Featuring: Larry Kenneth Alexander
Transcript:
Today, we gather not merely to recount history, but to confront its unvarnished truths, to examine the forces that shaped a nation and the ideals that continue to echo through time. Let us strip away the myths and face the realities of our past, for only in truth can we find clarity and purpose.
In the early days of the 13 British colonies, the Atlantic Ocean served as a vast buffer between the Crown’s rule and the ambitions of colonial settlers. Oversight from London was distant, sporadic, and at times non-existent. When the English Civil Wars erupted in 1642, colonial assemblies seized the opportunity. Freed from the immediate gaze of the Crown, they enacted laws, many of them cementing the institution of slavery to serve their own interests. To the colonial elite, this autonomy became the natural order, an unspoken arrangement that allowed their power and wealth to flourish unchecked.
But history’s tides are relentless, and by the late 1750s, the British Empire faced immense challenges. A series of costly wars fought to protect and expand its territories had drained the Treasury. Parliament, viewing the colonies as integral to the empire, deemed it only just that they share the financial burden. Taxes were levied, trade regulations imposed, and British imperial oversight reinvigorated. This was not an unprecedented imposition. It was a restoration of the structure outlined in colonial charters, a return to balance as British lawmakers saw it, and an assertion of the Crown’s authority.
Yet to the slaveholding colonists, these measures felt like an assault. They perceived the Crown’s actions not as the enforcement of rightful governance, but as an encroachment on freedoms they had come to see as their birthright. But let us be clear. These so-called birthrights were not born of justice or universal liberty. They were privileges rooted in systemic violations of English law, in graft, and in the exploitation of human beings. These freedoms were sustained by a foundation of racial tyranny and the calculated evasion of British scrutiny.
For decades, colonial assemblies had ignored their charters, flouting English law while amassing power and wealth. When the Crown sought to reassert its oversight through taxes, trade restrictions, and the rule of law, the colonists cried tyranny. They saw the reintroduction of governance as a threat to their way of life—a life built on the oppression and enslavement of others. It was not justice they opposed, it was accountability.
In response, the British Parliament passed the American Colonies Act of 1766, reaffirming its supreme legislative authority and abolishing colonial laws that defied it. This included slave codes and Negro laws, which violated the English Bill of Rights of 1689. This was not a capricious act, but a principled one, rooted in the ideals of parliamentary sovereignty and the pursuit of justice. And in 1772, England’s highest court, the Court of the King’s Bench, ruled that slavery had no recognition in the kingdom and could only be lawful if authorized by positive law—a power only Parliament possessed, which it never exercised.
Yet the colonial elite saw these developments as an existential threat. Their wealth, their power, their very identity were entwined with the institution of slavery. The patriots’ cry for freedom was not a call for universal liberty, but a desperate effort to protect a specific kind of freedom: the freedom to exploit, to dominate, to sustain a system of white supremacy.
And so, let us dispel the myth of a noble fight for liberty. The American Revolution was many things, but at its heart, it was a struggle to preserve privilege. Their revolution was not a revolt against tyranny—it was a revolt against justice.
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