Alan Keyes
September 22, 1995

"The Real Moment of Liberation"

[Last part of Congressman Bob Dornan's introduction to Alan Keyes]

Rep. Bob Dornan: . . . that's why Alan's in this race, one of the best political speakers I've ever seen in my life. What a lift, to go and get bored by people who will not commit to any solid set of principles--and that's friends of mine like Dole and Gramm. Specter just went out and had a fundraiser by an abortionist, Dr. George Killerteller in Wichita, Kansas, who specializes in 7th month abortions and 8th month abortions--and this one will blow your mind: the next time you see a woman who's 9 months pregnant, particularly if she happens to be your wife and you love her, he specializes in 9 month abortions. That's pretty ghastly, and he's fundraising for Arlen Specter, who stands before us and tells us that he's against abortion? What's he doing in Wichita, Kansas?

And then, on the other side, with the exception of Pat, but Alan and I want to reach out to the world with the American Dream! We don't want to circle the wagons! This is not fortress America! . . . But now we're joined by a series of millionaires:

Mori Taylor, who showed up with 50 women on Harleys! Why didn't you and I think of that?! $800 black leather outfits . . . these were nice looking ladies, 50 of them! That's not the Dornan Campaign, I know that. Here comes a guy that, when you think of them jumping on Dan Quayle for looking like the deer caught in the headlights, this guy really does look like the deer caught in the headlights. This guy Malcolm Forbes really does look like he's trapped in the headlights, he's going to spend 25 million of his own money--excuse me, his father's money--and he also comes out pro-abortion.

So now we've got Specter, Wilson--who thought he was going to win with pro-abortion. Alan and I are scratchin' for our funds. You know, he founded this great group, even the founder can only get a few bucks out of it, Pete Wilson just let go, I don't know if Alan was shocked by this, but I went "WOW!" I'm feeling great about this race, 90 paid employees. He hired a young guy 18 months out of college a month ago, $38,000 a year, as an advance man! I said, "How can he do this?"--you can't, he just let him go, and let 90 people go with him. He's a million dollars in debt, and the Post report on Washington Weekend Review said: "This is the greatest implosion of a political campaign in the history, in the history of modern politics, in the history of modern politics."

So Wilson, Spector, now Mori Taylor, and then Malcolm Forbes, all pro-abortion--and now comes "Kahlin" Powell. I have a grandson named "Kahlin."

I said [to Colin Powell], "Kahlin, what is this 'colon' stuff? That's your upper GI tract!" And he goes, "My parents call me Kahlin, my brothers and sisters and brother-in-laws all call me Kahlin, my friends from grade school and high school all call me Kahlin--they picked that up in ROTC." I said, "Well, excuse me! I have a grandson Kahlin, he's so young I can even tell people I named him after you! So I'll call you Kahlin!" "Hey, my parents do. Be my guest." So, that's an inside thing, I will call him Kahlin.

Colin Powell read all the polls so hard over the last two years, and I have Terry Dornan whom you've met, her husband is a book rep for this coast, the whole coast for Little Brown--he said every thing Colin is doing is perfect to drive book sales, absolutely perfect! He's breaking all the records, he said, but he read too many polls, and only Bill Sneider on PBS sinked up that his every view is perfectly synchronized with the majority opinion, with the first weak question asked, not only nationally, but in the Republican Party--and if you will get, 2 weeks ago, TIME Magazine, and read this profile on Colin, you will see in the end that it is so much pablum that you can't figure out where he stands, and it ends with a spin on John F. Kennedy's "ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."

We need men of courage, women of courage, who only die once in their lives, when God calls them. It is the weak person, what Margaret Thatcher used to call "the wets"--I said to her once personally, "You mean a wet finger in the air taking polling?" "Oh, NO! NO! I mean like a wet, limp, dishrag!" Oh, I said, that's even better, I though you mean a wet finger in the air testing the winds." These people who try to play the political game, by seeking election--the President, with focus groups electrically wired, watching something, or by polling--they're not the men and women that are going to have to lead this country out of this moral morass.

The people who are going to lead us out of the mess are the courageous people like our main speaker here today. You referred to one of your co-founders as a brother. I'll tell you, my friend, this race, after 8 months, I feel like you're my brother, and you and I are going to be around a long time, I feel it!

I said this once in a Senate race that Pete Wilson won. There were 13 people in. I said, "When it's all over, it will be the winner and me." And that's exactly the way it turned out. Pete Wilson, he of "the implosion," and myself still on the scene 13 years later and when this race is all over, it's going to be whoever the winner is, and if it's not going to be one of us, it's going to be that winner and who knows what will happen to him on November 5th, 1996. And Alan Keyes and Bob Dornan, God willing our health, we're going to go around trying to lead this country out of the mess that 40 years in the desert with no principle and no philosophy has gotten us into. I give you a courageous man whom I love to listen to in the presidential debates, Alan Keyes. [applause]

Alan Keyes: Thank you! Thank you very much! [BAMPAC sign falls from the podium as Alan takes it] Now, I am not supposed to be susceptible to ancient thoughts and omens, so let's see if we can get that to stay. Is that going to stay? Are you gonna stay up there, sign?!

Thank you very much, Bob! I really appreciate it! Did he go?! Oh! There you are! You're sitting there! You're moved!

I am going to, since I am, in a sense, so intimately among friends this evening, I'm going to take the liberty to speak with that same intimacy . . .

Ah! Ha-ha! leave it to Alvin to make SURE it doesn't come down! That's it! Get it up there properly! It's not gonna fall again! Now you know why I like Alvin Williams, right?!

I want to speak tonight--actually, I'm going to speak in the same vein I always do, because, it's interesting, people think that I give a lot of different speeches; some folks say they have followed me around and they rarely hear me give the same one twice, but it's not true, really. I am always talking about the same thing. I tried to explain it to someone the other day, and I said my speeches are the same body, I just dress it up in different clothes sometimes. And it will be this evening. But I do it in a context that is especially close to my heart, and I want to share with you some thoughts that, oh, I don't know, I don't very often get an opportunity to share, but which I think are extremely important to me, at least, because they touch on the relationship between the public and the private, between what I try to do in public life and what I am as an individual.

Because, you see, at some level being here for Black America's Political Action Committee is, for me, or could appear to be, a kind of contradiction. Because I'm not one who goes around the country usually preaching the kind of approach to politics or anything else that would have Americans banning together in their different groups and squabbling with each other, and thinking of ourselves as if we were blacks over here, and whites over there, and Protestants and Catholics over there, and all divided up the way that a lot of people in our politics seem to want to do.

I try to emphasize, more than anything else when I speak, what I believe are the common American principles--the things that constitute our ability as individuals to transcend all those differences and to find the common core of beliefs and principles that we have in common and that constitute our identity as a people--and by speaking from those things, I hope, everywhere I go, to remind people that there's a lot more to what we are than all our differences.

Now, that can be some serious work sometimes--because, you know, if you're going to have common principles, if you're going to have a common set of values, then you've got to apply them, you've got to live by them, you've got to take them seriously enough that they affect your judgments and influence the way you behave. And there's a big struggle going on in our country right now among those who want to lead us down a path that deserts those principles, and that lives as if some technical formula is going to arrange the material world in such a way that we can dispense with moral judgment.

The battle is going on between those forces and those who understand that there is no escape from moral principle, that we will not be able to survive as a people if we abandon those basic ideas of right and wrong, of justice and fairness and decency, without which we cannot understand ourselves as one people, one nation.

Now, I don't know how that struggle is going to turn out, and I've got to tell you that there are people on one side and the other of it, they wear all kinds of labels.

A Republican is no guarantee that you're not a kind of mindless materialist, who doesn't take moral things seriously.

"Conservative" is no guarantee that you're not somebody who believes that if we just make enough money out of a problem, we'll be able to solve it.

Of course, liberalism these days has long since been identified with a view of human life that reduces everything to its materialistic dimensions, and believes that if we structure them the right way with enough government power and enough government spending, we will be able to achieve some utopia.

Now, I happen to believe that both these views are wrong, that they represent one and the same thought, one and the same idea--and whatever label they wear, they lead this country down the same road to perdition. Because this nation, indeed, no nation can survive without a clear sense of its moral foundations--but this nation, most of all. Because that's all we have!

We do not have a common ethnic background, we do not have a common race, we do not have a common language, even, to a certain degree now. People come with all accents and all backgrounds. We've gathered them from everywhere in the world, and if we lose that common sense of our moral identity, if we lose that common sense of sharing the things that cannot be seen and touched, then the tangible things will divide us and disintegrate us and tear us apart, and we will lose the last best hope.

Now, that's all by way of preface, because we're here, obviously, in the context of celebrating the beginning of a Political Action Committee, as it's called these days, dedicated to trying to encourage and promote the participation, involvement and success of black Americans in politics--and in particular, in conservative and mostly probably Republican, but not always, politics.

Why would I be willing and interested in doing something that was therefore based on, it would seem like, the encouragement of the very divisions that I so often seem to speak against? Isn't that a contradiction? You see, I don't think it is.

Sometimes people misunderstand, me and others, when we speak about promoting and encouraging the common American identity. I don't think that that necessarily means that we're all going to become alike. I don't think it means that we all give up our background and heritage, and things that might, in some sense, because of that background, give us a special insight. I, in fact, believe that the background and heritage of different groups of people can give them a special word to add to that language with which we can understand our human condition, and I believe, and over the years now have managed, I think, and hope to put some substance behind the belief that black Americans, in particular, have something extraordinary and important to say to America.

I believe we have to say it, and I actually am more and more coming to believe that the moment that was shaped for our word is here.

In fact, I was having a conversation just a little earlier this evening with, what is your name? With Everett, who approached me and asked me about capitalism, and whether it was compatible with sort of morality--and I, in the course of responding to him, got to talking about something that then came very close to what I was going to talk about this evening. We got to talking about the special insight that results from the history of Black America. And I believe that that's an insight that is kind of different than what we so often hear about these days--and we are hearing an awful lot of stuff now, by the way, that I think is highly distorted and likely to lead in a very bad direction.

I'm sorry to say that some of it is coming out of colleagues who, I guess, used to bear the label "neoconservative," but appear to be headed down roads that will give them rather more unpleasant labels if they're not careful; people who are intent on looking at all the bad things that they can find about the black community and Black America and the black situation, the black condition and so forth, and while making a point that is true, which is a point that goes to the question of what the moral decay is doing to the black community, they create an impression that is false, that that decay is somehow a consequence of the Black American identity. And that is a lie.

See, you look back at the history of this country, and yes, over the last 30, 40, 50 years, what has everybody concentrated on? Everywhere you look, every time you turn around, people concentrate on the material repression, oppression, suffering, and misery that black Americans went through during slavery and Jim Crow, and racism, and segregation--always looking at these things, just by-the-by, from the point of view of those who where doing the oppressing.

Looking at it from the point of view of those who were doing the beating and doing the exploiting and doing the buying and selling--looks pretty awful from that point of view. Nothing to be said for such a condition, when you see it from that point of view. From that point of view, black folks just look like the passive victims of terrible historical circumstances. And in that particular drama, they play a roll that lacks any kind of intrinsic or inner meaning or quality and that can hardly have any basis in it for inspiration or hope.

I guess that's what leaves me to understand, [to Rep. Dornan] you're talking about Kulin is it? I wouldn't want to mispronounce it, you're right! Kulin? Kulin as in? Kahlin! Kahlin, excuse me. Kahlin, as opposed to Colon. Kahlin Powell. But I read a little excerpt from his memoirs, [laughter] and at one point he basically expresses the view--and apparently he's been known to say this before--that he didn't have a problem with a sense of self-worth, because his parents were from Jamaica, and he therefore didn't look back to the heritage of slavery, as opposed, I guess, to folks like myself, who do look back to the heritage of slavery, and by implication, therefore, have a problem with our sense of self-worth. Now, I would tell Colin Powell that, though he was a General and my father was only an NCO, I grew up with a very strong sense of self-worth. It actually had something to do with a right understanding of that heritage of slavery. I also tell others that, as long as he takes that view, I hope no one will insult me in the future with the suggestion that we are part of the same group, because we are not.

If he has not learned how to look back at the Black American heritage and understand that in it which is a cause for pride, then he had better step back, and learn again, before he puts himself forward as anything that will symbolize that heritage.

For, there is something in it, that, well understood, learns to look upon the truth with different eyes than those of the oppressor, and to understand that human beings degraded, human beings suppressed, human beings enslaved are human beings still, and that the secret of how you maintain that spark, that kernel, that truth of humanity that is the great, the precious secret, the great and treasured strength of Black America.

See, and I look back, and I know that for all the lies that have been told in the last 20 or 30 years about the civil rights movement--you know, they've rewritten the history of things so that people are actually brought up, young black people are actually brought up to believe that the government ended the era of segregation! I'm sorry. The government did not. It was eventually registered in legislation in Washington, but the revolution that occurred in this country's heart, in this country's consciousness, in this country's conscience was not made by legislators in Washington. I was made by the people who marched and sang and prayed their way past the barriers of segregation and into the decent heart and conscience of the majority of Americans, and who did so with a courage unexampled in human history before, when everything was arrayed against them.

And the thing I've always wondered about, where did that strength come from? You see? From a people that was supposedly was dehumanized, destroyed, and crushed out, they tell us, by slavery. Where did the strength to move this nation's conscience come from? Where did the strength to brave the dogs? Where did the strength to endure the possibility of bombs, and threats, and death, where did it come from? If these are not human beings? Not degraded, not destroyed by oppression but somehow able to retain in spite of it, something so strong that it could overcome the deep, abiding, habit and prejudice of this entire nation and turn its heart around. You see?

Now, if you go back and you look at the heritage of Black America with that in mind, not trying to describe how we were oppressed, but in trying to explain how on earth we came through it all with that kind of spiritual strength, then you start to understand something a little different. You start to look back at the experience of slavery, and the wonderful thing about it is that now that the historians have been willing to take a better look, they actually have learned [that] a lot of the things that were written, particularly back in the 60's when Pat Moynihan was forming his misimpressions, they turn out not to be so true!

The notion, for instance, that the black family was destroyed by slavery--oh, beaten down, yes. Brutalized, yes. Very often torn asunder by economic exploitation, all of that's true. But in instance after instance, story after story, in statistic after statistic coming from that period, what comes forward is the story of a people who, however brutalized were their actual families, clung to the idea, clung to the instinct, clung to heart needed for family life in spite all the grief it caused them. And that, in itself, begins to tell us were we should look for the truth of the Black American identity.

See, pulling against all those forces, somehow or another people hold on to an idea that transcends their oppressed circumstances, and hold onto it with such strength, by the way, that when the slave period ended, black folks were able, in the course of the next 20 and 30 years, to reconstitute a family system that then survived all the vicissitudes of freedom! Disenfranchisement, lynching, the Ku Klux Klan, the depression, all of it.

And what explained it? You see, I think that what explained it is fairly simple, and I guess in that sense, what I am doing these days that people find so unusual is not unusual at all, because it is the only thing that I could do consistent with a true, I believe, understanding of my heritage.

For, I think, out of all of that, when you look for the secret of the spiritual and moral survival of Black America, there is only one answer, and it is an answer that sometimes these days, I guess, makes all the trendy intellectuals blush with shame. But it is the only answer possible.

What allowed black Americans to survive in slavery and freedom, in slavery and oppressive racism, in slavery and economic discrimination, in slavery and out, what allowed black Americans to survive was just one thing, and that one thing is faith in God! [applause]

Nothing else! See, and a heritage that was built around that faith in God has very important consequences for what you think of yourself, because as long as you have faith in God, you have a consciousness of a possession that cannot be touched by any material oppression whatsoever, cannot be bruised by it, cannot be destroyed by it, cannot be broken down by it, and you hold onto a dignity that, however bowed your body, can never desert your spiritual life.

And to me, all the time that I was going through my kind of education in this that and the other thing, trying to reconcile what I was learning with kind of what I felt about my own background, there was always this contradiction, because everything in this society tends to move us in a direction where we measure all things in material terms. Everything can be measured in dollars and cents, everything can be can be quantified, the only pleasures that matter are material pleasures, the only joys that have content are those you can touch and feel, everything moral is denigrated, everything material is elevated until finally there is no sense whatsoever that there is anything to human life and human individuality, except this feeble fragile material frame.

And you know what is the worst of it, from the point of view of black Americans, if we accept that way of looking at ourselves, then it means that the vital treasure that has been stored up by our experience is utterly devalued and debased.

Means nothing! Means nothing! And that's what brought it to mind when I was talking to Everett a few minutes ago, because, you see, in so far as black Americans today, whether left, right, or center, surrender to the trendy materialism of our times, what they may or may not realize is that in that surrender, they are surrendering the most important, the most precious thing about their heritage.

Because, if there is one word to be spoken from the Black American experience, if there is one idea to be conveyed to our fellow Americans, it is the word that understands that, as human beings, we are not to be measured by any material measure at all--that our worth is not what we can fetch on the auction block, whether it be the auction block of slavery, the auction block of politics, or the auction block of career and profit.

All those things are not the measure of human beings, because there is something in each and everyone of us that when all of that is gone, when everything is lost, when everything is taken away, when you have nothing whatsoever, when even your ownership of your own body is in question, there is something still that will endure--as it endured in the father who endured as a slave to have his hand cut off before he would abandon his son; as it endured in those who, even in the depths of slavery, still held on to the ownership of their family love and remembered their mothers and brothers and fathers and sisters through all the years until they could be re-found.

That is a kind of life, a kind of strength, a kind of spirit, a kind of being that nothing can destroy, nothing can take away, and that, therefore, in the end, can triumph over every material oppression.

See, and I think that the Black American experience--and this is one of the reasons why in my book "Masters of the Dream" I was so presumptuous as to give the book that title! Because, after all, you have the standard understanding of the American Dream, a dream of lucre and profit and materialism and material success and profit and gold and money in the bank and fancy car; how could you possibly say that a people enslaved who didn't even own their own bodies, that a people oppressed where 90% of them were in the depths of poverty, can be looked upon as the Masters of that little Dream? Not in any way.

But if the Dream that is at this heart of this country is instead a dream of human dignity, a dream of moral dignity that transcends every material measure, if it is a dream that measures up to what our Founders put in that first great document when they told us that our essence does not come from human measures of worth and money, but instead comes in the creative power and mind of Almighty God--at the moment when endowing us with unalienable rights, He breathes into each and everyone of us an indomitable piece of His Divine Essence (that's what it's all about)--then surely the people who manage to see everything material stripped away, and yet survived to stand before this nation as a shining example of courage and of dignity and of strength, surely such people are the Masters of the Dream.

And at a time like this, when it seems as if so many people have forgotten the real nature of what this country is about, when being after all the different little toys that they can play with, and all the speculative pleasures they can have, and all the titillation and all the money that they think they might get by whatever means, the one thing that as Americans we seem to be forgetting is that our country is not a dream of profit and money and material prosperity, it is a dream of human dignity and the triumph of the soul.

Who better, then, to stand up in the midst of all of this confusion, to rescue the essence of that dream from the flames of material sacrifice, who better than the people who were burned so deeply in those flames, yet lived to preach about it?

So, I do believe that if this nation has reached the culmination of its moral crisis that it is the time when Black America has something really special to say. If only we have the eyes to see in our own heritage, and the ears to hear out of that heritage the real voice of its truth.

I believe that that is also a responsibility and an obligation. In the end, I guess I think that the real liberation for black Americans will come not in the form of some day when we are recognized and accepted in all of these other things that people talk about. No. I think that the real moment of liberation comes when you realize that whatever it is that you're fighting for, whatever dignity, whatever justice, whatever fairness, whatever hope, it is not something that speaks only to yourself and to your own, but that must speak as well to and for every human being who could draw hope and inspiration from what in that moral and spiritual sense we have achieved.

It's one of the reasons, I guess, that I always take the abortion issue so seriously, because I think in a very special way, it may be a test on offer especially to black Americans. We who were so much in need of champions throughout the history of this country, called upon somehow to see beyond our preoccupation with our own misery and suffering and heritage of oppression, in order to become the champions of those more helpless, more vulnerable, more voiceless than we had ever been, and yet in need of the same principle to come to their aid and to rescue their lives.

The principle of justice founded on the will of God. This is the principle through which as a people we survived, and it is our understanding of that principle which may, at this key moment in this nation's life, be the trumpet that will awaken it again to integrity and decency and hope.

And that's why I especially think, at a practical level, it will be a travesty if somebody who claims to speak for the Black American tradition does so with a sense of contempt for its real meaning. That can happen. It won't be allowed to happen. God will not let this happen. You see? Because there is a special word for Black America to say. And Black America's Political Action Committee, I hope you'll see it in that context.

Oh, I know, there are people out there, and I've watched them over the years in Republican politics--there's something to be said for becoming a Republican, sometimes, because if you're black, you've been pretty outstanding without having to do anything. (Keyes and audience laugh) When you're few and you need to be spread out, you need to be pushed forward a little faster maybe, but you'll notice that that's changing--but I hope that that will not be the inspiration for this organization.

My inspiration for doing it was the hope that on a solid, self-reliant and independent ground we could create an organizational basis for coming together, understanding better what we can speak from as a people, and building a foundation that will allow the leadership within us to come forward and speak a word that will bear fruit, not only for black Americans but for all Americans, in this time of spiritual crisis that will lead, we hope, to spiritual renewal.

In that spirit, I commend you all for being here, and I hope that we will work together in the months and years ahead. And I hope that you'll realize, as well, that we cannot build this organization for this evening or next year or for any short time, but we must try to invest it with a sense that this will be an institution that can provide support for the delivery of this special message of the soul, from black Americans, to the Republican Party, to all Americans, for a long time to come.

For, the struggle in which we are engaged, the struggle for America's conscience and spirit and will, will go on for a long time. Generation after generation perhaps will have to be shaped and reshaped, claimed and reclaimed--and I hope that we will, ever mindful of the special heritage we bring, play the role of leadership I think God means us to play in that great struggle; moved not only by the fact that moral decay is claiming more lives and destroying more hopes in the black community than in any other, but also by the knowledge that, you know, they say that of those to whom much is given, much will be required. Isn't that what Christ said? But, you know, maybe you could think that of suffering, too.

Of those to whom much has been given in the way of insight from a history of suffering, much will be required in the way of wisdom to speak to all people about the real nature, the real value, the real worth of this our human life--and to speak to them out of the depths of that knowledge of the hope that never died in the black community because it was grounded on the faith that, however unjust this world appears, there is justice in the right hand of God.

That is the meaning of our experience. I think it will turn out to be the best meaning of the American experience. And in that hope, let us go forward. [applause]