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Great Essays
MARTIN LUTHER KING -
LETTER FROM THE BIRMINGHAM JAIL
EDITORIAL COMMENT:
Written April 16, 1963 from the Birmingham City Jail, this was a
response to eight white Alabama clergymen who published an "open
letter" in the newspaper earlier that January calling on King to
end his policy of non-violent resistance and allow the issue of
integration to be handled in the courts. According to King, who
was in jail for civil rights demonstrations, "I began writing
the letter on the margins of the newspaper in which the
statement appeared and continued it on scraps of writing paper
supplied by a friendly Negro trusty, and finally concluding it on a pad
my attorneys were eventually permitted to leave me". The
clergymen were :
Bishop C.C. Carpenter
Bishop Joseph A. Durick
Rabbi Milton L. Grafman
Bishop Paul Hardin |
Bishop Nolan B. Harmon
The Rev. George M. Murry
The Rev. Edward V. Ramage
The Rev. Earl Stallings |
I'm reminded of the old adage of "not judging a
man till you've walked a mile in his shoes!" This letter puts
you in the shoes of the Black man of that day. It should be in
every high school textbook. Is it in your school?
[To
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GEORGE
WASHINGTON'S FAREWELL ADDRESS
EDITORIAL COMMENT: He leaves
us with concern about the vigilance required by all citizens
to assure The Unity of Government, The Rule of Law and the
recognition of Religion and Morality as necessary agents of
good government. He speaks of special interest groups as
"potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and
unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the
people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of
government..." He speaks of the damage to the foundation of
Constitutional government of Executive Orders and
unconstitutional Judicial Court rulings. He strongly warns
of the destructive force allowed through the centralization
of power, and urges that in our dealings with other Nations,
to " Observe good faith and justice toward all Nations;
cultivate peace and harmony with all ... to give to mankind
the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always
guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. " Read his
full address and you will find the errors of American
Foreign Policy for the last 100 years ! Must reading in
every high school. Is it in yours?
[To
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ABRAHAM
LINCOLN - SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS
EDITORIAL COMMENT:
Abraham Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address,
which was his favorite of all his speeches on March 4, 1865.
At the start of his second term as President of the United
States. At a time when victory over the secessionists
in the American Civil War was within sight and slavery had
been effectively ended. Lincoln did not speak of
triumph, but of loss, guilt, and sin. Some see his
speech as a defense of his pragmatic approach to
Reconstruction, in which he sought to avoid harsh treatment
of the defeated South by reminding his listeners of how
wrong both sides had been in imagining what lay before them
when the ware began four years ago. Lincoln balanced
that rejection of triumphalism, however, with a recognition
of the unmistakable evil of slavery, which he described in
the most concrete terms possible. It is inscribed,
along with the Gettysburg Address, in the Lincoln Memorial
in Washington D.C. The address is the briefest
inaugural address by an US President on record.
[To
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ABRAHAM
LINCOLN - GETTYSBURG ADDRESS
EDITORIAL COMMENT:
Few documents in the growth of the American Republic are as
well known or as beloved as the prose poem Abraham Lincoln
delivered at the dedication of the military cemetery in
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
In June 1863 Confederate forces under
Robert E. Lee moved north in an effort to win a dramatic
victory that would reverse the South's declining fortunes.
On July 1-3, Lee's forces fought the Union army under the
command of George C. Meade, and before the fighting ended,
the two sides suffered more than 45,000 casualties. Lee,
having lost more than a third of his men, retreated, and the
Battle of Gettysburg is considered a turning point in the
American Civil War.
The dedication of the battlefield and
cemetery thus provided Lincoln with an opportunity for a
major address, but he disappointed many of his supporters
when he gave this short talk. In fact, many of the
spectators did not even know the president had started
speaking when he finished. But in this talk Lincoln managed,
as the great orator Edward Everett (the main speaker at the
dedication) understood, to combine all the elements of the
battle and the dedication into a unified whole.
These men fought, and died. Now their work was done; they had made the supreme
sacrifice, and it was up to those living to carry on the
task. But Lincoln's rhetoric, as subsequent generations
discovered, did far more than memorialize the dead; it
illuminated the meaning of the Constitution for those still
alive. Lincoln highlighted the Constitution's promise of
equality, the "proposition that all men are created equal."
That, of course, had been a premise of the Declaration of
Independence, but everyone understood that the drafters of
that document had not intended to include slaves and other
"inferior" peoples in their definition. Now the country had
fought a great war to test that notion, and the lives of the
men who died at Gettysburg could be hallowed only one way --
if the nation, finally, lived up to the proposition that all
of its people, regardless of race, were in fact equal. The
power of the idea still informs American democratic thought.
For further reading: James M. McPherson,
Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (1991);
Philip B. Kunhardt, A New Birth of Freedom: Lincoln at
Gettysburg (1983).
[To
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DECLARATION OF
INDEPENDENCE
EDITORIAL COMMENT:
Without this very brazen act, on the part of a group of very
principled leaders there's a good chance our Country would never
have come into being as we know it today. Have you ever wondered what happened to those men
who committed treason against England by signing this
Declaration of Independence?
[To
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CONSTITUTION OF
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
EDITORIAL COMMENT: Without
the Constitution binding the 13 States together, based on
their commonality of interest in certain areas of civil
society, our Country probably would have collapsed into 13
special interest groups. Ruled by " the light and dark sides
of human nature of man's capacity for reason and justice
that makes free government possible, and of his capacity for
passion and injustice that makes it necessary " (1)
It's important to remember that this
American idea was "the world's first experiment in popular
government over an extended area" (2) recognizing that
the structure of government, and the powers given it, came
from the consent of those governed by it. It acknowledged
the real power center to be the individual, not the
governing administration.
(1)&(2) The Federalist Papers [see
Books of Interest page]
[To
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Copyright
© 2004 -
Duplication permitted with inclusion of Link to
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