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Kenny Gamble’s America
"I Am an American," a new hymn to the nation’s purposes and meaning, had its first major public performance Friday evening at Philadelphia's "Welcome America" celebration. Home-grown: a Father Divine-inspired Kenny Gamble composition, produced and released by Gamble's International Records, recorded with the Temple University Orchestra and Choirs, and with Patti LaBelle.
The production was intended, of course, to complement celebrations of the Declaration of Independence, approved 232 Fourths ago.
I listened to the piece Friday morning before its presentation. It was indeed the Declaration about which I thought as I listened. But one idea nagged, and it was not about what the Declaration said. It was about what the Declaration did not say. It was about what had been excluded.
Among the “repeated injuries and usurpations” of a tyrannous king, this, from Jefferson's first draft:
“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither….”
The section was cut during the two days of Congressional debate on the draft.
We can suspect the sincerity of Jefferson's argument, made as it was by a slave-holding Virginian. We can parse the moral claims and political realities that got the argument in there, as well as those that got it scissored.
But, think of this: had it remained, what difference could it have made? What thorn to the political conscience of a developing nation might it have been, to hasten the time when America, “ always destined to be a country standing for freedom, justice and equality” as Gamble himself had it last week, could be that as a matter of fact?
Posted by
G.E. “Skip” Lawrence
posted by The Phoenix Files at
4:44 AM
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