This past week we have been celebrating Juneteenth – a celebration of the day that Texans were informed that the slaves were free.
Thomas Jefferson had described Americans in the states bordering the Chesapeake Bay as hypocrites about slavery – understanding its illegitimacy but keeping men, women and children in bondage anyway. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in which he included the words “all Men are created equal.” That certainly made Jefferson one of the hypocrits and many of his fellow Virginians understood the conflict between the illegitimacy of slavery and their continued enslavement of African-Americans among others.
It took more than the four score and seven years leading to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address for America to start to eliminate that hypocracy and live up to the standard of its Declaration.
I see Juneteenth as a twin with July 4th for on Juneteenth America began to live up to its promise, a promise that has been a beacon of justice shining throughout the world.
I say “start to eliminate” and “begin to live up to its promise” because it is an unfinished project. But the point I want to make today is that the message of Juneteenth is part and parcel of the message of the Declaration, part and parcel of the universal ethics that Americans should be most proud of – one message for men and women, one message for rich and poor, one message for farmers and city dwellers, one message without regard to race, creed, gender, sexual orientation or national origin, one message of life, liberty, prosperity and justice for all, one message for high and low that none of us from the lowliest street dweller to the highest corporate or public office-holder among us.
This country was the first to proclaim and try to live by that doctrine and we should be proud of it. We must be proud of it. To live as if the equality of humanity is a problem is to tear this country apart at its roots, to live as if the seven hundred thousand soldiers and uncounted civilians who gave their lives in the Civil War did indeed “die[] in vain.”
For America to be America, for America to take a leading role in the world, for America to be and remain great, that fundamental issue of the equality of all people must be accepted as settled, finally, and we, in Lincoln’s words, “here dedicate[ ourselves] to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
That is the path of unity and progress. Any other path is the path of self-destruction, mutual slaughter and lawlessness.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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