"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..."
For more than half the history of the United States, the preceding words did not apply in practice to more than four million people who lived here because the United States was a Slave Power. Between 1863 and 1963, there was a sharp struggle to make the words of Thomas Jefferson, slave master of Monticello apply to everyone. The struggle was long and it was hard, and there were failures along the way, most especially Plessy v. Ferguson, among the most racist decisions handed down by the Supreme Court of the United States.
Here is an excerpt from
We As Freemen, the story of Homer Plessy and the struggle of the Freemen of New Orleans to stop legal segregation.
The first Fourth of July after the emancipation proclamation event showed the sea changes that were taking place across the city. On that Independence Day in 1863 in New Orleans, the Loyal National League of Louisiana - a group of Southerners who retained their loyalty to the Union despite secession - held the first integrated political rally ever on Canal Street. Torches, banners, and American flags waved in the nighttime breeze as, according to the League's minutes, "White men and women, black men and women, shouting aloud in concert" gave three cheers for Abraham Lincoln.
Then, a Black man named Reverend James Keelan spoke to the crowd:
"Fellow citizens, this is the first time for eighty seven years that the son of Africa is permitted to join in a public celebration of the Fourth of July. We have passed through trials and persecutions - we have been chained and handcuffed for two hundred and fifty years. Tonight the son of Africa holds his head up to the public. Our country has given us our rights - we have now but to defend them."
"There never was a field of battle in this country that their bones were not bleached upon the soil - when General Washington's army failed for the lack of reinforcements, the black man came and fought side by side with the white man, and in every battle they fought like men. We stand here tonight to renew our duties before God and our country, to strive for our rights as men, and to put down treason in our land. We wanted our rights before, but we were deprived of them, because we were cheated out of them, and denied the freedom which we desired.
"All we want now is our rights and religious privileges - to live as Christians in a Christian country. We like our rebel friends, and we don't want to hurt them. We want them to give us our rights and to receive us as distant brothers...But they can't be good Christians while slavery stands."
"Let us go", he concluded, "We have raised your children, cleaned up your grounds and enriched you. Now let us go." from We As Freemen, Plessy v. Ferguson by New Orleans historian Keith Weldon Medley
More on Who was Homer Plessy? and who is Keith W. Medley and why is he writing about The Fight Against Legal Segregation.
Author Keith W. Medley is second from the right in the photo.
Many have heard of the case, Plessy vs. Ferguson but few know who was Homer Plessy. I like Medley's We As Freemen because it tells the story of the humble shoemaker whose name is on one of the most important high court decisions, but who little was known about until Keith Medley searched through old documents in New Orleans to track down his family and to tell his story. (Ferguson is the sheriff at the time Homer Plessy was busted for sitting in the 'whites only' car.)
By the time the US Supreme Court declared segregation to be legal in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the Republican Party had, in the previous generation, sold out the Freed People and joined with the old Democratic Party in returning to power in the South the antebellum Plantation class that had controlled the South before the Civil War.