A former slave had to remind a do-gooder where his and everyone else’s rights come from.
During the ’30s and ’40s, a number of different people and institutions went around the U.S., and occasionally outside of it, seeking to record the voices and stories of people who had been slaves in America. The fruit of their labor is recorded in the Library of Congress website, and it is humbling and remarkable to hear these real voices testifying about the reality they knew firsthand.
One of the people who was involved in this work was John Henry Faulk, who achieved some fame in radio and as a person who fought and won battles against blacklisting in the entertainment industry. Faulk, a white man, reminisced on air about the comeuppance he received from one of these former slaves.
Faulk was speaking to an old black man in Texas taking in his story. Trying to establish rapport, he had been going on about how he was a different kind of white man. Faulk told the man that he was working to give the blacks the vote, to give them proper schooling, and so on. Faulk recounted that the old man shook his head and said to him,
You know you still got the disease, honey. I know you think you’re cured, but you’re not cured. You can’t give me the right to be a human being, I’m born with that right. Now you can keep me from having that. If you’ve got all the policeman and all the jobs on your side, you can deprive me of it. But you can’t give it to me, because I was born with it just like you was.
Faulk remembered that the lesson didn’t go down easy, but he knew the old man was right.
The clarity the former slave brought to the discussion about race is as necessary today as it was 80 years ago when Faulk was doing his work. Behind the craziness and the agitation, behind the political opportunism and the reaction, there are fundamental and immoveable truths, and those truths are the ones upon which America was founded.
Foremost among those is the idea that our rights are not things that others must give us, but rather were given to us directly by God. As the Declaration puts it, “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 … ”
Shmuel Klatzkin – The American Spectator – June 30, 2020.
