On the 4th of July, Comedian Chris Rock stirred up the age old question of what Independence Day means to Blacks in America since most of their ancestors were slaves at the founding of our country. Chris Rock sent this tweet out on the 4th of July: "Happy white peoples independence day the slaves weren't free but I'm sure they enjoyed fireworks."
In 1852, Frederick Douglass, a far more eloquent speaker than Chris Rock and a freed slave who actually experienced the horrors of that "peculiar institution", gave a speech to a white audience shortly after July 4th in which he said: "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."
Douglass, of course, made that statement while slavery still existed in America; not in the 21st Century when many Blacks like Chris Rock and others in business, entertainment, sports and other professions have become very successful in a more free and equitable country (in which the incumbent President is of African descent) than Frederick Douglass could have never imagined would ever exist from his vantage point in the mid-19th Century.
But before becoming President of the United States in 1861 with the hot winds of civil war starting to blow, Abraham Lincoln gave a speech that foretold how the aspirational values expressed in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 would lead America to become more free and equitable in generations yet to come:
"They [the Founders] grasped not only the whole race of men, then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. They erected a beacon to guide their children and their children's children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages. Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when, in the distant future, some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, none but white men, or none but Anglo-Saxon white men were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began, so that truth and justice and mercy and all the humane and Christian Virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man hereafter would dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the Temple of Liberty was being built."
(Abraham Lincoln's Speech at Lewiston, Illinois on August 17, 1858 during debates with Senator Stephen Douglas)
Let us hope that such words of inspiration would find their way into our public discourse more often than the ill-advised tweets and Internet statements of celebrities and others that seem to dominate news cycles in our modern 21st Century society with its easy access to wide-spread dissemination of words expressed by anyone with a smart phone, laptop or tablet linked to the Internet.
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My thanks to an excellent Townhall.com article by Ken Blackwell, a contributing editor at Townhall.com, who is a senior fellow at the Family Research Council and the American Civil Rights Union, for inspiring my thoughts and identifying the quotes above. Blackwell's article can be found at http://townhall.com/columnists/kenblackwell/2012/07/06/chris_rocks_tweet_beyond_the_pale. Sphere: Related Content
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