In the ashy aftermath of Ferguson, Missouri, after over one hundred seventy U.S. cities faced spirited and sometimes violent protests, it was disturbing in the extreme to hear President Barack Obama come out and call for respect for the rule of law. In his case, it was particularly ironic given the fact that when he was born — at a time when the very marriage of his mother and father, a white person and a Black person, was a crime in several dozen states. Indeed, it was only in 1967 in the Loving vs. Virginia case, that the laws against interracial marriage — at the time, the law in some sixteen states, were struck down. At the time, Obama was a six-year-old boy. In some parts of the U.S., his very birth was a crime.
Interracial marriage was against the law in roughly a third of the United States, and in those states, wasn’t that the rule of law? For law can be just or unjust. Dr Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, said “The law must serve man, not man serve the law.” John Africa, founder of the MOVE organization, said, “Just because it’s legal, don’t make it right.”
The rule of law in a nation that legally enslaved Africans for centuries, that exploited, raped, lynched and disfranchised Black folks legally, means different things to different people. We readily forget that the Holocaust in Germany against Jews, Romani, Sinti and Poles, was legal. Apartheid in South Africa, legal. stop-and-frisk, until very recently, was perfectly legal. All were allowable under the rule of law. It took long, bitter and yes, sometimes violent protests, to bring these injustices to light and begin to change them.
The late Dr. Nelson Mandela was, we forget, a lawyer, but he became the head of the ANCs, or African National Congress’, military wing to fight against the unjust system of apartheid. He knew intimately about the rule of law. That’s why he fought it so relentlessly by armed struggle. He knew then, the keen limits of the rule of law. From in prison nation, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
