Richard LeBaron, Chargé d'Affaires a.i.
Speeches & Remarks
17 February 2009
Civil Liberties and Civil Rights in America
From Lincoln to Obama
(As prepared for delivery, February 17, 2009)
It is an honor to be with you today here at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool. I want to thank Dr. Richard Benjamin for inviting me to speak and I want to thank the Museum for hosting this special event commemorating Black History Month in the United States. This is my first visit and not my last. I'm not planning on giving lots of speeches. I'm mainly interested in listening to what you have to say about this important city in whose history many of my countrymen have shared.
Black History Month occurs in February every year in the U.S., but this year is truly historic. Not only does it mark the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth Abraham Lincoln, the president who ended slavery in America, it is the first year that the highest office in the United States is held by an African-American, President Barack Hussein Obama.
To understand the significance of President Obama's election, and how much the United States has changed, it is not necessary to travel back to Lincoln's time. It suffices to go back to the 1950s. Sixty years ago, an African-American could not be served in many of the restaurants of Washington, DC. Today, an African-American leads the country.
I can think of no better place in Britain then Liverpool to reflect on President Obama's election and what it means for the progress of civil rights. The International Slavery museum, as David Fleming, the director of National Museums Liverpool noted, does more than tell the story of a shameful area in our shared history. It reminds us of the enduring effects slavery has had on the world.
We struggle with this heritage to this day in the United States. True, we have broken a very important barrier with the election of President Obama. But we must be mindful of prejudice and inequality which still challenge American society. By shining the light of honest scholarship and frank discussion on our past, as this museum does, we can better understand and overcome these evils which diminish us as nations and keep us from fully attaining our national ideals.
Speaking of idealism, I'd like to recall briefly the catalytic role the United Kingdom played in the world-wide movement to abolish slavery. The first organized opposition to the slave trade began with the Quakers in 1783 when the London Society of Friends presented a petition against the slave trade to parliament signed by over 300 Quakers. Because Quakers were barred from standing in Parliament, on May 22, 1787, six Quaker activists joined with three Anglicans to form the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade.
Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery throughout the empire in 1833. Public opinion against the slave trade was shaped by many activists. The autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, a former slave, awakened Parliament to the horrors of slavery. Josiah Wedgwood, the English potter who founded the world famous Wedgewood pottery firm, helped humanize the plight of Africans by producing a medallion of a slave in shackles with the legend, "Am I not a man and a brother?"
Britain fought international slavery. The Royal Navy is credited with seizing 1,600 slave ships and freeing 150,000 Africans. The belief in the fundamental immorality of trafficking in persons lives on today in the United Kingdom's active role -- in cooperation with the United States -- in combating the scourge of human trafficking around the world.
Liverpool was at the heart of these early struggles, just as it has played a central role in the UK's relationship with the United States. The Museum of Slavery is a testament to Liverpool's role between 1700 and 1800 as an important center of the slave trade, part of a triangle between Africa, Britain and the Americas. Later, Liverpool's port was at the center of the maritime traffic of the industrial revolution. Similarly, Liverpool was the primary destination for vital Lend-Lease shipments from the U.S. to the U.K. in the early days of WWII, and later saw the arrival of a flood of American soldiers.
During the founding of the United States, the Liverpool-born merchant Robert Morris emigrated to the American colonies and ended up overseeing the financing of the American War of Independence. Morris was also a signatory of the U.S. Constitution, and earlier, the American Declaration of Independence, the second line of which reads: "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."
This was the crux of the matter then, and remains so today. Compare these lines with the following: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
This simple sentence, the introduction to the Gettysburg Address, represents the genius of Lincoln. With these lines, he took a moment of supreme crisis in the United States and used it to redefine the meaning of our founding. As you know, our Bill of Rights - the first ten amendments of the U.S. Constitution - guaranteed the civil liberties of free men in America, but left out more than half million African-Americans slaves.
It was Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation that began the process of ending Slavery's exclusion on January 1, 1863. With the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln ensured that out of our terrible Civil War would come a union devoted to this ideal. I believe his legacy is most alive in our continuous search for freedom, equality and opportunity. Striving to secure for all Americans these unalienable rights has been the ongoing struggle of the civil liberties and civil rights movement.
Lincoln was a lifelong opponent of slavery, saying, "If slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong." It is no surprise then that he felt his most enduring achievement was the Emancipation Proclamation. He was also instrumental to the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to our Constitution, which officially abolished slavery throughout the United States.
While the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment extended liberty to America's African-American population, they weren't enough. In response to local legislation designed to restrict the freedom of former slaves, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were passed, which sought to guarantee the rights of former slaves by affirming their citizenship and barring voter discrimination based on race or former status as a slave.
However, by the end of the 19th century, these gains had been lost on the ground. Law and violence were used to enforce what in the South became known as the "Jim Crow" system of legalized segregation, which called for separate facilities and institutions for whites and African-Americans.
The states defended the laws under the claim that they were creating separate but equal facilities for blacks and whites. In reality, they were anything but equal. Jim Crow laws ensured that African-Americans in the South had to use dilapidated restrooms, were banned from eating in the same restaurants as whites, and received inferior public education.
These laws began to unravel in 1954, the year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Brown versus the Board of Education of Topeka that segregation was inherently unconstitutional. Since the school system provided to African-American children under Jim Crow were inferior, the Court ruled that the state had failed to provide equal schools, and therefore failed to provide equal protection. The equal protection clause has been used extensively since then to extend civil liberties to other Americans who have faced discrimination.
Brown versus the Board of Education inspired Americans to engage in civil disobedience to stop segregation and voter suppression. Under the leadership of such courageous figures as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., thousands participated in boycotts, staged "sit-ins" in segregated restaurants, and participated in marches. The Montgomery Alabama bus boycott demonstrated the power an organized African-American community could wield. The sit-ins and marches - broadcast across the nation via television -- focused the nation's attention on the inequities faced by African Americans and shone a light on the brutality with which state and local authorities often responded. Many Americans were sickened and outraged at scenes of peaceful protestors being beaten with sticks or sprayed with firehouses or attacked by police dogs.
As America recoiled at the inequality, intolerance and prejudice on display, our government acted to finish the work Lincoln had begun. Important legislative achievements included the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination in employment practices and public accommodations; the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that restored and protected voting rights; the Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965, that dramatically opened entry to the U.S. to immigrants other than traditional European groups; and the Civil Rights Act of 1968, that banned discrimination in the sale or rental of housing.
America today is a land of opportunity for all. Today the chance for every American to fully participate in the American dream is greater then it was sixty years ago, or even ten years ago. As I said earlier, there is still work to be done. Indeed, the first piece of legislation signed by President Obama was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act, designed to ensure that women receive equal pay for equal work.
I am confident that we will continue to make progress towards the ideals Lincoln stood for. When you look across my country today -- in schools, in offices, in the courts, in government service, in the media -- you see the truer, more diverse face of the American people. And we are better for it.
As President Obama said during his inauguration:
We know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness….We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself.
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Speeches & Remarks