This patriot points our way past Capitol siege
The jarring events of Jan. 6 in Washington challenge our ability to understand and situate in historical terms what is happening in real time.
I feel the emotional brew others have described – sadness, anger, shock – and also share the questions: How could authorities be so unprepared? How can we account for police treatment of a rampaging mob without seeing a racial double-standard?
And yet the breathless exclamations that the indignities we witnessed were an unprecedented, new nadir leave me uneasy.
It is true, of course, that we have never seen rioters occupy the U.S. Capitol in a bid to disrupt the process of electing the next president. But this physical desecration is not the first time our national ideals have been defiled in these chambers.
While I share the sentiments expressed regarding the sanctity of this symbolic heart of American democracy, it is not lost on me that from this hallowed building emerged laws that treated humans as property, laws that denied people rights based on ethnicity or nationality and laws that dispossessed the original inhabitants of this continent of their land and culture.
Remembering this history is important in avoiding despair and considering the way forward. My thoughts turn to those who soldiered on perfecting American democracy in the face of previous desecrations.
In particular, I have been thinking about Frederick Douglass, a person born and raised as chattel who somehow found the fortitude to educate himself, escape to freedom and emerge as a forceful and influential advocate for abolition of slavery. Emerging from bondage, Douglass discovered the Constitution and its high-minded idealism.
Rather than simply scoff at the hypocrisy – a more than understandable reaction – he somehow embraced the document and dedicated his life to achieving freedom for his people within the civic architecture established by the very Constitution that legitimized his enslavement.
Frederick Douglass should be held aloft as one of our country’s great patriots. And yesterday I thought of his ability to remain committed when the “temple of democracy” was debased by passage of the particularly vile Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. How did Douglass maintain his belief in the possibility of America in the face of that abomination?
Far from recognizing the human impulse for freedom that drove Douglass and so many other to risk life and limb escaping slavery, Congress amplified the abhorrent “runaway slave” clause in Article IV, Section 2 of the Constitution.
I thought about an aging Frederick Douglass – who thrived long enough to see the Union prevail, amendments eliminating slavery adopted, and Blacks elected to Congress – witnessing the creation of a “commission” in 1877 to hand the presidency to Rutherford Hayes. This reprehensible bargain ended Reconstruction, led to Jim Crow and launched an era of domestic terror targeting African Americans. How did Douglass, or Sojourner Truth, another aging titan of the abolitionist movement, see such dispiriting events and take away primarily the need to work that much harder?
Ted Cruz’s grotesque invocation of the shameful (and largely forgotten) 1877 commission maneuver as a justification for his mendacious proposal to overturn the presidential election results is as chilling as it is horrifying. But if Frederick Douglass could press on undeterred – perhaps even energized – by the sacrilege he witnessed in the halls of Congress then we must do the same in the face of riotous thugs egged on by the president.
Historical abominations are not cited to minimize yesterday’s outrages. But the heartfelt invocations of the Capitol’s majesty were perhaps overly precious, inadvertently awarding profane but banal violations too much power as indicators that American democracy is doomed.
The United States of America remains a young, flawed country figuring out how to make democratic governance work in this remarkably diverse, highly fluid society that is grappling with technological and social change. Our national greatness is found in our ability to confront the flaws and contradictions and eliminate them as we pursue greater fidelity to our ideals.
Those who found fuel rather than despair in our past injustices – be it Frederick Douglass or Stacey Abrams – have been among the most influential actors in American political development.