In the over five decades since Dr. King laid out his dream at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, our country has made great progress toward racial equality by destroying Jim Crow, expanding voting rights, and more thoroughly integrating our society.
Today, black people hold seats in Congress, the Cabinet, Fortune 500 company boardrooms and, of course, the Oval Office.
The ideas of the American Revolution — individualism, natural rights and free markets — led logically to agitation for the extension of civil and political rights to those who had been excluded from liberty, as they were from power.
Leading abolitionists called slavery “man stealing,” in that it sought to deny self-ownership and steal a man’s very self. Their arguments paralleled those of John Locke and the libertarian agitators known as the Levellers. William Lloyd Garrison wrote that his goal was not just the abolition of slavery but “the emancipation of our whole race from the dominion of man, from the thraldom of self, from the government of brute force.” Frederick Douglass likewise made his arguments for abolition in the terms of classical liberalism and libertarianism: self-ownership and natural rights.
Slavery is long gone, but it is hardly coincidence that the descendants of slaves have accounted for disproportionate percentages of Americans in poverty and incarceration in the 150+ years hence. Save Emancipation and America’s reluctant recognition of the 14th Amendment by way of Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s, the government has consistently (though not exclusively) been a boot on the necks of African-Americans, hindering progress and true equality.
A D.C.-based public policy research organization (or "think tank") dedicated to the values of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.
