"FREEDOM"

A DEFINITION OF "FREEDOM" Constitutional rights are personal, individual, in application. So the U.S. Supreme Court held in the 1935 case Murray v. Maryland, prosecuted by Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall. The Supreme Court decreed that the black plaintiff was to remain as a student at the all-white University of Maryland School of Law, due to the State of Maryland having failed to make available to him a separate but equal law school, as Plessy v Ferguson (1896) had mandated. The Court held similarly in Gaines v. Canada (1939). As in Maryland, the State of Missouri had failed to make available to Lloyd Gaines of St. Louis a separate but equal law school to the University of Missouri to which he was denied admission due to his race, African American. Here, too, Lloyd Gaines' personal, individual constitutional rights had been abridged in violation of law. We are accustomed to think of our rights as corporate or group rights, and as not personal or individual. This piquant point occurred to me when reading the wonderful legal discursive, ROOT AND BRANCH: CHARLES HAMILTON HOUSTON, THURGOOD MARSHALL AND THE STRUGGLE TO END SEGREGATION, by Rawle James, Jr. (2010). I read it, after having read a memorable quote in UNCLE TOM'S CABIN by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852), that defines "rights" as "freedom," through a character in her classic. That quote reads: "What is freedom to a nation but freedom to the individuals in it? What is freedom to that young man who sits there with his arms folded across his broad chest , the tint of African blood in his cheek, its dark fires in his eye--what is freedom to George Harris? To your fathers, freedom was the right of a nation to be a nation. To him, it is the right of a man to be a man and not a brute; the right to call the wife of his bosom his wife, and to protect her from lawless violence; the right to protect and educate his child; the right to have a home of his own, a religion of his own, a character of his own, unsubject to the will of another." P.356. (1852, 1987) Constitutional rights are freedom, are personal freedom, your and my freedom, to be who we are; doing what we can or want to make life better for ourselves and our family.