As President Obama so eloquently remarked. the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitutiona Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law. a Constitution that promised its people liberty and justice and a union that could be and should be perfected over time. Yet these words were not enough to deliver slaves from bondage or to provide men and women of every color and creed with their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. It is this inherited sin that has guided a national history of challenging race relations in America. from slavery to the ThreeFifths Compromise. to a nation divided and broken over the issue of slavery. to poll taxes and literacy tests. to separate but equal. to Japanese internment. to antiSemitism. to the Tuskegee experiment. to Brown v. The Board of Education. to the loving Confederate flags at State houses. to the Confederate statues in this Capitol. and to parishioners executed during a Charleston Bible study. executed in the hopes that it would spark a race war. It is the sad truth that. while race relations do not define us as a nation. ignoring and perverting these relations has left a painful blemish on our national record.
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