“Behind everything there is still the sin and curse of slavery, and the fact that for black Americans, the way up through hard work and education was closed in the South by force of law, closed by government policies that combined with private action to create racial ghettos and urban decay.”
Our Quote of the Week is a stark reminder that slavery is at the root of the division and inequity that defined the United States on its inception. We are meditating on this quote this week as we marked Juneteenth, a day of celebration that also reminds us of the cruelty and injustice of slavery.
This week, we return to Sargent Shriver’s 1975 speech about busing at Cooper Union in New York. Although the speech is almost 50 years old, the issues about racial justice and education that Sargent Shriver raises continue to be critical.
While Shriver’s language is rooted in the time (e.g., we wouldn’t typically use the term “ghettos” in this way today), his observation points to a fundamental truth about the history of our country: that the legacy of slavery continues to shape our systems, from education to banking to the criminal justice system and beyond.
As a remembrance of the day when, on June 19, 1865, the last formerly enslaved people were informed that slavery had been abolished, Juneteenth brought us much closer to a universal “independence day” than July 4, 1776 had. However, it is also a bittersweet day, both because it reminds us that there were people still suffering under the system of slavery after the moment of emancipation (which occurred over two years earlier in January 1963), and because those who had been enslaved were “freed” by and large into an agrarian society without any land or reasonable opportunities, and in a place where the power structure continued to be dominated by racist ideas.
Let us commit to doing all we can to ensure that we move decisively towards a society where we are all emancipated and able to fulfill the promise of our founding documents: the exercising of our inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
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