A Battle Between the Two Souls of America

We the people of the United States do not have a single national soul, but rather two souls, warring with each other. The battle for the soul of America is actually the battle between the souls of America.

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If God breathes souls into humans, then humans breathe souls into nations. What did the Founding Fathers (and the Founding Mothers they barred from participating as equals) breathe into America? Into Americans? Into American politics? Into American culture? Into American policies and practices? Into American institutions?

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There have been many battles between the souls of America on many issues. Both souls—the soul of justice, the soul of injustice—were there at the founding, in the 1770s and ’80s. They battled during the Continental Congresses. They battled in the First Congress. The soul of injustice defeated the soul of justice with the battle cry of “necessary evil” by the end of the 18th century. But the defeated soul of justice battled on in the shadows of history. In an 1844 letter to his fellow abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass called for a “great moral and religious movement” that involved “the quickening and enlightening of the dead conscience of the nation into life, and to a sense of the gross injustice, fraud, wrong and inhumanity of enslaving their fellow-men,—the fixing in the soul of the nation an invincible abhorrence of the whole system of slaveholding.”

Instead, racist Americans compromised on manacled bodies again in 1850, as they had in 1820 in Missouri, as they had at the founding in Philadelphia. The Civil War, which started as an effort to put the soul of injustice back in its slaveholding place, transformed into a battle between the souls of the nation. The soul of justice won the Civil War but lost the battle. The soul of injustice defeated the soul of justice with the battle cry of “separate but equal” by the end of the 19th century. But once again, the soul of justice battled on in the shadows of history.

Then came the Great Migration, and a New Deal for some of those who migrated north, and the great Ella Baker and Rosa Parks. Lawyers like Thurgood Marshall took the soul of injustice to the Supreme Court, and preachers like Martin Luther King Jr. chose “to save the soul of America,” the motto of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, newly formed in 1957.

The soul of justice won the civil-rights movement but yet again lost the battle. Once again, racist Americans imposed a compromise, conjuring a Black criminal menace rather than acknowledging the continued crime of racist policies leading to racial inequity. The soul of injustice defeated the soul of justice with the battle cry of “color-blind” by the end of the 20th century.