Quote from Rosemary Bray

Quote from author Rosemary Bray in the documentary film A More Perfect Union:

When people wrote “All men are created equal,” they really meant men; but they didn’t mean any other men except white men who owned land. That’s what they meant. But because the ideas are powerful, there’s no way that they could get away with holding to that. It’s not possible when you have an idea that’s as powerful and as revolutionary as a country founded on the idea that just because you’re in the world, just because you’re here, you have a right to certain things that are common to all humanity. That’s really what we say in those documents. The idea that we begin the Constitution with, “We, the People” . . . even though they didn’t mean me! They had no idea I’d ever want to make a claim on that. And they’d have been horrified if they’d known that any of us would. But you can’t let that powerful an idea out into the world without consequences. ¹

• 1Rosemary Bray, quoted in “Toward a More Perfect Union in an Age of Diversity,” PBS website, companion materials to A More Perfect Union, accessed May 22, 2018.