An Apology to the African American People in Behalf of White America: Part I

An Apology to the African American People in Behalf of White America:  Part I


A Promise of Rectification Through Transformation of K-12 Education 




I must in behalf of white America offer the apology to my African American friends that the nation as a whole seems reluctant to extend to you.


I have long felt that the nation owed this apology to you and now feel moved to offer these words of contrition, admiration, and appreciation.


I am sorry that 25,000,000 of your mostly youngest and strongest ancestral family members were ripped from the Bight of Benin, the realm of the Ashanti, the kingdom of Dahomey, many places along the Ivory Coast, and numerous other areas of the continent that gave birth to humanity. How ironic that the gift of humanity was returned with so many acts that we term, “inhumane.”


I am sorry that your ancestors were confined to cages until ships came to transport them across the Middle Passage through the Atlantic Ocean to toil on plantations variously producing sugar, tobacco, rice, cotton, and whatever else the owners and manufacturers could secure for profit--- with no regard at all for your needs. So many of those strong young people were confined to subterranean decks with little space to rest, chained together, lying for days in urine, feces, and other detritus until at last allowed to emerge on the upper deck to be doused with water, led around, and returned to nautical Hades.


 How despicable that the wager was that enough people would survive under those conditions to be offered on the auction block to the highest bidders, all rejoicing that a sufficiency of inhumanely treated humanity had endured the sweat, stench, urine, blood, and chains to give their free labor to the agricultural South so as to feed the factories of the industrial North in these United States.


I am so very sorry.


I apologize that once on the plantations and farms of the American South, so many of your ancestors worked almost all of the time, that they were whipped for the smallest infractions or merely perceived slights to masters and overseers, and that via some combination of abuse and overwork they lived out their lives stooped, marred, scarred, limping, lame.


I am so very, very sorry that an overabundance of the women of your heritage were used as breeders and objects of pleasure, valued for the young slaves to which they could give birth and as the outlet for the urges of many a white master and male inhabitant of the plantation. I am appalled that so many women of African provenance were separated from their children, sold as mere units of production rather than treasured offspring, and that these young people grew up without knowing who their mothers and fathers were.


Please accept this apology.


I am sorry that an otherwise brilliant document, the Constitution of the United States of America, democratic in much of its spirit, mocked this spirit internally in failing to extend full rights of citizenship to women and implying that people in conditions of servitude should be considered just one-third of a human being for the purposes of population enumeration and ranking of states for representation in the United States House of Representatives.


I am sorry that the Dred Scott decision labeled enslaved humanity as transportable chattel and that Justice Roger Taney declared that Negroes had no rights that white America and authorized judiciaries had an obligation to respect.


How remarkable, though, that within a year of the Dred Scott decision and the Fugitive Slave Act, the great abolitionist Sojourner Truth stood before an assembly of assertive women and oppositional men, gathered in upstate New York to discuss women’s right to suffrage and full citizenship, and delivered one of the most eloquent speeches in the history of American oratory, as follows:




Sojourner Truth


Ain’t I a Woman?


Delivered at Women’s Convention in New York, 1851


Well, children, there is so much racket there must be something must be out of kilter. I think that ‘twixt the Negroes of the South and the women of the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this talking about?

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?


Look at me! Look at these arms! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man--- when I could get it--- and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most of them sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?


Then they talk about this thing in my head; what’s they call it? [“Intellect,” someone whispers.] That’s it, honey. What’s that got to do with women’s rights or Negro’s rights? If my cup won’t holds but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to give me my half-measure, full?


Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as a men, ‘cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did you Christ come from? From God and woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.


If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.


Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner Truth ain’t got nothing more to say.


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I am sorry that Sojourner Truth’s appeal for women’s suffrage was not honored until 1920; and that her entreaty for the abolition of slavery was so imperfectly realized even after the passage of a constitutional amendment (13th) to that effect. But I thank my African American brothers and sisters for the gift of this great seeker of justice under the law, for her energy, her optimism, and her relentless courage.


But I apologize that the ideals of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution were subverted under the doctrines of interposition and nullification in the former slave states, that Reconstruction came to an ignominious conclusion in the Compromise of 1877, that unequal equality was deemed sufficient in Plessy V. Ferguson (1896) by the very Supreme Court Justices who were sworn to uphold statutory and constitutional law, that sharecropping incorporated many of the features of slavery in a wickedly innovative agrarian system, and that Jim Crow and the Black Codes were allowed to trump the Law of the Land.


I am so very sorry.


I apologize profusely for this abnegation of citizenship in a polity that projects itself as a paragon of democracy.


I am so sorry that the party of Lincoln reinvented itself as the champion of corporate interests.


But I thank you for this eloquent reply from Frederick Douglass to an assemblage of African American leaders in 1883:


Frederick Douglass


Who Would Be Free, Themselves Must Strike the Blow        


Delivered at Convention of African American Leaders in 1883.


Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow. You know that liberty given is never so precious as liberty sought for and fought for. The man outraged is the man to make the outcry. Depend upon it, men will not care much for a people who do not care for themselves.


Our meeting here was opposed by some of our members, because it would disturb the peace of the Republican Party. The suggestion came from coward lips and misapprehended the character of that party. If the Republican Party cannot stand a demand for justice and fair play, it ought to go down. We were men before that party was born, and our manhood is more sacred than any party can be. Parties were made for men, not men for the parties.


If the six millions of colored people of this country, armed with the Constitution of the United States, with a million votes of their own to depend upon, and millions of white men at their back, whose hearts are responsive to the claims of humanity, have not sufficient spirit and wisdom to organize and combine to defend themselves against outrage, discrimination, and oppression, it will be idle for them to think that the Republican Party or any other political party will organize and combine for them or care what becomes of them. Men may combine to prevent cruelty to animals, for they are dumb and cannot speak for themselves; but we are men and must speak for ourselves, or we shall not be spoken for at all.


We have conventions in America for Ireland, but there should be none if Ireland did not speak for herself. It is because she makes a noise and keeps her cause before the people that other people go to her help. It was the sword of Washington that gave Independence the sword of Lafayette.


In conclusion, we have to say that we meet here in broad daylight. There is was nothing sinister about us. The eyes of the nation are upon us. Ten thousand newspapers may tell if they choose of whatever is said and done here. They may commend our wisdom or condemn our folly, precisely as we shall be wise or foolish. We put ourselves before them as honest men and ask their judgment upon our work.


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Thank you for the great gift of Frederick Douglass, who believed so fervently in the very Constitution that was soon given such scurrilous short shrift by those Justices sworn to uphold it.


Thank you for the relentless pursuit of justice under the law, by which courageous African American patriots held the mirror of the nation’s own legal institutions up to the American populace, extolling a beautiful vision of justice amidst horrendous brutality.


How terrible it was for your ancestors, my African American brothers and sisters, to walk amongst their kinfolk hanging from trees, burned at the stake, tarred and feathered, maimed for life for faults as slim as spitting on the lawn of a white person or failing to step aside for one of lighter skin hue to pass.