Words of freedom come alive
Councilor delivers dramatic reading of Declaration of Independence
When NPR posted the Declaration of Independence -word-for-word in 122 tweets -- on Independence Day this past summer, some people didn’t recognize the words. They thought the public radio network was calling for a revolution and accusing President Trump of being a tyrant.
NPR was actually reciting the Declaration of Independence as it has done for nearly 30 years on the Fourth of July.
This “lack of awareness” inspired Yuma City Councilman Mike Shelton to deliver a dramatic reading of the Declaration on Monday, one day after U.S. Constitution Day.
“I did it because NPR tweeted pieces of the Declaration of Independence and a lot of listeners didn’t know what they were listening to,” Shelton said, noting that he also wanted to explain what the Declaration “really said and what it meant.”
The Yuma Super Speakers Club hosted the event, which featured three speakers, including Shelton, Howard Blitz, another Distinguished Toastmaster and founder of The Freedom Library, and 20-year-old Connor Davis, who holds the rank of Advanced Communicator Gold.
All three speakers addressed how their training in Toastmasters International has helped them in both presenting their ideas to the public and when serving as leaders.
Blitz spoke on the importance of understanding the nation’s founding documents and the service his organization provides to the public through its new location at the Yuma Sun, 2055 S. Arizona Ave.
Blitz said he founded The Freedom Library almost 22 years ago solely for the purpose of helping people learn and understand ideas about liberty. While teaching economics and later the U.S. Constitution, he found very few people had read the Declaration.
He encouraged attendees to make use of the education opportunities available through The Freedom Library.
Davis spoke on the benefits of both courses and how he used his scholarships from The Freedom Library to expand his education.
Davis joined the club at 14 years old and he’s now close to the rank of Distinguished Toastmaster, the highest rank, which would make him one of the youngest in the club, according to Lester Favish, also a Distinguished Toastmaster.
Davis will be heading into the Army to work in public affairs. While he interned at Fort Huachuca, he saw people stuttering when talking to the general. They clearly would benefit from Toastmasters, he said.
The club has “prepared me for going into the world,” Davis noted.
In introducing Shelton, Blitz explained that the Declaration has four parts: the introduction; rights and responsibilities, which he considers the “most important”; complaints against the British government, specifically the King of England; and a statement informing the British government that the United States intended to become independent.
“It’s only proper that a city of Yuma official would do the reading,” Blitz said.
Shelton, a die-hard Star Trek fan, first greeted the room packed with young people with the Vulcan greeting. He then addressed a controversy surrounding the writer of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson.
“One of the controversies, particularly in the East Coast, has to do with Thomas Jefferson and slavery and the idea that Thomas Jefferson didn’t care about slavery. I want you to know that if you look in the rough draft of the Declaration that exists, Thomas Jefferson wrote a plank against slavery. He called for the end of slavery trade, which was the American slave trade,” Shelton said.
“The problem was that in the political process, which this was, there were about 84 edits made to the rough draft of the Declaration of the Independence and one of the things taken out was his initial ending of slavery in the Declaration.
“Imagine for a moment if Thomas Jefferson had had his way and it was in the Declaration and it had survived the Revolutionary War and that it survived the Constitution Convention. Imagine Africans becoming Americans without the Civil War. Imagine no segregation, imagine no Jim Crow (laws), imagine no Civil War. If only Thomas Jefferson had his way.”
He noted that the Declaration was more than the Boston tea party, more than taxation and representation, things most people learn in school and what sticks to them. “Those were small pieces in the picture. It was about a universal declaration of human rights, on top of American rights. And it is that dealing with human rights really what we’re talking about, humanity vs. inhumanity, civility vs. cruelty. It is those factors that made the Declaration loved around the world,” Shelton said. He explained that the document was translated shortly after the summer of 1776 into several European languages. In the decades and centuries that followed, “it became a source of inspiration for those who fought against colonial rule around the world … There was one power that fought colonial rule and won and that was the American people.”
He also pointed out that the Founding Fathers knew “their lives hung in the balance because King George believed in the divine right of kings and once you said, ‘We don’t want you to be our king,’ he would have responded with ‘off with your head.’ That was the kind of king he was.
“This was the point of no return. This was do or die. Everyone who signed the Declaration put a target on their backs and if they lost the war, off with their heads, arms and legs and feed them to the alligators. That was what King George would have done.”
Shelton then made the Declaration come alive, reading it with passion, making it easy for attendees to imagine how the Founding Fathers would have read it themselves.