2005: Stuart Towns

Remarks to Freedom of Speech Run,  September 23, 2005

      We are here today to celebrate and pay tribute to one of the defining elements of our American culture: our Freedom of Speech. One of my fears about our nation is that we all too often take for granted what defines us and sets us apart from many other cultures and nations around the world. 

Freedom of Speech is one of those critical, defining characteristics.

Let me remind you of what the fundamental document of our nation says. Article One: Congress shall make no law . . .abridging the freedom of speech. . . .

Note that this is the first of the 10 amendments to the Constitution which were required by the states before they would accept and ratify the Constitution. “We the People” understood the importance of this freedom and in effect said, “We are not Americans” unless we have the right and the freedom to speak out against injustice, against bigotry, against evils and wrongs that we see in the world around us–unless we have the freedom to criticize, to amuse, to entertain, to defend, to reinforce our values, and to persuade.

Our Freedom of Speech has been used countless times in highly visible ways to change the status quo, to defend the values we hold dear. A very short list, even shorter than Letterman’s Top Ten List, would include things like the Abolition Movement, which finally culminated in the end of human bondage in America; the Labor Movement of the nineteenth century which gave the working man in America a better world in which to strive for the American Dream; and the Environmental Movement of the 1970s which has vastly improved the quality of our water and our air.

A classic example of Americans standing up and exercising their Freedom of Speech was the protest against the Viet Nam War in the 60s and 70s, in which many young Americans battled the establishment in opposition to a war they felt was injust and immoral. 

And no list of expressions of Freedom of Speech would be complete without the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, when thousands of young southerners, black and white, along with older Americans from across the racial divide and from around the nation, linked arms and hands and voices to force the nation and the South to change the second class citizenship of an entire race in America.

One of my heroes of that exercise of Freedom of Speech is Fannie Lou Hamer. Fannie Lou is a person you may not have heard of, but her immense spirit and courage and devotion to Freedom of Speech led her from her life as a poorly educated cotton share cropper in Mississippi to the palaces of power in America. In 1964, she simply believed in the American promise, and tried to register to vote. For simply trying to do what Americans believe in, she was severely beaten by the police in Mississippi. Weeks later, she spoke before a committee of the United States Congress and before the national Democratic Party Convention about her beliefs. She exercised her Freedom of Speech.    

After describing her beatings, she said to the Convention: “All of this is on account we want to register, to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America:  Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”

We take our freedoms for granted too often, but events like this run today help us focus from time to time on what we have and what we would lose if we are not willing to be beaten or harassed, or threatened as Fannie Lou Hamer was willing to endure and defend and fight for.