All lives matter? Those who think so are missing the point, and a lot of U.S. history
The ever-more-popular rejoinder to the Black Lives Matter movement is the slogan “All Lives Matter.” Ignoring, for present purposes, the fact that this is an effort to soothe our collective white conscience and rebuff a centuries-old struggle with a slogan, the notion that “all lives matter” in America raises a most compelling and deeply unsettling question: Since when? Since when have all lives really mattered in America?
In the most tumultuous period in the history of our nation, 11 states separated from the Union over “states’ rights”—a euphemism for slavery. The Confederacy wanted to be left alone to exploit those held in bondage for the benefit of those at the top of the southern economic pyramid. Thus, they sent those at the bottom of that pyramid—including the enslaved—to fight and die for their “way of life.”
Following this “recent unpleasantness”—a southern idiom for the Civil War—there was hope that all lives might matter. The 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865, ending slavery. Closely followed by the 14th Amendment in 1868, granting citizenship to the formerly enslaved and guaranteeing “equal protection of the laws,” and the 15th Amendment in 1870, forbidding the states from engaging in racial discrimination in voting, our Declaration’s promise that “all [persons] are created equal,” began to take hold in pockets of the South, but only briefly. The political tides quickly shifted. Jim Crow laws swept through the South. Segregation became the order of the day. The Klan, its indifferent co-conspirators — well-respected business people, lawyers, doctors, politicians, teachers, even preachers of the Gospel — and their generational offspring began a decades-long crusade to assure the continued subjugation and disenfranchisement of persons of color using a creative array of weapons—deprivation of quality education, economic isolation, voter tests and poll taxes—along with the less creative—intimidation and sheer brutality, even lynching. All lives would not matter for the next 100 years.
The winds of change only began to blow with the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, when our Black sisters and brothers rose up from exhaustion with separate but unequal schools, segregation in housing and public accommodations, and perhaps most insidious, the deprivation of the right to vote. People of color were sick and tired of being forced to sit in the back of the American bus. Some reform followed, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. But it shouldn’t be lost on the reader that these landmark acts came 100 years after the adoption of Constitutional amendments supposedly guaranteeing African Americans full privileges of citizenship. And though these legislative strives are laudable, they nevertheless prompt a bothersome question: If all lives matter to Americans, why do we have to keep legislating equality for Americans?
Still today, African Americans’ ability to participate in elective democracy is stifled by unambiguous efforts at voter suppression. Still today, many African Americans are unable to exercise the right to vote because they are not full participants in the American economy—hampered by inferior schools, housing, jobs, and health care. Still today, African American parents must warn their children how to act if confronted by law enforcement—the same talk Black parents have had with their Black children for more than 300 years. So, when exactly was it that all lives started to matter in America?
Most of us live our lives relative to some plumb line of moral and ethical certainty—some line from which if we vary too far, we know we’ve lost our way. Christian scriptures teach that this plumb line should be the way we treat “the least of these.” The day the first enslaved person stepped foot on the shores of this continent, a plumb line dropped for the nation we would come to know as the United States of America. From that day to this, the moral and ethical soul of this nation has been judged by how we treat a race of formerly enslaved persons, and perhaps more importantly, what we do to restore that race of persons to the full privileges of citizenship promised long ago. Our actions speak far louder than our words. Merely saying “all lives matter” does not make all lives matter. To resay, “faith without works is dead.” (James 2:26).
To suggest that “all lives matter” in America is to ignore both the weight of history and our present reality. But we, as Americans, should agree on one thing: All lives should matter—Black lives, immigrant lives, homeless lives, impoverished lives, store clerks’ lives, teachers’ lives, elderly lives, disabled lives. But here, I submit, is a fundamental truth that our nation must face and address: All lives will never matter in America until Black Lives Matter.
Guthrie True is an attorney in Frankfort.