This country faces a reckoning. The question is whether we will come together or fall apart, move forward, or descend toward a moral abyss. In this time of deep discord, of partisan divide, racial tension, and extreme inequality, the outcome is far from certain.
As fraught as this time is, however, it is not unique. We have faced such moments before.
When this nation was founded on the proposition that all were created equal, the Founders could not duck the question of slavery. States with large numbers of slaves wanted the slaves to be counted for purposes of representation and taxation, even though they were considered property without any rights. To form the union, the Founders compromised in the Constitution, with slaves counted as three-fifths of a person – three-fifths human– increasing the number of representatives from the slave states while remaining in bondage. Thomas Jefferson owned 600 slaves but publicly denounced slavery as a “moral depravity” and believed that slavery represented the greatest threat to the new nation. “I tremble for my country,” he wrote, “when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”
In the end, it took a Civil War – with the most casualties of any war in American history – to bring an end to this depravity. That triumph was driven by an abolitionist movement, by increased slave revolts, by strong leaders like Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, and by whites and blacks willing to risk their lives to preserve the union and eventually to save it from the moral abyss of slavery.
Then, after a period of Reconstruction when biracial majorities transformed the South, creating the first public school systems and a new economy, a relentless reaction set in, with terrorism – lynchings, murders, beatings, intimidation – stripping the new free man of their rights and driving their allies apart. What followed was nearly a century of legal apartheid – segregation – in which blacks were deprived of the right to vote, the right to sit on juries, access to public facilities, and more. Once more, America was scarred by a moral depravity.
This time, it required a nonviolent civil rights movement with courageous whites joining African Americans in demanding their rights. The country responded when they witnessed the horrors of the Birmingham bombing, Bloody Sunday in Selma, and more. That movement for justice forced politicians to react, and with strong leaders like Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King, they reconstituted America with the passage of the Civil Rights Bill, and the Voting Rights legislation. Once more, coalitions like the Rainbow Coalition came together to exercise those rights, register people to vote, and elect new leaders to lead the way.,…
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