A freedman-politician speech demanded immediate civil rights as natural and God-given

Evidence

Like to the Rushing of a Mighty Wind Tracy K. Smith I rise. I rise, lifting my voice. … Weary of bondage, sorrow, adjudication delayed, they wait and they wait. The feelings which animate them are, by God’s law, natural, logical. Alone, my own race acts in interrogation: Would the country believe its borders wide enough for all truly loyal men to find within them peace? … And be that loyal man black, will his pursuit of liberty and happiness find feuds and contentions, death and disaster, the very air dark as an ugly dream? Many of my race sleep in the countless graves of the South. If our dead could speak, what a voice, like to the rushing of a mighty wind, would come up from the ground. Her whole people, white and colored, should race to each other wholly and with honor, meet and fit for admission of events transpired. Now, sir. Sir, now. I wish my last word upon the bill before us to be: Now. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 824

Categorization

• QUESTION: Which ‘bill before us’ is this oration urging passage of — likely Reconstruction-era civil rights legislation, worth confirming the specific bill and speaker this poem is ventriloquizing.