Sojourner Truth, an emancipated slave, led the fight in the years preceding the American Civil War as a fiery abolitionist and as an advocate of womenšs rights. The speech from which this excerpt was taken is called "Ainšt I A Woman." In its pathos we can feel some of the emotion as men and women of African-American extraction searched for their place in a nation built on the fundamental tenet of equality of all mankind.

"That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?" Sojourner Truth - December 1851

Frederick Douglass was a fugitive slave. He was the son of a white man and a black woman. A kindly lady taught him to read and write and he, too, became a voice against the barbarity and inhumanity of slavery.

"What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mock; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy," Frederick Douglass - July 4, 1852

On the Forth of July 2006 we have come a long way from those days. In much of the white consciousness the black person is still held in a place of inferiority. Forced to think always black while the white person has the luxury to see himself as tolerant of his black friends and somehow better for his tolerance.

In the years following these two speeches Americans fought the bloodiest war in our history. It was not, at first, an abolitionist war in the Northern mind or a war to retain slavery in the mind of the average Southerner. The elimination of slavery was as much a political expedient to keep Great Britain and France from recognizing the South, as it was an act of true repentance for the slave trade.

It was not until 600,000 young men in blue and gray lay dead on battlefields from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to Brownsville, Texas. that it came to an end and the black American was a free man. The South called this war the second American Revolution; it was indeed a defining time in our history. It began the healing of our divided nation. Today Frederick and Sojourner would, I think, be pleased with the changes. We all might be pleased but certainly not satisfied. We need only look around to see how much further we have to go.

We had better do it soon because the day is coming when you and I, white Americans, will be the minority. In many places we already are. Think about it.