·
This evening we celebrate with the year 1863
foremost in our minds. One hundred fifty years
ago tomorrow, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, (declaring
that “all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a
State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States,
shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of
the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will
recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts
to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their
actual freedom.”)
·
Despite this historic proclamation, freedom for
enslaved Africans was not codified until the 13th Amendment to the
Constitution was adopted in December, 1865---and after a Civil War, in which
some 700,000 people lost their lives.
· This
was a great price to pay for an ideal, an ideal that is still yet to be fully
realized, but it illustrates that constant struggle is the only path to that
which is worth having. Frederick
Douglass famously said
“Those who profess
to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops
without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning;
they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a
moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a
struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never
will.”
·
These words are meant as a reminder to all who
wonder what must be our continuing posture and purpose. While the manifestation of the nation’s true ideals still
remain illusive, there can be no doubt about the progress that has been made
over the past 150 years. This
progress has been paid for by the blood and sacrifice of people from every race
and clan. And so it must be, if we
are to continue this journey toward freedom begun long before 1863; men and
women, young and old, must take up the torch of eternal vigilance and
unyielding demand until full freedom is won, then preserved.
·
For this, I maintain, is the call of human life.
Because freedom for human kind, regardless of specific characteristics, is not
a fight to be won once and for all, but it is one to be won each and everyday
of our lives.
