Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
as well as reason, all teach that the Negro is not human'. In
more modern times, some racists still reject the plain testimony
written in the DNA that all the races are not only human but
nearly indistinguishable with appeals to the Bible as an 'impregnable
bulwark' against even examining the evidence.
It is worth noting, though, that much of the abolitionist
ferment arose out of Christian, especially Quaker, communities
of the North; that the traditional black Southern Christian
churches played a key role in the historic American civil
rights struggle of the 1960s; and that many of its leaders -
most notably Martin Luther King, Jr. - were ministers
ordained in those churches.
Douglass addressed the white community in these words:
[Slavery] fetters your progress, it is the enemy of
improvement; the deadly foe of education; it fosters
pride; it breeds indolence; it promotes vice; it shelters
crime; it is a curse of the earth that supports it, and yet
you cling to it as if it were the sheet anchor of all your
hopes.
In 1843, on a speaking tour of Ireland shortly before the potato
famine, he was moved by the dire poverty there to write home
to Garrison: 'I see much here to remind me of my former
condition, and I confess I should be ashamed to lift my voice
against American slavery, but that I know the cause of humanity
is one the world over.' He was outspoken in opposition to the
policy of extermination of the Native Americans. And in 1848,
at the Seneca Falls Convention, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton*
had the nerve to call for an effort to secure the vote for women,
he was the only man of any ethnic group to stand in support.
On the night of 20 February 1895 - more than thirty years
after Emancipation - following an appearance at a women's
rights rally with Susan B. Anthony, he collapsed and died, a
true American hero.
* Years later, she wrote of the Bible in words reminiscent of Douglass's: 'I know
of no other books that so fully teach the subjection and degradation of women.'
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