American Dialogue: The Founders and Us

by Joseph J. Ellis

Martin Luther King, Jr., liked to buoy the spirits of his supporters by observing that “the arc of the moral universe bends upward toward justice,” a thought he borrowed from Theodore Parker, the nineteenth-century antislavery theologian. But nearly a century and a half after slavery was ended, the dark side of the Jeffersonian legacy continues to cast a shadow over King’s hopeful words, reminding us that Jefferson never intended his lyrical version of the American promise to include blacks, and the very belief that it should was a recent, mid-twentieth-century idea. Each lurch forward along the arc of racial equality, in fact, has generated a backward surge that exposes residual prejudices called to the surface of American life from some deep pool of racial resentment that was always there and, if Jefferson was right, always will be. Instead of an upward arc, then, the dominant racial pattern since the end of slavery has been a cycle in which progress actually generates resistance to its continuation.