Justice  /  Comment

An American Conception of Justice

Historians have demonstrated how central racism has been to the formation of the U.S. But many of those same ideas have also been vital to combating white supremacy.

For the past several years, I have been writing a history of the Democratic Party. Perhaps the most important question to answer about that institution is how it switched from being a bulwark of a profoundly racist society to an ally, if always a conditional one, of the Black freedom movement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, and even Franklin D. Roosevelt would be shocked—and the first two quite dismayed—to learn that future leaders of their party enacted the landmark civil rights bills of the 1960s, endorsed last year’s massive protests against police murders of Black people, and consistently win the overwhelming support of African-American voters.

The Democrats’ turnabout was due to a variety of factors—including the growth of the Black electorate in the North, the emergence of an interracial labor movement, and competition with the Soviet Union for the allegiances of people in the Third World who had recently liberated themselves from European empires. But in opposing racism, Democrats also drew on the stated principles of their party and nation, despite how their predecessors had betrayed those values in expanding the empire of slavery, opposing Reconstruction, and erecting the Jim Crow order.

In 1963, outlining what would become the Civil Rights Act, President John F. Kennedy asked rhetorically, “Are we to say to the world—and much more importantly, to each other—that this is the land of the free, except for Negroes, that we have no second-class citizens, except Negroes, that we have no class or caste system, no ghettos, no master race, except with respect to Negroes?”

A quarter-century later, Jesse Jackson, the first African American to run competitively for the presidential nomination of a major party, evoked both the Black freedom struggle and the party’s populist traditions in a speech to the Democratic National Convention. He began with a tribute to organizers who had died to win the right to vote, then uttered a sentiment that could have appeared in an address by Andrew Jackson, or Wilson, or FDR. “We believe in a government that’s a tool of our democracy in service to the public, not an instrument of the aristocracy in search of private wealth.” By combining these two appeals, the activist-turned-politician joined the fight for Black equality to a mission that might appeal to the majority of Americans, whatever their race.