October 4, 2024 • 31 mins
Timothy Sandefur of the Goldwater Institute gave a talk at STARRS Rally for Our Republic in September 2024 in Arizona. Rally emcee Ray Semko, the D*I*C*E Man introduced Timothy.
Description:
Frederick Douglass—the escaped slave who became an internationally famous spokesman for liberty and one of America’s most celebrated intellectuals—declared in the 1850s that the U.S. Constitution was “a glorious liberty document,” and that those who denounced it as enshrining white supremacy and slavery were wrong. What led Douglass to break even with anti-slavery allies to defend the Constitution? And does his vision of the American Dream survive today?
Douglass, a beacon of hope amid the shadows of America's racial past, is reframed by Timothy Sandefur, an impassioned advocate for free speech. He challenges prevailing narratives by portraying Douglass not just as a former slave but as a profound believer in the promise of American equality. He compares Douglass's optimism with the more critical perspectives of contemporary figures like Ta-Nehisi Coates, exploring how their differing views influence today's discourse on racial justice and national identity.
Sandefur covers the stark contrast between Douglass's belief in the Constitution as a vessel for unity and Coates's view of the American dream as a façade. Through an exploration of historical and modern perspectives, he discusses how these narratives shape our understanding of race and equality today. His talk emphasizes the importance of hope and perseverance, drawing inspiration from Douglass's unwavering faith in the nation's founding ideals as pathways to progress.
Finally, Timothy reflects on the enduring battle for unity in America, guided by Douglass's teachings on dignity and the relentless pursuit of freedom. He highlights the need for loyalty and self-respect in realizing constitutional ideals for all. Timothy puts forth a call for unity, reminding us of the shared history that binds Americans together and the better angels that can guide us toward a more unified future.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Ray Semko, Emcee (00:05):
Our next speaker is Timothy Sandeifer.
Now, do not hold this againsthim, but he's a lawyer, and you
know what a thousand lawyers atthe bottom of the ocean are?
Do you know what they are?
No, no, a good start.
You knew that, you just didn'twant to say it.
(00:26):
And I only say that with love,because this guy is a lawyer,
but he's doing it for goodthings Advocate for free speech.
He has written more books thanI have read, so he's prolific in
his writing.
He's doing the country aservice by advocating.
(00:47):
If anybody advocates for freespeech, that's a major victory
for us.
Okay, and he does so many otherthings.
But why should I tell you whenTimothy Sandefur can, timothy,
if you would please, thank you,sir.
Timothy Sandefur (01:09):
Well, thank you very much for having me.
I've been asked to talk aboutone of my great heroes,
Ffrederick Douglass.
I wrote a book about Douglassand I brought some copies with
me and I put them out on thetable out there and, rather than
charge you for them, I thoughtI'd just give them away.
I didn't bring enough foreverybody, I don't think so
everybody rush out during thebreak and grab one, and if you
(01:32):
like what you read and you'reinterested in the kind of work
that I and my colleagues do atthe Goldwater Institute, I'd ask
that you consider dropping us afew dollars.
We work based on the.
We survive off the money that'sdonated to us by people who
agree with the work that we do,unlike, for example, public
sector unions which operate frommoney stolen out of the
(01:53):
paychecks, against their will,of public employees.
But, in any event, that's atopic for another day.
I wanted to talk to you aboutDouglass and what he teaches us
about the world today.
Douglass is a fascinatingfigure and he's one of the
giants of American history, butthe reason that he's of interest
to this audience is because hestands as such a refutation to
(02:17):
many of the claims that havebeen made in recent years about
the nature of the United States.
It's become very fashionable inthe past decade or so to regard
America as a fundamentallyracist nation, a country steeped
in white supremacy, in whichblack Americans and members of
other minority groups aresystematically repressed and
exploited.
The New York Times 1619 projectclaims that the Constitution of
(02:40):
the United States was writtento protect slavery, and popular
writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coatesclaimed that white supremacy
and racial hatred lie at theheart of American political life
.
And yet in Douglass we find ablack man, a fugitive from
slavery, who rejected such ideasand who insisted, not out of
mindless patriotism orsloganeering, that the United
(03:03):
States is out of mindlesspatriotism or sloganeering, that
the United States isfundamentally about equality,
not racism, and that blackAmericans should cherish their
American citizenship.
It is impossible to regardDouglass as naive or as a fool.
So how can we reconcile hisview of the American political
order with the claims of thecritical race theorists?
Well, the answer, obviously, isthat we can't.
(03:26):
And to appreciate why we shouldstart with his famous life
story.
Douglass was born to an enslavedmother and a father he never
met in 1818.
He grew up on a plantation inMaryland and in the Baltimore
home of some relatives of hisowner.
He learned to read by foolingwhite children in the
neighborhood into teaching him,and then began secretly reading
(03:49):
anti-slavery pamphlets.
Eventually, when he became ateenager, he grew so angry about
being enslaved that his ownerdecided to teach him a lesson
and sent him to live with a mannamed Edward Covey, who was a
famous slave breaker.
He ran a torture facility thatwas designed to destroy people's
independence and render theminto abject servants.
(04:11):
So Covey beat Douglass everyweek for any reason or no reason
.
He hid in the bushes to attackhim out of nowhere, all to
instill in him this sense ofhopeless terror and to try and
destroy Douglas's capacity todream of a better life.
And at first it worked.
But then, on one hot August day, douglas decided that he would
(04:33):
not surrender.
He fainted from heat stroke onthat day and Covey beat him for
it with a wooden club, andDouglas begged his owner to
intervene, but he refused.
So Douglas resolved to fightback.
The next time Covey attackedhim, he grabbed the man around
the throat and held on.
They struggled for hours untilCovey stumbled off, mumbling,
(04:55):
and he never beat Douglas again.
Douglas learned from thisincident a crucial principle, he
who would be free must himselfstrike the blow.
Striking that blow rather thansurrendering, believing in
himself enough to stand up.
That was the crucial lesson,and Douglass refused to accept
the hopeless, helpless,dreamless life of a brute Quote.
(05:18):
Next to the dignity of being afree man is the dignity of
striving to be free.
I detest the slaveholder andalmost equally detest a
contented slave.
They are both enemies tofreedom.
One of the saddest factsconnected with organized and
settled oppression is that itdeadens the sensibility of its
victims.
It acts upon the oppressed likecertain deadly poisons upon
(05:41):
animal life which lull to sleepbefore dissolving the body in
death.
Now, you all know that story or, if you don't, you can read it
in my book or preferably inDouglas's own books.
But I tell it now because Iwant to talk about the lessons
Douglas teaches us aboutidealism and cynicism, about
(06:02):
pride and surrender, about theAmerican dream and about that
deadly poison that lulls tosleep, a helpless, hopeless,
dreamless sleep.
Let me begin with a part ofDouglass' life that's often
neglected his place in thehistory of anti-slavery
political thought.
We often think of abolitionismas a single movement, but in
(06:23):
fact the enemies of slavery werea diverse bunch and their
internal disagreements shaped animportant chapter in Douglass'
life.
When he escaped from slavery in1838, he moved to Massachusetts
where he joined up with onewing of the abolitionist
movement, a wing led by WilliamLloyd Garrison.
Garrison was a brave anduncompromising man, a feminist,
(06:44):
a pacifist and an anarchist.
He and his friends hadessentially founded abolitionism
in 1831, when they reactedagainst what was then the only
existing school of anti-slaverythought, known as colonialism.
Colonialism held that slaveryshould be ended gradually and
former slaves or their childrenshould be sent to colonies in
(07:04):
Africa or Central America.
And this was considered arespectable form of anti-slavery
thinking among whites, but itwas anathema to Garrison.
Gradual emancipation meantleaving the slaves in chains for
life, and sending freed slavesto Africa was irrational and
unjust.
Most enslaved Americans hadnever even been there.
Most of their parents andAmericans had never even been
(07:24):
there.
Most of their parents andgrandparents had never even been
there.
Garrison rejected colonizationand insisted on abolitionism,
which meant the immediate,uncompensated freeing of the
slaves, with no colonization.
But he went further.
Garrison also thought that theUnited States Constitution was
an evil document because itprotected slavery.
(07:45):
He called it a deal with thedevil and burned the
Constitution.
During his July 4th speeches headopted the motto no union with
slaveholders, by which he meantthat northern states should
secede from the union in orderto have nothing more to do with
slavery.
Because he was a pacifist, hedid not call for slave uprisings
, but instead for persuadingmasters to free their slaves,
(08:07):
and he argued that abolitionistsshould refuse to participate in
politics.
They should not vote or run foroffice, because that only lent
credibility to a politicalsystem that was morally corrupt.
Nothing short of the totaloverthrow of the government
would do Now.
When Douglass joined Garrison'sgroup at the age of 21, he
followed the party line.
(08:27):
The Constitution was apro-slavery document.
American politics washopelessly corrupt.
Abolitionists should remainoutside the political system,
but he eventually came toquestion that theory.
In the 1840s, after he visitedEurope, he moved to Rochester,
new York, and there he beganconsorting with a different
branch of the abolitionistmovement, the New York wing that
(08:48):
was led by a philanthropistnamed Jarrett Smith.
Smith differed dramaticallyfrom Garrison.
He thought the Constitution wasnot a pro-slavery document but
was, in its principles,anti-slavery, or at least that
it gave the federal governmentpower to restrict or abolish
slavery if elected officialswere willing to do so.
Smith believed in politicalparticipation and sponsored the
(09:10):
Liberty Party, america's firstanti-slavery political party.
Within a few years, douglassbecame persuaded that the
Constitution is anti-slaveryFundamentally.
The words slave and slavery donot appear in it.
He observed Even the obliquereferences to slavery found in
the Constitution thethree-fifths clause, the
fugitive slave clause and soforth could be interpreted in
(09:32):
ways that avoided protectingslavery, and other provisions of
the Constitution most notablythe privileges and immunities
clause of Article 4, positivelycontradicted slavery.
In fact, douglass argued thatslaves were actually American
citizens.
Certainly nothing in theConstitution or the Declaration
of Independence said otherwise.
Black Americans had been partof the all men whom the
(09:55):
Declaration says are all arecreated equal.
They were among the people ofthe United States referred to in
the Constitution's preamble.
Nothing in the Constitutiondeprived them of that status.
So to reduce them to slaverywithout due process of law was
unconstitutional.
Now, obviously, the pro-slaverylawyers argued the reverse.
The Constitution was only meantfor white Americans.
(10:16):
Its references to slaveryamounted to permanent guarantees
.
The Declaration's statementthat all men are created equal
was not intended to refer tonon-whites.
It really meant all white menare created equal, and so forth.
In their eyes, the idea ofblack people being citizens was
absurd.
Now, what's remarkable aboutthis is that the Garrisonian
abolitionists shared thispro-slavery view.
(10:39):
They agreed that theConstitution was a pro-slavery
document.
That's why they called it evil.
The Constitution, said oneGarrisonian, is and always has
been a sham, an imposter, aninstrument of oppression
unsurpassed in the criminalhistory of the world.
When the Supreme Court decidedin the Dred Scott case that
black Americans could never becitizens and that the
(11:00):
Constitution aimed to protectslavery forever, douglas pointed
out that the judges were justsaying what the Garrisonians
believed.
What really united theGarrisonians with their
pro-slavery enemies was theirshared view that the Founding
Fathers could never really havemeant what their words said and
that it was unrealistic toimagine that they ever expected
(11:21):
the country to be anything otherthan a land for whites only.
They thought Douglass'spro-constitution abolition
theory was utopian,pie-in-the-sky, wishful thinking
, unrealistic, merely a dream.
Douglass asserted that dreamwholeheartedly, both as a
theoretical and a practicalmatter.
He pored over the history ofthe Constitution and concluded
(11:43):
that Americans had quote allowedthemselves to be ruinously
imposed upon by those who saidit was pro-slavery.
In fact, it contained neitherwarrant, license nor sanction
for slavery.
Interpreted as it ought to beinterpreted, he said, the
Constitution is a gloriousliberty document.
America's founders had despisedslavery and hoped that it would
die from economic weakness orthat their children would sicken
(12:06):
of it.
But by the 1830s, southernerswere trying to rewrite history
to justify what was neverintended a permanent slave
nation.
Now, as a matter of history,douglass was right, but there
was a practical dimension tothis too.
Consider the immense progressmade between 1855 and 1875
(12:27):
through political engagement,progress that would never have
been made if the nation hadfollowed Garrison's
anti-constitution rule.
Only political activism bypeople like Doug Douglas and
Jarrett Smith and many others,whose names you've probably
never heard, made any progresstoward ending slavery, and their
greatest triumph was theratification of the 13th, 14th
(12:49):
and 15th Amendments, whichvindicated pro-Constitution
abolitionism forever.
That story teaches us a vitallesson about America today, a
lesson about viewing ourConstitution not just as a legal
document but also as anaspirational commitment, because
that is what the Constitutionis not a morally neutral machine
(13:10):
for making legislation.
It's a promise, as all law is,promises grounded on moral
propositions, and therefore itis as much about how our nation
ought to be as it is about whatit is.
In Douglass' opinion, theGarrisonians' anti-Constitution
theory shared a false and evennihilistic premise with the old
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colonization theory.
Both assumed that the Americannation is fundamentally
committed to white supremacy.
Colonizationists could notimagine black men and women
sharing the continent with them,and those who viewed the
Constitution as pro-slaverycould not imagine its
protections for freedom applyingto all races.
So these two doctrines ofracial separation were really
(13:53):
the same old serpent.
That said, the Constitution andthe Declaration don't really
mean what they say.
This land is only for whites.
But the colonization theory andthe anti-constitution theory
would, in Douglass' words, makeblack Americans despondent and
doubtful where they should feelassured and confident, and would
force upon them the idea thatthey are forever doomed to be
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strangers and sojourners in theland of their birth and that
they have no permanent abidingplace here.
Frederick Douglass had morereason than most people to
oppose any doctrine of racialseparation.
He was half white himself andlate in life he married a white
woman.
He believed that white andblack Americans share a destiny,
a common inheritance in thelibertarian principles of the
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Declaration and the Constitution, regardless of our racial
ancestry.
Have we not a right here,douglas asked?
We have been with you inadversity and, by the help of
God, we will be with you inprosperity.
We are American citizens.
Citizenship meant more than alegal status to Douglas.
It meant a conviction of thetruth, of the principles of
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liberty.
Black Americans had proven thatconviction a thousandfold, had
earned their citizenship throughtoil, suffering, patience and
courage and should be proud ofit.
They should never let it betaken away or, god forbid, be
fooled into giving it up.
That may be the most importantlesson Douglass teaches us today
, and it's a lesson aboutbrotherhood and what it means to
be an American.
(15:19):
That makes it hard to hear intoday's environment of contempt
and even despair, that despairis merely an echo of the
nihilism that Douglass detectedin colonization and anti
constitutionalism Then and nowthat despair tells black
Americans that this nation andits principles are not for them
and never were.
(15:44):
It has become fashionable inrecent years to claim that the
United States is fundamentallyracist and that the Constitution
was written to secure whitesupremacy and to assert that
nothing but a total overhaul ofAmerican institutions can hope
to remedy its inherent evil.
One of the most outspokenadvocates of this idea today is
Ta-Nehisi Coates, theanti-Frederick Douglas, who, in
(16:06):
2015, in his book Between theWorld and Me, made the argument
that the American dream is a lie.
Coates argues that the dream isa mirage designed to fool
non-whites into believing thatAmerica is something other than
a land of oppression.
The dream appears in Coates'writing only as perversity, as a
target of scorn and contempt,as just another fraud to be
smirked at by those of usworldly enough to know that only
rubes fall for it.
(16:27):
No, not even so jocularly asthat.
The dream in Coates' writing isa massive white machine that
gorges itself on black bodies inorder to gather strength to
gorge itself once more.
White supremacy, coates writes,remains, as it has since 1776,
at the heart of this country'spolitical life, and the American
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dream is quote concocted byAmericans to justify themselves.
Coates' nihilism is trulyboundless.
There are times when he seemsto say the opposite, as when he
quotes Abraham Lincolnapprovingly, but he goes on to
say that quote Americans believein the reality of race as a
defined, indestructible featureof the natural world, and racism
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inevitably follows from thisunalterable condition.
Racism lies at the very root ofthe national consciousness of
white Americans.
Whiteness, as Coatesunderstands it and which he sees
everywhere, whiteness not thecolor of people's skin or the
content of their minds, but theentire evanescent and
omnipresent thing of Americanculture simply is racism.
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We are captured, brother, hewrites, surrounded by the
majoritarian bandits of America.
That, of course, was not whatFrederick Douglass thought.
Douglass, who actually wascaptured more than once, was the
greatest of all articulators ofthe dream, at least until
Martin Luther King.
He spent two decades in slavery.
He had better reason than anyAmerican today to call the
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American dream a lie, but he didnot.
He declared my mission is toplead the cause of the colored
millions of our countrymen andto hasten the day when the
principles of liberty andhumanity expressed by the
Declaration of Independence andthe Constitution of the United
States shall be the law and thepractice of every section and of
all of the people of this greatcountry, without regard to race
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, sex, color or religion.
I would not emphasize this soheavily today if it weren't that
Coates' nihilism has becomesuch a common feature of public
discourse.
Many people today see hiscynicism as the realistic way to
view the United States.
A few years ago, the New YorkTimes ran an article flatly
declaring quote the Americandream is one of the most
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enduring myths in this countryand one of the most prominent
falsehoods when it comes toblack Americans.
Now, of course, cynicism alwaystries to market itself as
realistic, but in most cases,and certainly in this case, it
is not.
Consider Coates writes, quoteAmerica is literally
unimaginable without plunderedlabor, shackled to plundered
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land, without the organizingprinciple of whiteness as
citizenship.
End quote this is untrue inevery respect.
First, it is possible to imagineAmerica without slavery.
Many people throughout historydid precisely that.
They did more than imagine it.
They made it a reality or, ifyou prefer, brought it closer to
reality than it was before.
They did the imagining.
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One might assume that everyenslaved black American in the
two and a half centuries beforeemancipation imagined it, and
after them others imagined anAmerica that was free of racial
oppression and acted to make ita reality In the silent parade,
in the bus, boycotts, in thefreedom summer.
We have a name for their act ofimagining we call it the dream.
(19:39):
If Coates chooses not to sharethat dream, why not?
It certainly is not on accountof realism.
Realism would force him toacknowledge that there is at the
heart of America's foundingdocuments, a set of principles
that frame an abiding dream, acompelling vision of a better
world that has led people in theUnited States, time and time
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again, to lay down their livesfor a freer, more just country,
to free the slaves, to end JimCrow, to make real a principle
of brotherhood by whichcountless Americans now find it
literally unimaginable thatthere ever was a world in which
such things were ever consideredpossible.
What most Americans today findunimaginable is the racism that
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their own grandfathers took forgranted, and what has made that
unimaginable is the dream.
I would go further.
Not only is America imaginablewithout slavery, but slavery has
been a feature of nearly everyhuman society in the history of
the world.
And yet in those societies,what was unimaginable was the
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principle that all men arecreated equal.
What was unimaginable was theidea that everyone, everywhere,
is entitled to liberty.
What people in other nationscould not imagine was
integration, emancipation andliberation.
The reality is that America isliterally unimaginable without
the end of slavery.
It is not remarkable thatAmerica had slavery, which is an
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ancient and ubiquitousinstitution vastly more common
in history than, say, monogamy.
Literacy, architecture,christianity are passing fads by
comparison with slavery.
The wonder, rather, is that theend of slavery in this country
came as a necessary consequenceof her fundamental creed.
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What is impossible to imagineis America without the principle
of equality, the core of theDeclaration of Independence,
which Douglass called the ringbolt of the chain of our
nation's destiny.
Without that, america would notbe America.
She would be like every othercountry rocks and trees and
people connected by ethnicityrather than principle.
(21:45):
This is what Lincoln meant whenhe said that the electric cord
that binds us together is notrace, but the principles of the
Declaration, which make each ofus blood of the blood and flesh
of the flesh of therevolutionary fathers.
These are the things that wecelebrate on Memorial Day, july
4th and Juneteenth, because theyare essential.
They make the dream, they arewhat America is unimaginable
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without.
In this connection, I cannotrefrain from telling a personal
story.
I was in Washington DC on July4th 2000.
I sat on the Capitol steps towatch Ray Charles sing America
the Beautiful.
I could barely hear him becausethe fireworks were so loud and
I didn't like that, and themassive people made the evening
(22:29):
less fun.
But as I walked back to myapartment I saw something that
stuck with me forever In anempty lot, an SUV, and in front
of it a father, a black man, waslighting off some little
fireworks that he had broughtwith him and inside, pressed
against the driver's side window, were two little children,
their shining faces overwhelmedwith guileless joy.
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Utterly pure, that is my realmemory of that day.
Now I wonder what were thesethree Americans celebrating?
Were they ignorant of thehistory of racism in this
country?
Did they not know about slaveryand segregation?
Were they fools, walking aboutin a delusion from which Coates
has liberated himself?
Or could it be that they knowthat story well enough and that
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in their veins runs the blood ofenslaved Americans and freedmen
, and the brave black soldierswho fought in the Union Army and
the Selma marchers and thefreedom riders, and the black
businessmen and scholars andartists and soldiers and
scientists who labor every dayknowing that this country is
theirs?
Could it be that they werecelebrating their country?
Could it be that they know thatwhat cannot be imagined is
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America without the dream?
I suspect that these people, ifthey were tourists, came to
Washington in part to visit thespot on the Lincoln Memorial
where a black man gave voice tothe dream so profoundly, so
truly and so eloquently thatwhen you say the dream to nearly
any American today, he thinksnot of James Treslow Adams, the
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author who first used the phraseAmerican dream, but Martin
Luther King.
I suspect that these peoplecame not to repudiate but to
claim the dream, not to concede,as Coates does, that America
and slavery are inseparable,which is an idea the foulest
racist in the land would applaudwith conviction.
But instead they came, as theyhad a right to do, to assert the
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dream.
Now you can call that foolish,but it's not unrealistic, it's
not a delusion.
To maintain that it is adelusion is to say that this
family and millions like themare also deluded.
It would also mean thatFrederick Douglass was deluded,
and that doesn't seem realisticto me.
Coates' contempt for the dreamleads me to ask in all candor
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what are we as individuals or anation if we surrender our
commitment to principle, whichis what we mean when we speak of
our dreams?
Without dreams, are we not justpoor, bare-forked creatures?
Aren't we just doomed to repeatthe crimes of past ages?
Where there is no vision, thepeople perish.
A land without a dream is onlydirt.
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A creature that does not dreamis only a conjuries of bones and
tissues.
A person who can dream andchooses not to has surrendered
the one thing that can never betaken away by any jailer.
Why does the caged bird sing?
Because it dreams of freedom.
What comes of a dream deferred?
It festers like a sore and thenruns.
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But a dreamless man can eithersing nor run.
He can only be a body, a thingacted upon by others.
A racist may be deluded bythinking he's biologically
superior, but a dreamless man iseven more deluded because he
thinks he's awake.
I've gone on like this because Ithink that one of the gravest
threats to freedom in ourcountry today is the growth of
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cynical abandonment,hopelessness, helplessness and
dreamlessness.
The idea that ourconstitutional promises of fraud
and our progress has been a lie, particularly among minority
groups who today feelincreasingly isolated, and
understandably so.
The idea that one has no placein our society and consequently
nothing to lose by giving it upcan be fatal.
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Despair is a deadly poison.
Indeed, frederick Douglass sawnot only that American ideals
are fundamentally just, but thatthose ideas are the only
realistic ones.
In the long run, nothing issettled.
That is not right, he said.
And nihilism, far from beingrational, is in reality
debilitating, paralyzing, or itcan invite pointless violence.
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The person who truly sees nodifference between being alive
or dead has taken the mostdangerous step towards suicide.
That's why nihilism so oftenleads to tyranny, as Douglass
himself warned.
Quote if human nature is totallydepraved, if the character of
this government will inevitablybe the expression of this
universal and innate depravity,then we should abandon our
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republican government, cease toelect men to office and place
ourselves squarely under somepotentate who governs by divine
right.
Cynicism about race relationsis simply not warranted by the
facts.
It is not realistic.
Black Americans are freer,wealthier, happier, better
educated, healthier and safertoday than they were 30 years
ago.
In fact, they're better off innearly all these categories than
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whites were 30 years ago.
Obviously, racism remains andmuch work must still be done to
undo its awful legacies.
But the idea that the Americandream is a fraud, or that white
supremacy is at the heart ofAmerican politics, or that we
can protect American culture byexcluding those who seek it,
dishonors people like Douglass,who fought to vindicate the
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American dream.
These ideas are lies and ifthey are left unchallenged, they
will lull this nation intosleep before dissolving it in
death.
Frederick Douglass refused tobelieve that Americans were
destined to be enemies.
He embraced the only valid formof American exceptionalism,
that our constitutionalprinciples are what make us and
would make any other peopleexceptional, and he teaches that
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a nation that is in a senseconsecrated to a dream,
conceived in liberty anddedicated to the proposition
that all men are created equal,can only thrive by being true to
those convictions.
It cannot endure as alienatedgroups who insist that the
Declaration doesn't mean what itsays or that its principles are
just a social construct thatare no more valid than any other
(28:20):
society's principles.
Douglas's whole life was a waragainst prejudice, cynicism and
surrender.
No man was ever lost whoseriously thought himself worth
saving, he said, and the same isequally true of a great nation.
The goal of the slave breakerCovey was to eradicate Douglas's
capacity to believe in a betterworld, and he would not accept
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that.
The goal of thecolonizationists was to destroy
the belief that America is aland for all races.
He would not accept that thegoal of the
anti-constitutionalists was toelevate their own moral purity
over the hard work of making abetter world, and he would not
accept that.
And the goal of today'ssophisticated realistic
nihilists, right and left, is todemolish the idea of the
(29:06):
American dream, to persuade usthat progress has been an
illusion, that our constitutionis a racist document, that
America is in spirit a fraud andin substance a wasteland of
walls and hatreds, that itsslogans about freedom are lies
and Americans are really enemies, but these are all poisons that
lull to sleep before they kill,and Douglass rejected them.
(29:28):
There is no Negro problem, hesaid.
The problem is whether theAmerican people have loyalty
enough honor, enough, patriotismenough to live up to their own
constitution.
That constitution is underassault again today, and again
we must heed Douglass's lesson.
We must have enough pride inourselves to refuse to surrender
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our convictions to those whocall them unrealistic, and we
must strive to make thoseconvictions a reality for those
still sitting in darkness.
Next to the dignity of being afree man is the dignity of
striving to be free.
Well, how lucky are we thenthat we have both.
Well, I am loathe to close.
(30:09):
We Americans are not enemies,but friends.
We must not be enemies.
Although passion may havestrained, it must not break our
bonds of affection.
The mystic chords of memorystretching from every
battlefield and patriot grave toevery living heart and
hearthstone all over this broadland will yet swell the chorus
(30:29):
of union when again touched, assurely they will be, by the
better angels of our nature.
Thank you.
Our next speaker is Timothy Sandeifer.
Now, do not hold this againsthim, but he's a lawyer, and you
know what a thousand lawyers atthe bottom of the ocean are?
Do you know what they are?
No, no, a good start.
You knew that, you just didn'twant to say it.
(00:26):
And I only say that with love,because this guy is a lawyer,
but he's doing it for goodthings Advocate for free speech.
He has written more books thanI have read, so he's prolific in
his writing.
He's doing the country aservice by advocating.
(00:47):
If anybody advocates for freespeech, that's a major victory
for us.
Okay, and he does so many otherthings.
But why should I tell you whenTimothy Sandefur can, timothy,
if you would please, thank you,sir.
Timothy Sandefur (01:09):
Well, thank you very much for having me.
I've been asked to talk aboutone of my great heroes,
Ffrederick Douglass.
I wrote a book about Douglassand I brought some copies with
me and I put them out on thetable out there and, rather than
charge you for them, I thoughtI'd just give them away.
I didn't bring enough foreverybody, I don't think so
everybody rush out during thebreak and grab one, and if you
(01:32):
like what you read and you'reinterested in the kind of work
that I and my colleagues do atthe Goldwater Institute, I'd ask
that you consider dropping us afew dollars.
We work based on the.
We survive off the money that'sdonated to us by people who
agree with the work that we do,unlike, for example, public
sector unions which operate frommoney stolen out of the
(01:53):
paychecks, against their will,of public employees.
But, in any event, that's atopic for another day.
I wanted to talk to you aboutDouglass and what he teaches us
about the world today.
Douglass is a fascinatingfigure and he's one of the
giants of American history, butthe reason that he's of interest
to this audience is because hestands as such a refutation to
(02:17):
many of the claims that havebeen made in recent years about
the nature of the United States.
It's become very fashionable inthe past decade or so to regard
America as a fundamentallyracist nation, a country steeped
in white supremacy, in whichblack Americans and members of
other minority groups aresystematically repressed and
exploited.
The New York Times 1619 projectclaims that the Constitution of
(02:40):
the United States was writtento protect slavery, and popular
writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coatesclaimed that white supremacy
and racial hatred lie at theheart of American political life
.
And yet in Douglass we find ablack man, a fugitive from
slavery, who rejected such ideasand who insisted, not out of
mindless patriotism orsloganeering, that the United
(03:03):
States is out of mindlesspatriotism or sloganeering, that
the United States isfundamentally about equality,
not racism, and that blackAmericans should cherish their
American citizenship.
It is impossible to regardDouglass as naive or as a fool.
So how can we reconcile hisview of the American political
order with the claims of thecritical race theorists?
Well, the answer, obviously, isthat we can't.
(03:26):
And to appreciate why we shouldstart with his famous life
story.
Douglass was born to an enslavedmother and a father he never
met in 1818.
He grew up on a plantation inMaryland and in the Baltimore
home of some relatives of hisowner.
He learned to read by foolingwhite children in the
neighborhood into teaching him,and then began secretly reading
(03:49):
anti-slavery pamphlets.
Eventually, when he became ateenager, he grew so angry about
being enslaved that his ownerdecided to teach him a lesson
and sent him to live with a mannamed Edward Covey, who was a
famous slave breaker.
He ran a torture facility thatwas designed to destroy people's
independence and render theminto abject servants.
(04:11):
So Covey beat Douglass everyweek for any reason or no reason
.
He hid in the bushes to attackhim out of nowhere, all to
instill in him this sense ofhopeless terror and to try and
destroy Douglas's capacity todream of a better life.
And at first it worked.
But then, on one hot August day, douglas decided that he would
(04:33):
not surrender.
He fainted from heat stroke onthat day and Covey beat him for
it with a wooden club, andDouglas begged his owner to
intervene, but he refused.
So Douglas resolved to fightback.
The next time Covey attackedhim, he grabbed the man around
the throat and held on.
They struggled for hours untilCovey stumbled off, mumbling,
(04:55):
and he never beat Douglas again.
Douglas learned from thisincident a crucial principle, he
who would be free must himselfstrike the blow.
Striking that blow rather thansurrendering, believing in
himself enough to stand up.
That was the crucial lesson,and Douglass refused to accept
the hopeless, helpless,dreamless life of a brute Quote.
(05:18):
Next to the dignity of being afree man is the dignity of
striving to be free.
I detest the slaveholder andalmost equally detest a
contented slave.
They are both enemies tofreedom.
One of the saddest factsconnected with organized and
settled oppression is that itdeadens the sensibility of its
victims.
It acts upon the oppressed likecertain deadly poisons upon
(05:41):
animal life which lull to sleepbefore dissolving the body in
death.
Now, you all know that story or, if you don't, you can read it
in my book or preferably inDouglas's own books.
But I tell it now because Iwant to talk about the lessons
Douglas teaches us aboutidealism and cynicism, about
(06:02):
pride and surrender, about theAmerican dream and about that
deadly poison that lulls tosleep, a helpless, hopeless,
dreamless sleep.
Let me begin with a part ofDouglass' life that's often
neglected his place in thehistory of anti-slavery
political thought.
We often think of abolitionismas a single movement, but in
(06:23):
fact the enemies of slavery werea diverse bunch and their
internal disagreements shaped animportant chapter in Douglass'
life.
When he escaped from slavery in1838, he moved to Massachusetts
where he joined up with onewing of the abolitionist
movement, a wing led by WilliamLloyd Garrison.
Garrison was a brave anduncompromising man, a feminist,
(06:44):
a pacifist and an anarchist.
He and his friends hadessentially founded abolitionism
in 1831, when they reactedagainst what was then the only
existing school of anti-slaverythought, known as colonialism.
Colonialism held that slaveryshould be ended gradually and
former slaves or their childrenshould be sent to colonies in
(07:04):
Africa or Central America.
And this was considered arespectable form of anti-slavery
thinking among whites, but itwas anathema to Garrison.
Gradual emancipation meantleaving the slaves in chains for
life, and sending freed slavesto Africa was irrational and
unjust.
Most enslaved Americans hadnever even been there.
Most of their parents andAmericans had never even been
(07:24):
there.
Most of their parents andgrandparents had never even been
there.
Garrison rejected colonizationand insisted on abolitionism,
which meant the immediate,uncompensated freeing of the
slaves, with no colonization.
But he went further.
Garrison also thought that theUnited States Constitution was
an evil document because itprotected slavery.
(07:45):
He called it a deal with thedevil and burned the
Constitution.
During his July 4th speeches headopted the motto no union with
slaveholders, by which he meantthat northern states should
secede from the union in orderto have nothing more to do with
slavery.
Because he was a pacifist, hedid not call for slave uprisings
, but instead for persuadingmasters to free their slaves,
(08:07):
and he argued that abolitionistsshould refuse to participate in
politics.
They should not vote or run foroffice, because that only lent
credibility to a politicalsystem that was morally corrupt.
Nothing short of the totaloverthrow of the government
would do Now.
When Douglass joined Garrison'sgroup at the age of 21, he
followed the party line.
(08:27):
The Constitution was apro-slavery document.
American politics washopelessly corrupt.
Abolitionists should remainoutside the political system,
but he eventually came toquestion that theory.
In the 1840s, after he visitedEurope, he moved to Rochester,
new York, and there he beganconsorting with a different
branch of the abolitionistmovement, the New York wing that
(08:48):
was led by a philanthropistnamed Jarrett Smith.
Smith differed dramaticallyfrom Garrison.
He thought the Constitution wasnot a pro-slavery document but
was, in its principles,anti-slavery, or at least that
it gave the federal governmentpower to restrict or abolish
slavery if elected officialswere willing to do so.
Smith believed in politicalparticipation and sponsored the
(09:10):
Liberty Party, america's firstanti-slavery political party.
Within a few years, douglassbecame persuaded that the
Constitution is anti-slaveryFundamentally.
The words slave and slavery donot appear in it.
He observed Even the obliquereferences to slavery found in
the Constitution thethree-fifths clause, the
fugitive slave clause and soforth could be interpreted in
(09:32):
ways that avoided protectingslavery, and other provisions of
the Constitution most notablythe privileges and immunities
clause of Article 4, positivelycontradicted slavery.
In fact, douglass argued thatslaves were actually American
citizens.
Certainly nothing in theConstitution or the Declaration
of Independence said otherwise.
Black Americans had been partof the all men whom the
(09:55):
Declaration says are all arecreated equal.
They were among the people ofthe United States referred to in
the Constitution's preamble.
Nothing in the Constitutiondeprived them of that status.
So to reduce them to slaverywithout due process of law was
unconstitutional.
Now, obviously, the pro-slaverylawyers argued the reverse.
The Constitution was only meantfor white Americans.
(10:16):
Its references to slaveryamounted to permanent guarantees
.
The Declaration's statementthat all men are created equal
was not intended to refer tonon-whites.
It really meant all white menare created equal, and so forth.
In their eyes, the idea ofblack people being citizens was
absurd.
Now, what's remarkable aboutthis is that the Garrisonian
abolitionists shared thispro-slavery view.
(10:39):
They agreed that theConstitution was a pro-slavery
document.
That's why they called it evil.
The Constitution, said oneGarrisonian, is and always has
been a sham, an imposter, aninstrument of oppression
unsurpassed in the criminalhistory of the world.
When the Supreme Court decidedin the Dred Scott case that
black Americans could never becitizens and that the
(11:00):
Constitution aimed to protectslavery forever, douglas pointed
out that the judges were justsaying what the Garrisonians
believed.
What really united theGarrisonians with their
pro-slavery enemies was theirshared view that the Founding
Fathers could never really havemeant what their words said and
that it was unrealistic toimagine that they ever expected
(11:21):
the country to be anything otherthan a land for whites only.
They thought Douglass'spro-constitution abolition
theory was utopian,pie-in-the-sky, wishful thinking
, unrealistic, merely a dream.
Douglass asserted that dreamwholeheartedly, both as a
theoretical and a practicalmatter.
He pored over the history ofthe Constitution and concluded
(11:43):
that Americans had quote allowedthemselves to be ruinously
imposed upon by those who saidit was pro-slavery.
In fact, it contained neitherwarrant, license nor sanction
for slavery.
Interpreted as it ought to beinterpreted, he said, the
Constitution is a gloriousliberty document.
America's founders had despisedslavery and hoped that it would
die from economic weakness orthat their children would sicken
(12:06):
of it.
But by the 1830s, southernerswere trying to rewrite history
to justify what was neverintended a permanent slave
nation.
Now, as a matter of history,douglass was right, but there
was a practical dimension tothis too.
Consider the immense progressmade between 1855 and 1875
(12:27):
through political engagement,progress that would never have
been made if the nation hadfollowed Garrison's
anti-constitution rule.
Only political activism bypeople like Doug Douglas and
Jarrett Smith and many others,whose names you've probably
never heard, made any progresstoward ending slavery, and their
greatest triumph was theratification of the 13th, 14th
(12:49):
and 15th Amendments, whichvindicated pro-Constitution
abolitionism forever.
That story teaches us a vitallesson about America today, a
lesson about viewing ourConstitution not just as a legal
document but also as anaspirational commitment, because
that is what the Constitutionis not a morally neutral machine
(13:10):
for making legislation.
It's a promise, as all law is,promises grounded on moral
propositions, and therefore itis as much about how our nation
ought to be as it is about whatit is.
In Douglass' opinion, theGarrisonians' anti-Constitution
theory shared a false and evennihilistic premise with the old
(13:31):
colonization theory.
Both assumed that the Americannation is fundamentally
committed to white supremacy.
Colonizationists could notimagine black men and women
sharing the continent with them,and those who viewed the
Constitution as pro-slaverycould not imagine its
protections for freedom applyingto all races.
So these two doctrines ofracial separation were really
(13:53):
the same old serpent.
That said, the Constitution andthe Declaration don't really
mean what they say.
This land is only for whites.
But the colonization theory andthe anti-constitution theory
would, in Douglass' words, makeblack Americans despondent and
doubtful where they should feelassured and confident, and would
force upon them the idea thatthey are forever doomed to be
(14:14):
strangers and sojourners in theland of their birth and that
they have no permanent abidingplace here.
Frederick Douglass had morereason than most people to
oppose any doctrine of racialseparation.
He was half white himself andlate in life he married a white
woman.
He believed that white andblack Americans share a destiny,
a common inheritance in thelibertarian principles of the
(14:37):
Declaration and the Constitution, regardless of our racial
ancestry.
Have we not a right here,douglas asked?
We have been with you inadversity and, by the help of
God, we will be with you inprosperity.
We are American citizens.
Citizenship meant more than alegal status to Douglas.
It meant a conviction of thetruth, of the principles of
(14:58):
liberty.
Black Americans had proven thatconviction a thousandfold, had
earned their citizenship throughtoil, suffering, patience and
courage and should be proud ofit.
They should never let it betaken away or, god forbid, be
fooled into giving it up.
That may be the most importantlesson Douglass teaches us today
, and it's a lesson aboutbrotherhood and what it means to
be an American.
(15:19):
That makes it hard to hear intoday's environment of contempt
and even despair, that despairis merely an echo of the
nihilism that Douglass detectedin colonization and anti
constitutionalism Then and nowthat despair tells black
Americans that this nation andits principles are not for them
and never were.
(15:44):
It has become fashionable inrecent years to claim that the
United States is fundamentallyracist and that the Constitution
was written to secure whitesupremacy and to assert that
nothing but a total overhaul ofAmerican institutions can hope
to remedy its inherent evil.
One of the most outspokenadvocates of this idea today is
Ta-Nehisi Coates, theanti-Frederick Douglas, who, in
(16:06):
2015, in his book Between theWorld and Me, made the argument
that the American dream is a lie.
Coates argues that the dream isa mirage designed to fool
non-whites into believing thatAmerica is something other than
a land of oppression.
The dream appears in Coates'writing only as perversity, as a
target of scorn and contempt,as just another fraud to be
smirked at by those of usworldly enough to know that only
rubes fall for it.
(16:27):
No, not even so jocularly asthat.
The dream in Coates' writing isa massive white machine that
gorges itself on black bodies inorder to gather strength to
gorge itself once more.
White supremacy, coates writes,remains, as it has since 1776,
at the heart of this country'spolitical life, and the American
(16:48):
dream is quote concocted byAmericans to justify themselves.
Coates' nihilism is trulyboundless.
There are times when he seemsto say the opposite, as when he
quotes Abraham Lincolnapprovingly, but he goes on to
say that quote Americans believein the reality of race as a
defined, indestructible featureof the natural world, and racism
(17:08):
inevitably follows from thisunalterable condition.
Racism lies at the very root ofthe national consciousness of
white Americans.
Whiteness, as Coatesunderstands it and which he sees
everywhere, whiteness not thecolor of people's skin or the
content of their minds, but theentire evanescent and
omnipresent thing of Americanculture simply is racism.
(17:30):
We are captured, brother, hewrites, surrounded by the
majoritarian bandits of America.
That, of course, was not whatFrederick Douglass thought.
Douglass, who actually wascaptured more than once, was the
greatest of all articulators ofthe dream, at least until
Martin Luther King.
He spent two decades in slavery.
He had better reason than anyAmerican today to call the
(17:53):
American dream a lie, but he didnot.
He declared my mission is toplead the cause of the colored
millions of our countrymen andto hasten the day when the
principles of liberty andhumanity expressed by the
Declaration of Independence andthe Constitution of the United
States shall be the law and thepractice of every section and of
all of the people of this greatcountry, without regard to race
(18:13):
, sex, color or religion.
I would not emphasize this soheavily today if it weren't that
Coates' nihilism has becomesuch a common feature of public
discourse.
Many people today see hiscynicism as the realistic way to
view the United States.
A few years ago, the New YorkTimes ran an article flatly
declaring quote the Americandream is one of the most
(18:36):
enduring myths in this countryand one of the most prominent
falsehoods when it comes toblack Americans.
Now, of course, cynicism alwaystries to market itself as
realistic, but in most cases,and certainly in this case, it
is not.
Consider Coates writes, quoteAmerica is literally
unimaginable without plunderedlabor, shackled to plundered
(18:57):
land, without the organizingprinciple of whiteness as
citizenship.
End quote this is untrue inevery respect.
First, it is possible to imagineAmerica without slavery.
Many people throughout historydid precisely that.
They did more than imagine it.
They made it a reality or, ifyou prefer, brought it closer to
reality than it was before.
They did the imagining.
(19:17):
One might assume that everyenslaved black American in the
two and a half centuries beforeemancipation imagined it, and
after them others imagined anAmerica that was free of racial
oppression and acted to make ita reality In the silent parade,
in the bus, boycotts, in thefreedom summer.
We have a name for their act ofimagining we call it the dream.
(19:39):
If Coates chooses not to sharethat dream, why not?
It certainly is not on accountof realism.
Realism would force him toacknowledge that there is at the
heart of America's foundingdocuments, a set of principles
that frame an abiding dream, acompelling vision of a better
world that has led people in theUnited States, time and time
(19:59):
again, to lay down their livesfor a freer, more just country,
to free the slaves, to end JimCrow, to make real a principle
of brotherhood by whichcountless Americans now find it
literally unimaginable thatthere ever was a world in which
such things were ever consideredpossible.
What most Americans today findunimaginable is the racism that
(20:21):
their own grandfathers took forgranted, and what has made that
unimaginable is the dream.
I would go further.
Not only is America imaginablewithout slavery, but slavery has
been a feature of nearly everyhuman society in the history of
the world.
And yet in those societies,what was unimaginable was the
(20:41):
principle that all men arecreated equal.
What was unimaginable was theidea that everyone, everywhere,
is entitled to liberty.
What people in other nationscould not imagine was
integration, emancipation andliberation.
The reality is that America isliterally unimaginable without
the end of slavery.
It is not remarkable thatAmerica had slavery, which is an
(21:03):
ancient and ubiquitousinstitution vastly more common
in history than, say, monogamy.
Literacy, architecture,christianity are passing fads by
comparison with slavery.
The wonder, rather, is that theend of slavery in this country
came as a necessary consequenceof her fundamental creed.
(21:24):
What is impossible to imagineis America without the principle
of equality, the core of theDeclaration of Independence,
which Douglass called the ringbolt of the chain of our
nation's destiny.
Without that, america would notbe America.
She would be like every othercountry rocks and trees and
people connected by ethnicityrather than principle.
(21:45):
This is what Lincoln meant whenhe said that the electric cord
that binds us together is notrace, but the principles of the
Declaration, which make each ofus blood of the blood and flesh
of the flesh of therevolutionary fathers.
These are the things that wecelebrate on Memorial Day, july
4th and Juneteenth, because theyare essential.
They make the dream, they arewhat America is unimaginable
(22:08):
without.
In this connection, I cannotrefrain from telling a personal
story.
I was in Washington DC on July4th 2000.
I sat on the Capitol steps towatch Ray Charles sing America
the Beautiful.
I could barely hear him becausethe fireworks were so loud and
I didn't like that, and themassive people made the evening
(22:29):
less fun.
But as I walked back to myapartment I saw something that
stuck with me forever In anempty lot, an SUV, and in front
of it a father, a black man, waslighting off some little
fireworks that he had broughtwith him and inside, pressed
against the driver's side window, were two little children,
their shining faces overwhelmedwith guileless joy.
(22:49):
Utterly pure, that is my realmemory of that day.
Now I wonder what were thesethree Americans celebrating?
Were they ignorant of thehistory of racism in this
country?
Did they not know about slaveryand segregation?
Were they fools, walking aboutin a delusion from which Coates
has liberated himself?
Or could it be that they knowthat story well enough and that
(23:13):
in their veins runs the blood ofenslaved Americans and freedmen
, and the brave black soldierswho fought in the Union Army and
the Selma marchers and thefreedom riders, and the black
businessmen and scholars andartists and soldiers and
scientists who labor every dayknowing that this country is
theirs?
Could it be that they werecelebrating their country?
Could it be that they know thatwhat cannot be imagined is
(23:35):
America without the dream?
I suspect that these people, ifthey were tourists, came to
Washington in part to visit thespot on the Lincoln Memorial
where a black man gave voice tothe dream so profoundly, so
truly and so eloquently thatwhen you say the dream to nearly
any American today, he thinksnot of James Treslow Adams, the
(23:57):
author who first used the phraseAmerican dream, but Martin
Luther King.
I suspect that these peoplecame not to repudiate but to
claim the dream, not to concede,as Coates does, that America
and slavery are inseparable,which is an idea the foulest
racist in the land would applaudwith conviction.
But instead they came, as theyhad a right to do, to assert the
(24:19):
dream.
Now you can call that foolish,but it's not unrealistic, it's
not a delusion.
To maintain that it is adelusion is to say that this
family and millions like themare also deluded.
It would also mean thatFrederick Douglass was deluded,
and that doesn't seem realisticto me.
Coates' contempt for the dreamleads me to ask in all candor
(24:40):
what are we as individuals or anation if we surrender our
commitment to principle, whichis what we mean when we speak of
our dreams?
Without dreams, are we not justpoor, bare-forked creatures?
Aren't we just doomed to repeatthe crimes of past ages?
Where there is no vision, thepeople perish.
A land without a dream is onlydirt.
(25:01):
A creature that does not dreamis only a conjuries of bones and
tissues.
A person who can dream andchooses not to has surrendered
the one thing that can never betaken away by any jailer.
Why does the caged bird sing?
Because it dreams of freedom.
What comes of a dream deferred?
It festers like a sore and thenruns.
(25:22):
But a dreamless man can eithersing nor run.
He can only be a body, a thingacted upon by others.
A racist may be deluded bythinking he's biologically
superior, but a dreamless man iseven more deluded because he
thinks he's awake.
I've gone on like this because Ithink that one of the gravest
threats to freedom in ourcountry today is the growth of
(25:44):
cynical abandonment,hopelessness, helplessness and
dreamlessness.
The idea that ourconstitutional promises of fraud
and our progress has been a lie, particularly among minority
groups who today feelincreasingly isolated, and
understandably so.
The idea that one has no placein our society and consequently
nothing to lose by giving it upcan be fatal.
(26:06):
Despair is a deadly poison.
Indeed, frederick Douglass sawnot only that American ideals
are fundamentally just, but thatthose ideas are the only
realistic ones.
In the long run, nothing issettled.
That is not right, he said.
And nihilism, far from beingrational, is in reality
debilitating, paralyzing, or itcan invite pointless violence.
(26:29):
The person who truly sees nodifference between being alive
or dead has taken the mostdangerous step towards suicide.
That's why nihilism so oftenleads to tyranny, as Douglass
himself warned.
Quote if human nature is totallydepraved, if the character of
this government will inevitablybe the expression of this
universal and innate depravity,then we should abandon our
(26:50):
republican government, cease toelect men to office and place
ourselves squarely under somepotentate who governs by divine
right.
Cynicism about race relationsis simply not warranted by the
facts.
It is not realistic.
Black Americans are freer,wealthier, happier, better
educated, healthier and safertoday than they were 30 years
ago.
In fact, they're better off innearly all these categories than
(27:13):
whites were 30 years ago.
Obviously, racism remains andmuch work must still be done to
undo its awful legacies.
But the idea that the Americandream is a fraud, or that white
supremacy is at the heart ofAmerican politics, or that we
can protect American culture byexcluding those who seek it,
dishonors people like Douglass,who fought to vindicate the
(27:34):
American dream.
These ideas are lies and ifthey are left unchallenged, they
will lull this nation intosleep before dissolving it in
death.
Frederick Douglass refused tobelieve that Americans were
destined to be enemies.
He embraced the only valid formof American exceptionalism,
that our constitutionalprinciples are what make us and
would make any other peopleexceptional, and he teaches that
(27:57):
a nation that is in a senseconsecrated to a dream,
conceived in liberty anddedicated to the proposition
that all men are created equal,can only thrive by being true to
those convictions.
It cannot endure as alienatedgroups who insist that the
Declaration doesn't mean what itsays or that its principles are
just a social construct thatare no more valid than any other
(28:20):
society's principles.
Douglas's whole life was a waragainst prejudice, cynicism and
surrender.
No man was ever lost whoseriously thought himself worth
saving, he said, and the same isequally true of a great nation.
The goal of the slave breakerCovey was to eradicate Douglas's
capacity to believe in a betterworld, and he would not accept
(28:42):
that.
The goal of thecolonizationists was to destroy
the belief that America is aland for all races.
He would not accept that thegoal of the
anti-constitutionalists was toelevate their own moral purity
over the hard work of making abetter world, and he would not
accept that.
And the goal of today'ssophisticated realistic
nihilists, right and left, is todemolish the idea of the
(29:06):
American dream, to persuade usthat progress has been an
illusion, that our constitutionis a racist document, that
America is in spirit a fraud andin substance a wasteland of
walls and hatreds, that itsslogans about freedom are lies
and Americans are really enemies, but these are all poisons that
lull to sleep before they kill,and Douglass rejected them.
(29:28):
There is no Negro problem, hesaid.
The problem is whether theAmerican people have loyalty
enough honor, enough, patriotismenough to live up to their own
constitution.
That constitution is underassault again today, and again
we must heed Douglass's lesson.
We must have enough pride inourselves to refuse to surrender
(29:49):
our convictions to those whocall them unrealistic, and we
must strive to make thoseconvictions a reality for those
still sitting in darkness.
Next to the dignity of being afree man is the dignity of
striving to be free.
Well, how lucky are we thenthat we have both.
Well, I am loathe to close.
(30:09):
We Americans are not enemies,but friends.
We must not be enemies.
Although passion may havestrained, it must not break our
bonds of affection.
The mystic chords of memorystretching from every
battlefield and patriot grave toevery living heart and
hearthstone all over this broadland will yet swell the chorus
(30:29):
of union when again touched, assurely they will be, by the
better angels of our nature.
Thank you.
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