From our founding fathers until the time of Lincoln, we have retained black slaves. “With liberty and justice for all” seemingly deceived these slaves, whereas any white man was proclaimed free. Some citizens, predominantly those who owned slaves, had the idea that African Americans weren’t even considered human because they are “colored”. It wasn’t until Martin Luther King Jr. had his “I have a dream speech that really set forth the realization that everyone should be truly equal. He recognized that the seemingly perfect ‘Declaration of Independence’ had flaws in reference to blacks. Unfortunately, the inequality and police brutality that Martin Luther King Jr. sought out to eliminate continued past his time and still exists today. In the image below, drawn by Samuel Joyner, an allusion and alogism is used in order to reveal the …show more content…
injustices that blacks had faced and continue facing in “the land of the free.” Joyner uses an allusion to The Declaration of Independence with “Liberty and Justice for all..” but quickly distorts it by adding “what a cruel hoax”.
To put it bluntly, The Declaration of Independence had set forth inalienable rights that somehow eludes the blacks of America. A majority of people in America recognize the significance of the phrase “liberty and justice for all” because it’s inscribed in the Declaration of Independence and is the final words of a school’s daily pledge of allegiance. Nevertheless the image claims this phrase to be a hoax, particularly for blacks. When you look deeper into just the meaning of the phrase, you find it to be more than true. Liberty meaning: “the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behavior, or political views” (Google). And the definition of Justice being: “just behavior or
treatment” (Google). Now I ask you, do African Americans obtain these rights? With the recent events of the Boston riots and the killings of numerous unarmed black youth, it is obvious that African Americans are not safe from the authority's behavior and are not treated just. Many bystander videos have appeared during the Boston riots revealing that the police will simply arrest or attack African Americans for the belief that they are dangerous and more violent than other Americans. In some cases this may be true, but some is not all; You can’t assume someone will be dangerous like a select few that are also of your skin color. These brutal beatings being depicted in the image saying “police brutality” with a chain connected to an African American. Let it also be known that many African American youth don’t feel safe around police officials because so many lives have been taken, leaving them to be shackled by their own actions. Joyner also uses alogism in the phrase “guilty only of being black,” emphasis on the word only. In other words, this was used because it is an illogical statement. It is preposterous to think that someone could be guilty for the color of their skin. Alas, this has been happening since our founding fathers, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr, apparently in 2000 according to the picture, and still today in 2015. After 239 years of this injustice, there’s no wonder why Joyner states, “Liberty and justice for all… what a cruel hoax”! Not only this but the emphasis on the only speaks out. On one hand you can see that it is a ridiculous statement because skin color shouldn't affect if you’re guilty or not. On the other hand you can see that this statement is not only true but is significant in what's happening in our society. It is ridiculous that a statement that this could even be validated by our society’s actions and words. Police bias seems to only grow nowadays with their harsh arrests, words, and even murders. In some cases little justice is served when the accused police official loses his job, but it doesn’t change the fact that these actions even happened in the first place. Just recently, a Muslim boy was wrongly arrested because his teacher thought his homemade clock was a bomb. Since then he has been freed and opened to numerous opportunities. So why don’t we see the same for wrongly arrested African Americans? Either because they are shot down on the scene or because officials believe that they are not innocent because of their skin color and supposed aggression. Samuel Joyner utilizes an allusion to the Declaration of Independence and an alogism to skin color to present that African Americans aren’t treated the same way as any other American. He is successful in his argument because Liberty and Justice have never really applied to the African American people since the Declaration was ratified.
Slavery is the idea and practice that one person is inferior to another. What made the institution of slavery in America significantly different from previous institutions was that “slavery developed as an institution based upon race.” Slavery based upon race is what made slavery an issue within the United States, in fact, it was a race issue. In addition, “to know whether certain men possessed natural rights one had only to inquire whether they were human beings.” Slaves were not even viewed as human beings; instead, they were dehumanized and were viewed as property or animals. During this era of slavery in the New World, many African slaves would prefer to die than live a life of forced servitude to the white man. Moreover, the problem of slavery was that an African born in the United States never knew what freedom was. According to Winthrop D. Jordan, “the concept of Negro slavery there was neither borrowed from foreigners, nor extracted from books, nor invented out of whole cloth, nor extrapolated from servitude, nor generated by English reaction to Negroes as such, nor necessitated by the exigencies of the New World. Not any one of these made the Negro a slave, but all.” American colonists fought a long and bloody war for independence that both white men and black men fought together, but it only seemed to serve the white man’s independence to continue their complete dominance over the African slave. The white man must carry a heavy
Being African American has never been easy. At birth, we are born with a target on our backs for simply being a different color and whites are born privileged. One would think that when slavery was abolished that the target would be removed but that isn’t so. King states in his article that “…white supremacy saturated public culture...”
Along with his arguments of mental inferiority, Jefferson argues that blacks concede their inferiority through their submissiveness to the slave owners. This argument is met by Walkers’ appeal to the people for action. He states that, “unless we try to refute Mr. Jefferson’s arguments respecting us, we will only establish them” (Walker 18). It is an urgent call for action that urges not only blacks but other abolitionist, to stand up and fight against the stereotypes. He calls for black people to stop being submissive and to stand up for their rights. He also calls on blacks to not allow their oppression to hinder them from attaining as much knowledge as is reachable given their circumstances. He uses Jefferson’s demeaning statements to incite black people to rise up against the injustices being done to them. Through his derogatory statements towards black people, Jefferson, the champion of equality, is inadvertently giving Walker a means to inflame the fight in black people.
While the formal abolition of slavery, on the 6th of December 1865 freed black Americans from their slave labour, they were still unequal to and discriminated by white Americans for the next century. This ‘freedom’, meant that black Americans ‘felt like a bird out of a cage’ , but this freedom from slavery did not equate to their complete liberty, rather they were kept in destitute through their economic, social, and political state.
John Quincy Adams once said that, “It is among the evils of slavery that it taints the very sources of moral principle. It establishes false estimates of virtue and vice: for what can be more false and heartless than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest right of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin?” John Quincy Adams be of the opinion that slaves were equal to the “white man” and should not be treated like animals but as equals. Agreeing with John Quincy Adams, he discusses inequality, a point that needs to be emphasized, since the Declaration of Independence “that all men are created equal” and that it is not followed completely by all fellow “Americans”. According to him, “we have
“All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights,” (Thomas Jefferson) This is the famous statement made by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. He is being extremely hypocritical here considering he himself owned a near two hundred slaves. The slaves are still owned and treated as ‘property’. Thomas Jefferson did not have care for the slaves. The equalities discussed in the Declaration were not aimed to all men, they were aimed at specific white men. Frederick Douglass a former slave excellently asks in reaction to Jefferson; “Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?” What he means by “Us” is African American, it could also mean slave considering he was one. It is just so perfectly put because it is obvious the beliefs of Jefferson were not extended to African American’s or slaves. He continues on rather sarcastically “confess the benefits”, this is important because there was very little benefits. (Frederick Douglass, 1852,
As King stood before the massive crowd of Americans, he urged the citizens of the United States to turn their hatred of colored people into a hatred of the true evil: racism. King continually states that the black people are being held back by the “chains of discrimination.” King uses this to make the audience feel that the black people are in great misfortune. King describes the white people as swimming in an “ocean of material prosperity” while the black people are stranded on a “lonely island of poverty.” Here, King magnificently uses the Declaration of Independence and implores the audiences’ emotions on all levels, wielding pathos as his Rhetorical weapon. Prejudices surrounded the nation and caused fear, anger, panic, rage, and many more intense emotions. All people who lived in this time period experienced these prejudices in one form or another. King takes the idea of these prejudices and describes a world without all of the hate and fear. He imagines an ideal world that all races, not just black people, would find more pleasant and peaceful. Moreover, King references how the United States has broken their promise to the men of color by refusing them the basic human rights granted in the foundational documents of the country: the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
Although our present day society still questions whether the rights of the Individual should outweigh the public order or the social order of our country should outweigh the individual rights has enlightened me to a distorted vision and a compromised system and questionable Leadership. “African- American men comprise less than 6% of the U.S. population and almost one-half of its criminal prisons.” Quoted by the Bureau of justice statistics. When research is conducted by another other than oneself yield such great crippling results, it does hold truths to be true to that which began before our awakening
After the close of the Civil War, African American slaves were recognized by the federal government as being free men and women. This new-found freedom led to a push for greater rights, including the ability to educate themselves, own property, and obtain jobs that would provide support for their families. To assist in these matters, the government responded with the creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau, an agency that was designed to create a new social order. Through the building of schools, the provision of medical care, and access to the justice system, African Americans were given a host of rights that had been denied them in years past (“Making…”, 1997). It was no wonder, then, that southern whites rejected many of these practices and took steps to undercut the advances of this agency. As they were gradually re-admitted to the union, many southern states passed black codes,...
Liberty, as defined by the Oxford dictionary, is explained as the “condition of being free from restriction or control; the right and power to act, believe or express oneself in a manner of one’s own choosing”. Liberty is a word familiar to most Americans, since the fundamentals of the country is based on freedom and independence. Symbolism of liberty (such as the national’s flag, statue of liberty, the liberty bell, Uncle Sam, the bald eagle) can be seen throughout the United States as a reminder of the freedom in which this nation has achieved for over the past two hundred years. Perhaps one of the greatest achievement of liberty by the Americans in the past two hundred years has been the founding of the United States Constitution. Not only does the constitution deal with the distribution of government powers, but it proclaims the freedom of all individuals, abolishing slavery. Although freedom is technically set to the slaves by the constitution, but it did not fully fulfilled the description of “liberty” for the slaves. In this essay, I will begin by demonstrating how the US Constitution not only did not fully provide the freedom of the slaves, but how the document itself is not as “liberating” as it seems. I will also briefly discuss exactly how much “liberty” contemporary America has politically and the level of racial inequality that continues to exist in this “democratic” country.
The American Declaration of Independence is perhaps the most meaningful and important document in the history of America. The main section of this document which is incompatible with the concept of slavery and shows a falsity is during the discussion of human rights and liberties. The Declaration stated ‘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 statement iterates that under legal rule all men were to obtain uniform freedom, the fact that the word ‘unalienable’ was used is a major contradiction to slavery, ‘unalienable rights are incapable of being lost or sold’ they are ultimately undeniable, yet these rights were denied to the black slaves. These entitlements were supposedly ubiquitous to every human being, however human beings in this sense were ‘all free, white, property-owning males’ black slaves were not observed as human ...
This concept was later expanded upon in the Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson and became the motto of American democracy: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. However, the founding fathers and their influential Enlightenment Era philosophers often referred to blacks as “savages” and “inferior humans”, denying them these “inalienable” rights. It is through this manipulation of language and human understanding that African Americans were denied the most basic elements of freedom. The Constitution itself is highly influenced by Enlightenment thought and meant to serve as the mark of an egalitarian republic. However, it includes no mention of the word “slave”, yet directly condones the foreign importation of slaves for at least 20 years after its ratification. This is evidence that African Americans were marginalized in their aspirations for freedom, strictly because their subjugated position in society benefited
Although African Americans were finally able to gain back their freedom; they did not gain equality in the eyes of their former oppressors. Resentful of the newfound freedom of African Americans, laws known as Jim Crow laws were established throughout the United Stated by states and local governments. These discriminatory laws worked to systematically oppress African Americans through segregation and violence. They were segregated from whites; forbidden to attend the same schools, eat in the same restaurants or intermarry. African Americans were treated as second class citizens; lesser beings that had no rights. “Blacks could not vote, sue whites, testify against them, raise their voice to them or even look them in the eye or stay on the sidewalk if they passed.” (BL p.98) The era of Jim Crow was a dangerous time where even a glance was enough for an African American to be murdered. But there was only so much abuse that would be withstood. The winds of change were beginning to stir and African Americans and their supporters were beginning to demand their equality.
He laments on the state of the Negro community which ought to have been freed about one hundred years ago. He particularly uses the historical document which became of America’s freedom today to talk to the Americans and indirectly asking why freedom was not granted to the blacks. King approaches his speech with a fair and non...
“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.” If the confusion has not yet set in, then give it a moment. This nation, the United States of America, prides itself on being far superior to all other nations because here in America we are free men. We set ourselves on a pedestal above Great Britain because the Declaration of Independence clearly states that everyone inside the parameters of our country will be treated as equal as the same individuals neighbor. Yet for nearly three centuries, our nation was full of individuals, including our forefathers, who “owned” people that were regarded as less than themselves simply due to the fact that the pigments in their skin did not allow them to fall within the Caucasian race. The very legal document that had the word “Independence” written within it’s name and blatantly stated that it is obvious that no human is greater than any other because we were all made by the same god for the same reason, is the foundation of a nation that used innocent lives as fuel for slavery. It wasn’t until some educated individuals finally stood up and realized how incredibly wrong these two concepts are when put together. It is said that when the former slave Frederick Douglass