Indeed, the black community can rightly claim the principal credit for its own emancipation, something we tend to overlook if we view black history as a story of oppression and the struggle for its removal from without.
The history of blacks in America reveals that the resolute retention of interior moral strength, rather than a collapse into bestiality, was the typical response of blacks to the condition of slavery. As did the Nazi concentration camps, so American slavery forced its sufferers to realize that human dignity is not conferred upon us by human hands, but by the hand of God, and that respect for that dignity is our responsibility regardless of our exterior circumstances. This same moral strength became, after the Civil War, the foundation of a heroic century of largely unsung personal and social progress in the black community.
Last week I talked about the importance for social renewal of invoking the confident and hard won strength of the black heritage in America. The lessons of this heritage fly in the face of the easy assumption that external assistance is the key factor in overcoming social distresses such as crime, poverty, illiteracy and illegitimacy.
The crucial fact of the black experience in America is that, even in the days of slavery, those who were treated without respect, beaten and exploited without compassion or even a second thought, did not lose respect for themselves. And an indispensable encouragement of that respect came, ironically, from an institution that the slavemasters thought they could rely upon to keep their slaves docile and tame – the church.
While the gospel was hypocritically deployed by many whites to teach the lesson of passivity and acceptance in servitude, it was not possible to edit out the message that true freedom is received from the hand of God in the granting of our intrinsic and equal dignity. Slaves who grasped this message did not look for respect in the eyes of the master and the mistress and the law. They looked instead to the eyes of Almighty God for respect of their humanity, and they never found Him wanting. The lash never crushed their spirit, because it couldn't break their faith. And so nothing this world could say or do could take away their dignity.
Forced by their circumstances to realize that personal dignity didn't depend on anything in this world, black Americans knew that their dignity depended on their own courageous spirit and their trust in God. As a result, no matter how the world defined them so that they did not even own themselves — so that even their physical body could be put up on an auction block and valued for somebody else's money — they knew that they had a real value that money couldn’t buy, and that whips and lashes couldn't destroy. And over time that knowledge allowed them to respond to the repeated violence of oppression in ways that protected and preserved that kernel of human dignity.
That's literally why people survived. It is also why moral ideas that the slave system did everything it could to crush, such as the idea of family, managed to survive. There was a time, of course, when the historians, and some of the politicians who read those historians, would tell us that during slavery the black family was destroyed. They would go on to tell us that this explains the weak family structure in some parts of the black community today.
But recent historical researches have shown a very different picture. It is true that the slavery system, for economic and other reasons, did everything it could to break the family structure. Particular attention was given to extirpating the role of the black males and denying them the respect due to fathers and husbands. And yet black folks themselves never gave up this respect.
When historians today look at the patterns of the naming of children and other kinds of evidence, it turns out that people were maintaining those family links and that family consciousness in every way they possibly could. There are many, many wonderful stories about how, no matter how many years had intervened, those who got the chance through individual freedom or the general emancipation would spend years looking for a lost spouse, a lost brother, or a lost child, that had been torn from their bosom by the heartless hand of slave exploitation.
So at the end of the slavery period, people put their families back together. Accounts of the time are filled with amazing stories of black folks getting their marriages formalized, searching for their lost relatives, and rediscovering family names of which they could be proud. By the early 20th century, the 1900's, 80% of the children being born in the black community were being born into two-parent households.
And this is not a period of significant outside help for the black community. The world was ranged against them. Everything was being done, from disenfranchisement to lynching, to try to crush out any initiative and hope for equality in the black community. But the hope persisted.
W.E.B. duBois pointed out at the time that black literacy rose from 30% to 70% between 1880 to 1910, in a period when the few post-Civil War attempts to encourage black literacy and education were being eliminated by the post-reconstruction Southern governments.
How did that happen?
It happened because black folks were determined, above all, that they and their children would be able to read the word of God. It happened because in every humble place, whatever else might be lacking, if one person knew how to read, that one person would be reading after church, and kids and adults gathered together to pass on the knowledge of reading.
Of course, this zeal for literacy wasn’t for the sake of worldly advancement. Blacks in 1900 knew quite well that often it didn’t matter how well prepared a black person was, he still wouldn’t be permitted to succeed. They didn't let that stop them because the reason they wanted to read wasn’t so somebody else could use their labor, and put a monetary value on them. They wanted to read so that they could be with God and they could know the value He placed on them: a value that never fails.
It was this spirit that helped black folks in America to survive and even begin to move toward prosperity during the years of legalized oppression after the Civil War and well into the 20th century. It was also this spirit, when it came to light in the Civil Rights movement of the late '50s and '60s, that had the power to transform the hardened conscience of America. Surprised and edified by the quiet dignity of black Americans seeking justice, the people of this country were called back to some respect for the first principles of America's life. For the Civil Rights movement followed the example of the American Founders, and of Lincoln, who had proclaimed that every single human being had a worth that comes not from laws and constitutions, but from the hand of God. With quiet determination the freedom marchers insisted that every government, every law and every power whatsoever is obliged to respect that worth.
This is the truth of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” America is founded on the truth that we are all the creatures of God, and our worth comes from God. This founding premise of American life is simple, but powerful enough to sustain an oppressed people for decades and centuries, and bring them out better in the end.
A people awakened to this truth can endure, and recover from, any external suffering – because they have an interior treasure as the foundation for all their efforts. Without such a foundation, the temptation to succumb to worldly judgment about the dignity of individuals, particularly those not favored by fortune with wealth, position and beauty, can be overwhelming.
Black Americans have faced this temptation, and defeated it. Lincoln led the public battle against the doctrine of human inequality, but countless anonymous others have steadfastly done their work over the decades to keep the flame alive and to spread it. And at critical moments, when the nation needs to act like the free people we say we are, we can find the courage to challenge even the most extensive abuses of human power because of our conviction that human rights rest on an authority that transcends human power – the authority of the almighty God who lays down the terms on which all human and non-human powers exist.
The battle to remember our God-given worth even when those around us are denying it is as old as mankind. Few people in history are such honored veterans of that battle as are the black Americans who kept hope alive during the dark years of external oppression. Today, their example can nourish the soul of any of our fellow citizens who have forgotten that liberty comes from God, and from within. I’m sure the Great Emancipator would agree.
