Trump is not the root of our problems. He is the distillation of centuries of man's inhumanity to man, sharply focused by the European Age of Empires since 1492, when Columbus began enslaving and murdering the Taino of Hispaniola, his first New World discovery. Although many Caribbean islanders are of mixed Taino-Spanish-African descent, the Taino language has been lost, along with most of their culture.
One side of the problem is the assumption that certain classes of people are, by birth and by nature, inherently superior to others, and that this is the Will of God. The other side is the existence of inconceivable amounts of loot in every land the Imperial invaders encountered: land itself, gold, silver, jewels, pearls, exotic fruits and other crops and birds and animals, tobacco, spices, dyes, tea, silks, and especially slaves. And now coal, oil, and gas, and for-profit health insurance, and mortgage-backed securities, and tax cuts and deregulation for the rich, and other bankster shenanigans, and so much more.
None of this originated with Columbus. Slavery and loot and privilege are the story of all ancient civilizations from Egypt and Mesopotamia to China, plus the empires of Africa and the Americas. It should also be noted that slavery is still legal in the United States under the 13th Amendment, for duly convicted felons. The South took full advantage of this loophole, as seen, for example, in the movie Cool Hand Luke, where the slaves were all white.
In the British colonies in North America, the problem began with Spaniards selling Native Americans as slaves, and was then sharply focused by the introduction of African slaves in 1619.
To come to our main point about Trumpists, our focus today is African slavery as the cause of the Civil War and all that followed, and in particular, What, to the slave, is the 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.
This is a shortened version. There are many others of the whole speech. I listen to one or another every July 4th.
It is not light that is needed, but fire.
Now, to review, what we need to bring fire to is, in short,
- Slavery since 1619.
- Political, economic, and theological justifications for slavery, including the blasphemous Curse of Ham theology among the Southern Baptists.
- Schism between Northern and Southern Baptists, and the beginnings of Abolitionism.
- Having to accommodate slavery in the Constitution, including the Three Fifths provision and the Fugitive Slave clause.
- Steadily ratcheting tensions, including the abominable Dred Scott decision, leading to the Civil War.
- Darwin, starting in 1859, explaining to the flower of the Southern Aristocracy that they were descended from Black Africans just like everybody else.
- The early successes of Emancipation and Reconstruction.
- Jim Crow, rolling back all of those successes, abetted by President "Rutherfraud" B. Hayes.
- Plessy v. Ferguson, the lie of Separate But Equal.
- The Civil Rights Era, starting with FDR and Truman, most notably desegregating the Federal work force, starting in 1933, and the military, starting in 1948.
- Segregationist backlash, starting with refusal to allow Social Security to apply to mostly Black agricultural and domestic workers in the South, then the Strom Thurmond Dixiecrat campaign, then the Republican Southern Strategy.
- Impeach Earl Warren.
- Expansion of voting rights vs. voter suppression.
- Demographic shifts, and the beginnings of the collapse of White racist, bigoted, misogynistic Christianity.
- Al Gore having the 2000 election stolen by the Supreme court, and comparable shenanigans around Kerry and Clinton.
- Biden leading by 10 points nationally and even by one point in Texas.
Every one of those topics is worthy of a book, nay, a library. But we have only a Diary here, and I have to get back to Frederick Douglass.
I deny and utterly scout the idea, that there is now, properly speaking, any such thing as a negro problem before the American people. It is not the negro, educated or illiterate, intelligent or ignorant, who is on trial, or whose qualities are giving trouble to the nation... The real question, the all-commanding question, is whether American justice, American liberty, American civilization, American law, and American Christianity can be made to include and protect, alike and forever, all American citizens... It is whether this great nation shall conquer its prejudices, rise to the dignity of its professions, and proceed in the sublime course of truth and liberty marked out for itself during the late war, or shall swing back to its ancient moorings of slavery and barbarism. The trouble is that the colored people have still to contend against ’a fierce and formidable foe,’ the ghost of a by-gone, dead and buried institution.
Speech
I have no more reason to be proud of one race than another, I dare to say, and I fear no contradiction, that there is no other man in the United States prouder than myself of any great achievement, mental or mechanical, of which any colored man or woman is the author. This not because I am a colored man, but because I am a man; and because color is a misfortune, and is treated as a crime by the American people.
Speech
I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such is my experience. I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.
...
Whilst I was saddened by the thought of losing the aid of my kind mistress, I was gladdened by the invaluable instruction which, by the merest accident, I had gained from my master. Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read. The very decided manner with which he spoke, and strove to impress his wife with the evil consequences of giving me instruction, served to convince me that he was deeply sensible of the truths he was uttering. It gave me the best assurance that that I might rely with the utmost confidence on the results which, he said, would flow from teaching me to read.
The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers.
I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes - a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, — a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, — and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection.
Essay in North Star (November 1858); as quoted in Faces at the Bottom of the Well : The Permanence of Racism (1992) by Derrick Bell, p. 40
We deem it a settled point that the destiny of the colored man is bound up with that of the white people of this country. … We are here, and here we are likely to be. To imagine that we shall ever be eradicated is absurd and ridiculous. We can be remodified, changed, assimilated, but never extinguished. We repeat, therefore, that we are here; and that this is our country; and the question for the philosophers and statesmen of the land ought to be, What principles should dictate the policy of the action toward us? We shall neither die out, nor be driven out; but shall go with this people, either as a testimony against them, or as an evidence in their favor throughout their generations.
'An address on West India Emancipation (3 August 1857), according to Frederick Douglass : Selected Speeches and Writings, p. vi ; other sources give 4 August 1857. Other citation source: Frederick Douglass, West India Emancipation Speech, Delivered at Canandaigua, New York (Aug. 4, 1857), in 2 The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass 437 (Philip S. Foner ed., 1950).
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 depreciate 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. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. [...] Men might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.
The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery? (1860)
The Constitution itself. Its language is "we the people"; not we the white people. Not even we the citizens, not we the privileged class, not we the high, not we the low, but we the people. Not we the horses, sheep, and swine, and wheel-barrows, but we the people, we the human inhabitants. If Negroes are people, they are included in the benefits for which the Constitution of America was ordained and established. But how dare any man who pretends to be a friend to the Negro thus gratuitously concede away what the Negro has a right to claim under the Constitution? Why should such friends invent new arguments to increase the hopelessness of his bondage? This, I undertake to say, as the conclusion of the whole matter, that the constitutionality of slavery can be made out only by disregarding the plain and common-sense reading of the Constitution itself; by discrediting and casting away as worthless the most beneficent rules of legal interpretation; by ruling the Negro outside of these beneficent rules; by claiming that the Constitution does not mean what it says, and that it says what it does not mean; by disregarding the written Constitution, and interpreting it in the light of a secret understanding. It is in this mean, contemptible, and underhand method that the American Constitution is pressed into the service of slavery. They go everywhere else for proof that the Constitution declares that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; it secures to every man the right of trial by jury, the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus — the great writ that put an end to slavery and slave-hunting in England — and it secures to every State a republican form of government. Anyone of these provisions in the hands of abolition statesmen, and backed up by a right moral sentiment, would put an end to slavery in America.
What the Black Man Wants (1865)
In regard to the colored people, there is always more that is benevolent, I perceive, than just, manifested towards us. What I ask for the negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us... I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us!
Our Composite Nationality (1869)
During the late contest for the Union, the air was full of 'nevers', every one of which was contradicted and put to shame by the result, and I doubt not that most of those we now hear in our troubled air will meet the same fate. It is probably well for us that some of our gloomy prophets are limited in their powers to prediction. Could they commend the destructive bolt, as readily as they commend the destructive word, it is hard to say what might happen to the country. They might fulfill their own gloomy prophecies. Of course it is easy to see why certain other classes of men speak hopelessly concerning us. A Government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men; claiming no higher authority for its existence, or sanction for its laws, than nature, reason and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword and purse in the service of any religious creed or family, is a standing offense to most of the governments of the world, and to some narrow and bigoted people among ourselves.
Our Composite Nationality (1869)
We have for a long time hesitated to adopt and carry out the only principle which can solve that difficulty and give peace, strength and security to the republic, and that is the principle of absolute equality. We are a country of all extremes, ends and opposites. The most conspicuous example of composite nationality in the world. Our people defy all the ethnological and logical classifications. In races we range all the way from black to white, with intermediate shades which, as in the apocalyptic vision, no man can name or number.
Plea for Free Speech in Boston (1880)
Why, what is the matter with us? Are we going to palliate and excuse a palpable and flagrant outrage on the right of speech, by implying that only a particular description of persons should exercise that right? Are we, at such a time, when a great principle has been struck down, to quench the moral indignation which the deed excites, by casting reflections upon those on whose persons the outrage has been committed? After all the arguments for liberty to which Boston has listened for more than a quarter of a century, has she yet to learn that the time to assert a right is the time when the right itself is called in question, and that the men of all others to assert it are the men to whom the right has been denied?
Equally clear is the right to hear. To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right to speak and hear as it would be to rob him of his money.
And we can ask the same questions today of voting rights, on which all else in government depends.
Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881)
When I was about thirteen years old, and had succeeded in learning to read, every increase of knowledge, especially anything respecting the free states, was an additional weight to the almost intolerable burden of my thought, 'I am a slave for life'. To my bondage I could see no end. It was a terrible reality, and I shall never be able to tell how sadly that thought chafed my young spirit.
And we could say the same about all of the weight of systemic racism and other oppressions for a century and a half since Abolition. But today, we can say that nobody is a victim of systemic oppression for life. All can aspire to equal rights, not only in theory but in practice.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there always is.
until enough of us embrace radical equality to prevent any malicious minority from denying and preventing it.
The south was not far behind the north in recognizing Abraham Lincoln as the natural leader of the rising political sentiment of the country against slavery, and it was equally quick in its efforts to counteract and destroy his influence. Its papers teemed with the bitterest invectives against the 'backwoodsman of Illinois', the 'flat-boatman', the 'rail-splitter', the 'third-rate lawyer', and much else and worse.
That's the entire Trump playbook.
Speech at Civil Rights Mass Meeting, Washington, D.C. (22 October 1883).
No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.
The Future of the Colored Race (1886)
Races and varieties of the human family appear and disappear, but humanity remains and will remain forever. The American people will one day be truer to this idea than now, and will say with Scotia’s inspired son,
A man's a man for a’ that.
When that day shall come, they will not pervert and sin against the verity of language as they now do by calling a man of mixed blood, a negro; they will tell the truth.
"The Race Problem" (1890)
That sturdy old Roman, Benjamin Butler, made the negro a contraband, Abraham Lincoln made him a freeman, and General Ulysses S. Grant made him a citizen.
And now we want to give Joe Biden the chance to make our brothers and sisters just that, with no further cavil.
I have no doubt whatever of the future. I know there are times in the history of all reforms, when the future looks dark... I, for one, have gone through all this. I have had fifty years of it, and yet I have not lost either heart or hope... I have seen dark hours in my life, and I have seen the darkness gradually disappearing, and the light gradually increasing. One by one, I have seen obstacles removed, errors corrected, prejudices softened, proscriptions relinquished, and my people advancing in all the elements that make up the sum of general welfare.
Butler received demands from rebel slaveowners for the return of their escaped slaves who had taken shelter behind Union lines. This was in accord with the Constitution and the Fugitive Slave Act which the Constitution authorized. Butler
took them at their word
that the slaves were their property, and confiscated this "property" as contraband of war. He then gave them paid employment supporting the Union Army, just as if they had been legally freed. Congress initially objected to this measure, but came around and codified it into law.
Mr. Lincoln was not only a great President, but a great man — too great to be small in anything. In his company I was never in any way reminded of my humble origin, or of my unpopular color.
And in conclusion, we find ourselves confronting the same question today as during Jim Crow.
From the first I saw no chance of bettering the condition of the freedman until he should cease to be merely a freedman and should become a citizen. I insisted that there was no safety for him or for anybody else in America outside the American government; that to guard, protect, and maintain his liberty the freedman should have the ballot; that the liberties of the American people were dependent upon the ballot-box, the jury-box, and the cartridge-box; that without these no class of people could live and flourish in this country; and this was now the word for the hour with me, and the word to which the people of the North willingly listened when I spoke. Hence, regarding as I did the elective franchise as the one great power by which all civil rights are obtained, enjoyed, and maintained under our form of government, and the one without which freedom to any class is delusive if not impossible, I set myself to work with whatever force and energy I possessed to secure this power for the recently-emancipated millions.
Our enemies have understood this requirement just as well as we do, and have labored mightily to prevent it since the founding of the Klans. Southern Blacks had the right to vote and to run for office in fair elections from shortly after the end of the Civil War to 1876, as Ta-Nehisi Coates explained in We Were Eight Years in Power. They partly got those rights again with the Voting Rights Act, and partly lost them again to gerrymanders and vicious voter suppression.
Time's up.
Yes, it's true, Trump. You do hear that Frederick Douglass is doing great things.
