The many and diverse people who lent their voices to the movement converged not around the most profound of anti-racist arguments, but rather around the straightforward demand that the nation accept the principle of racial equality, first in civil rights and then in political rights. They had inherited a country in which equality was enshrined in the soaring words of the Declaration of Independence, but almost nowhere else; a country in which few believed the abolition of slavery would lead inexorably to multiracial democracy; and a country where many believed that repealing racist laws would
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