On Teaching All Men Are Created Equal

On Teaching All Men Are Created Equal

Cutting Through the Controversies

by Jeff Schneider

8/29/21

The controversy over Critical Race Theory has animated teachers, school administrators and state legislators — not to mention parents. The former chancellor of the New York City schools, Richard Carranza, went so far as to proclaim that it was the duty of teachers to combat “toxic whiteness” — a disastrous term that was picked up by the New York Post.

One of the difficulties in discussing Critical Race Theory is that the term has become entwined with the ideas in Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. Endless disclaimers that Critical Race Theory (CRT) is about systemic rather than individual racism seem specious to those who conflate the idea with the so-called “anti-racism training” associated with DiAngelo, and the passive-aggressive personal confrontations offered in her training sessions. Educators and others are afraid of undoing the self-esteem of white students, and this is a legitimate concern. I imagine that many race-training sessions at workplaces are intimidating to adults, but the idea is even more of a danger to classroom teaching. No teacher should enter a classroom and announce that “I will be very cautious about this, but you need to understand that you all as individual white people are perpetuating racism in this country.” You cannot have a real discussion after that, no matter how gently you try to approach the subject.As a long-time teacher of American history, I hope to show that it is possible to discuss racism and the years of protests against it without intimidating students of color or white students.

This essay is dedicated to the students and teachers who want to cut through the controversy about teaching race and racism to confront the truths in American history with all their twists and turns, lights and shadows.

I was a teacher of American history for more than 30 years at a high school in Brooklyn, and at several of the New York City community colleges and Hunter and City College as an adjunct instructor. I taught abolition, slavery and Civil Rights which consumed much of my class time from the first day to the last every semester. My students were a glorious mixture of nearly every race and color in New York City.

I treated them whatever their academic level as intellectuals-in-training by assigning them speeches and documents long and short for homework, which they had to bring to class the next day. I would not lecture, give them any questions to answer or ideas to look for when they read. Instead they were asked to choose sentences they liked or disliked for what ever reason and made brief comments explaining their choices.

In some classes I had the kids write the first few words of their sentences on the blackboard and then we would discuss what they had chosen. They read their whole sentence out loud and everyone read silently along with them. These were works by ML King Jr., Frederick Douglass, Madison Grant (one of the founders of scientific racism) and Barack Obama. I also taught a class in which we read only American speeches. My first question nearly every day we did these longish readings of 10 or 15 pages was for example, “What do you think about Frederick Douglass's “Fourth of July Oration?'' That would lead to a discussion that served as an introduction to the lesson before we turned to their sentences. We would do shorter documents – sometimes in class – one or two times a week and the longer ones twice in three weeks. In my high school classes I called this the Tarzan Theory of Reading because we were swinging through the document by grabbing on to sentence after sentence.

To teach you have to “bring the things before the eyes.” When we discussed the clause “ all men are created equal” the understanding came from the students that it embodies the hopes and dreams of every American and, simultaneously the nightmares of inequality and violence that people of color have been forced to live with in this country. I did this on the first day of every class when the students suggested events for a timeline from 1492 to 1865. They each would write down three events, I would ask students to volunteer one event, I would write them on the board and then we would discuss them as we went along. The Declaration of Independence and its most famous phrase always came up. When it came to teaching the American Revolution, I spent five days discussing the document and it's implications for the Revolution and history up to the present. Whatever you think of the 1619 project with its attempt to de-emphasize the importance of the Declaration, it is still necessary to understand the most famous phrase in American, if not world history. Here is a brief description of my lessons on the Declaration concentrating on the last day in the sequence when we discussed the meanings of “all men are created equal.”

The first assignment for the series of Declaration classes was to determine how many parts the document had -- keeping within a limit of five. Then the students were asked to find and underline the references to the Native Americans, the Stamp Act, the Boston Port Act, the Quebec Act and the Massachusetts Government Act. The last three were parts of the Intolerable Acts which caused the Americans to respond by forming the first Continental Congress in 1774. By narrowing down the Declaration structure to three parts, the students could see that in the middle part of the document all the sentences began with He or For. Those were the Grievances.

The students pointed out each of the grievances that they had underlined. We concluded that “For taxing us without our consent” was ambiguous. It could be the Stamp Act or the Navigation Acts, the Townshend Acts or the Tea Tax which was the motivation for the Boston Tea Party in 1773. The Intolerable Acts were more straightforward to identify. All of these details were parts of classes for the weeks prior to our study of the Declaration which was written in June and July of 1776, more than a year after the first battles of the American Revolution, Lexington and Concord in 1775. Originally celebrated as Patriots' Day in Boston on April 19 it began with the famous “shot heard 'round the world.”

Then I asked for a volunteer to read the first paragraph of the Declaration itself, which begins with “When in the Course of Human Events....” and ends with “impelled them to the separation” in their version. (The document I used was the version from the Yale Avalon 18th century document site.) When I asked them what they thought of the opening words, the students concluded that it is a theory of history: people make history. This is a description of agency, a key term for historians that describes how all peoples can take control of their fate. In our case, the Americans became revolutionaries by protesting the Stamp Act, and the Tea Act, and forming the First Continental Congress in response to the Intolerable Acts.

The first paragraph also discusses the laws of nature and nature's God that entitled the Americans to separate from Great Britain. Now a student reads the next few sentences which contain the clause “That all men are created equal” and list the unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Thus, “all men are created equal” is one of the natural laws like the right to life and liberty and, of course gravity, that are all on the same plane here: natural laws –- the laws discovered by Sir Isaac Newton that describe how the universe runs. We discussed the most famous clause, “all men are created equal,” by itself on the last day of the week.

At this point I hand out the part of the Declaration written by Thomas Jefferson that the Second Continental Congress dropped from the final version. It was the section that blamed the king for slavery in the 13 American colonies. Here is the beginning:

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 and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. (T)his piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain.

As my students saw immediately, Thomas Jefferson described the slaves as humans with natural rights and he called slavery “cruel war.” Clearly this omitted section was meant to be part of the grievances because the paragraph begins with “He.” Jefferson uses the phrase “piratical warfare” which might be obscure to readers today, but my students knew it referred to man-stealing, an abolitionist term for enslavement. They had read the four-page polemic “African Slavery in America,” by Samuel Hopkins for the third day of class. ***(The author was not Thomas Paine as had been commonly thought.) Man-stealing is one of the key phrases in his abolitionist pamphlet published in 1775 by the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser. Jefferson also refers to the middle passage, which caused the enslaved people to suffer “miserable death” in their journey to North America. He also sarcastically called the slave trade the work of the “Christian King of Great Britain,” who was practicing the “execreble commerce” of the “infidel powers:” the Spanish, Portuguese and Muslims who had preceded the British in the slave trade. Now the hypocrisy of future president Jefferson becomes the topic of discussion; especially since his livelihood depended on the labor of hundreds of enslaved persons on two plantations. He blamed the king for foisting the slaves on the Americans and complained that the king was also

…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 upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

Such blatant hypocrisy was common for those defending system of slavery; especially in view of his words about equality and liberty for whites and blacks in this very document. The audacity of Jefferson to claim that “his” slaves were unfairly treated by the king and that the king, was to blame for his (Jefferson's) own ill-gotten gains reminds me of a drug dealer who claims it is fine to sell drugs to “get over.” Of course he does not take them himself, which would be dangerous to his health. It takes a close reading of the phraseology in the quote above to figure out who were the slaves and who were the Patriots in the convoluted grievance. It is remarkable that almost all of the Declaration is clearly written. It is a prose poem that drives you on, in the same way the Gettysburg Address does. This omitted section is turgid.

Finally, we must point out why the Second Continental Congress rejected the grievance on slavery and the king. The Congress had agreed that the Declaration had to be unanimous in order to create a united front against the king and his army. But the slave holders, led by South Carolina refused to vote for the Declaration if it included the section criticizing slavery. It was left out of the final version.

What makes this intimate bond of Enlightenment idealism and rank racism a grievance is the argument that the king is encouraging the slaves of the Patriots (not the Loyalists, truth be told) to kill the revolutionaries to obtain their freedom as members of the British Army. The slaves of the Loyalists were not offered that opportunity by Lord Dunmore in his recently famous but misunderstood Proclamation of 1775. After all, the Loyalists were supporting the king, so they could keep their slaves. This idea in the section comes out in the final grievance that says “he has excited domestic (slave) insurrection among us” which Jefferson couples with a separate grievance condemning the king for encouraging the “merciless Indian savages” to wage war against the Patriots by murdering our people of “all ages, sexes and conditions.” Students are not used to reading the word “savages:” shocking language for a document about equality. It is an assault on modern sensibilities, but of course it was a common way to refer to the Native Americans.

So this class began with a discussion of the causes of the turmoil in the 1760s and '70s as examples of human agency then moved to a description of unalienable rights based on nature or nature's God then finally to a justification of the Revolution as part of natural law, and an inclusion of the idea “all men are created equal” as one of those natural laws. But as has become apparent is the context, indeed all this is bound up with the deep hypocrisy about the contradiction of holding humans with natural rights in the bonds of what the slave holding founding father called the “cruel” and “piratical” war that we call chattel slavery.

At this point we have read only about 80 words at the beginning of the final version of the document.

The assignment for the second day is to find the words where Jefferson discusses revolution and describes government and democracy. Unfortunately even though the ideas of “all men are created equal” are at the basis of the right to revolution, we will have to put off most of that discussion until the last day. However here is a key sentence describing the relation between revolution and government:

(T)hat to secure these (natural) rights governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed: that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, … as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

The causal relationships among natural rights, agency and government are at the heart of the description of the right to revolution. It is these lines that inspired peoples all over the world to take their fate in their hands and overthrow tyrannical rule. It is these ideas that inspired Tom Paine to write in the first edition of Common Sense:

O ye that love mankind! Ye that oppose not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, Africa have long expelled her! Europe regards her like a stranger and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.

On the third day we discuss the meanings of the right to revolution and the paragraph leading to the Grievances and the conclusion sometimes called the declaration of war. The last lines declare that all the previous ideas and grievances will be defended at all costs.

And for the support of Divine Providence we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

The fourth day is devoted to an Oprah show in which she interviews the two white and two black descendants of Thomas Jefferson. Here is the link:

I showed it up to the end of the comment by the great historian Annette Gordon-Reed who speaks from the audience. It is about halfway through. The discussion is riveting: a real discussion between blacks and whites about race, heritage and truth in history. “All men are created equal” is its background. Students are fascinated by the straight-forward exchanges on America's creed and its complexities. Many questions are raised in this discussion including passing for white and the shocking actions of Jefferson who took the enslaved half sister of his deceased wife as a concubine when she was a young teenager. The story of Sally Hemings could be a week at least in itself. Oprah is one of the few TV personalities who could make a success out of such a show.

Now we are ready for the last day of Declaration classes in my series. The assignment is for the students to list all the meanings they could think of for “All men are created equal.” Who is equal in the Declaration? The list grows as we talk. First there are the white men over 21 who own property or pay a minimum of taxes. These men comprised the vast majority of the voters in all the states. However were there other groups of people to whom the Declaration was addressed? Let us consider some possibilities. Could George Washington and Thomas Jefferson fight the war by themselves? All the troops could not come from the elite family members of the Continental Congress. To be sure the protesters of the 1760s and '70s were essential for the development of the revolutionary movement. They were not voters by and large, yet they were essential to the movement.

If we consider the dates we had discussed during the first class for the Revolutionary War the first battle was April 1775, the Treaty with Great Britain was 1783, but the date of the Declaration was July 4th, 1776 then the Declaration could have been written at the beginning or the end. So why was the Declaration written so long after the first battle and before the treaty, or why was the Declaration written at all? One purpose, besides recruitment of troops, was to gain support for the war and the organizations in the states and local committees of public safety: enforcing boycotts and discouraging Americans from supporting the Loyalists. In addition the Declaration itself was addressed to the supporters of democracy and opponents of Great Britain around the world. The Americans were declaring that they were equal to all the peoples of the world in including the British people. The line before the Grievances was “(L)et these facts be submitted to a candid world.” The Continental Congress expected honest people and countries all over the world to accept the long list of grievances against the king of Great Britain. France, Spain and Holland eventually gave money and political support to the Americans. Generals and troops from Prussia, France and Poland supported the Revolution.

I should make clear that when we discuss “All men are created equal,” we are on a series of simultaneous tracks. First the clause is part of the natural law argument at the beginning of the document: the Revolution is “impelled” by the laws of the universe. Then it is an element in the relation between the people and the government: Since the government is founded by the people they have the right to “alter or abolish it” when the government threatens their natural rights to liberty and safety. As we saw in the quote above on democracy and revolution, it is their government that they built to “secure” their rights. All men have these rights and the responsibility to defend themselves against tyrannical government.

Thus equality is a law of nature, and a political factor in democracy. Equality is an organizing concept, as we have seen. Finally, equality is a concept that breaks through the prejudices of thousands of years of hereditary rights in Europe.

Now we come to the question of why the king is addressed as “He.” If there were a delay in a response to this question, I asked my students what happens when you are at a large family gathering and while you are talking to your cousin you refer to your father as “he.” Some of the students laugh. Some are dumbfounded. As we say in the vernacular of southern Long Island, where I grew up, you get “slapped upside the head.” Demystifying the king is the key here. During the coronation ceremony in England the king is anointed – in secret – with a holy oil that causes him to attain a status between man and God. He obtains thaumaturgic powers: divine right. If you are going to have a revolution against the king, he must be a man like anyone else. Calling him “He” strips him of his mystery.

As we have been pointing out since the beginning of this journey through the Declaration of Independence, the clause, “All men are created equal” embodies the hopes and some of the worst nightmares of every American. Who was not equal or addressed in the empowering clause for white men? Women, Blacks, most of whom were slaves, and those white men without property. Native Americans were also not included in the so-called equality promoted by the Declaration. It is usually stated that about 6% of the total population could vote. New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire all allowed free black men to vote if they met property requirements which at least in NY were higher than for whites. Women of any race could vote in New Jersey if they were widowed or not married, but In 1807 the state changed the relevant clause in their constitution from inhabitants to male inhabitants. However more than 40,000 Blacks ran away during the Revolution and by 1800 there were nearly 60,000 free Blacks in the US. In addition Blacks and their allies petitioned the states for freedom based on the bill of rights of the constitution of Massachusetts, for example, which stated that “all men are born free and equal.” Here are the essential parts of one of those petitions:

To the honorable Counsel and House of Representatives for the State of Massachusetts in General Court Assembled, January 13, 1777:

The petition of a great number of blacks detained in a state of slavery in the bowels of a free and Christian country humbly show … that they have in common with all other men a natural and inalienable right to that freedom which the Great Parent of the heavens has bestowed equally on all mankind.... (We petition) your honors... (to) cause an act of the Legislature to be passed whereby they may be restored to the enjoyments of that which is the natural right of all men – and their children who were born in this land of liberty – not to be held as slaves.

The drama in this cannot be denied. These Black petitioners took only 6 months and 9 days after the signing of the Declaration to demand freedom for themselves. It was based legally not only on the clause referred to above in the Massachusetts bill of rights, but it also quoted the Declaration's assertion of “inalienable” rights and claimed the natural right of equality for “all man(kind.)” These petitioners changed the meaning of men in “all men are created equal.” It was a verbal act of agency that resulted in a legal ruling that slavery in Massachusetts was unconstitutional in the new Massachusetts Constitution of 1780. The Declaration gave them an opening to claim their freedom; something that the US Constitution later denied them. There are no natural rights written into the Constitution of 1787.

I taught these lessons in class after class for more than 30 years. My students welcomed the explanations and close readings of the founding documents. They were proud of learning from the sources and figuring out the truth about our founding as they read and discussed. They took it as a matter of course that they were learning the history of our country in all its complexity. We later read the Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, the Seneca Falls Declaration, the 4th of July Oration by Frederick Douglass, the speeches and letters of Lincoln, the platform of the Populist Party, the Supreme Court cases of Plessy v Ferguson, Korematsu v US, Brown v Board of Education, the Inaugural Addresses of FDR and JFK, and the Letter from Birmingham Jail. I could not wait to get to class to discuss these great works. It was a privilege to teach. I tried to grab my students by the brain and run. I gave them the documents and we learned together. Race was not the only topic we covered, but it was a frequent subject. I did not confront their prejudices instead, I had them confront the ideas of our history and how our leaders and ordinary people explained them. We covered strikes from the Lowell Mills to the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 to the sit-downs if the 1930s. We read the obituary of one of the survivors of the Triangle Fire and an article by a leader of the of the garment workers. We watched sections of “Eyes on the Prize,” where they learned that agency was a way of life for the Civil Rights workers.

Over time students will see that there are alternative ways of looking at the world different than the one in which some of them grew up. Eventually they can come to understand that racism is virulent and dangerous to peace in society and physically dangerous to Blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Indigenous peoples in the US. I taught American History with all its flaws. It is not impossible, but it takes intellectual effort and trust that your students can understand and learn how to think for themselves.

The Declaration is complex. It contains soaring rhetoric and grievances that can pull at your heartstrings and a call for equality that can make you want to believe every word. But it is also riveted to and riven by slavery and hypocrisy. The idea that these slaveholders and their non-slaveholding allies were calling for freedom in the name of a humanity that was so narrowed by race, religion and wealth is appalling. Yet it is still a powerful document even when we understand the context: the contradictions of the real lives of the people and the undemocratic character of the government of the United States. Nevertheless we can face all this in class without blaming our students or their parents for the sins of our Founding Fathers.

***Note: See the paragraph long correction on the authorship in my essay on African Slavery in America elsewhere in this Substack site.