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Resistance! Resistance! Resistance! [1]
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Date: 2025-02-18
Resistance! Resistance! Resistance!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fsr_-shnWNs
Hello. My name is Alan Singer. I am a historian, a teacher, a teacher educator, and a lifetime activist. I am also 75 years old. Along with many of you, I’ve felt overwhelmed by the Trump-Musk assault on democracy, government, and basic rights in the United States. Our country is a nation of laws but Donald Trump has expressed contempt for rule by law. He actually claimed, he was exempt from legal restriction because “he who saves his country does not violate any laws.” When a leader is unrestricted by law you have an authoritarian society and everyone is vulnerable. It is important to remember that Adolf Hitler took power in Germany in 1933 through its electoral process and then dismantled democracy. As an historian, I know that the future may look bleak but it is not predetermined and that even at the darkest moment there are reasons for hope. Adolf Hitler’s thousand-year Reich lasted only 12 years.
Henry Highland Garnet was born to enslaved parents in Kent County, Maryland in 1815. In 1824, his family escaped to New Jersey and a year later they arrived in New York City where Garnet attended the African Free School. After a sea voyage to Cuba as a cabin boy in 1829, Garnet returned to New York where he learned that his family had separated in a desperate effort to evade slave catchers. Friends arranged safe-haven for him with abolitionists on Long Island.
Garnet graduated from Oneida Institute near Utica, New York and in 1842, he became a pastor of the Liberty Street Presbyterian Church in Troy, New York. In an 1843 speech at a National Negro Convention in Buffalo, New York Garnet called for active resistance to slavery. He beseeched his enslaved brethren to “Awake, awake; millions of voices are calling you! Your dead fathers speak to you from their graves. Heaven, as with a voice of thunder, calls on you to arise from the dust. Let your motto be resistance! resistance! resistance! No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance.”
As Donald Trump and Elon Musk issue illegal directives designed to break the will of Americans who believe in democracy, science, social justice, human rights, diversity, equity, and inclusion, they count on fearful compliance and self-censorship. It is crucial that we remember the words of Henry Highland Garnet in the battle to end slavery – Resistance! Resistance! Resistance!
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