Created Equal

Ministry of Love

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal …

— United States Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776.


ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL,
BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.

— George Orwell (1903 – 50), Animal Farm, 1945.

(Geeta Gandbhir & Sam Pollard, Why We Hate, 2019)

Liberty Is Not License

(Cathy Wilcox, The Age, 12 January 2021)




(Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided, PBS American Experience, WGBH, 2001)

Abraham Lincoln (1809 – 65) [16th President of the United States]:
Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.
The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
(First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1861)

Andrew Johnson (1808 – 75) [17th President of the United States]:
This is a country for white men and, by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.

Garrett Epps (1950) [Law Professor, University of Baltimore]:
[Andrew Johnson] loved the idea of big rallies.
He loved to get up and make long speeches, largely about himself.
(Reinaldo Green & Kenny Leon, Citizen, Amend: The Fight for America, Episode 1, 2021)

Abraham Lincoln (1809 – 65):
Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow?
Never!…
At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected?
I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us.
It cannot come from abroad.
If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher.
As a nation of free men we must

• live through all time, or
• die by suicide. …

Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man possessed of … ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us?
And when such a one does, it will require the people to be:

• united with each other,
• attached to the government and laws, and
• generally intelligent,

to successfully frustrate his designs.
Distinction will be his paramount object, and … nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.
(Lyceum Address, 27 January 1838)

Would you like to know more?

Stephen Schmidt (1970) [Former Republican Strategist]:
Great presidents have been able to forge compromise.
President Obama was not able to do that, and the reason may well be the implacability of the people sitting on the other side of the table from him.
Sometimes you can’t get to "yes" with someone who won’t say anything other than "no."
(Michael Kirk, America’s Great Divide: From Obama to Trump, PBS Frontline, WGBH, 2020)

(Michael Kirk, Supreme Revenge: Battle for the Court, PBS Frontline, WGBH, 2020)

Addison Mitchell McConnell (1942) [Republican Leader in the Senate]:
The single most important thing we want to achieve … is for President Obama to be a one-term president.
(Michelle Obama, Becoming, 2018, p 370)

Yoni Appelbaum [Senior Political Editor, The Atlantic]:
A conservatism defined by ideas can hold its own against progressivism,

• winning converts to its principles, and
• evolving with each generation.

A conservatism defined by identity reduces the complex calculus of politics to a simple arithmetic question—and at some point, the numbers no longer add up. …
The GOP’s efforts to cling to power by coercion instead of persuasion have illuminated the perils of defining a political party in a pluralistic democracy around a common heritage, rather than around values or ideals.
(How America Ends, The Atlantic, December 2019, emphasis added)

Paul Weyrich (1942 – 2008) [Co-founder, Heritage Foundation]:
How many of our Christians have the ["good government"] syndrome?
They want everybody to vote.
I don't want everybody to vote.
Elections are not won by a majority of people.
They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now.
As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.

Ronald Reagan (1911 – 2004):
I know this is a non-partisan gathering, and so I know you can't endorse me.
But I only brought that up because I want you to know that I endorse you [evangelicals] and what you are doing.
(The Roundtable, Dallas, August 1980)

The American Promise

This nation … was founded on the principle that all men are created equal.
And that the rights of every man are diminished, when the rights of one man are threatened.
Now is the time for this nation to fulfill its promise. …

We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. …
The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities. …
Next week I shall ask the Congress of the United States … to make a commitment … to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law.

— John Kennedy (1917 – 63), Civil Rights Address, 11 June 1963.


[It] is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.
And we shall overcome.

— Lyndon Johnson (1908 – 73), The American Promise, 15 March 1965.


When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.
This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." …

Injustice anywhere, is a threat to justice everywhere. …
Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. …
[Freedom] is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. …

We cannot accept these conditions of oppression.
For this is not a struggle for ourselves alone.
It is a struggle for the soul of America. …

Let us all hope that:

• the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away, and
• the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities,

and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

— Martin King (1929 – 68)


Martin Luther King [is] the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation — from the standpoint of:

• communism,
• the Negro, and
• national security.

— William Sullivan (1914 – 77), Head of COINTELPRO, FBI, 30 August 1963.

(David Grubbin, LBJ, PBS American Experience, WGBH, October 1991)

Martin Luther King (1929 – 68):
[If] physical death is the price a man must pay to free his children from the permanent death of the spirit, then nothing could be more redemptive.
(The Rising Tide of Racial Consciousness, 6 September 1960)

John Kennedy (1917 – 63):
Other people, [George Bernard Shaw] said, "see things and say, 'Why?'
But I dream things that never were, and I say, 'Why not?'"
The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics, whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities.
We need men who can dream of things that never were, and ask why not?

(Freedom Ride, Anniston, Alabama, 14 May 1961)

Evan Thomas (1951) [Writer]:
Jack Kennedy was very conscious of images.
When the television cameras and Life magazine arrived down South [in 1963,] that's the moment when the federal government cannot sit back anymore.

The President deputized a Justice Department official to go to Alabama and help get a deal to end "the spectacle," as he called it.
But he refused to push Congress to solve this problem once and for all, by passing federal civil rights legislation that applied everywhere in America.
The solution, he insisted, would have to be worked out by Birmingham itself.

The protesters did agree to take a break as negotiations began, but as soon as a tentative deal was reached, the segregationists started a new firebombing campaign.
Kennedy sent 3,000 federal troops to the city to keep the peace.
He was worried, he said, that "the Negroes will be uncontrollable." …

The pressures of presidency [took] a heavy toll on Kennedy's health.
He required as many as seven injections of Novocain in his back in a single day, and was still often unable to bend over to put on his own socks.
He was on:

• Codeine, Demerol and Methadone for pain,
• corticosteroids to control his Addison's disease,
• paregoric for his bad digestion.

He sometimes needed Nembutal to help him sleep.
His nights were often long and uncomfortable.
(Susan Bellows, JFK, PBS American Experience, WGBH, 2013)

God is a Segregationist

Maylon Watkins [Baptist Pastor]:
God is the greatest of all segregationists.
He made the white man white, and he made the Black man Black, and I for one will honor God’s creative act.

Darren Dochuk [Historian]:
Billy Graham was born into a South that was heavily segregated.
Graham’s evangelical circles were overtly white.
Evangelicalism was defined by its whiteness. …
[But, by] the early ’50s, Billy Graham has become more progressive in his racial views, so that by 1953, he begins desegregating his revivals.

Nancy Gibbs (1960), [Journalist]:
[Billy Graham] believed in order.
Graham's really is a gospel of obedience.
The whole fundamental principle of civil disobedience, I think, is a hard one for him to really understand.

Anthea Butler, [Historian]:
[Martin] King is advocating for rights for African Americans and for all people.
Graham advocated for power.
Graham advocates for power for himself.
(Sarah Colt, Billy Graham, PBS American Experience, 2021)

Billy Graham (1918 – 2018):
I’m afraid that people are getting a distorted idea about American democracy, when they see, for example, rubber hoses and police dogs and all these things being used.
Because I think these are isolated incidents that do not really reflect the mood of the entire country. …

You cannot legislate morals.
You cannot make people love each other.
That can only come from within.
And whether you are of the white race or the Negro race in the United States, you have an obligation as a Christian to love your fellow man no matter who he may be. …

A lot of Southerners may be frustrated and angry right now, and many don’t agree with all the changes that have been taking place in the schools, especially this busing for racial balance. …
I really believe that the South will set an example of respect for law that will be a model for others to follow.
(Nixon-Agnew Campaign Ad, 6 September 1970)

William Buckley (1925 – 2008) [Founder, National Review]:
[The] White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically.
(Adam Serwer, Civility Is Overrated, The Atlantic, December 2019)

(Ken Burns, War Is All Hell, The Civil War, Episode 8, 1990)

Texas Secession Convention:
We hold as undeniable truths:

• that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity …
• that [the African race are] rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable. …
• that the servitude of the African race …
  • is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and
  • is abundantly authorized and justified by
    • the experience of mankind, and
    • the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations;
  while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring
  • inevitable calamities upon both and
  • desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states.

(A Declaration of the Causes which Impel the State of Texas to Secede from the Federal Union, February 1861)

Alistair Cooke (1908 – 2004)

… I respect more the considerate relations that many Southerners have with the Negroes around them than the glib 'social consciousness' of Northerners and Westerners whose daily life has a guaranteed immunity from Negro problems …
It is is one thing to talk about equality in New York or Oregon and … Mississippi, where there are one million whites and one million Negroes.
[The] mere force of numbers is a threat, if only in the minds of men, to the political and social dominance of the white man.

(The Court and the Negro, 20 August 1954)


I believe that Monroes' solution, shipping negros back to Africa to form their own nations, might have been wise in 1820; but it's a century and a half too late.
I do not know what the realistic solution is. …
I do know … that nothing is more mischievous to good government than splendid rhetoric that doesn't pay off. …

I have tried to show that the original institutions of this country still have great vitality.
[That much] of the turmoil here springs from the energy of people who are trying to apply those institutions to forgotten minorities. …

Now look what's being asked:

• the rehousing of the population,
• the chance of free education through college,
• the strangling of the drug traffic at the roots, and
• the radical overhauling of:
  • the prisons,
  • the jury system,
  • the courts.

Now this is going to call for … a massive subsidy of taxes, white taxes, beyond our experience.

As an historian, I'm not sure an integrated society will work.
As an old reporter, I suspect the blacks will not get more than Lincoln's "the mass of whites", who live here in the ratio of nine to one, is willing to give them.
[Perhaps the] only sensible hope is that the mass of whites have greatly changed since Lincoln's day (or will change) so that the blacks … can become an equal race, separately respected. …

[Since 1972, the] black revolution has achieved less and more than it promised. …
I would never have dreamed:

• that by today most of the big cities of America would have black mayors — Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, Washington; or
• that there would be black generals in the armed forces; or
• that my bank manager would be a young black woman. …

(The More Abundant Life, Alistair Cooke's America, Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1973 / 2002, emphasis added)


[Never] before in history have free men faced the threat of a tyranny so large, so merciless, and so painstaking as that with which the Soviet Union confronts us.
Dangling between these two unique worlds —

• a world of unequalled slavery, and
• a world of incomparable riches

— we build the storm-cellars and hope for the best.

(Getting Away from It All, Letter from America, 11 September 1953)


[The] United States has just suffered the most unmitigated defeat in its history …
What Kennedy started with the quiet infiltration of 'military technicians' is about to end, fourteen years later.
It would no doubt have ended much sooner if … the United States hadn't believed that it had a duty to stem the advance of Communism in Asia …
[But] what if, after all, the domino theory is correct?

(The End of the Affair, Letter from America, 11 April 1975)

Would you like to know more?

• Free At Last
• Voter Suppression
• Rolling back the Voting Rights Act
• Forever Free

(Geeta Gandbhir & Sam Pollard, Tools and Tactics, Why We Hate, 2019)

Edmund Barton (1849 – 1920) [First Prime Minister of Australia, 1901-3]:
[The] doctrine of the equality of Man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishmen and the Chinamen.
(1901)

Alfred Deakin (1856 – 1919) [Prime Minister of Australia, 1903-4, 1905-8, 1909-10]:
It is not the bad qualities, but the good qualities of these alien races that make them so dangerous to us.
It is their inexhaustible energy, their power of applying themselves to new tasks, [and] their endurance and low standard of living, that make them such competitors.
(1901)

Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965):
I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to:

• the Red Indians of America, or
• the black people of Australia.

I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that:

• a stronger race,
• a higher-grade race,
• a more worldly wise race …

has come in and taken their place.
(Palestine Royal Commission, 1937)

Wikipedia:
Under the terms of the [Slavery Abolition Act (1833)], the British government raised £20 million to pay out for the loss of the slaves as business assets to the registered owners of the freed slaves.
In 1833, £20 million amounted to 40% of the Treasury's annual income or approximately 5% of British GDP at the time.
To finance the payments, the British government took on a £15 million loan, finalised on 3 August 1835 …
The money was not paid back by the British taxpayers until 2015 …
The long gap between this money being borrowed and its repayment was due to the type of financial instrument that was used, rather than the amount of money borrowed.
(Slavery Abolition Act 1833, 18 December 2020)

[Haitian rebels decisively defeated the French] at the Battle of Vertières on 18 November 1803, establishing the first nation ever to successfully gain independence through a slave revolt. …
In July 1825, King Charles X of France … sent a fleet to reconquer Haiti.
Under pressure, President Boyer agreed to a treaty by which France formally recognized the independence of the nation in exchange for a payment of 150 million francs. …
The enforced payments to France hampered Haiti's economic growth for years … and the country did not finish repaying it until 1947.
(Haiti, 6 March 2021)