Founding ‘truths’ not evident to all
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
With these words, on July 4, 1776, our nation’s Founding Fathers embarked on the establishment of a sovereign and independent nation – a nation in which those having settled on this soil from Great Britain and Europe could build new lives, pursue new opportunities, and openly express their religious beliefs, free from British rule.
The claim in our Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” did not reflect our nation’s reality in 1776. Freedom included neither the Africans who were brought here and traded as slaves, nor those natives whom the British and Europeans found and displaced upon their arrival here.
Indeed, African slaves were to be counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of states’ representation in Congress and the Electoral College – even though those slaves could not themselves cast a vote for anyone or anything.
The fate of slaves would change between 1865 and 1870, with the adoption of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution – which granted them their freedom, equal protection under the law, and the unfettered right to vote.
But a checkered history of separation, segregation and Jim Crow laws that threatened the protections granted under those amendments would continue to haunt us for yet another 100 years – until a round of sweeping federal civil rights legislation in 196465 sought again to bring redress.
On the recent July 4, while many of us celebrated our nation’s birthday with neighborhood parades, patriotic music, cookouts, and fireworks, the holiday was being experienced by some in ways that did not speak of freedom, justice or equality.
In Los Angeles, 91-year-old Rodolfo Rodriguez was walking down a street when he was severely beaten by a woman wielding a concrete block and shouting at him, “go back to Mexico.”
In Winston-Salem, N.C., a neighbor called police to remove Jazmine Abhulimen, a woman of color, and her child from their neighborhood pool. Although Abhulimen provided her address, and had clearly entered the pool with the access card given to neighborhood residents, the unapologetic neighbor would not be convinced that she did indeed live in the neighborhood and should have access to the pool.
The fact that both the attack on Rodolfo Rodriguez and the demeaning singling-out of Jazmine Abhulimen at her neighborhood pool occurred on July 4, as we as a nation celebrated the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, should not be lost on us.
Our national conscience should grieve with them, not only for their suffering on that day, but more for the fact that even in 2018 we still struggle with the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
More than 240 years after our Founding Fathers declared our equality and our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is time for all of us to stand for the rights for which our country was founded. To treat one another with respect and dignity.
It is time for us to demand justice and equality for all. It is time for us to remind one another, when we forget, that all of us, all humankind, are made in the image and likeness of our God. It is time for us to show compassion – and to love.
Rev. Dorothy Sanders Wells is rector of St. George’s Episcopal Church in Germantown.