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Awakening
the Conscience of America
Text of remarks by
President George Bush
Goree Island, Senegal,
Tuesday, 8 July 2003 Mr. President and Madam First Lady, distinguished
guests, and residents of Goree Island, citizens of Senegal, I'm
honored to begin my visit to Africa in your beautiful country.
For hundreds of years on this island, peoples of different
continents met in fear and cruelty. Today we gather in respect
and friendship, mindful of past wrongs and dedicated to the
advance of human liberty.
At this place, liberty and life were stolen and sold. Human
beings were delivered and sorted, and weighed and branded with
the marks of commercial enterprises and loaded as cargo on a
voyage without return.
One of the largest migrations of history was also one of the
greatest crimes of history. Below the decks, the middle passage
was a hot, narrow, sunless nightmare; weeks and months of
confinement and abuse and confusion on a strange and lonely sea.
Some refused to eat, preferring death to any future their
captors might prepare for them. Some who were sick were thrown
over the side. Some rose up in violent rebellion, delivering the
closest thing to justice on a slave ship. Many acts of defiance
and bravery are recorded. Countless others we will never know.
Those who lived to see land again were displayed, examined and
sold at auctions across nations in the Western Hemisphere. They
entered society indifferent to their anguish and made prosperous
by their unpaid labor.
There was a time in my country's history where one in every
seven human beings was the property of another.
In law they were regarded only as articles of commerce, having
no right to travel or to marry or to own possessions.
Because families were often separated, many were denied even the
comfort of suffering together.
For 250 years the captives endured an assault on their culture
and their dignity. The spirit of Africans in America did not
break.
Yet the spirit of their captors was corrupted. Small men took on
the powers and airs of tyrants and masters. Years of unpunished
brutality and bullying and rape produced a dullness and hardness
of conscience. Christian men and women became blind to the
clearest commands of their faith and added hypocrisy to
injustice. A republic founded on equality for all became a
prison for millions.
And yet in the words of the African proverb, no fist is big
enough to hide the sky. All of the generations of oppression
under the laws of man could not crush the hope of freedom and
defeat the purposes of God.
In America, enslaved Africans learned the story of the exodus
from Egypt and set their own hearts on a promised land of
freedom. Enslaved Africans discovered a suffering savior and
found he was more like themselves than their masters.
Enslaved Africans heard the ringing promises of the Declaration
of Independence and asked the self- evident question, "Then
why not me?"
In the year of America's founding, a man named Olaudah Equiano
was taken in bondage to the New World. He witnessed all of
slavery's cruelties, the ruthless and the petty. He also saw
beyond the slave- holding piety of a time to a higher standard
of humanity.
"God tells us," wrote Equiano, "that the
oppressor and the oppressed are both in His hands. And if these
are not the poor, the brokenhearted, the blind, the captive, the
bruised which our Savior speaks of, who are they?"
Down through the years, African-Americans have upheld the ideals
of America by exposing laws and habits contradicting those
ideals. The rights of African-Americans were not the gift of
those in authority.
Those rights were granted by the Author of Life, and regained by
the persistence and courage of African-Americans, themselves.
Among those Americans was Phyllis Wheatley, who was dragged from
her home here in West Africa in 1761, at the age of seven. In my
country, she became a poet, and the first noted black author in
our nation's history. Phyllis Wheatley said, "In every
human breast, God has implanted a principle which we call love
of freedom. It is impatient of oppression and pants for
deliverance."
That deliverance was demanded by escaped slaves named Frederick
Douglass and Sojourner Truth, educators named Booker T.
Washington and W.E.B. DeBois and ministers of the Gospel named
Leon Sullivan and Martin Luther King Jr.
At every turn, the struggle for equality was resisted by many of
the powerful. And some have said we should not judge their
failures by the standards of a later time, yet in every time
there were men and women who clearly saw this sin and called it
by name.
We can fairly judge the past by the standards of President John
Adams, who called slavery "an evil of colossal
magnitude." We can discern eternal standards in the deeds
of William Wilberforce and John Quincy Adams and Harriet Beecher
Stowe and Abraham Lincoln.
These men and women, black and white, burned with a zeal for
freedom and they left behind a different and better nation.
Their moral vision caused Americans to examine our hearts, to
correct our Constitution and to teach our children the dignity
and equality of every person of every race.
By a plan known only to Providence, the stolen sons and
daughters of Africa helped to awaken the conscience of America.
The very people traded into slavery helped to set America free.
My nation's journey toward justice has not been easy and it is
not over. The racial bigotry fed by slavery did not end with
slavery or with segregation, and many of the issues that still
trouble America have roots in the bitter experience of other
times.
But however long the journey, our destination is set: liberty
and justice for all.
In the struggle of the centuries, America learned that freedom
is not the possession of one race. We know with equal certainty
that freedom is not the possession of one nation. This belief in
the natural rights of man, this conviction that justice should
reach wherever the sun passes, leads America into the world.
With the power and resources given to us, the United States
seeks to bring peace where there is conflict, hope where there's
suffering, and liberty where there's tyranny. And these
commitments bring me and other distinguished leaders of my
government across the Atlantic to Africa.
African peoples are now writing your own story of liberty.
Africans have overcome the arrogance of colonial powers,
overturned the cruelties of apartheid, and made it clear that
dictatorship is not the future of any nation on this continent.
In the process, Africa has produced heroes of liberation,
leaders like Mandela, Senghor, Nkrumah, Kenyatta, Selassie and
Sadat. And many visionary African leaders, such as my friend,
have grasped the power of economic and political freedom to lift
whole nations and put forth bold plans for Africa's development.
Because Africans and Americans share a belief in the values of
liberty and dignity, we must share in the labor of advancing
those values. In a time of growing commerce across the globe, we
will ensure that the nations of Africa are full partners in the
trade and prosperity of the world.
Against the waste and violence of civil war, we will stand
together for peace. Against the merciless terrorists who
threaten every nation, we will wage an unrelenting campaign of
justice. Confronted with desperate hunger, we will answer with
human compassion and the tools of human technology. In the face
of spreading disease, we will join with you in turning the tides
against AIDS in Africa.
We know that these challenges can be overcome because history
moves in the direction of justice.
The evils of slavery were accepted and unchanged for centuries,
yet eventually the human heart would not abide them.
There is a voice of conscience and hope in every man and woman
that will not be silenced, what Martin Luther King called a
certain kind of fire that no water could put out. That flame
could not be extinguished at the Birmingham jail. It could not
be stamped out at Robben Island prison. It was seen in the
darkness here at Goree Island, where no chain could bind the
soul.
This untamed fire of justice continues to burn in the affairs of
man, and it lights the way before us.
May God bless you all.
Copyright © 2003, The Associated Press |
