Shadow of Power by Steve Martini Read Free Book Online Page A

Scarborough. “And to this day no one has seen fit to remove those words.
    “You can complain about the Bolshevik Revolution and its failure to deliver,” he says. “But there is no deal in history dirtier and more deceptive than the inclusion of slavery in the United States Constitution. What is worse, these offending words are still there, for all to see, there in the organic law of this nation. They may be dead-letter law, no longerenforceable, but they are still visible, AND THEY ARE STILL OFFENSIVE!”
    This is the point of Scarborough’s thesis: the manner in which the Constitution is amended. The video we are watching is from a speech he gave in the weeks before he was killed. It was delivered at a university near Chicago while he was on tour for his book Perpetual Slaves. The audience is mostly young, many of them black.
    “If you don’t believe that the old Rebel flag of the defeated Confederacy should be hanging outside in front of state capitols in this nation, just beneath the Stars and Stripes, then how is it that the language of slavery should remain visible in the United States Constitution? Is there a different standard for the federal government?” he asks.
    “What is so intellectually dishonest is that these ‘great men,’ the minds of the American enlightenment—Adams, Franklin, Madison, and others—dodged the use of plain language when it came to concealing slavery. And nothing has changed. The leaders of this nation continue to dodge it today.
    “Look, search, and you will not find the words ‘slave’ or ‘slavery’ anywhere in the Constitution. No, they insult the descendants of slaves, and the national government has seen fit to continue to allow these to exist in print to this very day.
    “Look at the infamous fugitive-slave clause, Article Four, Section Two, of the Constitution. This was the cardinal law of slavery crafted at the birth of the nation, the provision that crushed even the shadow of a dream of freedom for African slaves. And did it use the words ‘slave’ or ‘slavery’? No, of course not.
    “It uses the euphemism ‘No person held to service or labor’ who escaped to a free state was to be freed. Why? Because the Constitution at its inception says that they should be dragged back and delivered up not to their ‘masters’ or ‘owners’ but to ‘the party to whom service or labor may be due.’
    “And have these words been removed from the Constitution?” Scarborough puts a hand up to his ear and listens.
    Some in the audience shout, “NO!”
    “That’s right. The language is still there, a monument to the guile and craftiness of the slave owners who crafted our Constitution.
    “Read Article One, Section Two, the insidious three-fifths clause, and tell me what it means or, more important, WHY IT IS STILL THERE. The continued appearance of these words is a national offense, an insult to every African American walking on this continent.
    “Historians know what it means, because they study it. Lawyers know what it means. The federal courts know what it means, because they enforced it. Congress knows what it means, because they passed the enabling statutes that allowed the institution of slavery to function. And Congress has done nothing in more than a hundred and fifty years, since the Civil War and the repeal of slavery by the Thirteenth Amendment, to remove the offending words from the Constitution. Members of Congress sit there and complain about the Dixie flag, and the states that fly it, while they have this stink on their own hands,” says Scarborough. He allows the fiery oratory to settle on the audience.
    “In simple terms the three-fifths clause identifies all the classes of people in the United States at the time of its founding. They needed this for purposes of taxation and apportionment, the formula to determine the number of representatives each state would get in the new Congress.
    “The clause identifies ‘free persons.’
    “It