Town Hall Meeting

 Greetings, my brothers and sisters in Christ, my name is Richard Allen. Formerly known as "Negro Richard," which should tell you all you need to know about my past. I owe the simple fact that I am standing before you here today to our all-powerful and loving Father up above. 20 long years I spent subjugated by the detestable institution of slavery, an institution that does nothing but callously tear the humanity away from both the slave and the slaveholder. I was born into bondage, already "owned" by a Quaker lawyer, a man who claimed to believe in the same loving God that I serve, yet subjected his fellow man to evils that no one deserves. While I was still a child(what age I do not know), I was sold to Mr. Stokely Sturgis, a plantation owner in Deleware. I had a mother and five siblings, however I don't have much recollection of them, as Mr. Sturgis had some financial problems and sold my mother and two of my siblings away when I was still young. I only had an older brother and sister left, which I thank the Lord for everyday for not leaving me completely alone. I can't help but consider myself more fortunate than my fellow brothers and sisters in bondage. 

Mr. Sturgis, though unconverted, encouraged us to attend the church service meetings of the local Methodist Society, one of the few that welcomed my people, enslaved or free. For this decision, I am eternally grateful! I was able to find the joy of the Lord for the first time! My brother, sister, and I sought the Lord and ensured we diligently completed our work as well; for there were rumors surrounding Mr. Sturgis that allowing us to attend those services would be the end of him. Though I had what the world would consider a good and humane master, I couldn't help but see slavery as a bitter pill I was forced to swallow every morning. The Lord graciously answered my prayers following the start of war, when Reverend Freeborn Garrettson visited our plantation and convinced Mr. Sturgis that our enslavement was sinful and immoral. I then convinced him to allow us to buy our freedom and he obliged, leading to me being a free man five years later, at the ripe age of twenty. 

I moved to Philadelphia six years later and began preaching. Once I saw my African brethren who though desperately in need of hope and spiritual fulfillment, didn't attend public service I was ignited with the Spirit of our Father in Heaven. I preached wherever there was room, preaching up to five times a day! I cultivated a small community of approximately 40 colored men and women and decided to build a house of worship for us with the help of my great brothers Rev. Absalom Jones, Dorus Ginnings, and William White. Our forced removal from St. George's Church, which mind you we had been attending for far longer and more often than some of those white folks, inspired our decision to construct the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, as well as establishing the Free African Society. 

Slavery brings damage to even the free man. Your horrible excuse for the enslavement of my brother's and sisters has caused you who would oppose slavery to still see us as your lesser, rather than fellow sons and daughters of the great Lord up above. The book you read and preach from every Sunday, that you claim to believe, tells you the same yet you deny it in reality. We do not. I pray the Lord may open your eyes before you stand before him! At the Free African Society we put the words of James, brother of Christ Jesus, into practice. Not only did I assist my recently freed brethren and my brethren in the pursuit of freedom via the Underground Railroad, but during the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia Brother Jones and I with the FAS served and nursed our white counterparts who fell ill with Yellow Fever. Just for the despicable and slanderous Matthew Carey to lie on our good names and convince the public that we were actually taking advantage of them during their plight, as if we weren't susceptible to the disease as well! We put our own health at risk to help those who wouldn't do the same for us. Why, you ask? It's the same reason we must abolish slavery.The love of Christ. For it is the only reason and only power that can overcome the barrier of hatred between the white man and colored man. 

Supreme Court

   Though I lived in Washington, DC and took a class all about Constitutional Law and its relationship with the Court, I realized there was a lot I didn't know as well as took for granted. I never would have guessed that there was a time where the Supreme Court was not respected as a branch of government by the American people. This mini-documentary did an excellent job at framing the history and function of the Supreme Court as a story of gaining the people's trust. 

    Ironically, the "Supreme" Court had no power or authority as a fellow branch of government until John Marshall's tenure as chief Justice. The real beginning of the Supreme Court's journey to become a powerful equal to its Legislative and Executive counterparts can be traced back to the Marbury v. Madison case in 1803. In delivering the Court's opinion, Marshall established the principle of judicial review, which is the power of the Court to declare a law unconstitutional. He envisioned the Court's role as expounding on the Constitution, making the Constitution a crucial tool in constructing this nation. This was the start of the Supreme Court's story of gaining not only the people's trust, but also their respect.

    The next big junction in the Court's journey was the Dred Scott v. Sandford case in 1857 in which a Missouri slave claimed his freedom under a Congressional act, but the Court ruled that Congress didn't have the power to ban slavery and that African Americans could never gain citizenship. This decision was a major setback on the Court's journey of gaining the people's trust and the issue of slavery was only solved through the Civil War that spanned nearly the next decade. 

    Following the Civil War, the 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution, sometimes considered the "Second Bill of Rights" as it was meant to protect the people from abuse of State power. This Amendment greatly widened the Court's range of judicial power, allowing it to judge and strike down many more laws as constitutional or unconstitutional, as it now had the ability to review State congressional acts. 

    The Court also has many policies and practices in place to secure the people's trust. There are no inside stories or secrets in the Court, as they lay out everything in their opinion. They also are not a group of activists that decide to deliver an opinion on whatever they feel like whenever they feel like it. They are only allowed to give their thoughts on issues that are essential parts of cases that have to make it past all sorts of District Courts and Appellate Courts. And even after that arduous journey, the Court only accepts one hundred cases out of the thousands that it receives! The Court also delivers its opinions to media outlets almost immediately, not keeping anything hidden.

    The Court functions on an unspoken agreement. When the Court says something, the people listen and follow. And in turn, the people believe in the good faith of the Court and the idea that they truly are trying to interpret the Constitution as it was meant to be. The documentary ends off on an amazing quote that perfectly sums up the story of the Supreme Court. "The power of the Court is trust earned. The Trust of the American people."

Bible Team Challenge

  

It’s no secret that Christianity was the most powerful driving force behind the seismic wave that was American abolitionism, but ironically, it was also one of the biggest supporting forces for its arch enemy; the institution of American slavery. Slaveholders who referred to themselves as Christian argued that the Bible from cover to cover endorsed slavery. The most accessible original sources were the collection of essays in the book Cotton is King and Pro-Slavery Arguments.

Their five pronged argument was as follows...

1) the Curse of Ham was the divine initiation of slavery;

2) All the patriarchs had slaves and were considered blessed by God;

3) the moral Law sanctioned and regulated slavery;

4) Jesus accepted slavery;

5) the Apostles accepted slavery.

The Curse of Ham comes from the Biblical story in which Ham, the youngest son of Noah, is cursed by his father to have a bloodline of servants that will serve his brothers. Slaveholders made Ham black and his descendants Africans to justify chattel slavery as divinely inspired. Southerners would then go on to argue that God must endorse slavery if the patriarchs of his people owned slaves and if slavery was sanctioned in his own moral law, often quoting Leviticus 25:44-46. Though they couldn’t find much say from Jesus on the matter, they interpreted his silence on the issue as support. Finally, they used passages like Ephesians 6:5-7 to argue that apostles supported the institution of slavery as well.

 As evidenced in the previous paragraph, proponents of slavery frequently cited scripture to support their arguments. Such an approach was widely popular among proponents of slavery due to the status of the bible as the word of God. Consequently, the biblical counter argument to slavery required a greater degree of complexity, extending interpretation of the bible beyond individual verses. Thus, many abolitionist preachers, theologians, and pastors, adopted a holistic interpretation of the bible, emphasizing the overall message of the text. Jonathan Blanchard–a popular abolitionist during the antebellum era– argued for abolition and condemned the institution of slavery as intrinsically “anti-christian.” At the basis of Blanchard's position was the biblical idea of “one blood-ism” which he felt alluded to the inherent equality of mankind. Other more radical christians, such as William Loyd Garrison, elected to entirely disregard biblical scriptures that expressed a permissible attitude toward slavery. Although Garrison still expressed his belief in God, he refused to acknowledge the bible as a direct reflection of God’s values; those that shared such an argument reasoned that God represented morality, symbolism that would juxtapose a pro-slavery ideology. From a separate angle, many anti-slavery christians argued that slavery in the antebellum period varied from biblical slavery in a myriad of significant ways. The two most popular competitive arguments asserted that southern slavery broke up families–a violation of the commandments– and prohibited the possibility of freedom–a transgression against the old testament. While the complexity of the christian anti-slavery argument far exceeded that of the anti-slavery argument, all christian abolitionists expressed a gestaltist interpretation of the bible. 

In all, the bible served as a repository of religious rationale that was mainpulated to serve slavery and anti-slavery sentiments alike. In a similar fashion to the Compromise of 1850, the Holy Bible failed to decisively settle American debate over slavery. As a result the nation experienced a "theological crisis" which played an important role in the escalation of tension that led to the Civil War in 1863.