 I am free to talk to you tonight, and you are free to listen because of freed slaves. Americans often think that our freedoms were bestowed by the founders, springing from their foreheads full-born, that freedom is a circle that was widened or that outsiders were allowed in. And that's not true. The first three words of the First Amendment say, Congress shall make no law. In 1933, Chief Justice John Marshall decided that those words mean exactly those words. States he said were free to abridge the Bill of Rights, our civil liberties, our individual rights for all. Needless to say, if you've studied anything about American history, is that those freedoms were most often abridged when it came to African-Americans and the struggle against slavery. Southern states felt free to ban abolitionist writings, abolitionist speeches. The U.S. Postmaster General decided that he would not transmit abolitionist writings through the mail. There are also other civil liberties that were not protected, that were infringed by the states. In New England, they maintained state churches with taxpayer money. North Carolina, not until after the Civil War, until not after the Civil War, you had to be a professing Christian and, of course, a man to be able to vote. Now this changed because of freed slaves. When the Civil War began, everyone expected them to keep working as before because there was an ideology that they were a separate species, actually, and were by nature suited to slavery. And, of course, they were not. And so they rebelled in what the historian Stephen Hahn calls the greatest slavery rebellion in history. And before the Emancipation Proclamation, they broke down and destroyed the institution of slavery on the ground. When the war ended, the people who were in charge in the South, even in the federal government, assumed that Southern society would go back to being the way it was minus the technicality of slavery. And African-Americans proved them wrong. They asserted themselves. They organized schools. They formed political clubs. They had mass meetings. They sent petitions to Congress. And the South responded with state laws that placed them basically back under slavery. They responded with mass violence with the Ku Klux Klan, with police riots in Memphis and Orleans that killed dozens of people. And Congress was forced to react. People in the North who were not racial egalitarians, congressmen who were not racial egalitarians, had to respond to this crisis, this self-assertion and this repression. Now they sought in terms of loyalty in the Civil War, that those who had stood by the union, the true patriots in the South, had all been the former slaves. They were the ones who had stood for this union. They were the ones who had stood for the Constitution. And they were being oppressed with impunity, murdered and brutalized with impunity by those who had rebelled against the United States. And so even those who were emphatically racist, I should say, in the North, decided they had to act. And so there came about a period called Reconstruction, the greatest wave of policymaking by the federal government in our history. That was a brief period in which there were African American jurors, there were African American voters, there were African American justices of the peace and sheriffs and state legislators and congressmen and senators. During this brief period, Congress decided that it had to put these principles that it was putting into effect in the South, into the Constitution, to put it beyond the reach of politics. And so among other things, they passed the 14th Amendment. The 14th Amendment establishes the idea of race-neutral citizenship. If you are born in the United States, if you are naturalized as a citizen, it doesn't matter who your parents were, it doesn't matter what your genes are. You're a citizen. You're entitled to equal protection of the laws. You're entitled to your civil liberties, as well as civil rights. This was, as its principal framer put it on the floor of Congress, simply a proposition to arm the Congress with the power to enforce the Bill of Rights against the states. It was, in fact, the 14th Amendment through legal historians, excuse me, call the incorporation doctrine, it is why we are all free. It is why we have freedom of speech. It is why we enjoy the civil liberties that so many of us think were given to us by the founders, as by the gods, to the mortals below. In fact, it was a result of a process driven from the ground up by African Americans. Now, of course, the courts did not enforce these rights immediately. It was not until 1923 when the U.S. Supreme Court heard a case, the ACLU was defending a man named Gitlow, who was a radical socialist, who had called for the overthrow of the U.S. government. And the ACLU said, thanks to the 14th Amendment, this man has freedom of speech that New York State cannot throw him in jail for calling for the overthrow of the U.S. government. And the Supreme Court agreed. It accepted the incorporation doctrine. And so, as a result of freed slaves, the most oppressed, the most scorned by Americans north and south, because of their self-assertion, they drove a crisis which changed the Constitution. Because of a radical socialist calling for the overthrow of the government, those principles were put into effect. So we have to remember that our rights, our liberties, are not given to us by those who are comfortable. They're not given to us by those who feel no need to test the limits of freedom. They're given to us by the oppressed. They're given to us by those who are pressing sometimes in ways we may not agree with. That's the whole point. They're given to us by the dissenters. And that the idea of America, the idea that we have a country based on an idea, that it is belief in freedom and universal citizenship, we often talk about America as a republic which is based on ideas and not on ethnicity. This was not something that was a fact at the beginning of our republic. It was because of resistance. And so I am a free man today because of freed slaves and because of a radical who wanted to overthrow the U.S. government. The American identity is diversity. The American identity is dissent. And so at moments when you are despairing, when there is a reaction, as there was when the Ku Klux Klan formed the first time, as there was when the Ku Klux Klan formed to keep Catholics and Jews out of the country in the 1910s, as it was when the Ku Klux Klan came back in the 1950s and 60s to kill and oppress. As it was at other points in American history when people asserted, no, no, no, you have to look like me to be an American. It's at these moments when we have rallied and we have made progress. And so, no, I don't think things are very bright right now. But I think that there's a chance they could be brighter in the future. Thank you.