From Wilberforce to Obama | Previous Challenge Entry

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TITLE: From Wilberforce to Obama | Previous Challenge Entry
By Sonya Leigh
01/29/09
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Dear President Obama,

I pray this letter finds you well, particularly after I impart to you from whence it comes. Though we have never met, the whisperings of your election have found their way to my tomb at none other than the North Transept of Westminster Abbey.

Please know that I am in earnest when I say that writing this letter alarms me just as much receiving it alarms you. Imagine my surprise when a Voice from Heaven summoned me to “execute yet one more imperative, of utmost importance.” Indeed, when I first discovered that I had been summoned from the dead, only to arrive in the year 2009, I imagined it to be merely a dream from the afterlife.

Oh, but how my ears were blessed, as though hearing soft sounds of silk flapping in a gentle breeze, when the momentous occasion of January 20, 2009 was confirmed as true —I can hardly believe it even as I pen the words—the swearing in of a Negro president to serve our America, as it were.

It can never be deemed too long ago that America and Great Britain shared the common shame of slavery. In that abhorrent trade of our time, many of the slaves were treated as cattle—nay—not even as such, but cast into the lowest depths of a ship, chained two by two and treated with the same regard as vile excrement, to be discarded into the sea with ease as one would cast off bodily waste.

I am sure you are aware, Mr. President, of the process which took place in the House of Commons in the year 1789, where I, as inadequate and fearful as imaginable, wholeheartedly led the charge for the abolition of the slave trade.

The scales of hell must have covered the eyes of men then, who were able to violently sever men and women from their beloved country as they were overwrought with tears. Likewise a deafness stole away the pity of men’s ears, even when they heard the haunting songs of the slaves, born out of their sorrow and grief, knowing all the while that their fellow human beings were suffering irremediable losses at their own bloody hands.

But we were all as guilty as they. For the waging of such a war for the abolition of the slave trade had to begin at this level of culpability, without whose solidarity of guilt we could not have stood against evil as one; rather we would have been caught in an unresolved cycle of blame.

Mr. President, I am now asking you for the same measure of compassion that overturned such a horrible injustice then: to repeal and revoke an equally condemnable injustice being carried out now. I speak of the hardened men and women of today who conceal themselves in the shadows of blame, while millions of unborn children are being murdered in that most inconceivable of horrors, abortion.

The bloodiest, deadliest of wars was fought upon your own soil not long ago—brother against brother—to abolish slavery. Oh, what lives were sacrificed to emancipate our fellow man, all because it was right and true to speak for those without a voice, to deliver those who were in bondage, to protect the inalienable rights of those men and women whose gifts and talents had been cut short by their oppressors. Yet only two short centuries passed, a moment in time, before we all became guilty of blood once again.

We spat out reprehensible reasoning then to justify those atrocities, and now we vomit the same reasoning upon our unborn children, the most innocent of the human race.

Mr. President, I implore you to scrutinize the similarities of these two indictments against us, for what is being done now has its roots in the same act of supreme selfishness as it did then. It was out of pure self-indulgence that men desired to own slaves, that they could spend on pleasure and lighten their own burdens by placing it on the backs of others.

Likewise, today, we seek to escape the responsibility of life. However, just as we could not exculpate ourselves then, neither can we discharge ourselves now from the murder of innocent lives, created by God Almighty. I appeal to you to speak on behalf of the unborn, to not allow the blood of innocents to linger upon the hands of America and Britain any longer.

I await your reply.

Sincerely,
William Wilberforce

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