Black People Suffered 345 Years for Freedom Because the Founding Fathers Were Bad at Getting It Done

Let's take the number 1964 and subtract it from the number 1619.  The result is 345, and that's the number of years that people from Africa were legally oppressed or enslaved in America.

With all due respect to the Founding Fathers, love is an action word.  If they’d wanted to end slavery, they would have just ended slavery.    I’ve had it with conservatives who say that the Founding Fathers somehow had a glint in their eye and really, really just wanted to end slavery but were so afraid of dividing the country that they just couldn't.  High-flown theories about a civil war in the 1790's or other disunity are merely a papering over of the truth about the Founders: many of them were deeply compromised by their economic interest in keeping slavery going.  

And yet, liberals would have us believe that, because many of the Founders owned slaves - Madison, Jefferson, and Washington spring to mind - that we can never admire them, that naming elementary schools after them is racist, and that they have to be carefully boxed off and all but purged from history, other than as cardboard cutouts who are manipulated in a shadow play about the glories of the collectivist State, used to demonstrate "how far we've come."

The truth is far more complicated, interesting, and invigorating.  The Founding Fathers were great men who risked everything to bring liberty and the principles thereof to an entire nation, and the effects of their weaknesses in not ending slavery were multiplied. They held power, and yet, essentially wrung their hands in ineffectual concern for the institution they'd carried from the colonies into what was supposed to be free Republic where all men were created equal.  Paradoxical?  Of course it is.  This is America - have you met us?  And the even deeper paradox is that the Founding Fathers - even the ones who enslaved people really did pave the way with both words and actions for eventual freedom.  I think history books say that, sort of, but we should shout it out and restore the Founding Fathers to their proper place of respect and admiration while living in and indeed loving the intellectual tension created by the fact that they *weren't* perfect.  Sort of like, "love the sinner, hate the sin": Hate the enslavement, love the ideas that led to eventual freedom.

Abraham Lincoln was a cool-handed dictator who had a tidy, Victorian moral disgust with slavery and yet little love for the actual liberation of enslaved black people.  Just look at his actions:  proposing an end to the expansion of slavery so that it would slowly wither - and what's a few decades under the Confederate lash, anyway?  You're up for that, right Malcom X's grandfather?  Another action: The Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that slavery was ended in places that were rebelling against the United States *because they were rebelling*.  Hey Confederacy, just trade in your muskets for ballots, and we'll allow you to commit a Holocaust for another 43 years or so?  Great deal, right? What, you still want to be your own nation-state?  Aww, maaaan!  Or passing the 13th Amendment under duress - I don't care what Spielberg and Daniel Day Lewis cooked up, good movie guys, but a tad idealistic - simply so that Radical Republicans would not embarrass him politically while he was trying to craft Reconstruction.

Look, I don't hate Lincoln.  His relative-to-the-times political courage was off the charts, A+, good job, stovepipe hats for everybody.  But his absolute political courage when held against a defined standard of All Men Created Equal is a C- at best - we'll let you graduate to twelfth grade, Abe, but you're lucky Common Core watered down the curriculum so much!

The irony, of course, is that Lincoln is recognized as a martyr for a cause he only sort-of believed in - black people's freedom.  But Lincoln's true passion, the idea of United States as a unified republic - survived as well.

Leaders whose real passion for abolition - the active, positive destruction of slavery and the liberation of our fellow humans - had such names as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison.  These men and those they inspired organized others by the thousands and then the millions, nurturing the political culture that empowered Lincoln and other Republicans to at least say they were against the expansion of slavery. In relatively bright moments in 1863 (Emancipation Proclomation) 1865 (Thirteenth Amendment and abolition of slavery nationwide) and 1868 ("Radical", i.e. popular Reconstruction - as in 'you mean, there were so many Radical, true-and-blue anti-oppression Republicans that they overrode a moderate President and ran the entire Federal government out of Thaddeus Steven's boarding-house parlor?  Why, what were they, a majority that represented America's genuine mass political culture against stodgy 'regular' politicians?  No way!'), the whole system came crashing down in 1877 after a brokered Presidential election, and black American suffered under Jim Crow for 87 years.

Finally, we got the Voting Rights Act in 1964.  And if you want to talk about a politician who couldn't crowd surf - who was squished to the front of the room by passionate civil rights activists when they locked arms, singing and marching, and who forced this politician to then, pop - sweaty, stumbling, and disoriented - out the front door, where he would then have the temerity to claim to have led us there, why, that politician would be America's single worst President, Lyndon Baines "how many kids have you killed today" Johnson.  Yup, Mr. "we lost the South for a generation" Johnson - and why would enfranchising black people lose the South for a generation, which it didn't?

That, my friends, is a story for another blog.

Because it's been a big sarcastic night for this history major and it's time to go to bed.