This is an important speech to remember, especially on Independence Day.
I recently posted on a related topic on my blog (which is on www.valexandrov.com) and which is dedicated to things connected with, and circling around, my forthcoming book, THE BLACK RUSSIAN. This is the biography of the remarkable (and largely forgotten) Frederick Bruce Thomas, the son of former slaves in Mississippi who went on to become a millionaire in pre-Revolutionary Moscow and was the first to import jazz to Constantinople in 1919:
The New York Times ran an article on its front page yesterday about the Daughters of the American Revolution, a patriotic organization that used to be notoriously racist, but that now accepts African-American women as members. The article mentions that some 5,000 blacks fought on the colonists’ side during the Revolution, out of 400,000 whites. Not all blacks did so willingly, although some did; and not all those who fought to win their freedom from slavery actually received it. Nevertheless, today’s descendants of these men are justifiably proud of their ancestors. But the article does not mention that far more black people chose the British side during the Revolution. Why would they have done so? Simon Schama in his Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution (2006) describes how tens of thousands of black people voted “with their feet for Britain and King George” during the Revolution because the last royal governor of Virginia had announced that any slave owned by a rebellious colonist who escaped and served the king would be freed. Tens of thousands did so, fleeing to Nova Scotia, and unleashing one of the great exoduses in American history. However, in the end, many were betrayed by the British and had to flee farther, to Sierra Leone on the coast of West Africa.