This editorial appeared in the combined The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution of July 4, 1966.
On this Fourth of July the American people can perform no greater service to the nation than to renew and redouble the honorable effort, which has fallen to this generation, to make it truly self-evident that all men are created equal.
The nation was flawed at its birth by equivocation on the racial issue, much to the disgust of Thomas Jefferson, who called it “deplorable.” In approving the draft of the Declaration of Independence that Jefferson wrote, members of the Continental Congress disgusted him with their editing, which went far beyond their tin-eared change of his graceful word “inalienable” to the prosaic “unalienable.”
They struck from the Declaration Jefferson’s condemnation of the British king and the British people for fostering “an execrable commerce,” the slave trade.
Had the founding fathers followed Jefferson’s lead and moved against racial exploitation in the beginning, what a burden of guilt would have been lifted from this land!
Instead, the tragedy of a nation trying to deny its own character culminated in the disaster of civil war and created a legacy of bitterness that has destructively tinctured American society for a decade short of two centuries now.
In this generation at last, the American people have determined to honor fully that inscription from Leviticus on the Liberty Bell: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”
Not some, but all: that is the national goal at last.
The way is painful, the gait is slow at times. But the United States Constitution, following up Jefferson’s censored Declaration, is turning out to be a mighty instrument of bringing life into those noble words preserved on parchment.
“The Declaration,” wrote Carl Van Doren, “had been ringing first principles about liberty and the rights of man. The Constitution was second thoughts about how that liberty and those rights, once obtained, might be perpetuated in an orderly government. Instead of the language of poets and prophets it used the language of lawyers and administrators. It was addressed to minds and not to emotions.”
The American mind, on this Independence Day, is being made up. Undertaken at last is the great, neglected task of proving “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Each coming day now yields to each American the privilege of carrying that task forward to a final vindication of the ideal for which the Revolution was fought.
Jefferson could not call a stop to the “execrable commerce” in his day. But the American people whose wisdom he trusted may now honor his faith in theirs.
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