On Benign Bigotry

Times change, as do circumstances. Even so simple and elegant a sentence as:

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, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

can be mucked around with. For example, “all” men didn’t include slaves, not to Jefferson, who wrote it…and all “men” didn’t include women. And it is entirely possible that there an ancient graybeard “creator” didn’t “decide” to “endow” these rights. They were claimed, in the ragged but wonderful process of history, and turned into unthinkable freedom and prosperity.

Even after the historic atrocity of slavery was abolished, laws were made—and upheld by the Supreme Court—which, in certain parts of the country, directly contradicted that founding principle. There were a hundred years of racial segregation after the Emancipation. Innumerable murders and rapes and casual brutalities were done in the name of white superiority. The trudge to justice began to gather steam in 1954, with Brown v. Board of Education, which abolished school segregation—in law, if not in fact. The 1960s saw the trudge become a rush and among the laws passed to rectify inequities was the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The summer of 1964, college students—I’ll forever regret I wasn’t one of them—went to Mississippi to register black voters. According to the New York Times:

Of the estimated 17,000 African Americans who tried to register to vote that summer, according to the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, only 1,600 applications were accepted.