Human Dignity and Conscience in the Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Maya Angelou
At first glance, it seems like a very difficult task to find any real connection between the writings of Maya Angelou on the one hand and Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson on the other. After all, Emerson and Thoreau were Northern white men of the 19th Century who had never personally experienced the oppression of slavery of the type of segregation and inequality that Angelou grew up with in Stamps, Arkansas in the 1940s. Even though they both opposed slavery, and Thoreau was willing to defy the law and go to jail to uphold his principles, in the final analysis they had no real claim to be part of the nation’s most oppressed minority group. Even though slavery had been abolished for decades by the time Angelou was growing up, conditions in the rural South had hardly shown any dramatic improvement since that time, nor would they until the victories of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. There is one strong connection between Thoreau and Angelou in this respect, however, in that he was one of the pioneer theorists and philosophers of nonviolent civil disobedience that would later be used with considerable success by Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. They too were willing to defy the law, the state and social convention in their fight against injustice, even if the majority disagreed with them and was willing to passively acquiesce in evil. In Angelou’s segregated world, black communities also found the internal strength to uphold their basic dignity and humanity in the face of constant attempts to deny them even the most basic rights and opportunities. As individuals and as a group, they too had the power to choose how they would respond to the oppression and of the state and society, without giving in to hopelessness and despair. In this they were also self-reliant in the Emersonian sense, and indeed had no choice in the matter given that the government, economy and education system were all under the control of the white majority and dedicated to keeping them in a second-class status that was not too far removed from slavery.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s philosophy of democracy, equality and individualism that he presented in his article “Self-Reliance” (1841) came to be part of the American Creed, although at the time it was also clear that these principles did not apply to slaves. Emerson was an abolitionist who thought that blacks were also entitled to freedom and equal citizenship rights, but the reality in the U.S. was far different in 1841 or indeed for over a hundred years afterward. For Emerson, history was progressive, and it was made not only by the Great Men but by the ordinary people as well. Each human being had a divine spark or spirit that made them equal to kings and dukes, and the real purpose in life was not to imitate the educated elite or the traditions of the past but rather to “insist on yourself’ (Emerson 1841). All people were free to develop their own ideas about religion, government, art and economics instead of meekly copying what “society has chosen for us” (Emerson 1841). Nor did he believe that people should be respected because they had accumulated money, property and titles, all of which reflected the “want of self-reliance” (Emerson 1841). According to Emerson, the true measure of a person was not their wealth, power or status but what they were internally.
In his essay “Civil Disobedience” (1848), written in protest against the Mexican War, Henry David Thoreau also repeated many of these same ideas about placing the highest value on individual conscience rather than the dictates of society and the state. His act of choosing to go to jail rather than paying a tax to support the government later became a model for future nonviolent protest movements led by Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. Each individual had a choice whether to stand with the forces of evil and injustice in the world or fight against them, even to the point of facing death. He did not believe that the majority was always right, but that it was almost always wrong, and that only a minority of people would be willing to take any risks on behalf of justice and morality. Like many abolitionists, Thoreau believed that the state and federal governments were complicit in supporting slavery in the South and that the aggressive war against Mexico would also add more territory that would be open to the expansion of slavery. Most people passively acquiesced to injustice because they feared social disapproval or lacked any firm convictions, and they also obeyed the law out of habit. Thoreau, on the other hand, insisted that it was “not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right” (Thoreau 1848). In his view, the crimes of the U.S. government in upholding slavery and wars of aggression were so great that that no decent human being could “without disgrace can be associated with it” (Thoreau 1848). He saw that most of his friends and neighbors, including Emerson, continued to pay their taxes and cooperate with the state even when they strongly opposed the war and slavery. They feared to take an open stand on the grounds on conscience because they “dread the consequences to their property and families of disobedience to it” (Thoreau 1848). Thoreau was unwilling to cooperate passively with evil, however, even if this required him to go to prison, although he hoped that millions more would follow his example.
Maya Angelou’s “Graduation” was written over a century after Emerson and Thoreau, and was set in her hometown of Stamps, Arkansas in 1940, and described how blacks struggled for human dignity and equality within a segregated and highly unjust society. Even in this most oppressive system of the rural South in the era of segregation, when they were denied equal education and civil rights, as well as political and economic power, these communities found the internal strength to offer hope for a better future to their young people. Very few of those who graduated from these segregated schools would ever go on to college, and those who did usually attended “one of the South’s A&M (agricultural and mechanical) schools, which trained Negro youths to be carpenters, farmers, handymen, masons, maids, cooks and baby nurses” (Angelou 23). Their leaders like Booker T. Washington and the principal of the Lafayette County Training School urged them to accept their unequal and second-class status and practical training as the best possible situation given the racist climate of the South at that time. White officials like Edward Donleavy reminded the blacks that the white schools would be getting more money for art teachers, microscopes and laboratory equipment, while the best blacks could ever aspire to would be football and basketball stars. As they heard him read his speech, the black students, parents and teachers gave way to despair, since the “white kids were going to have the chance to become Galileo’s and Madame Curies and Edison’s and Gauguin’s”, while the blacks would be lucky if the state provided them with a paved basketball court (Angelou 29). In these conditions, it seemed a travesty to talk about freedom, democracy and self-reliance, since they clearly had so little control over their own lives. All the teachers and parents simply hung their heads in despair, and Angelou wished they could just be dead, since the world was hopeless. Even Henry Reed’s “To Be or Not to Be” address now seemed meaningless since “we couldn’t be” (Angelou 30). When he gave his powerful recitation of the Negro National Anthem, including references to the ongoing struggle amid tears, death and suffering, “we were on top again. As always, again. We survived” (Angelou 32).
Angelou’s essay was hardly naïve or blandly and mindlessly optimistic about the prospects of freedom and equality in the United States, and she agreed with Thoreau that none of this would be achieved without struggle, suffering and sacrifice. In her poor black community in the rural South of the 1940s, blacks were still far removed from full citizenship rights even though slavery had been abolished over seventy years before. By definition, these segregated black communities had to be self-reliant, since the state and federal governments were still under the control of the very forces that oppressed them. They were certainly receiving no assistance from the larger white society, which was still determined to keep them in a separate and unequal condition forever. Donleavy’s speech to the graduating class was a not-too-subtle reminder that they were to be kept ‘in their place’ and should be grateful for any handouts they received. Yet in spite of this, they still found that they had a choice of how they would respond to the forces oppressing them, either to give way to despair and self-destruction, as most whites hoped they would do, or the defy and disobey the evil system that was being imposed on them. Even under these highly unfavorable circumstances. Angelou and her community found the internal strength to uphold their basic human dignity and hope for change in the future.
WORKS CITED
Angelou, Maya. “Graduation”. http://m.docholley.com
http://m.docholley.com/upload/Maya%20Angelou%20Graduation.pdf
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Self-Reliance” (1841). www. math.dartmouth.edu.
http://www.math.dartmouth.edu/~doyle/docs/self/self.pdf
Thoreau, Henry David, “Civil Disobedience” (1848). http://thoreau.eserver.org
http://thoreau.eserver.org/civil1.html
