Apology For Slavery & Segregation

Slavery might have ended a hundred forty years ago, but its horrors still echo through the ages.  For the first hundred years after it ended, our nation lived under a code of “equal justice” that was anything but equal, and never resembled justice.  While the Brown vs. the Board of Education decision, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and most of all, the leadership of a great American such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. might have officially done away with that, the stench of inequality still lingers today.

I have sponsored a bill in the House of Representatives that calls upon the United States government to officially apologize for slavery and for the segregation era that followed it.  It is my sincere hope that by doing so, we may open a new dialogue on race in this nation.  You don’t treat a wound by ignoring it as it festers.  You treat it by addressing it acknowledging it and facing it.  Sometimes the medicine is bitter, but we end up the better for it.

Only when we can let go of the petty hatreds of the past can we create the “more perfect union” that the Founding Fathers spoke of.

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