The arc of history bends toward justice

Thanksgiving is a holiday for reflection. Many of us need to reflect on our dietary habits and waistlines. Some reflect on whether the football team to which they pledge loyalty is returning their support with adequate performance. Some, including the original Pilgrim celebrants, in 1621, used the day to reflect on what they saw as God's providence in allowing 50 percent of their original company to survive that first year in the wilderness.

At a time when many people are demanding that we set up surveillance of the temples of "un-American" religions, or take away the First Amendment rights of all sorts of dissenters, from college presidents to the homeless, it might be useful to spend some time reflecting on the history and role of law in some of our national debates over liberty.

"The arc of history bends toward justice." Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s faith might seem like pie in the sky to people who lived through the police dogs, fire hoses, church bombings and bus burnings of the civil rights movement. And to those who grew up hearing about those things from parents and grandparents, and now watch an apathetic society automatically blame the victim in every case of police shooting an unarmed, non-white child.

It might be helpful to recall that the First Nations people who helped the Pilgrims survive their first years in the new wilderness, and celebrate the first Thanksgiving, were rewarded with government gifts of disease-infested blankets and mass extermination. But now, almost 400 years later, First Nations and their children are protected by the Indian Child Welfare Act, and are using their casinos to drain the wallets of the descendants of their colonial oppressors. They collect (at least some of) the revenues from royalties on the resources drilled and mined on their lands.

Similarly, we legislated against the Chinese and the Irish. The Irish grew to dominate the politics of some major cities. And today's racist thought about the Chinese is that they are too smart for most people to fairly compete with. Social control legislation often reveals more about the legislators' unspoken beliefs than about the people or subjects being legislated.

When Nat Turner led a slave rebellion, in 1831, Virginia and other states passed laws making it illegal to teach blacks (slave and free) to read and write, and prohibited even black church assemblies. Turner had been able to read and write, and was a Baptist preacher. Legislating mandatory illiteracy was an indication that white slave owners knew full well what the world learned in the century after the Civil War - blacks were as educable as anyone else, and would be formidable if allowed to become literate.

Similar knowledge underlies present day efforts to restrict minority voting in red states. And the same concept underlay historic legislation to restrict labor organizing. When people use the phrase "pie in the sky" to refer to false promises and vain hopes, they are quoting from a 1911 labor organizing song by Joe Hill.

His union, the IWW, organized the 1912 Lawrence, Mass., mill strike that led to the first congressional hearings on child labor and abusive factory conditions. Hill was executed by the state of Utah in the week before Thanksgiving, 1915. But his phrase "pie in the sky," and songs he wrote and songs that were written about him, continue in popular circulation.

Summer camps have the song "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night" as a folk standard, along with Hill's "Rebel Girl" (to 2015 ears, 1915 Joe Hill sounds very sexist). We use "pie in the sky" as a common colloquialism. And even the Republican presidential candidates mouth IWW-sounding concerns about the need to increase workers' wages, reduce (if not close) the gender pay gap, and the need to address immigration reform (just not yet).

The arc of history does bend toward liberty. The Pilgrims at the first Thanksgiving were thankful for their escape from religious oppression to a place where they could be religiously oppressive. But at Thanksgiving in 2015, the Chinese we once excluded, the blacks we kept in slavery, the Jews we wouldn't let escape here from Nazi Germany, will all participate. They will thank whom they choose, without compulsion from the state. They will pray or not, according to individual choice. And over post dessert coffee, or while washing the dishes, or watching the game, they will argue about whether the arc of history has bent too far or not far enough.

Thomas M. Hall is a certified specialist in family law practicing in West Los Angeles.