“Providence has not created the human race either entirely independent or perfectly slave. It traces, it is true, a fatal circle around each man that he cannot leave; but within its vast limits man is powerful and free; so too with peoples.” Thus mused Alexis de Tocqueville in the closing pages of his magnum opus, […]
“What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?”
Mr. President, Friends and Fellow Citizens : He who could address this audience without a quailing sensation, has stronger nerves than I have. I do not remember ever to have appeared as a speaker before any assembly more shrinkingly, nor with greater distrust of my ability, than I do this day. A feeling has crept […]
Our Promissory Note
Living downstream from the American founding, we are heirs today to what Martin Luther King, Jr., in his most famous speech, referred to as the “promissory note” implicit in our Declaration of Independence: that “all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the […]
