingness to forgive the white man who killed their relatives. In the last year, after seeing racial tensions explode into property destruction and violence in Ferguson, Missouri following the death of Michael Brown, and in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray, some people undoubtedly wondered whether Black Charlestonians would respond to the murders with acts of property destruction and violence. The killer expressed a hope that his actions would ignite a race war. Given that desire, the family members’ expression of forgiveness toward the killer are important, making it difficult for those who may be angry because of the killings to rally others to a violent cause that the family members clearly want no part of. 

Still many people remain puzzled at the expressions of forgiveness, and that these expressions came so soon after the murders. Many of the relatives have provided an answer to the unusual quickness of their expressions of forgiveness, noting that this is what they have been taught in their churches. Forgiveness is a core principle of the teachings of Jesus Christ.  Even so it is remarkable to see the act of forgiving, such a challenging concept, put into practice in the aftermath of such a horrific crime.   

Beyond the rapidness of the expressions of forgiveness, in all likelihood many people are puzzled even more by the concept of forgiveness in the face of personal tragedy and grief.   In these circumstances, the expressions of forgiveness challenge the concept of vengeance that is an often unspoken element of American responses to crime. These people assume that in forgiving the killer, those offering forgiveness do not want the killer held accountable.  They are wrong. I am certain that the family members want the killer held accountable for his crimes, but by forgiving him, they will not waste their psychic energy hating him. Such actions would not bring their relatives back, and in the long run would harm their own mental and physical health, which is at the core of the practice of forgiveness. The people forgiving benefit from the act by not having to carry anger and hostility along with the grief that they are already bearing. Forgiveness is for their benefit, not for the benefit of the killer.

African Americans do not have a monopoly on the practice of forgiveness, and many of us do not agree that it is a logical reaction to painful circumstances, but culturally we do have significant experience with its practice. In the years leading up to the 1860s emancipation period, many white Americans worried that the formerly enslaved would begin a reign of vindictive terror against White people in the South in response to the centuries of stolen labor, family destruction, and oppressive violence inflicted upon them and their ancestors.  There may have been isolated incidents of vengeance undertaken by the formerly enslaved, but for the most part, the enslaved focused on looking forward, exemplified by the Juneteenth celebrations of last week.  That a holiday would be inspired by receiving the news of emancipation in Texas on June 19, 1865, two months after the Civil War ended was not delusional, but represents the self-awareness of these newly freed Texans who instinctively understood that their self-care required that they not dwell on what in reality were bitter circumstances for the receipt of good news.

Ironically, the forgiveness of Juneteenth took place at the beginning of an era in the United States during which Black freedom, unenslaved Blackness, became unforgivable for many White Americans, who replaced the violence of slavery with violence in response to Reconstruction. Segregation customs and laws became the method of denoting Blackness as unforgivable, and lynching and other forms of anti-Black violence became the means of enforcing these policies.

On June 17, 2015, the murderous acts of the Charleston killer were inspired by his ancestors’ history of White supremacy enacted against the unforgivable notion of Black freedom. This enduring belief still held by the killer and others made a prayer meeting at a historic Black church in Charleston, South Carolina an unforgivable act of Black independence and autonomy.  That this act did not inspire a race war, but instead prompted Black forgiveness, is the ultimate lesson for all of us. In all likelihood the acts of forgiveness, expressions of both love and self-care, undertaken by the relatives of the nine dead Black Charlestonians, laid the moral groundwork for the discussions of the removal of Confederate flags from various public spaces in Southern cities.

It is possible that this series of events has provided activists with a foundation on which to organize beyond the symbolic act of removing flags to implement policies that can better ensure Black freedom and equality, whether Black people are praying in church or interacting with the police.

*Unforgivable Blackness is the title of a Geoffrey Ward book and Ken Burns documentary on the life of boxing champion Jack Johnson (1878-1946)

A new book by Emancipation Proclamation: Forever Free co-author Kevin McGruder, Race and Real Estate: Conflict and Cooperation in Harlem, 1890-1920 (Colubmia University Press), is available as of today. If you order through the Columbia University Press website using the discount code MCGRAC you'll receive a 30% discount off of the purchase price bringing the total to $35.00. http://cup.columbia.edu/book/race-and-real-estate/9780231169141

The book also received a brief review over the weekend in the New York Times:

"Kevin McGruder’s new book, “Race and Real Estate: Conflict and Cooperation in Harlem, 1890-1920” (Columbia University Press), could easily have been called “How Harlem Became Harlem.”

Professor McGruder, who teaches at Antioch College, explores how development, speculation and shifting views about integration and the proverbial “changing neighborhood” created the largest black community in the country.

https://zinnedproject.org/materials/the-first-decoration-day/

The First Decoration Day

The people’s history of Memorial Day.

By David W. Blight, 2011

Americans understand that Memorial Day, or “Decoration Day,” as my parents called it, has something to do with honoring the nation’s war dead. It is also a day devoted to picnics, road races, commencements, and double-headers. But where did it begin, who created it, and why?

As a nation we are at war now, but for most Americans the scale of death and suffering in this seemingly endless wartime belongs to other people far away, or to people in other neighborhoods. Collectively, we are not even allowed to see our war dead today. That was not the case in 1865.

At the end of the Civil War the dead were everywhere, some in half buried coffins and some visible only as unidentified bones strewn on the killing fields of Virginia or Georgia. Americans, north and south, faced an enormous spiritual and logistical challenge of memorialization. The dead were visible by their massive absence. Approximately 620,000 soldiers died in the war. American deaths in all other wars combined through the Korean conflict totaled 606,000. If the same number of Americans per capita had died in Vietnam as died in the Civil War, 4 million names would be on the Vietnam Memorial. The most immediate legacy of the Civil War was its slaughter and how we remember it.

War kills people and destroys human creation; but as though mocking war’s devastation, flowers inevitably bloom through its ruins. After a long siege, a prolonged bombardment for months from all around the harbor, and numerous fires, the beautiful port city of Charleston, South Carolina, where the war had begun in April, 1861, lay in ruin by the spring of 1865. The city was largely abandoned by white residents by late February. Among the first troops to enter and march up Meeting Street singing liberation songs was the Twenty First U. S. Colored Infantry; their commander accepted the formal surrender of the city.

1865 view of the Union soldiers graves at Washington Racecourse. Library of Congress.

Thousands of black Charlestonians, most former slaves, remained in the city and conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war. The largest of these events, and unknown until some extraordinary luck in my recent research, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the planters’ horse track, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an outdoor prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. Some twenty-eight black workmen went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

Then, black Charlestonians in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders’ race course. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy’s horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freedpeople. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”

At 9 a.m. on May 1, the procession stepped off led by three thousand black schoolchildren carrying arm loads of roses and singing “John Brown’s Body.” The children were followed by several hundred black women with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantry and other black and white citizens. As many as possible gathering in the cemetery enclosure; a childrens’ choir sang “We’ll Rally around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and several spirituals before several black ministers read from scripture. No record survives of which biblical passages rung out in the warm spring air, but the spirit of Leviticus 25 was surely present at those burial rites: “for it is the jubilee; it shall be holy unto you… in the year of this jubilee he shall return every man unto his own possession.”

Following the solemn dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: they enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches, and watched soldiers drill. Among the full brigade of Union infantry participating was the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th U.S. Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite. The war was over, and Decoration Day had been founded by African Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been all about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic, and not about state rights, defense of home, nor merely soldiers’ valor and sacrifice.

According to a reminiscence written long after the fact, “several slight disturbances” occurred during the ceremonies on this first Decoration Day, as well as “much harsh talk about the event locally afterward.” But a measure of how white Charlestonians suppressed from memory this founding in favor of their own creation of the practice later came fifty-one years afterward, when the president of the Ladies Memorial Association of Charleston received an inquiry about the May 1, 1865 parade. A United Daughters of the Confederacy official from New Orleans wanted to know if it was true that blacks had engaged in such a burial rite. Mrs. S. C. Beckwith responded tersely: “I regret that I was unable to gather any official information in answer to this.” In the struggle over memory and meaning in any society, some stories just get lost while others attain mainstream dominance.

Officially, as a national holiday, Memorial Day emerged in 1868 when General John A. Logan, commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union veterans organization, called on all former northern soldiers and their communities to conduct ceremonies and decorate graves of their dead comrades. On May 30, 1868, when flowers were plentiful, funeral ceremonies were attended by thousands of people in 183 cemeteries in twenty-seven states. The following year, some 336 cities and towns in thirty-one states, including the South, arranged parades and orations. The observance grew manifold with time. In the South, Confederate Memorial Day took shape on three different dates: on April 26 in many deep South states, the anniversary of General Joseph Johnston’s final surrender to General William T. Sherman; on May 10 in South and North Carolina, the birthday of Stonewall Jackson; and on June 3 in Virginia, the birthday of Jefferson Davis.

Over time several American towns, north and south, claimed to be the birthplace of Memorial Day. But all of them commemorate cemetery decoration events from 1866. Pride of place as the first large scale ritual of Decoration Day, therefore, goes to African Americans in Charleston. By their labor, their words, their songs, and their solemn parade of flowers and marching feet on their former owners’ race course, they created for themselves, and for us, the Independence Day of the Second American Revolution.

The old race track is still there—an oval roadway in Hampton Park in Charleston, named for Wade Hampton, former Confederate general and the white supremacist Redeemer governor of South Carolina after the end of Reconstruction. The lovely park sits adjacent to the Citadel, the military academy of South Carolina, and cadets can be seen jogging on the old track any day of the week. The old gravesite dedicated to the “Martyrs of the Race Course” is gone; those Union dead were reinterred in the 1880s to a national cemetery in Beaufort, South Carolina. Some stories endure, some disappear, some are rediscovered in dusty archives, the pages of old newspapers, and in oral history. All such stories as the First Decoration Day are but prelude to future reckonings. All memory is prelude.

Blight is the author of “American Oracle” and many other books.

By Jay Caspian King, New York Times, May 10, 2015

DeRay McKesson

On the evening of April 25 at the corner of Pratt and Light Streets, in Baltimore’s revitalized downtown district, more than 100 police officers in riot gear stood shoulder to shoulder, shields up. Six officers on horseback fidgeted behind them, staring down at a crowd of about 40, an odd mixture of protesters, journalists and protester-journalists. Earlier in the afternoon, well over a thousand people marched from the Western District police station to City Hall to protest the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man whose spinal cord was severely injured while he was in the custody of the Baltimore Police Department. Only a handful of live-streamers, an older man in a kente-cloth kufi, five or six teenagers with bandannas drawn across their faces and two young women in cocktail attire who had just been kicked out of a wedding were left. Each person was filming the police.

In the coming days, riots would convulse the city, with young people running through the streets, looting stores and setting fires, and the National Guard descending on their neighborhoods. But this protest looked much like the ones that have characterized the growing movement against police violence. Bodies moved in the dark, but the faces — protesters and police officers alike — were lit up by the thin, lunar glow of cellphone screens.

One protester was DeRay Mckesson, a 29-year-old former school administrator who has spent much of the past nine months attending and catalyzing such protests, from Ferguson, Mo., last summer and fall, to New York City and Milwaukee in December, to North Charleston, S.C., in April. Mckesson, who is from Baltimore, had returned to his hometown not long after Gray’s death to join the protests. Now he stood in his usual pose — his slender back straight as a ramrod, phone held in front of angular face, camera lens pointed directly ahead.

The phalanx of police officers began tapping their riot shields with their batons and shouting, “Move back!” Then, in a sloppy, seemingly unrehearsed lock step, they advanced on the protesters.

Tap —

Moooove back.

Tap —

Moooove back.

Mckesson crouched down and angled his phone. On its screen, I could see the dramatic shot he had composed: the faces of police officers, flat and impassive. As the police marched their way up the street, Mckesson posted a Vine, a photo and a 30-second video to his 85,000 Twitter followers. “What in the world is going on?” he asked. “There’s, like, how many hundred cops for 40 of us? This is wild.” He walked backward at a slow pace, eyes on his screen.

“It’s strange to come home after all that time in St. Louis,” he said, calmly. “I know it’s a cliché, but it’s really driven home the saying: ‘There’s a Mike Brown in every town.’ ”

Since Aug. 9, 2014, when Officer Darren Wilson of the Ferguson Police Department shot and killed Michael Brown, Mckesson and a core group of other activists have built the most formidable American protest movement of the 21st century to date. Their innovation has been to marry the strengths of social media — the swift, morally blunt consensus that can be created by hashtags; the personal connection that a charismatic online persona can make with followers; the broad networks that allow for the easy distribution of documentary photos and videos — with an effort to quickly mobilize protests in each new city where a police shooting occurs.

Johnetta Elzie

We often think of online activism as a shallow bid for fleeting attention, but the movement that Mckesson is helping to lead has been able to sustain the country’s focus and reach millions of people. Among many black Americans, long accustomed to mistreatment or worse at the hands of the police, the past year has brought on an incalculable sense of anger and despair. For the nation as a whole, we have come to learn the names of the victims — Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Tony Robinson, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray — because the activists have linked their fates together in our minds, despite their separation by many weeks and thousands of miles.

In the process, the movement has managed to activate a sense of red alert around a chronic problem that, until now, has remained mostly invisible outside the communities that suffer from it. Statistics on the subject are notoriously poor, but evidence does not suggest that shootings of black men by police officers have been significantly on the rise. Nevertheless, police killings have become front-page news and a political flash point, entirely because of the sense of emergency that the movement has sustained.

The movement began with a single image: Michael Brown, lying facedown on the asphalt, a stream of blood running from his head. That picture, combined with the testimony of witnesses who claimed to see the teenager surrender before being shot several times, brought hundreds of people from St. Louis out to the scene of his death the same evening. The following day, Aug. 10, protests began on West Florissant Avenue nearby, as well as outside the Ferguson Police Department; the crowds demanded justice for Brown and that the name of the officer who shot him be released, prompting the police to come out in force. That night, the QuikTrip gas station on West Florissant burned, which in turn brought out the mainstream media and an even more militarized police response. By Aug. 13, images from the Ferguson protests — plumes of tear gas, armored vehicles in the streets, packs of heavily armed police officers wearing military fatigues — were leading the news.

Mckesson watched all this from Minneapolis, where he was working in the public-school system. He was struck by the distance between the sensational accounts of rioting he saw on television and the reports he was reading on Twitter from people in Ferguson, who claimed that the cops had been firing tear gas and rubber bullets into crowds of peaceful protesters. Mckesson decided to go see the protests for himself.

On the morning of Aug. 16, Mckesson drove to St. Louis. Inspired, in part, by the Twitter accounts he had been following — at the time, Mckesson had fewer than 900 followers and tweeted inconsistently — he decided to live-tweet the trip. Setting out, he tweeted: “En route.” A couple hours later, he tweeted: “So, this stretch through Iowa has trucks that aren’t very good drivers.” And when he finally arrived in St. Louis, Mckesson noted: “I should’ve gotten gas in Iowa. Much more expensive in St. Louis.”

Mckesson arrived in Ferguson, and the next day he headed over to West Florissant, where he was tear-gassed. His terse, matter-of-fact updates, which had seemed almost comical when describing the banalities of everyday life, took on a forceful lucidity in the context of the protests, especially when they were accompanied by raw photographs from the scene.

“Y’all, tons of police,” he tweeted that night. “Tear gas. It has begun #Ferguson.” He added: “Also, the noise sirens are out. Tear gas feels like extreme peppermint tingling. F.Y.I. #Ferguson.” Then, about an hour and 30 tweets later: “Phone is dying. I am nowhere near my car. I am lost in #Ferguson. Really bad car accident. Looting across from it. Pray for me. #Ferguson.”

Mckesson was radicalized that night. “I just couldn’t believe that the police would fire tear gas into what had been a peaceful protest,” he told me. “I was running around, face burning, and nothing I saw looked like America to me.” He also noticed that his account of that night’s tear-gassings, along with a photo he took of the rapper J. Cole, had brought him quite a bit of attention on Twitter. Previously, Mckesson used the social-media platform to post random news articles that interested him, but now he was realizing its documentary power. He quickly grasped that a protester’s effectiveness came mostly from his ability to be present in as many places as possible: He had to be on West Florissant when the police rolled up in armored vehicles; inside the St. Louis coffee shop MoKaBe’s, a safe haven for the protesters in the city’s Shaw neighborhood, when tear gas started to seep in through the front door; in front of the Ferguson Police Department when shots rang out. He had to keep up a steady stream of tweets and carry around a charger so his phone wouldn’t die.

Mckesson eventually returned to Minneapolis, but by then he had committed himself to the protests. He started traveling down to St. Louis every weekend. On one of those trips, Mckesson met Johnetta Elzie, a fellow protester who goes by Netta. They became fast friends.

Elzie is “Day 1,” the term given to Ferguson protesters who showed up on Aug. 9. She grew up all around St. Louis, spending much of her childhood in the beauty salons where her mother worked. The day Michael Brown was killed, Elzie, who had been mourning the death of her mother, went down to Canfield Green, a housing complex near where Brown was shot, to pay her respects.

The first thing Elzie did was tweet: “It’s still blood on the ground where Mike Brown Jr was murdered. A cone in place where his body laid for hours today. #STL #Ferguson.” She experimented with other networks to see if they could do a better job of spreading what she was seeing. “I took an Instagram photo — there was one teddy bear; maybe three, four candles on the ground,” she told me. “I even tried Tumblr, a social-media platform that I never use. Those videos got hundreds of thousands of reposts.”

Over the next few weeks, Elzie, who studied journalism in college, emerged as one of the most reliable real-time observers of the confrontations between the protesters and the police. She took photos of the protest organizers, of the sandwiches she and her friends made to feed other protesters, of the Buddhist monks who showed up at the burned QuikTrip. Mckesson, too, was live-tweeting when he was back in Ferguson, integrating video and referring to protesters and police officers alike by name. Mckesson’s tweets were usually sober and detailed, whereas Elzie’swere cheerfully sarcastic, mock-heroic and forthright: a running account of events that felt intimate.

Other voices came to the fore as well. There was Bassem Masri, perhaps Ferguson’s most famous live-streamer, who attracted tens of thousands of viewers to nightly feeds that showed what the protests looked like beyond the media barricades. Another local activist, Ashley Yates, created T-shirts and hoodies that read “ASSATA TAUGHT ME” — a reference to the former Black Panther Party member Assata Shakur — and that became part of the protest iconography. Clifton Kinnie, a senior in high school, organized other students throughout St. Louis. By the fall, these activists and a handful of others had gone from lone Internet figures to recognized faces of the movement.

Mckesson and Elzie focused much of their attention on criticizing the mainstream media, who devoted too much airtime, they felt, to violence and discord among the protest community. As a corrective, in mid-September, they teamed up with Brittany Packnett, the executive director of St. Louis’s Teach for America program, and Justin Hansford, a law professor at St. Louis University, to publish the This Is the Movement newsletter, which scrutinized and curated the daily news out of Ferguson. A wide range of readers, from reporters to protesters to officials within the Department of Justice, subscribed. Pretty soon, Mckesson and Elzie were appearing regularly on TV and radio. The two cultivated appealing personas, becoming easily recognizable to their many followers. Mckesson had begun wearing red shoes and a red shirt to protests. Later, he replaced this outfit with a bright blue Patagonia vest, which he now wears everywhere he goes. (Someone created a DeRay’s vest Twitter account.) Elzie often wore dark lipstick, a pair of oversize sunglasses and a leather jacket: the beautician’s daughter channeling a Black Panther.

Mckesson and Elzie have always insisted that the movement is leaderless, that it is a communal expression of pent-up anguish spilling onto the streets, but over the fall, they were frequently called upon to serve as its spokespeople. Elzie was invited to conferences and panels, and talked with established social-justice activists around the country about the actions in Ferguson. Mckesson, who was dutifully putting out the newsletter during this time while still working at his job in Minneapolis, began using Twitter to announce actions throughout St. Louis. He and Elzie would tweet a time and location and then wait for the people to show up. By October, they were also being followed by the police, who would sometimes arrive at the scene of the action before the protesters themselves.

Together, Mckesson and Elzie were developing a model of the modern protester: part organizer, part citizen journalist who marches through American cities while texting, as charging cords and battery packs fall out of his pockets. By Nov. 24, when Robert McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecutor, announced that Darren Wilson would not be indicted on murder charges, a network of hundreds of organizers was already in place, ready to bring thousands of people into the streets with a tweet.

I first met Mckesson on Dec. 7, the 121st day of continuous protests in Ferguson. Three days before, a grand jury in Staten Island decided not to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo, of the New York Police Department, on charges of killing Eric Garner, an unarmed black man, by choking him. Demonstrations broke out across the city, with major bridges and tunnels shut down every night by protesters, and Mckesson traveled to New York to join them. In Grand Central Terminal, I ran into a group of 30 protesters who had just performed a “die-in,” lying quietly on the ground for four and a half minutes — the duration symbolizing the four and a half hours Michael Brown’s body was left in the street. A handful of police officers stood by, looking bored and stern.

The crowd headed outside into a cold rain and started up the chants: “Black lives matter!” “I can’t breathe!” “We need freedom from these racist-ass cops!” Three young white protesters in front of me — all dressed alike in thick, fur-fringed coats covered with see-through, formless rain ponchos — marched in a straight line with their phones set to video mode, holding them solemnly in the air like processional candles. At 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, near the New York Public Library’s main branch, I saw Mckesson, recognizing him by his blue Patagonia vest. He was walking at the edge of the crowd, head buried in his phone.

We walked with the group until it came to a halt in Times Square. Mckesson stood under a bank awning, shivering. When I asked why he didn’t wear something warmer than a vest, he smiled and said, “I feel bulletproof in this.”

An elderly man in an orange rain parka walked up to us and said he had been inspired by Mckesson’s Twitter account and wanted to thank him for the work he did in Ferguson. “You just keep it up and stay safe,” the man said. Mckesson, who speaks in a high-pitched, singsong voice, thanked the man for his kindness before turning his attention back to his phone.

After the protest, Mckesson and I retired to a nearby cafe in a Japanese bookstore. Mckesson took out a large charging device, roughly the size of a deck of cards, and plugged in his white iPhone 6 Plus. Then, reaching into a vest pocket, he pulled out another white iPhone and plugged that in as well. Dozens of Twitter notifications piled up on his screen, and Mckesson shared them with me. Earlier that day, he asked if any of his followers knew the address of William Bratton, New York’s police commissioner, thinking that he might organize a protest.

In response, one person called Mckesson a “Mongoloid,” while others asked if he was threatening Bratton’s life. Some tweets were obliquely menacing: “I look forward to seeing your ass rightfully beaten” or “I hope one of his Rottweilers takes a bite out of your ass.” The tone of these replies went beyond standard trolling — an odd familiarity ran through them. The Twitter users, especially the more vicious ones, seemed to actually know Mckesson and some of his fellow protesters.

“This is, like, every day,” Mckesson told me. “The trolls are wild. They know where I am at all times.”

Mckesson had come to New York to attend workshops and to spread the word about actions in the city. He wanted to see if the wave of dissent that had gathered in the streets of Ferguson and radiated out across the Internet could become something substantial and organized. Two weeks later, after a series of actions involving tens of thousands of people, the murder of two New York police officers had a chilling effect on the street protests. For now, though, Mckesson was in his element, using his phone to create a connection between the outrage on social media and the actions in the streets.

In the cafe, surrounded by shrink-wrapped pastries and a gathering of lucky cat figurines, he answered WhatsApp messages from fellow organizers and text messages from friends, and tried to fact-check a future tweet. When he wasn’t sending out data, he was swiping down on Twitter to refresh his timeline with such frequency that it looked as if he were petting his phone.

“When I tweet, I’m mostly preaching to the choir,” he said. “But the heart of the movement is in the actions. It’s in shutting down streets, shutting down Walmarts, shutting down any place where people feel comfortable. We want to make people feel as uncomfortable as we feel when we hear about Mike, about Eric Garner, about Tamir Rice. We want them to experience what we go through on a daily basis.”

Mckesson is a restless man. In the time we spent together, the only occasion I can recall him sitting in one spot for more than 15 minutes was in an Applebee’s in St. Louis, where, after a long day of protests and TV interviews, he laid his head down next to a plate of salmon — he almost always orders salmon — and fell asleep. But his habit of seeing every minute of relaxation as a minute lost serves his activism well. In the rare quiet moments between police shootings and actions, Mckesson tweets and retweets stats, trivia, inspirational messages and the names of the dead.

NYC TV stations report crimes committed by blacks more frequently than they even occur.

Love is the Why.

Justice is not an abstract concept. Justice is a living Mike Brown. Justice is Tamir playing outside again. Justice is Darren Wilson in jail.

I once watched Mckesson spend a good five minutes trying to edit down a tweet that ran long before calling one of his closest friends. They talked through the tweet together. Ultimately they landed on this: “Blackness in America is never a question of afraid or unafraid; it’s a matter of varying degrees of fear, as we are victims of state terror.” This obsessive focus is evident in every part of Mckesson’s life. He makes a point to never curse in public. He is too busy to watch movies or television. He does not have a boyfriend (some in the movement have objected to having a gay man in a prominent position). And although fellow protesters sometimes call him “the storyteller,” his tweets gain their force from their concision and relentlessness rather than from narrative flair.

Mckesson grew up in Baltimore, the son of drug addicts; his mother left the family when he was 3, so his father and great-grandmother raised him and his sister. Starting in sixth grade, Mckesson was elected to the student government every year all the way through college. He went to Bowdoin, the small, elite liberal-arts college in Maine, paying part of his own way through a work-study job in the mailroom. During lulls, he would study the rows of mailboxes in the student union, trying to learn the name of every student on campus, hoping it would give him an edge in the coming campaigns. He also worked as a campus tour guide and diligently honed his patter. When he found that he was stumbling through the list of languages Bowdoin offered, he practiced reciting them. When he saw that prospective students weren’t reacting to his presentation as enthusiastically as he hoped, he tweaked his delivery until he got it right. There is a touching earnestness to Mckesson that makes you want to believe everything he says.

“There was a whole generation of Bowdoin students who came to the college because of the campus tours DeRay would do,” said Barry Mills, the president of Bowdoin, who considers Mckesson a close friend. “He’s always known how to inspire a group of people, so it doesn’t surprise me that he’s become a thought leader for what’s going on out in Ferguson.”

After graduating in 2007, Mckesson joined Teach for America and taught middle school for two years in East New York, Brooklyn, before moving back home to Baltimore to work in H.R. for the city’s schools. He developed a reputation as a ruthless administrator — every hiring and firing was justified, in his own mind, by what was best for the kids in the district.

His career, both academic and professional, was built on an unusual faith in effecting change from within a bureaucratic organization, whether a student government or the city public-school system. But when he saw Michael Brown lying dead in the street, he felt as if he had come up against the edge of that belief. “I kept thinking, Kids can’t learn if they’re dead,” he told me.

There is an indelible picture of Mckesson taken on his first full day in Ferguson. He is standing by the side of the road, right fist raised defiantly in the air; in his left hand, he holds a cardboard sign that reads: “My Blackness Is Not a Weapon. #handsup #dontshoot.” Behind him are the dull greenery of St. Louis in August and hints of the one-story, uniform brick houses off West Florissant. After a night of photographing and documenting everyone else at the protest, Mckesson, the education executive with a six-figure salary, finally turned the camera around on himself, revealing the awkward resolve of a student-body president who had lost confidence in all those systems and was trying something new.

In March, Mckesson and Elzie traveled to Selma, Ala., for the 50th-anniversary commemoration of Bloody Sunday, the pivotal moment in the civil rights era when protesters marching on the Edmund Pettus Bridge were brutally attacked on national television by Alabama state troopers. I stood with Mckesson on the bridge. “We’re really up high,” he said, staring down at the brown waters of the Alabama River. “Can you imagine having all those troopers on horseback riding toward you, trying to beat you down? Where do you run? You definitely can’t jump over the side here.” All day, hundreds of tourists had been walking over the bridge, solemnly touching its supports and snapping selfies in front of its historical markers. If Mckesson was feeling the sway of the 50th anniversary, he betrayed no emotion. Instead, he asked me how far I thought the drop was down to the river, and started searching Google for answers.

Mckesson and Elzie have each expressed ambivalence over whether the youth movement should try to draw from the popular image of the civil rights movement. They worry that the constant comparisons with something that happened 50 years ago will dilute the immediacy of today’s protests. Much as they admire the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — each is well versed in his writings — they feel his legacy has been distorted. He is held up as an avatar of genteel protest, invoked by conservative politicians and leaders in the black community as a way to discredit their movement. Mckesson and Elzie frequently point out that King was in fact a revolutionary who believed in the power of confrontation, and that it’s a crime against American history to confuse the real King with an appealingly passive one. To make their point, they participated in an action called #ReclaimMLK, which sought to counter “efforts to reduce a long history marred with the blood of countless women and men into iconic images of men in suits behind pulpits.”

“Also,” Elzie often says whenever someone brings up King as a way of questioning their work, “they killed him too.”

If you ask Mckesson and Elzie why there is no central figure in today’s movement, they will again insist on the advantages of leaderlessness. If you bring up legislative reform, they will point out that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been all but rolled back and that their aims go well beyond small changes to the criminal-justice system. If you bring up nonviolence as the only civilized way to effect change, they will recite King’s words: “A riot is the language of the unheard,” or they will say they don’t condone rioting, but they understand it. Their resistance to confining the civil rights movement to a museum made Mckesson and Elzie an awkward fit for Selma, which was filled with people doing just that.

At dinner that night in Montgomery, Mckesson and Elzie received the news that a 19-year-old unarmed black man, Tony Robinson, had been shot and killed in Madison, Wis. They spent the meal with their heads bent over their phones, compiling and tweeting out all the information they could confirm through their sources in the Madison protest community. Piece by piece, a digital portrait of Robinson emerged: a photo of him in a graduation gown, his arm around a female friend; a few tweets he sent out in the days before his death. Then, around midnight, dinner long gone by, Mckesson sighed and held up his phone to show Elzie a photo of the front steps of Robinson’s home, which were streaked with blood. “That’s where they dragged him out of his house,” Mckesson said.

The next morning, in the lobby of the education center at Selma’s George C. Wallace State Community College, Mckesson and Elzie took selfies with Diane Nash and her son Douglass Bevel. In the early ’60s, Nash, along with Bernard Lafayette Jr., John Lewis and others, founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (S.N.C.C.). She also helped organize the Freedom Riders, helped lead the march from Selma to Montgomery and played a key role in the push to integrate lunch counters throughout the South. Between photos, Nash talked to another admirer about a call she had received from one of Bobby Kennedy’s aides, who pleaded with her to cancel an action because Kennedy thought there was a good chance people would be killed.

Mckesson and Elzie seemed almost star-struck, peppering Nash with questions about the civil rights movement and then posting her answers on Twitter. Mckesson told Nash she needed to get on Twitter to share her wisdom.

“Twitter?” Nash asked. “I just figured out how to have a Facebook.”

“Twitter is the revolution, Ms. Nash,” Mckesson said.

For him, the social network seemed to have become not just the site of revolution but the conduit for his ideas. Two days later, on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, Mckesson was scheduled to speak at a rally before a ceremonial crossing of the bridge. As we drove from Montgomery to Selma, Mckesson wrote drafts of tweets on his phone.

“I do this to make sure what I say can be tweetable,” he explained. “And it helps me be precise in what I say.”

He muttered lines to himself. “We must always confront,” he said, but something about the phrase displeased him. He deleted the words and started from the top.

For him, the social network seemed to have become not just the site of revolution but the conduit for his ideas.

Mckesson and Elzie arrived in Selma and walked to the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, the starting point for the original march across the bridge. Inside, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. was addressing the congregation. The crowd outside was made up largely of union members carrying placards for their local chapters. Mckesson, Elzie and Packnett, who arrived the night before, tried to find a contact who would take them to the foot of the bridge, where Mckesson would speak. After 20 minutes of confusion, they walked back through the crowd to a small auditorium off Broad Street, where Bernard Lafayette Jr. was holding a book signing. When they walked in, an elderly woman said, loudly enough for all to hear, “Social media just showed up.”

In the end, Mckesson did not get to deliver his speech. The Rev. Al Sharpton, who followed Holder, went long, and there was no time left.

In an interview with People magazine to promote the release of the film “Selma,” Oprah Winfrey voiced some of the questions skeptics have had about the modern protest movement. “I think it’s wonderful to march and to protest, and it’s wonderful to see, all across the country, people doing it,” she said. “But what I’m looking for is some kind of leadership to come out of this to say: ‘This is what we want. This is what has to change, and these are the steps that we need to take to make these changes, and this is what we’re willing to do to get it.’ ”

Certain factions of the movement have made explicit demands. During the Eric Garner protests in New York, a group called the Justice League NYC, which is affiliated with Harry Belafonte, came out with a list that included the immediate firing of Officer Pantaleo and the appointment of a special prosecutor. In the wake of the Department of Justice’s report on Ferguson, some people within the St. Louis protest community demanded the recall of Mayor James Knowles III. But on the whole, the movement does shy away from specific policy prescriptions. Instead, the work seems to be aimed at an abrupt, wide-scale change in consciousness, channeling the grief and anger that these police killings engender around the country. The pipelines for that energy are still under construction, but asking the leaders of the youth movement what they plan on doing with it is akin to barging into a funeral and asking the mourners why they haven’t donated their inheritance to charity yet.

Soon after I met them, Mckesson and Elzie took me on a tour of some of the sites around St. Louis where black men have been killed by the police. Many of the buildings that burned during the protests were standing in ruin. “They want to leave them all up,” Elzie said, referring to the St. Louis city government. “They want this to be a museum of black rage.” As we drove from the Six Stars Market, where Kajieme Powell, 25, was shot in August, to the gas station where Antonio Martin, 18, was killed in December, Elzie talked about the emotion behind the movement and how, for many people in St. Louis, the Ferguson protests represented the first time they were able to collectively voice their frustrations with the police. “Our demand is simple,” Elzie said. “Stop killing us.”

The starkness of that demand has been enough to create some measure of change, purely by creating an atmosphere of awareness and constant urgency around an issue that was previously ignored. Although Ferguson’s mayor was not recalled, the Department of Justice report did lead to the resignation of the police chief, the city manager and a handful of city employees who sent racist emails. The swiftness with which the movement now acts, and the volume of people it can bring out to every protest, have turned every police killing into a national referendum on the value of black lives in America.

In April, after cellphone video footage showed a North Charleston police officer firing eight times at the back of a 50-year-old black man named Walter Scott as he was running away, the officer was arrested and booked on murder charges the same day, and nearly every prospective candidate in the coming presidential election subsequently released a statement, expressing horror at Scott’s death and promising to address criminal-justice-system reform. Later that month, after riots broke out in Baltimore, Hillary Clinton gave a speech at Columbia University in which she explicitly allied herself with the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement, and implicitly rejected some policies that her husband put in place during his presidency. Her proposals were hardly specific or new: widespread adoption of body cameras by police officers, “a renewed focus on working with communities to prevent crime” and a call for a “true national debate” on how to end the “era of mass incarceration,” but the fact that Clinton chose to address these issues at such length suggests that police reform will be an unavoidable subject during the campaign season. “What we’ve seen in Baltimore should, indeed does, tear at our soul,” Clinton said. “And from Ferguson to Staten Island to Baltimore, the patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable.” She listed the names of Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner and Freddie Gray, and called for “real reforms that can be felt on our streets, in our courthouses and our jails and prisons, in communities too long neglected.”

Perhaps the most telling evidence of change was the charges filed on May 1 against six Baltimore police officers related to the death of Freddie Gray, which ranged from misconduct in office to second-degree depraved heart murder. While making the announcement, Marilyn Mosby, the Baltimore state’s attorney, said: “To the people of Baltimore and the demonstrators across America, I heard your call for ‘no justice, no peace.’ Your peace is sincerely needed as I work to deliver justice on behalf of this young man.”

The swiftness with which the movement now acts has turned every police killing into a national referendum on the value of black lives.

The attention that political figures are paying to the movement points to real anxiety that African-American voters who supported President Obama won’t turn out again. “This issue is at the forefront of people in the black community,” Quentin James, co-founder of the public-affairs firm Vestige Strategies, which specializes in engaging communities of color, told me. “Not voting is a choice, and many may choose to stay home. If you look at a pivotal state like Ohio, African-Americans ended up overvoting in 2012. If they undervote in 2016, the election becomes a little bit shakier.”

In talking about the problem of police violence at all, these national political figures are reversing a three-decade presumption within the Democratic Party, one established by Bill Clinton himself in 1994, that there is zero incentive to advocate for the rights of criminal suspects. “The narrative used to be: ‘We support the police and whatever police unions say,’ ” James said. “That has changed. Technology, having a video camera anywhere, has changed the game.”

Most of the activists are deeply skeptical that the candidates will follow through on their promises. Rachel Gilmer, the associate director for the African American Policy Forum, pointed to the long history of Democratic candidates who have “embraced rhetoric that implies their willingness and readiness to produce systemic change. However, once they’ve solidified our support and are elected into office, we’ve seen that they aren’t willing to confront or align themselves with the powers, systems and interests that continue to exploit black lives.” Gilmer went on to say that, absent a candidate who would be willing to address white supremacy directly, many within the movement would be content to opt out of voting for “the lesser of two evils.”

But perhaps the question of political follow-through is misplaced. “Black lives matter” is a vital statement, especially when people are confronted with all the footage that shows police officers who may not agree. But it is more a provocation than a platform, a phrase that might be more appropriate for a rally than a sustained political movement. Jim Crow was an evil that could be addressed by Congress and argued against before the Supreme Court. But how do you legislate the worth of black lives? Could a law force a police officer to cut out the possible prejudice and fear he feels when he sees a young black man, however seemingly unarmed, reach for his waistband?

For now, the victories of the movement are difficult to quantify — the paradox, perhaps, of a movement that exists to raise awareness of death. Shortly after Tony Robinson was shot and killed in Madison, Mike Koval, the city’s police chief, released the name of the officer involved and visited Robinson’s mother. In an interview with CNN, Koval said: “We have a person of color cut down in his prime — he was unarmed — by a police officer. So whether I like it or not, I am inextricably tied to the Ferguson phenomenon.”

“Do I think that was influenced by the protests in Ferguson?” Mckesson said. “Yes. But Tony’s still dead, so how do you call that a win?”

On April 26, a bright, warm Sunday in Baltimore, Mckesson attended Freddie Gray’s wake. Across the street from the funeral home, a group of demonstrators held up signs that read: “We are ONE Baltimore,” “Our hearts are with you” and “We grieve with you.” Television crews had set up nearby. A cable-news anchor grabbed Mckesson and said, “It’s the esteemed DeRay.” The two had met back in St. Louis. Mckesson agreed to come back later that afternoon to record a short interview.

Inside, Gray’s body was laid out behind a gauzy shroud. His head, swollen and shiny, was covered by a white baseball cap. A pair of spotless white sneakers had been placed on his feet.

Looking at the body, I couldn’t help thinking that in the coming months, more incidents would arise in more American cities. Nobody can predict where and when these killings may happen, only that they will happen, and that the movement will continue to draw attention to them, and that the sense of grief within black America and of constant siege at the hands of the police will not abate.

“They never look like they do in life,” Mckesson said. “Being back here, it reminds me of how many funerals we attend.”

We walked back to Mckesson’s rental car. A big man in a tank top stood in the center of the road, holding up a sign that asked passing drivers to honk for Freddie Gray. “We come in peace!” he screamed. “We come in peace!”

I asked Mckesson what his thoughts were after seeing Gray’s body.

“I just tweeted my thoughts,” Mckesson said. Over the five months I had been following him and Elzie around, from Ferguson to New York to Selma and now to Baltimore, I found that Mckesson often tweeted the answers to my questions before I could think to ask them. I took out my phone to check Twitter, but this time Mckesson saved me the effort.

“I’m not desensitized to death,” he said. “I just expect trauma now and am trying to steel myself for what’s coming next.” For the first time since I met him, Mckesson seemed overcome by emotion. He turned his head away and covered the bridge of his nose with his hand.

Ben Mathis-Lilley, The Slatest

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/05/01/marilyn_mosby_video_background_footage_biography_on_prosecutor.html

Marilyn Mosby, the Maryland state’s attorney for Baltimore, announced Friday [May 1st] that her office had charged six police officers in Freddie Gray’s death. Mosby now becomes a, perhaps the, focal figure in the biggest ongoing news story in the United States, and the content and delivery of her speech announcing the charges—as well as her star-on-the-rise backstory—suggest she is eager for the challenge.

Mosby, 35, was elected to her office and sworn in this January; she’s reportedly the youngest top major-city prosecutor in the United States. A Boston native, she met her husband—Baltimore City Councilman Nick Mosby, described Thursday as a rising star himself by NPR—as an undergrad at Tuskegee University in Alabama before attending Boston College Law School. She worked as an assistant state’s attorney in Baltimore from 2006 to 2011 before becoming a “field counsel” for Liberty Mutual insurance.

This January a Baltimore magazine interview discussed Mosby’s belief in the importance of trust between law enfrcement officials and the communities they serve, a theme she also spoke about in her forceful and often eloquent Friday press conference.

After describing her office’s version of Gray’s treatment—in summary, she said officers negligently failed to buckle him in the police van in which he was being transported and then repeatedly ignored clear evidence of a medical emergency after he was hurt—Mosby began speaking more broadly, alluding to the common “no justice, no peace” chant of civil rights protesters.

Her words:

To the people of Baltimore and the demonstrators across America: I heard your call for “no justice, no peace.” Your peace is sincerely needed as I work to deliver justice on behalf of this young man. To those that are angry, hurt, or have their own experiences of injustice at the hands of police officers, I urge you to channel the energy peacefully as we prosecute this case.

That “no justice, no peace” reference, not surprisingly, has already been criticized by a Fox News host. (On the other side of the aisle, the Huffington Post called her “objectively badass.”)

Mosby also spoke about her family’s history in police work, perhaps as a response to potential pushback against her move to charge the officers—pushback that has already begun via a police union open letter that calls for the appointment of an independent special prosecutor in the case, noting Mosby’s connections to Gray family attorney William Murphy, who donated to her campaign and advised her during her transition into the prosecutor’s office.

Her words:

To the rank and file officers of the Baltimore city police department—please know that these accusations of these six officers are not an indictment on the entire force. I come from five generations of law enforcement. My father was an officer. My mother was an officer. Several of my aunts and uncles. My recently departed and beloved grandfather was one of the founding members of the first black police organization in Massachusetts. I can tell you that the actions of these officers will not and shoudl not in any way damage the important working relationships between police and prosecutors as we continue to work together to reduce crime in Baltimore.

And she closed her remarks with a statement directed to “the youth of this city.”

Said Mosby:

To the youth of this city—I will seek justice on your behalf. This is a moment. This is your moment. Let’s ensure that we have peaceful and productive rallies that will develop structural and systemic changes for generations to come. You’re at the forefront of this cause. And as young people, our time is now.

Born on April 27, 1927

http://www.thekingcenter.org/about-mrs-king

Human Rights Activist and Leader 1927-2006

Coretta Scott King was one of the most influential women leaders in our world. Prepared by her family, education, and personality for a life committed to social justice and peace, she entered the world stage in 1955 as wife of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and as a leading participant in the American Civil Rights Movement. Her remarkable partnership with Dr. King resulted not only in four children, who became dedicated to carrying forward their parent’s work, but also in a life devoted to the highest values of human dignity in service to social change. Mrs. King traveled throughout the world speaking out on behalf of racial and economic justice, women’s and children’s rights, gay and lesbian dignity, religious freedom, the needs of the poor and homeless, full-employment, health care, educational opportunities, nuclear disarmament and environmental justice. She lent her support to pro-democracy movements world-wide and consulted with many world leaders, including Corazon Aquino, Kenneth Kaunda, and Nelson Mandela.

Born and raised in Marion, Alabama, Coretta Scott graduated valedictorian from Lincoln High School. She received a B.A. in music and education from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and then went on to study concert singing at Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music, where she earned a degree in voice and violin. While in Boston she met Martin Luther King, Jr. who was then studying for his doctorate in systematic theology at Boston University. They were married on June 18, 1953, and in September 1954 took up residence in Montgomery, Alabama, with Coretta Scott King assuming the many responsibilities of pastor’s wife at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

During Dr. King’s career, Mrs. King devoted most of her time to raising their four children: Yolanda Denise (1955), Martin Luther, III (1957), Dexter Scott (1961), and Bernice Albertine (1963). From the earliest days, however, she balanced mothering and Movement work, speaking before church, civic, college, fraternal and peace groups. She conceived and performed a series of favorably-reviewed Freedom Concerts which combined prose and poetry narration with musical selections and functioned as significant fundraisers for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the direct action organization of which Dr. King served as first president. In 1957, she and Dr. King journeyed to Ghana to mark that country’s independence. In 1958, they spent a belated honeymoon in Mexico, where they observed first-hand the immense gulf between extreme wealth and extreme poverty. In 1959, Dr. and Mrs. King spent nearly a month in India on a pilgrimage to disciples and sites associated with Mahatma Gandhi. In 1964, she accompanied him to Oslo, Norway, where he received the Nobel Peace Prize. Even prior to her husband’s public stand against the Vietnam War in 1967, Mrs. King functioned as liaison to peace and justice organizations, and as mediator to public officials on behalf of the unheard.

After her husband’s assassination in 1968, Mrs. King founded and devoted great energy and commitment to building and developing programs for the Atlanta-based Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change as a living memorial to her husband’s life and dream. Situated in the Freedom Hall complex encircling Dr. King’s tomb, The King Center is today located inside of a 23-acre national historic park which includes his birth home, and which hosts over one million visitors a year.

As founding President, Chair, and Chief Executive Officer, she dedicated herself to providing local, national and international programs that have trained tens of thousands of people in Dr. King’s philosophy and methods; she guided the creation and housing of the largest archives of documents from the Civil Rights Movement; and, perhaps her greatest legacy after establishing The King Center itself, Mrs. King spearheaded the massive educational and lobbying campaign to establish Dr. King’s birthday as a national holiday. In 1983, an act of Congress instituted the Martin Luther King, Jr. Federal Holiday Commission, which she chaired for its duration. And in January 1986, Mrs. King oversaw the first legal holiday in honor of her husband–a holiday which has come to be celebrated by millions of people world-wide and, in some form, in over 100 countries.

Coretta Scott King tirelessly carried the message of nonviolence and the dream of the beloved community to almost every corner of our nation and globe. She led goodwill missions to many countries in Africa, Latin America, Europe and Asia. She spoke at many of history’s most massive peace and justice rallies. She served as a Women’s Strike for Peace delegate to the seventeen-nation Disarmament Conference in Geneva, Switzerland in 1962. She was the first woman to deliver the class day address at Harvard, and the first woman to preach at a statutory service at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.

A life-long advocate of interracial coalitions, in 1974 Mrs. King formed a broad coalition of over 100 religious, labor, business, civil and women’s rights organizations dedicated to a national policy of full employment and equal economic opportunity, as Co-Chair of both the National Committee for Full Employment and the Full Employment Action Council. In 1983, she brought together more than 800 human rights organizations to form the Coalition of Conscience, sponsors of the 20th Anniversary March on Washington, until then the largest demonstration ever held in our nation’s capital. In 1987, she helped lead a national Mobilization Against Fear and Intimidation in Forsyth County, Georgia. In 1988, she re-convened the Coalition of Conscience for the 25th anniversary of the March on Washington. In preparation for the Reagan-Gorbachev talks, in 1988 she served as head of the U.S. delegation of Women for a Meaningful Summit in Athens, Greece; and in 1990, as the USSR was redefining itself, Mrs. King was co-convener of the Soviet-American Women’s Summit in Washington, DC.

In 1985 Mrs. King and three of her children, Yolanda, Martin III and Bernice were arrested at the South African embassy in Washington, DC, for protesting against apartheid.

One of the most influential African-American leaders of her time, Mrs. King received honorary doctorates from over 60 colleges and universities; authored three books and a nationally-syndicated newspaper column; and served on and helped found dozens of organizations, including the Black Leadership Forum, the National Black Coalition for Voter Participation, and the Black Leadership Roundtable.

During her lifetime, Mrs. King dialogued with heads of state, including prime ministers and presidents, as well as participating in protests alongside rank and file working people of all races. She met with many great spiritual leaders, including Pope John Paul, the Dalai Lama, Dorothy Day, and Bishop Desmond Tutu. She witnessed the historic handshake between Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Chairman Yassir Arafat at the signing of the Middle East Peace Accords. She stood with Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg when he became South Africa’s first democratically-elected president. A woman of wisdom, compassion and vision, Coretta Scott King tried to make ours a better world and, in the process, made history.

http://www.civilwaronthewesternborder.org/content/underground-railroad

By Kim Warren, University of Kansas

In an effort to help runaway slaves escape from slave states to the North and to Canada, white and African American abolitionists established a series of hiding places throughout the country where fugitives could hide during the day and travel under the cover of night. Although runaways tended to travel on foot and trains were rarely employed, all involved referred to the secret network as the “Underground Railroad,” a term which first appeared in literature when Harriet Beecher Stowe referred to a secret “underground” line in her 1852 book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The total number of runaways who used the Underground Railroad to escape to freedom is not known, but some estimates exceed 100,000 freed slaves during the antebellum period.

Those involved in the Underground Railroad used code words to maintain anonymity. Fugitive slaves were “passengers” or “cargo,” while the hiding places were referred to as “stations” or “depots.” Anyone who guided runaways or provided aid to them along the journey held the title of “stationmaster,” “conductor,” or “engineer.” Both runaways and conductors suffered uncomfortable circumstances, frigid weather, and severe hunger on Underground Railroad rides. Many risked their lives, especially after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act outlawed the provision of aid to runaway slaves, even in free states. This federal law also made it increasingly difficult for free African Americans to maintain their independence, because they might have been mistaken for runaways.  An abolitionist at the time concluded that “free colored people shared equal fate with the breathless and [footsore] Slave.”

Defying federal law, conductors in Kansas felt especially compelled to help slaves from nearby Missouri, Arkansas, and Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). They often used Underground Railroad routes that ran into Kansas and branched into Northern states such as Iowa and Nebraska or all the way into Canada. Abolitionists in Kansas especially wanted to help passengers along the “Most Miserable” routes that they nicknamed “M & M” for lines coming out of Mississippi and nearby Missouri. One conductor from Wakarusa, Kansas, stated in 1859, “I feel rather proud & very thankfull [sic] that I have been able to do so much good for the oppressed, & so much harm to the oppressors.”

There were notorious people involved with the Underground Railroad, including Harriet Tubman, who escaped from slavery and then returned to the South 19 times to escort over 300 slaves to freedom. Tubman reportedly carried a pistol to ensure that she would never lose a passenger. Levi Coffin, a Quaker, assisted more than 3,000 slaves, many of whom stayed at his homes in Indiana and Ohio, which became well-traveled stations. Individuals in Kansas also played important roles, including Enoch and Luther Platt, who operated stations in the 1850s out of their own home in Wabaunsee County of the Kansas Territory.

Other Kansans supported fugitive aid societies with their money or volunteer efforts. “Share holders” could make donations to such societies to provide supplies or establish new lines. For example, when the “Lane Trail” and the “John Brown Road” had become known to proslavery factions, an anti-slavery aid society made new plans to move fugitives through Kansas to the North with side branches that split in towns throughout Iowa. Members of aid societies not only created new routes, but they also tested the routes to be sure that men, women, and children could travel safely. During an escape, engineers led passengers and signaled the rest of the train to reroute if danger threatened.

Decoding the Underground Railroad:

Freedom or Gospel Train: the Underground Railroad

Cargo, Passengers, or Baggage: runaway slaves

Station or Depot: hiding places for runaway slaves

Conductor, Engineer, Agent, or Shepherd: a person who guided runaway slaves between stations

Stationmaster: a person who managed a station and helped guide runaways along their route

Shareholder or Stockholder: an abolitionist who made financial contributions to the Underground Railroad

Conductors from Kansas could easily cross from Kansas into Missouri to make contact with potential runaways. During the war, slaves living in Missouri, so close to the free state of Kansas, felt especially tempted to use the Underground Railroad to cross the border. One African American man reflected that he did not know details about specific routes into Kansas, but he had heard that if he could just get “to the Yankees” in Lawrence, a town approximately 40 miles from the state line, he could find freedom.

Conductors often gave fugitives clothes and food for their journeys and sometimes at their own expense. One conductor reported that his horse died from serious fatigue after a 63-mile trip into Kansas that took less than 10 hours. Some conductors preferred not to know explicit details about the fugitives they aided for fear of questions from pursuers.

http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/aarcwgm.htm

The Era of Emancipation posed distinctive religious challenges for northern and southern African Americans. When the Civil War finally brought freedom to previously enslaved peoples, the task of organizing religious communities was only one element of the larger need to create new lives—to reunite families, to find jobs, and to figure out what it would mean to live in the United States as citizens rather than property. Northern blacks, for their part, having already gained freedom, saw Emancipation as an enormous logistical challenge—how could black Protestants meet the many needs of newly freed slaves and truly welcome them into a Christian community? And for both, Emancipation promised a meeting between two African American religious traditions that had moved far apart, in terms of both theology and ritual, in the previous seventy years.

In significant respects, the story of African American religion between Emancipation and the northern migration that began just prior to World War I is a tale of regionally distinctive communities that found several areas of common cause, not the least of which were the advent of Jim Crow and lynching as ominous new forms of racism. But an understanding of religious experience in this era must also be supplemented by the complexities of the many internal boundaries in African American life in both the north and south—class divisions, rural/urban differences, and gender issues that accompanied the dawn of freedom.

Class Divisions (Emancipation in the North and South)

A long history of antislavery and political activity among northern black Protestants had convinced them that they could play a major role in the adjustment of the four million freed slaves to American life. In a massive missionary effort, northern black churches established missions to their southern counterparts, resulting in the dynamic growth of independent black churches in the southern states between 1865 and 1900. Predominantly white denominations, such as the Presbyterian, Congregational, and Episcopal churches, also sponsored missions, opened schools for freed slaves, and aided the general welfare of southern blacks, but the majority of African-Americans chose to join the independent black denominations founded in the northern states during the antebellum era.

Within a decade the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) churches claimed southern membership in the hundreds of thousands, far outstripping that of any other organizations. They were quickly joined in 1870 by a new southern-based denomination, the Colored (now "Christian") Methodist Episcopal Church, founded by indigenous southern black leaders. Finally, in 1894 black Baptists formed the National Baptist Convention, an organization that is currently the largest black religious organization in the United States.                       

In many ways this missionary effort was enormously successful. It helped finance and build new churches and schools, it facilitated a remarkable increase in southern black literacy (from 5% in 1870 to approximately 70% by 1900), and, as had been the case in the north, it promoted the rise of many African American leaders who worked well outside the sphere of the church in politics, education, and other professions. But it also created many tensions between northerners, who saw themselves in many respects as the superiors and mentors of their less fortunate southern brethren, and southerners, who had their own ideas about how to worship, work, and live.

Not all ex-slaves welcomed the "help" of the northerners, black or white, particularly because most northern blacks (like whites) saw southern black worship as hopelessly "heathen." Missionaries like Daniel Payne, an AME bishop, took it as their task to educate southern blacks about what "true" Christianity looked like; they wanted to convince ex-slaves to give up any remnants of African practices (such as drumming, dancing, or moaning) and embrace a more sedate, intellectual style of religion. Educational differences played a role in this tension as well. Southern blacks, most of whom had been forbidden from learning to read, saw religion as a matter of oral tradition and immediate experience and emotion. Northerners, however, stressed that one could not truly be Christian unless one was able to read the Bible and understand the creeds and written literature that accompanied a more textually-oriented religious system.

Religious Variety and the Holiness/Pentecostal Movement

Freedom also brought with it opportunities for self-improvement and "getting ahead," and differences of class and location also fostered different kinds of religious practices and beliefs. Gradually, southern religious life became as variegated as that in the north, with Protestant churches to suit a variety of styles. Generally, poorer and more rural churches tended to cling more tenaciously to older customs, and to more experiential forms of worship, and since the vast majority of southern blacks remained in rural areas, many of the traditions inherited from the "hush harbors" of slavery—including root work, chanted preaching, and particularly musical styles—remained a part of church life. In southern cities, as the numbers of educated and middle-class African Americans grew, so too did the interest in a more rationalized and uniform religious experience like that of the north.

Several momentous religious developments emerged out of these changes in southern life by the 1880s. First was the emergence of a "holiness" movement, a trend that emphasized the possibility of Christian perfection through a series of religious experiences of "sanctification." Initially a biracial movement within Methodist churches, holiness ideals fit well with the emphasis on intense religious experience and separation from the world already practiced in southern African American churches. Eventually holiness advocates drew followers and adherents from within other denominations as well. At camp meetings and revivals throughout the south and midwest, black and white Christians met and sang, preached, and testified together in a spirit-filled style reminiscent of earlier African American patterns. Ultimately organized into "Holiness" churches, this development would, after World War I, find its way back to the north and would reinject a new religious style into African American urban worship.

By 1906, the loosely organized holiness movement gave birth to an offshoot, pentecostalism, that would become tremendously important in subsequent decades. That year, during a holiness revival at a Los Angeles church, worshippers were said to have received the gifts of the spirit (speaking and interpreting "tongues," among others) bestowed upon Christ’s followers at Pentecost. This feature came to be a hallmark of pentecostal worship. Although like holiness, pentecostalism began as a multiracial movement that emphasized equality before Christ, by World War I racial lines had formed, and separate black Pentecostal denominations had organized after being shut out by their white counterparts. By the late twentieth century, black Pentecostal denominations, led by the large and influential Church of God in Christ, would become an important component of black religious variety throughout the United States.

Urban Centers

Meanwhile, African American religion in urban areas of the north and south also changed dramatically, particularly after the 1880s. Here, issues of class predominated, as middle-class blacks began to build a religious life much like that of their white counterparts. The AME Church, in particular, was noted for its large, formal churches, its educational network of schools and colleges, and its vast publishing arm that included several publications by the end of the century. Black religious leaders became involved in some of the interdenominational institutions, such as the YMCA and the Sunday School movement, that were the bulwarks of evangelical life at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet unlike white evangelical leaders of the day, who were also engaged in theological battles about biblical history and interpretation, middle-class blacks kept their eyes trained toward the basic social injustices wrought by American racism. This battle, which had steadily worsened after the 1870s, promoted a degree of political unity among black Protestant groups that, at times, outweighed their many differences.

Yet there were some internal tensions. With the emergence of middle-class membership came issues about women's participation in the church, as some black women now had the relative leisure to look beyond the immediacies of life. Several female leaders in this era raised the issue of women's ordination, only to be rebuffed by the male hierarchy. Instead, women formed missionary societies to address all manner of local and international needs, from the support of job training in their communities to funding for African American missionaries to Africa. They worked on urban ills, established reading groups, and advocated for better living conditions. They also wrote for religious periodicals, promoting quite traditional ideals of Victorian womanhood, respectability, and racial uplift. Women also continued work among their less fortunate counterparts in the rural south, in what continued to be an uneasy alliance. Like male religious leaders, too, they protested the creeping effects of Jim Crow laws and the systematic violence of lynching.

Baptism, early 1900s

http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/fair-housing-act

The Civil Rights Act signed into law in April 1968–popularly known as the Fair Housing Act–prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin and sex. Intended as a follow-up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the bill was the subject of a contentious debate in the Senate, but was passed quickly by the House of Representatives in the days after the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. The act stands as the final great legislative achievement of the civil rights era.

Struggle for Fair Housing    

Despite Supreme Court decisions, including Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) and Jones v. Mayer Co. (decided in June 1968), barring the exclusion of African Americans or other minorities from certain sections of cities, race-based housing patterns were still in force by the late 1960s, and those who challenged them often met with resistance, hostility and even violence. Meanwhile, while a growing number of African-American or Hispanic members of the armed forces fought and died in Vietnam, on the home front their families had trouble renting or purchasing homes in certain residential areas because of their race or national origin. In this climate, organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) the G.I. Forum and the National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing lobbied for new fair housing legislation to be passed.

The proposed civil rights legislation of 1968 expanded on and was intended as a follow-up to the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964. The bill’s original goal was to extend federal protection to civil rights workers, but it was eventually expanded to address racial discrimination in housing. Title VIII of the proposed Civil Rights Act was known as the Fair Housing Act, later used as a shorthand description for the entire bill. It prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin and sex.

Passage by the Senate and House    

In the Senate debate over the proposed legislation, Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts–the first African-American ever to be elected to the Senate by popular vote–spoke personally of his return from World War II and his inability to provide a home of his choice for his new family because of his race. In early April 1968, the bill passed the Senate, albeit by an exceedingly slim margin, thanks to the support of the Senate Republican leader, Everett Dirksen, which defeated a southern filibuster. It then went to the House of Representatives, from which it was expected to emerge significantly weakened; the House had grown increasingly conservative as a result of urban unrest and the increasing strength and militancy of the Black Power movement.On April 4–the day of the Senate vote–the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to aid striking sanitation workers. Amid a wave of emotion–including riots, burning and looting in more than 100 cities around the country–President Lyndon B. Johnson increased pressure on Congress to pass the new civil rights legislation. Since the summer of 1966, when King had participated in marches in Chicago calling for open housing in that city, he had been associated with the fight for fair housing. Johnson argued that the bill would be a fitting testament to the man and his legacy, and he wanted it passed prior to King’s funeral in Atlanta. After a strictly limited debate, the House passed the Fair Housing Act on April 10, and President Johnson signed it into law the following day.

Impact of the Fair Housing Act    

Despite the historic nature of the Fair Housing Act, and its stature as the last major act of legislation of the civil rights movement, in practice housing remained segregated in many areas of the United States in the years that followed. From 1950 to 1980, the total black population in America’s urban centers increased from 6.1 million to 15.3 million. During this same time period, white Americans steadily moved out of the cities into the suburbs, taking many of the employment opportunities blacks needed into communities where they were not welcome to live. This trend led to the growth in urban America of ghettoes, or inner city communities with high minority populations that were plagued by high unemployment, crime and other social ills.