Weekly Column:   –  “In Southern Missouri and across this great country, we take pride in our citizenship.  Being a natural-born American is something that would be easy to take for granted, but we don’t.

Our civil rights to voting, to public education, and to equal protection under the law are rare in the world – though not as rare as they used to be.  Many men, women and children around the globe live in the absence of these freedoms.  In the U.S., we know how precious they are, which is why we serve our communities, take part in our representative system of government, and serve our nation in uniform.  These are no small acts of patriotism, because the freedoms we treasure as Americans are not small, either.
                               
Yet it is important to remember during the month of February that African-American History Month provides important reminders that these freedoms were long denied to Americans based on nothing more than the color of their skin.

Two hundred years ago, the slave trade was outlawed in the United States.  Fifty-five years ago, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in the matter of Brown v. Board of Education that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.  Though the case explicitly pertained to the public school system in Topeka, the ramifications of the Court’s ruling would form the basis of a national argument against segregation.  Over a long period of time, the struggle for human rights and civil rights in our country has slowly unfolded.

Are our freedoms fragile?  Ask anyone who grew up during the civil rights movement.  Are civil liberties precious?  Ask their parents.

African-American History Month gives us many American heroes to reflect upon; men and women who, despite the discrimination they faced, made enduring contributions to our great nation.  The preciousness of freedom was not lost on them, even if they were not allowed to enjoy the full fruits and benefits of the civil rights every American ought to enjoy.

Frederick Douglass, who escaped a life of slavery to become our most renowned and most effective American abolitionist – he fought for women’s rights along with African-Americans’ rights, and he was the first African-American Vice Presidential candidate.  Harriet Tubman helped bring enslaved African-Americans to freedom on the Underground Railroad.  George Washington Carver made contributions to science and agriculture that changed the shape of American fields and the American dinner table forever.  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other peaceful leaders of the civil rights era put their lives and liberty at risk for principles of equality obtained by nonviolent revolution.

The lessons of these pioneers and patriots ought to instruct us in our own lives.  If this is what African-Americans endeavored to do for our country during the darkest hours of slavery and racism, then what will we do in our free lives to honor their contributions?  Will we serve in uniform?  Will we vote in every election?  Will we volunteer in our communities?

It’s not an accident that in a nation where we have the liberty of relatively few restrictions on our private lives – we must always do something to save the gift of freedom for Americans of the future.”