By Deborah L. Hughes, President & CEO
“The consent of the governed is the sole, legitimate authority of any government! This is the essential, peculiar creed of our republic. That principle is on one side of this war; and the old doctrine of might makes right, the necessary ground-work of all monarchies, is on the other. It is a life-and-death conflict between all those grand, universal, man-respecting principles, which we call by the comprehensive term democracy, and all those partial, person-respecting, class-favoring elements which we group together under that silver-slippered word aristocracy. If this war does not mean that, it means nothing.”
~Antoinette Brown Blackwell, 1863
Susan B. Anthony called us out in 1863, “It is a war to found an empire on the negro in slavery, and shame on us if we do not make it a war to establish the negro in freedom—against whom the whole nation, North and South, East and West, in one mighty conspiracy, has combined from the beginning.”Our nation, supposedly founded on the ideals that all are “created equal” and that the government gets its power and authority from the people, has waged a war against humanity, in direct contradiction to the ideals of liberty, justice, and equality. The Civil War was not a war between the north and the south, nor did it end in 1865. It was a war for the soul of our nation, and we are still in the midst of the battle.
Anthony had a challenge, “I therefore hail the day when the Government shall recognize that it is a war for freedom. We talk about returning to the old Union—”the Union as it was,” and “the Constitution as it is”—about “restoring our country to peace and prosperity—to the blessed conditions that existed before the war!” I ask you what sort of peace, what sort of prosperity, have we had? Since the first slave-ship sailed up the James River with its human cargo, and there, on the soil of the Old Dominion, sold it to the highest bidder, we have had nothing but war. When that pirate captain landed on the shores of Africa, and there kidnapped the first stalwart negro, and fastened the first manacle, the struggle between that captain and that negro was the commencement of the terrible war in the midst of which we are today. Between the slave and the master there has been war, and war only. This is only a new form of it. No, no; we ask for no return to the old conditions. We ask for something better. We want a Union that is a Union in fact, a Union in spirit, not a sham.”
We put down slavery, but we took up weapons like lynching, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and racial profiling. We’ve waged war by denying access to businesses, clubs, and board rooms. We’ve waged war by segregating classrooms and separating school districts. We’ve waged war by intimidation. We’ve waged war by creating food deserts and accepting higher infant mortality and disparate health outcomes. We’ve waged war by moving away, or turning away.
Perhaps we have not been personally guilty of these crimes, but we must understand that we are complicit. We’ve paid for this war with our tax dollars and we’ve benefited from this war with our privilege. We must be willing to listen to those who have been under attack for far too long, and together, we can actively engage in ending this war. Then, perhaps, we’ll have a union in fact, not a sham.
