Pantechnicon; BBCs America

A. Good evening and welcome to a fantastic on the nightly magazine on entertainment the arts and ideas. Tonight we present the first of a four part series The BBC Radio takes a bicentennial look at America. The series is compiled and presented by Michael Sumner titled All men are created equal. The most affluent society of people within a nation. And from Plymouth Rock to Vietnam. Tonight's topic all men are created equal. The modern reality of equality. Single men need to learn to manage to conceive what you are about and what you're going to do. During the hour. Eason I'm sure you'll rue the day you roused the Sons of

Liberty here in North America to rouse the Sons of Liberty. No no no. Of all the cities of the United States there are two which above all others will be in the hearts and minds of Americans this July when they celebrate their bicentenary the 2 100th anniversary of their independence from Britain. One city is Boston where the first flames of the armed rebellion were lit and the other is Philadelphia where the political rebellion was conceived. And it's in Philadelphia that I'm sitting now on a cold wet day. Within yards of the spot on which on a hot July day in 1776 that famous Declaration of Independence was made. I'm sitting in Independence Park. Outside Independence Hall on a bench beneath the trees and in spite of the rain at least squirrels are playing around the feet of the great queues of people waiting to visit their national shrine. And I've

just been into Independence Hall. The first thing you see is the famous Liberty Bell which ironically was presented by England in 1753 to mark the 50th anniversary of the charter of liberty granted by William Penn to the settlers of Pennsylvania. Around its base it has the biblical inscription proclaim liberty throughout all the land and to the inhabitants there all of. The bell was rung to summon the good citizens of Philadelphia to hear the reading of the Declaration of Independence. The bill cranked actually for the second time in 1835 and it hasn't been used since and is being given a new site but it remains a great symbol of American liberty and independence. Incidentally Great Britain is giving Philadelphia a new bell to mark the bicentenary. Independence Hall has been restored and in the Pennsylvania assembly room which is part of it I looked at the mementos of 200 years ago. There's the

chair used by George Washington. With the rising sun the top of the palette and the silver inkstand used to sign the decoration and tables littered with boxes of sand used to dry the income notes and documents and the green baize which the revolutionaries used to wrap around their legs on cold days. Independence Hall was also used by the delegates to the Convention in 1787 which drew up the American Constitution. George Washington presided over it. And there's a statue of him in front of the whole. It's a peaceful spot. And I have the strangest feeling sitting here that such a simple and unpretentious place and such simple things like an inkstand and even the scooter was playing on the wet grass. Should have been the setting for those momentous events. They should have been the cradle for the infant nation which has grown into such a giant today. And the Constitution devised in this place by the Founding Fathers

and which has survived for so long. Was. Big chunks still fill up the ground for a big dog unloading broadly good dish washing ton's. Filled up 48 Sokolove to prod the faction with conquest the cone. Is on our side like. They took just 17 weeks to use 55 men who met in Philadelphia in 1787 to create a nation or at least delay the most solid of foundations upon which a nation could be built. Starting with nothing but blank paper before them they devised a set of rules for the government of man in a free society like nothing the world had seen before it was a remarkable achievement by those founding fathers of America.

Doctor just a professor of constitutional law at the American University in Washington uses the words of John Adams signatory to the Declaration of Independence and later president of the United States to describe that task. This was in 1776. He said Let us study the law of nature search into the spirit of the British constitution. Read the histories of the ancient ages. Contemplate the great examples of Greece and Rome set before us the conduct of our own British ancestors who have defended for us the inherent rights of mankind against foreign and domestic tyrants and usurpers and indeed that is precisely what we did. Most particularly that is what the framers of the American Constitution did. And that alone hot summer in Philadelphia in 1787 they brought to bear on the shyness and degree. Of their their knowledge of past experiments in government in trying to.

Determine the shape in the character of the American Constitution. Mostly what these men did was draw on their own experience. The men who gathered in Philadelphia were men of an extraordinary range of very practical experience they had been members of Congress. They had been governors of their states. They were experienced politicians. As well as representatives of what was. Then the natural governing class. So the founding problems were attempting to create a national government that would be effective. That would be efficient. And. The strongest national government that was possible at that time and. Had to be a federal government. But it had to be a system in which very substantial power was indeed left at the state level. Much has been written about the American Constitution about the separation of

powers about how the three branches the presidency the Congress and the judiciary are designed to complement and at the same time to check and balance each other. Doctorow first define the role of the president. The president enjoys considerable legislative power in that the Constitution gives him the message power. It also of course gives him the very important power of veto and at the present time we see our President Ford using his power of veto to reject any pieces of legislation that are essentially the product. Of a Democratic majority in the Congress the president of course stands at the head of the nation. The leader of 213 million people. But his power is not absolute. There is power in the Congress too. As Richard Nixon discovered they Congress of course to

a degree shares in the executive power and that it has the power to accept or reject his nominations to ministerial posts are to cabinet. Positions in the Senate has the power to accept are to reject trade treaties. For example. And of course most particularly the Congress has the ultimate authority and. The decision as to whether money will be appropriated or not it possesses that basic power of all legislative bodies the money power. Increasingly the 20th century has seen the judiciary taking on a much more important role in America a role about which many Americans have misgivings. The nine justices of the Supreme Court are after all not elected by the people as such although they are appointment by the president must be approved by the Senate. There's no doubt that in fact the Supreme Court has strengthened the Constitution.

For all the reverence with which we may regard that document and the nobility of the Declaration of Independence there were potential flaws. After all the men who drafted them were wealthy men. The American aristocracy of their day. The Inspiring language of the Declaration for example didn't mean in practice what it said all men are created equal it began in dollars by their Creator with certain inalienable rights that among these are Life Liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The first draft actually spoke of the pursuit of property. But that would hardly have appealed to the poor. So property became happiness and all men are created equal equal that is unless they happen to be Indians or negroes. The wealthy slave owner Thomas Jefferson the principal author of the Declaration for all his compassionate nature would hardly have regarded his plantation negroes as men I suppose. A famous judge of the Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan commented wryly nearly a hundred years

ago the Constitution is colorblind. Freedom. Freedom of freedom. And before be a slave I'd be buried in a mug re. I go along to my law. If the American economy at the time of independence was geared to one institution slavery the population was two and a half millions and over a quarter were slaves. Most of the northern states had abolished slavery by 1783. And as the years passed it was the South that became the great reservoir of slave labor on the cotton and sugar and tobacco plantations.

Northern farmers began to fear the loss of their lambs to the big Southern plantation owners and an influx of black slaves. This was the alarm like a fire bell in the night. As Thomas Jefferson put it which heralded the Civil War. North and South meet head on in 1861 the southern states voted to leave the Union and American was at war with America. I h the Constitution this great republic do I hate the Freedmen's Bureau in uniforms of blue. I hate the nasty eagle with all his brag and fuss but the Lions even Yankee is I hate someone's son was four years later in 1865 when the south surrendered. Over half a million men lay dead. Slavery as an institution was at an end. But real freedom for the blacks had not begun. For nearly a hundred years they remain slaves to the white economic system. They were victims at least in the south of a rigid colored segregated from whites in buses and trains

in parks and public lavatories and schools. Their right to vote was eroded by local legislation which required an impossible property qualification or a poll tax or unattainable literacy or plain thuggery which frightened them away from the polling booths. The violence reached appalling proportions in a single year 1896. Every 50 hours also a black man was lynched. Southern treed is bad a strain. Love is at the root. Black bodies swinging in the southern. Stray as fruit

from the poplar tree. Oh. It was left to the Supreme Court to right the wrongs done to those people who the declaration said had been created equal but had not been granted equality. Professor as well right. A leading authority on American history has made a study of the role of the court in the battle for civil rights. They didn't Tirpitz the Constitution when appealed to to interpreted by being given a case on which to pronounce. The court doesn't sit day after day and read the Constitution again and say Is this relevant or valid for our times. It has to look an individual case. Now in the last 15 or 20 years a great many of the problems of blacks and voting rights of blacks and civil rights of blacks in educational rights of blacks have been put to the Supreme Court by having a test case

and the Warren court the court of which the Chief Justice Earl Warren of California was the the head became notoriously a very liberal court. If one takes for instance an issue like education to 1954 it was argued by the federal government and by individual state governments that provided you gave a black or Negroes or them called. Adequate facilities but separate facilities from whites because there was a form of of Calabar in operation. But if you have adequate facilities that was enough that was enough to his entitlement in schooling. But in 1954 it was a famous case of Brown vs. Topeka Kansas in which the court decided that to be seperate was to be treated unequally that separate but equal no longer held. Now the separate but equal

phrase was in fact a case that arose out of an earlier court's judgment back in 1896. In other words you can measure the progress of civil rights in the United States by just taking the history of the cases that have gone to the Supreme Court and been pronounced on. Now you can still of course get ways of breaking This supremum court liberalism. By local interpretation e.g. do you bus children to school from poor black areas to more affluent white areas. Is this a way of giving them a better facility. Is this separation. Is it equality you can get into areas of great moral dilemma but nevertheless Supreme Court has certainly been the great instrument of the enfranchisement and elevation of the black people hand-in-hand with the liberal legal process marched violent protest at injustice.

Race riots fled in Little Rock in 1957 in Watts the Los Angeles suburb in 1065 in Detroit in 1967. But black leaders arose who touched the conscience of America such a leader was the late Martin Luther King a minister of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference who led marches and freedom rides and mass demonstrations in the 1980s until his assassination in 1968. He more than any other man crystallized black aspirations. I did it to the same not with the feeling that. We are caught in a dog dungeon. That will never lead to a way out. I go back believing that the new day is coming. So this afternoon I have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream I have a dream that one day. Right down in Georgia in Mississippi in Alabama. The sung to the slaves and the sons of former slaves would be

able to live together as brothers I have a dream at the side of Martin Luther King on those marches in Montgomery Alabama and Washington D.C. and in Georgia and Mississippi was Robert Tako. Now a senior official in the New Orleans city government how oust him was this miracle achieved that so improved a lot of the black man. Surely it wasn't only the work of the Supremes court. I think it's better than the willingness of the southern black leadership. To find a position that we could coalesce with the white leadership on the other has not been necessarily a trackball process we've demonstrated where you walk picket lines we have literally been at each other's throats. But the overriding consideration has been that we have been able to come to the table together in an atmosphere of honesty to the extent that we've begun to work through some of our problems together not.

Independent of one another but saying look I some things that affect and impact all of us unless we're willing to sit down is black and white and together then we're not going to be able to solve those problems doesn't mean that we're anywhere near to having all these problems. But I think that even while we were up top button segregation once we decided to put segregation behind us based on the economic reality that it was a very costly way of doing business coupled with black people making those with demands we weren't going to continue to exist in a second class citizenship then we were able to least create an atmosphere in which we could deal honestly with one another. What's it like to be a Negro in the south today. What's it like in a sleep state like say Arkansas. Terry is a school teacher in the town of Little Rock and Little Rock is centrally located in Arkansas and right here in this state. You have a difference in attitude

to the south east. You have a heavier population of blacks. And this is where your large plantations were in the early history of the state. And here the people feel more threatened by black activism. I think that very often the job competition between poor whites and blacks was more of an issue than say here in the population here in Little Rock is not as great as the black population is not this greatest city as in say the largest cities in Mississippi or Louisiana. And I guess this is one thing that account for regulations not being quite as tight keeping black people in the land as they call it.

They just didn't feel the need for it. This is one of the things that I think accounts for a lot of difference. A little more freedom. I played Little Rock of course was the scene in 1957 and one of the earliest riots over desegregation in schools. But since those days Mildred Terry and her husband Le Roy agree they've seen great progress. We have integrated many agencies that were previously restricted to rights only I can remember when I first went in the Postal Service in 1939 and as an example there were no blacks in my car positions that even any black in the current capacity of the post office. But now we have many employees in all agencies and the same thing is true in factories around the city that were formerly restricted to the plights only we have blacks in dispersed into

higher than menial positions. I encounter quite a few blacks who have a very definite hostile feeling towards whites. My son who was one of the first youngsters to integrate on a junior high school basis head was much better raw feelings then my husband or I and most of the time he isn't of course not going around nursing these feelings. But whenever any little thing happens that he's involved in that sort of a black white confrontation then this is when I see his bitterness. Fortunately my younger daughter who is now a student at Central High School does not have these things to encounter she has a very nice school very spirited and she's very proud of her school

so that even as one evidence of change and I don't feel any special bitterness myself I think mostly economics is responsible for a whole lot of the as I see many white people who are much worse off than I am. This surely must be the second American Revolution. When a black woman in Arkansas can speak of whites being worse off than she is is my right to seize the new South as a new revolution. I first went to Virginia graduate school in a longer 138 and quite genuinely if anyone had said to me then that in your lifetime there will be a vast social revolution in which blacks will be treated as the equal of whites and they are treated as the equal of whites. You see in shops in colleges black and white students arm in arm and I don't mean sex relations or affection here. Two two bodies together who are of a totally different race

with no sense of racial difference now. Now I would never have believed because of Agenor I first went to not so long ago. Total segregation total Calabar. I would never have believed that we possible in my life time without conflict. And the United States has in fact done more to deal with this problem and come as close to solving it as human nature allows us without war in our lifetime as it tried and failed with the civil war. Over a century ago there's been of course a profound change in attitudes to voting rights. So the Black house power in local Congresses he elects blacks to office quite openly and happily. And there's been not least out of set a massive expenditure of federal and state money to lift the black condition schooling housing roads facilities into an approach to equality with white. So I think the edge has gone out of this issue in the south. And I would add I think

that the Southerner gets on more easily with blacks understands that it must be said that in the north the miracle of the South has yet to be performed. The slums and the black ghettos of New York and Washington and Chicago and Detroit they're witness to the continuing misery and degradation of the black people. Unemployment and the horrific crime rate are the norm. How strange it is that the North which fought so bloodily for the abolition of slavery against the slave masters of the South should know lag so far behind the South in raising up these under-privileged black Americans. There's been a considerable drift from the south to the north of blacks into the urban areas the northern towns are now overwhelmingly black cities with a number of black mayors in them in the north you know there's a brittleness a tension between Protestant and Catholic between Irish and Italian nevermind blacks. And much of the trouble in Boston is as much

to do with the Italians and the Irish as with a black immigrant. And this is missing from the south because of the presence of large numbers of blacks there hasn't been the same number of Italians and Irish and Greeks and Germans. They stayed in the north. And so this is now I think particularly in times of economic. The tension in the north produced many race riots in Norman Toms missing happily for most of the South. But history and the slow painful march of history can't be stopped. One day the North will catch up with the South. As Robert Tucker says I think that black and poor people and people of color in this country universally still have problems in being able to invest philosophically and materially in the economic system. And I say invest. I have reference to the fact that there are still barriers and impediments to becoming fully

understood and accepted in all phases of life. For people in this country I think that in the South we do have at least an effort to bring about equalization of lifestyle and opportunity that is sincere that is imperfect being sincere but at least we began to address some of those problems and I think that in large part what we've begun to turn the corner on some of those problems. You know the strain. Yes I. Have a dream this afternoon. One Dan dismantled the words of Amos will become real justice with downmarket

and righteousness like a mighty stream. The dream deceiving everyone did it. We. Had to wait to Jefferson for you to be at their own camp by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among thieves the money for liberty and the pursuit of happiness and the dream deferred. Thank you for being with us tonight. Listening to the first segment on the four part series The BBC Radio takes of America. The segment is titled The most affluent society. Join us then for fun talking. This is Element stuff.