“that his justice cannot sleep forever….” The phrase entices one to wonder, when? When will it be that God will wake his sleeping justice and unleash it on this nation? How loud and terrifying a clamor must His justice raise, what kind of ‘terrible swift sword’ must it wield to make Americans right the wrongs of their beginning? Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831 wasn’t loud enough. Major race riots in Wilmington, NC (1898), Atlanta (1906), E. St. Louis (1917), Washington, DC (1919), Tulsa (1921), Detroit (1943), Watts (1965), Newark (1967), weren’t terrible enough. The murders of Emmett Till (1955), three little girls in a Birmingham Sunday school (1963), and even Dr. Martin Luther King (1968) didn’t scream a loud enough warning. If riots after the murders of Trayvon, Michael, Eric, Tanisha, Tamir, Freddie, and Breonna (just a few among many) didn’t wake it, why should we now think that George Floyd can do it?

The brutal fact is, inequality and greed sully the lofty founding principles of our nation. Although the Declaration of Independence states “All men are created equal,” there was an implicit understanding about who could be one of those men. And that understanding intentionally excluded African men, enslaved or free.

Scholars suggest it is likely the Declaration does not mention enslaved people because giving them equal status would have undermined the excuses that legitimized the slave trade. And both the business of that trade and its fruits were making the framers rich.

Noted columnists, commentators, and officials from various disciplines have been asking this week after the murder of George Floyd, whether THIS TIME we are at an inflection point. That elusive inflection point we chase as we strain our ears to hear God’s justice waking and raining enough terror to open eyes and hearts in America. And terror does not have to include physical violence. It is found even in the sight of peaceful protesters whose message threatens the status quo of the same inequality and greed to which the descendants of those original “men” feel entitled.

Thomas Jefferson, whose relationship to slavery was fraught and regrettable, took a strong anti-slavery stance in his early years. He expressed this in his writing of the Declaration of Independence. The Second Constitutional Congress tasked a committee with the writing, which the five members entrusted primarily to Jefferson.

The Declaration starts with a statement of purpose–“When in the course of human events…”–and follows with a list of grievances against King George III that served as rationale for the split from England. Jefferson’s draft included a paragraph that signaled the king’s support of the slave trade as a grievance–one that supported separation. He referred to it as “this execrable commerce.” It would have been the grounds for eliminating slavery at the birth of the nation:

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.  This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain.  Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.  And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/declaration-independence-and-debate-over-slavery/

The committee submitted Jefferson’s draft, including the section above, to the Continental Congress. The Congress met for five days, during which they debated and edited the document. Their final version omitted Jefferson’s section on slavery.

This simple, intentional, and premeditated omission paved the way for a country to achieve riches and greatness on the backs of others, without whom those achievements would have been imperiled, if not impossible. Jefferson later blamed the omission on delegates from South Carolina and Georgia and on certain Northerners whose constituents were involved in the slave trade.

It is often said that slavery was the country’s original sin. We might also say that omitting this paragraph was our original inflection point. And we missed it. There was an opportunity then, in June and July of 1776, to make everyone living in this country equal, to guarantee the rights of life and liberty to all. And we walked the other way.

The fate (or Fa, as her language called it) of the heroine in my novel-in-process, Destiny Reclaimed, is entwined with the founding of this country. She sees the arc of her Fa and comes to know that her understanding of it was flawed. When the inflection point arrives, she sees it, grabs it, and puts her life on a new trajectory.

So when will God’s justice truly wake and be enough to change the arc of this country’s destiny, to put it on a new trajectory? What will it take to make that happen? Is His justice taking the form of global outrage over yet another murder of a Black man by police, making this country a pariah, an object of pity and scorn?

What do we have to do to tear away the floss from our founding principles and examine the rot on which they stand: greed and excuses for denigration of “the other” to rationalize pursuit of the greed. Only then can we attack the real problems caused and perpetuated by wrapping ourselves in those principles.

In a piece for her blog, my daughter focuses on the power of children’s literature to help the next generations raise themselves to a higher ethical code. It is an excellent piece and gives hope that we might still recognize our inflection points and grab them in time to avert the justice Jefferson feared. https://fromthemixedupfiles.com/2020/06/our-hearts-are-heavy/