Today is the first of three revisits to the Declaration of Independence; three communities to which the tenets of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness did not apply.
Byron Williams, author of The Radical Declaration, walks us through how enslaved Americans and Black Americans pushed against the document from the very beginning of our nation’s founding.
In this episode students will learn about: Prince Whipple, Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, and James Baldwin.
Episode Resources
Graphic organizer and discussion questions
Freedom and the Nation's Founding Documents from Teaching Tolerance (references Whipple petition)
Episode Segments
Transcript
[00:00:00] Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Nick Capodice: [00:00:04] About a year ago, Hannah, we made an episode about the Declaration of Independence. And it had a healthy dose of my enthusiasm for 1776.
[00:00:13] The declaration will be a triumph. I tell you, a triumph!
Nick Capodice: [00:00:17] And it had different takes from three scholars on what the document was.
[00:00:22] It had the job of justifying one of the most consequential political decisions ever taken.
[00:00:27] And I refer to the Declaration Independence as originally written as a secession ordinance.
[00:00:32] This was as close to a perfect document on human agency that one will ever find,
Nick Capodice: [00:00:40] And I loved making that episode. I really did.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:44] And since then, the declaration has found its way into many of our episodes.
Nick Capodice: [00:00:49] Yes, our exploration of that document feels forever unfinished. And on the cutting room floor of that episode was something our guest, Byron Williams, said. How the declaration was exclusionary, but the ideas in it evolved into the words of Abraham Lincoln. James Baldwin, the poet and activist Langston Hughes. As we passed this most recent quarantined Fourth of July, I called Byron up to just get a little more on this.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:18] Just want to check the time before we start to start, you got like 30 minutes.
Byron Williams: [00:01:21] I got thirty one for you.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:24] Byron Williams is a professor, theologian and host of the show The Public Morality, and he has just written The Radical Declaration. It's a book of essays on our paradoxical founding document. So I asked him first how the declaration had been used to fuel political change.
Byron Williams: [00:01:41] Well, Lincoln, reconstruction, women's suffrage, civil rights, Jim Crow, Vietnam. The current moment. We see that. That's the great thing about about that document. We can just pick a seminal moment and it pretty much works. So how do you want to go?
Nick Capodice: [00:01:58] I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:59] I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: [00:02:00] And this is Civics 101, the podcast refresher course on the basics of how our democracy works. Today is the first of three revisits to the Declaration of Independence, perhaps our most celebrated founding document. While it has been used, as Byron said, to instigate change throughout our country's history, it is, frankly, a document that's left many people and communities out.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:23] By which you mean enslaved Americans, women, people of color and Native Americans.
Nick Capodice: [00:02:30] And initially, even more than that,
Byron Williams: [00:02:33] It is never stated. But the unstated part of that declaration was it applied to white male landowners. In our present discourse, oftentimes we hear white male and we leave out landowners. But it was white male landowners. Sort of like think of it this way. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is this moral agreement. And you've got to have all three to have them all. Two thirds of that proposition won't cut it. If you were white and male and not a landowner, you were still disenfranchised. So as a result, you have this document that proposes creating a nation on liberty and equality. What becomes with the unstated white male land owners? You have subjective liberty and inequality. You disenfranchise all the women, all the people of color, and depending on the, on the data, somewhere between 35 and 50 percent of the white male population. So it's a document right there rooted in inconsistency in what I talk about in the book paradox.
Nick Capodice: [00:03:47] And that paradox in the declaration was commented on and tested not long after it was signed. Byron points to Prince Whipple of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Byron Williams: [00:03:57] He was this slave of William Whipple, who was a signer of the Declaration, and they petitioned to the Hampshire Continental Congress in 1779, to be exact. And a part of it reads The petition of Nero Brewster and others natives of Africa now forcibly detained in slavery and said state most humbly submit that the God of nature gave them life and freedom upon terms of the most perfect equality with other men. That freedom is an inherent right of the human species not to be surrendered. Does that not sound like they were slightly influenced by we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator?
Byron Williams: [00:04:45] You see right there, the Declaration of Independence is already becoming radicalized, going already going beyond the intended white male landowner to, to more people really not included going, wait a minute. But you said these things. And we are petitioning our freedom based on what you have already committed yourselves to.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:09] This was a literal petition that went before the New Hampshire house.
Nick Capodice: [00:05:13] Yes. Before we even had a constitutional right to protest or petition. This was how the people in New Hampshire could interact with their government.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:21] What did the New Hampshire Congress do?
Nick Capodice: [00:05:23] They tabled it with no legislative action. Whipple himself was not freed for five more years. Movement towards abolition in New Hampshire began in 1783, but Portsmouth merchants participated in the slave trade until 1837. That was the year the African slave trade was abolished, not the practice of slavery itself.
Nick Capodice: [00:05:45] A small number of enslaved people were reported on the census in New Hampshire until 1840. And shortly after that, in 1852, one of the most famous and critical speeches about American independence was delivered. Frederick Douglass's What to the Slave is the Fourth of July. It's a speech he gave at a commemoration of the Declaration signing.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:08] Did you see that recording done by NPR this past Fourth of July of his descendants reading sections from that?
[00:06:15] What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer a day that reveals to him more than all other days in the year the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham. Your boasted liberty and unholy license, your national greatness, swelling vanity, your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless.
Byron Williams: [00:06:44] Frederick Douglass is obviously one of those stories you can't make up a runaway slave.He runs away, stows away, goes to England, becomes educated. I'm just giving you the really not even the Reader's Digest version and comes back and becomes one of the most ardent abolitionists to end slavery.
Byron Williams: [00:07:05] At this point. It was 1850, 1852. Frederick Douglass sees the irony, the inconsistency of the Declaration of Independence that it does not extend to everybody specifically. It does not extend, you know, to the people of African descent. But later on. Post Civil War. Douglas says this, "I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ringbolt to the chain of your nation's destiny. So indeed, I regarded the principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions and in all places against all foes and at whatever cost. I think that's a great lesson for all of us if we freeze this document in time. You know, I you know, I'm an African-American, if I freeze it, if I freeze the document to the intentions of 1776, then the document may not be relevant to me given given given the history of America. But it's not about anyone's intent. It's what the country committed to. And so you see in Frederick Douglass at the first reading, he points out the hypocrisy, but then later on he evolves and goes, you know what? This document does work, but it can only work if we wanted to.
Nick Capodice: [00:08:36] When I learned about Frederick Douglass in school, it was always in the context of the civil war. But he continued to give lectures across the world well after. He helped to build housing for Black Americans in Baltimore in the late 1890s. And he died in 1895 after returning from a meeting of the National Council of Women in Washington, DC. So, yes, slavery was abolished in 1865, but responses to the declaration and the ideals laid out in it continued into the 20th century.
Byron Williams: [00:09:10] So then you have Langston Hughes saying, you know, America has never been America to me, it's a beautiful poem.
Nick Capodice: [00:09:18] Are you familiar with Langston Hughes?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:19] I know a little I know that he was a prominent author during the Harlem Renaissance and that he wrote a famous poem called Harlem.
[00:09:27] What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun or fester like a sore and then run? Does it stink like rotten meat?
Nick Capodice: [00:09:38] Byron is referencing Hughes's later poem entitled Let America Be America Again.
Byron Williams: [00:09:45] But even in that lament that America has never been America to him and acknowledging the hypocrisy Hughes carves out a piece of hope. "But I do say clearly America will be America to me" in spite of itself, this thing will happen. And so there is the reality that the America of America's failed promise, but yet there's still this hope that America will be this thing one day.
Byron Williams: [00:10:14] And then you have one of the great 20th century writers, James Baldwin.
Nick Capodice: [00:10:20] James Baldwin was a prolific playwright and novelist and essayist who wrote extensively on the subject of race, but also spoke about it on late night talk shows.
Byron Williams: [00:10:31] There's this great interview that he does on Dick Cavett, and I'm paraphrasing, but Baldwin basically says, you know, I don't know if if real estate lobbyists hate black people, but I know where they forced me to live.
[00:10:46] I don't know what the labor unions and their bosses really hate me. That doesn't matter. But I know I'm not in their unions. I don't know if the Board of Education hates Black people. I know the textbooks I give my children to read and the schools that we have to go to. Now, this is the evidence. You want me to make an act of faith, risking myself, my life and my woman, my sister and my children on some idealism, which you assure me exists in America, which I have never seen.
Byron Williams: [00:11:14] And so at some point, delayed gratification becomes no becomes nonexistent. And I don't believe it. And the only challenge to that is that if you follow the Baldwin path to its logical conclusion, you end up nihilistic and apathetic, which is an understandable conclusion. It does not make us a better people. You know, Bob Dylan wrote the lyric, When you got nothing, you've got nothing to lose. A Democratic Republic cannot survive if it has a growing population that feels they have nothing to lose. That they have nothing. So they have nothing to lose. And they're sort of checked out. The republic cannot survive if that number reaches a certain threshold. And I and I actually worry today Nick that we're getting closer to that threshold.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:06] What does Byron think will improve our Democratic Republic?
Nick Capodice: [00:12:11] Byron was very careful to not give prescriptions on how to improve our democratic republic. He specifically said he wrote this book on the declaration to start a conversation. I think I'm going to end this one on the words of someone else, on James Baldwin.
Nick Capodice: [00:12:31] Apathy and nihilism aside, in 1959 he wrote, "Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom from which we began," which is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And then he said "the recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country, a hard look at himself. And if we're not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations."
Nick Capodice: [00:13:14] I'm taking a page out of Byron's book in honor of him being the first outdoor Civics 101 interview, and I'm recording these credits outside on the hottest day of the year at 12 noon.
Nick Capodice: [00:13:26] Today's episode is produced by me Nick Capodice with Hannah McCarthy. Our staff includes Jacqui Fulton and Felix Poon. Erica Janik is our executive producer and figurative thunder blanket. Music in this episode by Jesse Gallagher, Blacksona, Sarah the Illstrumentalist and that musician who keeps his songs in a brisk key, Chris Zabriskie. And attention teachers! We're hiring! Civics 101 is hiring. We're looking for a few educators from across the country to design lesson plans and brainstorm new episodes and materials. For more information, remuneration, s super short application, go to civics101podcast.org/info. Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.
