Of course, it is called inalienable rights that were in the Declaration of Independence and used as foundational principles as the agreed to generate a new system of government from. Black Americans did fight as individuals in the Revolutionary War and paid pension or set free as a condition for fighting. Although those cases took place up North, and although Vermont officially abolished slavery in 1777, followed by Massachusetts by court orders in 1781, we disregard these examples and we disregard the struggle of abolition. Why? Because it doesn’t fit the narrative that black Americans had civil or inalienable rights from day one in SOME places and that those rights reflected the original intent. Those places were in the North, and just with some prominent intellectuals perhaps, but many intellectual influencers were founders.
No, the problem is that the narrative must always be fixed —and re-fixed and re-adjusted—so as not to tell the ‘real story’: that of the other half of the nation concentrated down south that resisted recognizing black Americans as equal human beings. Instead, we are forced to look at Civil RIghts as something black Americans got, or had those right extended to, instead of something they had all along because that story is more cheerful, more benevolent, showing that whites in the 1960s ‘finally’ what they had all along in other places. The black Americans who fought for their civil inalienable rights were just as brave and noble when they sued the governor and state of Massachusetts in the 1790s by saying they had all other rights but the right to carry a gun in the national militia. That was the only right in Boston they didn’t have and could exercise. Look at the contrast.
Not many people can. Because the contrast of these two white narratives doesn’t show unity, and such a contrast also shows the violent, brutal repression after the Civil War in horribly named “Jim Crow” period when millions and millions of black Americans in the 15 states lived, 80 percent until 1930, were re-enslaved through illegal contracts piled on with debt and lived in shacks on plantations owned by white men, like US Senator Jim Eastland, caught and beaten if trying to escape, killed if trying to vote? That’s not a form of slavery?
Really, that’s a good example. Think about it: What black American historian today, if they had the choice, working from scratch, and not acquiescing for their tenure to keep their job at historically run state and private white universities, would call a period of violent Genocidal lynchings and massacres where no white men were every tried, convicted, and sent and served in prison until 1981 when the first batch of white men were tried and sent to prison for the ‘extrajudicial’ killing of Michael Donald, a random black man they picked up off the street, call that period “Jim Crow”? Would you name the dark repressive era where the right-wing stole through violence and legal trickery the vote black Americans received in 14th and 15th amendments that had just been explicitly given constitutionally to black Americans “Jim Crow”? The contrast of narratives eclipses not only those but other periods when progress was made: Even though 9 of the original 13 colonies gave freed black Americans the right to vote by 1830 through struggle, those days of struggle and victory are forgotten, they don’t count in your mind and in the mind of others, just like the fact that those freed slaves who now got the constitutional right to vote were so brutally repressed after receiving it that democracy in many of those 15 states was completely eclipsed and reduced to a one party state. How is that a democracy when for decades only one party appeared on the ballots in most of those states because of violence and anti-constitutional laws enacted?
Personally, and it’s could be just me, but I wouldn’t name the most violent and authoritarian time in US history for black Americans living in those one-party no-democracy states after a white man who wore black face and took on the mannerisms of a physically disabled black man from Pittsburgh in the 1830s and took his minstrel act around America to spread racist stereotypes, would you?