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The closing words of the Declaration of Independence still ring true, "And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor." But do we really mean it?
Executive Minister for Justice and Witness Ministries Bernice Powell Jackson.
Every year my own tradition of celebrating Independence Day is to read two documents. First, the Declaration of Independence, which was the document dated July 4,1776, which declared our nations independence from England. The second is the speech entitled, "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro," given by Frederick Douglass, the former slave and great orator and abolitionist for Independence Day in 1852 in Rochester, NY.
The beautiful words of the Declaration of Independence and the concepts which the words embody always touch me deeply and remind me every year of the vision upon which this nation was founded. The troubling words of Frederick Douglass three quarters of a century later remind me that we have struggled to live up to those words from the very beginning. While we have certainly made progress since Douglass time in living out the words, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men (I would add and women) 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 . . . ," we certainly have a long way to go to make them a reality.
But one small example. The author of the Declaration of Independence is Thomas Jefferson, who became the third President and is perhaps the most respected Founding Father of our nation. Since those early days of the Jefferson presidential campaigns it was brought out that there were light-skinned slaves who closely resembled Jefferson on his plantation and thus there were rumors that Jefferson had fathered several children with a slave woman, Sally Hemings, who happened to be the half-sister of his late wife Martha. Jeffersons descendants vehemently denied these claims, but there was much oral history passed down in the families of Hemings descendants and we in the African American community in Washington, DC, where I grew up, were well aware of these ties.
The larger public became aware of the story of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings in the latter years of the 20th century, mostly through the work of several writers and a DNA study which showed that, indeed, in at least the case of one branch of Sally Hemings family, there was a DNA match with Jeffersons family, although there was no way of proving which male Jefferson might have been the father. Descendants of Sally Hemings were invited to the 1999 Jefferson family reunion and it seemed that two hundred years of separation might finally be bridged. That might have been the end to this story of "the mysterious power of race" in America, in the words of the writer Shelby Steele, as we ended that century which W.E.B. DuBois had predicted would be the one in which "the color line" would be our nations biggest problem.
But late this spring the Monticello Association, the 700 member organization of the white descendants of Jefferson, met and voted 74-6 to exclude the Hemings descendants from membership in the family organization as well as burial rights at Monticello, Jeffersons plantation. Said a former president of the Association, "Our intent was to kill this forever so it doesnt keep coming up again." Said one of Hemings heirs, "Nothings changed in 200 years, has it?"
The power of the legacy of slavery is still strong in this country. Im not sure that even Frederick Douglass, who was so critical of our nations support of this evil institution, would have foreseen its grip on our nation nearly 150 years after its end. The story of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings lives on. The sad fact is that the Jefferson family has lost generations of relationships with their black cousins, lost opportunities to be enriched by each others stories and gifts. The same might be said about our nation, which still has not established an equitable relationship with its African American part of the family. Its a loss for us all.
The closing words of the Declaration of Independence still ring true, "And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor." But do we really mean it?
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