A Thomas Transcript

Updated below, but here at last is a transcript of the speech Justice Thomas gave at UT Austin.

Some highlights from the first half only:

It is my sincere hope that your work to revitalize the teaching and research of Western civilization and the American constitutional tradition will lead the way in the reform of our nation's colleges and universities. And I hope that your example will help to rejuvenate our fellow citizens' commitment to the principles of the Declaration of Independence....

[A]ll too often the sentiments [voiced by the common culture] tend toward cynicism, rejection, hostility, and animus toward our country and its ideals. With the foregoing in mind, I would like to begin by addressing my first encounter with the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

It is perhaps not what you would immediately think. The second paragraph of the Declaration proclaims, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Throughout my youth, these truths were articles of faith that were impervious to bigotry and discrimination.

The American Heritage Dictionary of English Language defines self-evident as obviously true and requiring no proof, argument, or explanation. Whether they had a divine source or a worldly one, they were never questioned. They were the Holy Grail, the North Star, the Rock, immovable and unquestioned.

Despite the multiplicity of laws and customs that wreaked a bigotry, it was universally believed among those blacks with whom I lived and who had very little or no formal education that in God's eyes and under our Constitution, we were equal. This was also the case with my nuns, most of whom were Irish immigrants. At home, at school, and at church, we were taught that we are inherently equal, that equality came from God, and that it could not be diminished by man....

Somehow, without formal education, the older people knew that these God-given or natural rights preceded and transcended governmental power or authority. When you lived in a segregated world with palpable discrimination and the governments nearest to you enforced laws and customs that promoted unequal treatment, it was obvious that your rights or your dignity did not come from those governments, but rather from God. Though not a literate man, my grandfather often spoke of our rights and obligations coming from God, not from architects of segregation and discrimination.

Men were not angels. They were subject to the constraints of antecedent rights, and we were not subject to those men, even as we were subjected to their whims. We knew that life, liberty, and property were sacrosanct....

Arguably, those men committed treason against the king, risking death at the hands of an empire far mightier than the newborn United States. They thus concluded with the memorable final sentence, and I quote, and for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. I will say it again.

We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. Recently, I came across a definition of courage that is attributed to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.

In essence, the signers of the Declaration were saying that they were willing to die for the principles they were asserting, the supreme act of courage. Those principles were more important than their fear. Nothing in the Declaration of Independence, I now realize, matters without that final sentence.

 This is an address that merits reading and consideration throughout.