◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

We the People I was not included in We the people. When those men gathered in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 and wrote that eloquent beginning, they did not mean me. They did not mean the people who looked like me. They did not mean the women. But I made a decision. I decided that the failure was theirs, not the document's — that the words themselves reached further than the men who wrote them were willing to reach — and that my task was to hold the document to the standard of its own language until the language finally included me. Through amendment and interpretation and court decision, through marching and bleeding and refusing to move to the back of the bus — I have finally been included in We the people. And now I am watching the people who were always included — who never had to march a single mile or bleed a single drop for a single syllable — treat it as an inconvenience. In the summer of 1974 I sat on the House Judiciary Committee and listened to the evidence against Richard Nixon. I was thirty-eight years old. A Black woman from the Fifth Ward of Houston. The first Black Texas state senator since Reconstruction. The first Black woman elected to Congress from the Deep South. I had not come that far to be an idle spectator. I said: my faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution. I meant it then. I mean it now. The Constitution is a covenant — the specific agreement a people makes with itself about how power will be held, subject to what limits, accountable to what law. The covenant does not enforce itself. It requires people — specific, living, breathing people — to enforce it. When the people with that power look away — when they calculate that the covenant is less important than their political survival — the covenant breaks. Not all at once. Gradually. Small lines that widen until one day the house moves. Nixon understood he had broken something and resigned before the structure came down. What I am watching now is a man who does not believe the structure applies to him — who has found in the Congress a body too frightened to say what the Judiciary Committee said in 1974: This is not acceptable. This is not what the oath means. You took an oath. Not to a party. Not to a man. Not to a base or a calculation about surviving the next primary. To the Constitution. I know what it costs to keep that oath when keeping it is expensive. I grew up in a country that told me the Constitution did not include me. I kept faith with it anyway — because the only way to make the document mean what it said was to refuse to abandon it when it had not yet kept its promises. The document kept its promises to me. Eventually. I am asking you to keep yours to it. Now. While there is still something left to keep. I did not wait for America to include me. I held America to its own words until it had no choice. I am asking you to do the same. Not because it is easy. Because the covenant requires it. Because We the people — finally, fully, completely — includes you. And the people it includes are not idle spectators. My faith in the Constitution is whole. It is complete. It is total. Make yours the same. The document is worth it. I am the proof.