Cultural Change for the We the People Amendment
[second in a series]
- William Myers
Chattel slavery, the system where people are treated as property by being bought, sold, and owned, goes back thousands of years and across “civilizations.” It has often been seen as an unavoidable aspect of human history, where the powerful few force labor upon others.
Enslaved Africans first arrived on the North American continent to present day St. Augustine, FL in the mid 16th century. About 450,000 enslaved Africans ended up being transported to North America.
Slavery was embedded in the U.S. Constitution. The "Return Servant's" Clause (Article 4, Section 2) deemed slaves as property. Enslaved persons couldn’t vote, but were each counted as “3/5ths” of a person for purposes of giving slave states more votes in the Electoral College to increase the odds the President would come from a slave state.
Those who believe that resistance to slavery in the U.S. was only violent and began in earnest with the civil war are badly mistaken. The civil war was in many ways the culmination of what many felt was an incredibly diverse cultural and strategic nonviolent movement of resistance and liberation.
Enslaved Africans held a core conviction that they were human beings with their own cultural identity, not simply pieces of property ruled by their masters. As was said, the slave’s “first duty …is utterly to refuse any longer to be a slave.” Religion, folktales, music, dance and food were means to preserve their specific cultural heritage from many places on the African continent.
Slave resistance involved breaking tools, faking illnesses, slowdowns of tasks and many other plantation disruptions. They also ran away with many forming “maroon colony” communities in mountains, swamps or frontier regions; sometimes joining with oppressed indentured whites and indigenous people.
A powerful cultural force within the abolition movement was religion – mostly in the North. Slavery was castigated as immoral, a national sin. Human beings were persons, not property. Quakers/Religious Society of Friends, Universalists and Congregationalists were active abolitionists. Methodists, Presyterians and Baptists split over the issue. The African Methodist Episcopal and African Methodist Episcopal Zion churches, formed by blacks who split from mainline denominations, were among the most active abolitionists of faith. Ministers spoke out from their pulpits, including “circuit rider preachers” who traveled from town to town in rural areas. Other ministers quit their pulpits and refused assignments to pro-slavery congregations. Churches that didn’t oppose slavery were boycotted by abolitionists. Church members shunned other members who were slaveholders. The Underground Railroad, the name given to the secret and illegal network of hundreds of safe establishments that helped enslaved people to escape to the northern states and Canada, was largely organized by people of faith – many whites, but mostly blacks.
Literature played a prominent role shaping opinion against slavery, especially those written by enslaved persons. Tom Paine’s African Slavery in America, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, The Liberator and North Star newspapers, and the memoir Twelve Years a Slave were among the most widely read texts.
Abolitionist-era music of resistance expressed the agony of enslavement, the yearning for freedom, escape plans, condemnation of slaveholders, and pleas for God's forgiveness. Songs included Let My People Go, Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen, Wade in the Water, Follow the Drinking Gourd, and Amazing Grace.
There were scores of abolitionist and anti-slavery organizations. The first in what is now the U.S. was the Pennsylvania Abolition Society formed in Philadelphia in 1775. The New England Anti-Slave Society and American Anti-Slavery Society were prominent.
Contributing to the abolitionist culture were, again, mostly in the North, an array of public actions consisting of speeches, petitions, conferences, boycotts and literature distribution. All the Northern States passed laws outlawing slavery. The Constitution was burned by those supporting enslavement. Slave hunters were followed and outed, sometimes temporarily restrained by the general public to allow slaves to further escape. Black parents withdrew their children from segregated schools.
Beyond the Underground Railroad, acts of nonviolent civil disobedience demonstrated the deep personal conviction of those who risked arrest, beatings, or even death to build popular support. These consisted of multiracial sit-ins, eat-ins, ride-ins and many other examples of pointing out the humanity of all people and the hypocrisy of “democracy” and “freedom for all.”
Racial unity was crucial in building cultural and political support for ending chattel slavery, even as many Northern supporters held deep prejudices against Black people in their own communities. Differing strategies early on among those who simply supported ending slavery in Northern states, others who called for migrating freed blacks to Liberia and still others who supported abolition by financially compensating slaveholders for their lost property. Eventually, the “radical abolitionists” objective of uncompensated and total emancipation unified the movement, although black abolitionists tended to link anti-slavery activities with wider demands for racial equality and justice.
Lessons for Move to Amend
Slavery is a legal fiction that a person is property. Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person.
The beginning of the end of slaves being a legal fiction of property was the collective cultural belief by blacks and whites that slaves were human beings. The beginning of the end of corporate personhood is the growing cultural awareness and acceptance that a corporation is not a person, but property – a legal fiction created by the state, by government, by We the People. Without publicly-granted charters (i.e. licenses) to do business, corporate entities, apart from its owners and employees, could not exist. A corporation is, thus, a public entity. Charters granted to individuals to run corporations early in U.S. granted privileges. Period. They had no constitutional rights.
Any abolition movement to end corporate rule will only be successful when enough people stop believing that corporate power, which is directly tied to corporate constitutional rights, is as inevitable as chattel slavery was believed to be inevitable; that corporate institutions, like the institution of slavery, is too powerful to resist; that it’s not realistic to expect that people’s rights should trump corporate rights; and that corporate entities should have the power to plunder the natural world since they have fundamental constitutional rights, but nature does not. The movement to abolish all corporate constitutional rights is impossible unless this single factor is deeply accepted by the majority of people.
Abolitionists didn’t ultimately seek anti-slavery laws or executive decrees, knowing that what may be enacted today could be reversed tomorrow. Nor did they seek something akin to a “Slavery Protection Agency” to regulate the number of slaves that could be held by any one master, the number of children of enslaved parents that could be sold, or the number of times per day slaves could be beaten. Rather, the uncompromising goal was abolishing the institution of chattel slavery. The result was the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery (except for prisoners), the 14th Amendment granting previously enslaved persons and others many rights and the 15th Amendment permitted black men the vote.
The immorality and perversion of constitutionally defining artificial legal fictions as human persons has led to massive harms to individuals, communities and the natural world – as well as to our ability to govern ourselves as corporate entities have become more powerful and less accountable. Corporate constitutional rights are not just illogical. They’re immoral. This takes on greater importance as philosophers, scientists, engineers and politicians debate the future of whether robots and artificial intelligence (AI) should be anointed with constitutional “personhood” rights. Morality and ethics contrasting corporate rights with human rights – as well as the rights to live in a sustainable world via rights of nature – need to be more incorporated into our discussions and strategies.
Beyond working for a constitutional amendment to abolish corporate constitutional rights and money as speech, Move to Amend has always had a “commitment to anti-oppression within ourselves, communities, workplaces, policies, and representation.” As the Trump 2.0 administration targets people of color (including immigrants), women, trans individuals, the poor and differently-abled, it’s imperative we find ways to act in solidarity by avoiding polarization and divide and conquer strategies of the power elite. Any authentically diverse and powerful movement composed of many groups for real systemic change has to be diverse and needs to be, as was frequently the case in the 19th century abolition movement, led by those most directly connected who have experienced the greatest injustices, have direct experiences that need to be shared and whose voices authentically must be heard.
Many of these same constituencies are those who’ve been most directly harmed by corporate rule. These include those without money who’s political voices are drowned out by massive campaign expenditures from the power elite, small business persons and low income farmers unable to receive preferential treatment by local or state governments because it discriminates against large corporations under the 14th Amendment, low income workers endangered on the job due to 4th Amendment corporate privacy rights preventing public workplace inspections, migrant workers not permitted to receive information about their rights while on the job since it violates a corporation's 5th Amendment takings rights, and women employees who can’t receive health care because it violates the religious rights of Hobby Lobby corporation.
Move to Amend organized an "Arts and Culture" Caucus for a few years. Its goal was to develop and share artistic mediums linking our political and movement building agenda with culture. We maintain a collection of stories, music, artwork, poems, etc, as well as a vast array of literature -- both print and electronic -- to share. Much more is needed.
Finally, a word on violence. There were numerous slave-led violent rebellions and, of course, a Civil War between the states over slavery. Space and time here doesn’t permit a detailed examination of whether emancipation in both the short- and long-term was aided or hindered by the mass violence of war.
The relevant question for us is does violence as a strategy have a role to play today in the quest to abolish corporate constitutional rights and money as speech. This is more than theoretical as more and more nonviolent avenues for change (i.e., elections, lobbying, lawsuits, free speech, protesting) become more difficult to achieve, less effective or criminalized). This has given rise to killing a UnitedHeathCare CEO, increasing violent rhetoric toward billionaires, and worse.
There is already massive and ever-growing opposition to corporate power and the corrupting influence of money in elections, including growing opposition to Elon Musk’s unilateral actions to cut workers, programs and funding that will harm tens of millions of people – including Trump supporters.
There’s a universe of potential nonviolent strategies and tactics involving symbolic protest and persuasion; social, economic and political noncooperation; and intervention to gum up the wheels of a system that have been used effectively in other times and places. Violence risks alienating neutral supporters, further hardens civilian opposition, invites provocateurs, justifies the unleashing of much greater violence by the state and, as history shows, is more often than not less effective than civil resistance.
There are a few of the many current lessons for Move to Amend from the 19th century abolition movement.
In solidarity
Greg Coleridge
National Co-Director
