    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George W. Bush (2003, Book II)]
    [July 8, 2003]
    [Pages 844-847]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at Goree Island, Senegal
    July 8, 2003

        Mr. President and Madam First Lady, distinguished guests and residents of Goree Island,
    citizens of Senegal, I'm honored to

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    begin my visit to Africa in your beautiful country.
        For hundreds of years on this island, peoples of different
    continents met in fear and cruelty. Today we gather in respect and
    friendship, mindful of past wrongs and dedicated to the advance of human
    liberty.
        At this place, liberty and life were stolen and sold. Human beings
    were delivered and sorted and weighed and branded with the marks of
    commercial enterprises and loaded as cargo on a voyage without return.
    One of the largest migrations of history was also one of the greatest
    crimes of history.
        Below the decks, the Middle Passage was a hot, narrow, sunless
    nightmare, weeks and months of confinement and abuse and confusion on a
    strange and lonely sea. Some refused to eat, preferring death to any
    future their captors might prepare for them. Some who were sick were
    thrown over the side. Some rose up in violent rebellion, delivering the
    closest thing to justice on a slave ship. Many acts of defiance and
    bravery are recorded; countless others, we will never know.
        Those who lived to see land again were displayed, examined, and sold
    at auctions across nations in the Western Hemisphere. They entered
    societies indifferent to their anguish and made prosperous by their
    unpaid labor. There was a time in my country's history when one in every
    seven human beings was the property of another. In law, they were
    regarded only as articles of commerce, having no right to travel or to
    marry or to own possessions. Because families were often separated, many
    were denied even the comfort of suffering together.
        For 250 years, the captives endured an assault on their culture and
    their dignity. The spirit of Africans in America did not break; yet, the
    spirit of their captors was corrupted. Small men took on the powers and
    airs of tyrants and masters. Years of unpunished brutality and bullying
    and rape produced a dullness and hardness of conscience. Christian men
    and women became blind to the clearest commands of their faith and added
    hypocrisy to injustice. A republic founded on equality for all became a
    prison for millions. And yet in the words of the African proverb, ``No
    fist is big enough to hide the sky.'' All the generations of oppression
    under the laws of man could not crush the hope of freedom and defeat the
    purposes of God.
        In America, enslaved Africans learned the story of the Exodus from
    Egypt and set their own hearts on a promised land of freedom. Enslaved
    Africans discovered a suffering Saviour and found He was more like
    themselves than their masters. Enslaved Africans heard the ringing
    promises of the Declaration of Independence and asked the self-evident
    question, ``Then why not me?''
        In the year of America's founding, a man named Olaudah Equiano was
    taken in bondage to the New World. He witnessed all of slavery's
    cruelties, the ruthless and the petty. He also saw beyond the
    slaveholding piety of the time to a higher standard of humanity. ``God
    tells us,'' wrote Equiano, ``that the oppressor and the oppressed are
    both in His hands. And if these are not the poor, the brokenhearted, the
    blind, the captive, the bruised which our Saviour speaks of, who are
    they?''
        Down through the years, African Americans have upheld the ideals of
    America by exposing laws and habits contradicting those ideals. The
    rights of African Americans were not the gift of those in authority.
    Those rights were granted by the Author of Life and regained by the
    persistence and courage of African Americans, themselves.
        Among those Americans was Phyllis Wheatley, who was dragged from her
    home here in West Africa in 1761, at the age of 7. In my country, she
    became a poet and the first noted black author in our Nation's history.
    Phyllis Wheatley said, ``In every human breast, God has implanted a
    principle which we call love of freedom. It is impatient of oppression
    and pants for

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    deliverance.'' That deliverance was demanded by escaped slaves named
    Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, educators named Booker T.
    Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, and ministers of the Gospel named Leon
    Sullivan and Martin Luther King, Jr.
        At every turn, the struggle for equality was resisted by many of the
    powerful. And some have said we should not judge their failures by the
    standards of a later time. Yet in every time, there were men and women
    who clearly saw this sin and called it by name.
        We can fairly judge the past by the standards of President John
    Adams, who called slavery ``an evil of colossal magnitude.'' We can
    discern eternal standards in the deeds of William Wilberforce and John
    Quincy Adams and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Abraham Lincoln. These men
    and women, black and white, burned with a zeal for freedom, and they
    left behind a different and better nation. Their moral vision caused
    Americans to examine our hearts, to correct our Constitution, and to
    teach our children the dignity and equality of every person of every
    race. By a plan known only to Providence, the stolen sons and daughters
    of Africa helped to awaken the conscience of America. The very people
    traded into slavery helped to set America free.
        My Nation's journey toward justice has not been easy, and it is not
    over. The racial bigotry fed by slavery did not end with slavery or with
    segregation. And many of the issues that still trouble America have
    roots in the bitter experience of other times. But however long the
    journey, our destination is set: liberty and justice for all.
        In the struggle of the centuries, America learned that freedom is
    not the possession of one race. We know with equal certainty that
    freedom is not the possession of one nation. This belief in the natural
    rights of man, this conviction that justice should reach wherever the
    Sun passes, leads America into the world.
        With the power and resources given to us, the United States seeks to
    bring peace where there is conflict, hope where there is suffering, and
    liberty where there is tyranny. And these commitments bring me and other
    distinguished leaders of my Government across the Atlantic to Africa.
        African peoples are now writing your own story of liberty. Africans
    have overcome the arrogance of colonial powers, overturned the cruelties
    of apartheid, and made it clear that dictatorship is not the future of
    any nation on this continent. In the process, Africa has produced heroes
    of liberation, leaders like Mandela, Senghor, Nkrumah, Kenyatta,
    Selassie, and Sadat. And many visionary African leaders, such as my
    friend, have grasped the power of economic and political freedom to lift
    whole nations and put forth bold plans for Africa's development.
        Because Africans and Americans share a belief in the values of
    liberty and dignity, we must share in the labor of advancing those
    values. In a time of growing commerce across the globe, we will ensure
    that the nations of Africa are full partners in the trade and prosperity
    of the world. Against the waste and violence of civil war, we will stand
    together for peace. Against the merciless terrorists who threaten every
    nation, we will wage an unrelenting campaign of justice. Confronted with
    desperate hunger, we will answer with human compassion and the tools of
    human technology. In the face of spreading disease, we will join with
    you in turning the tide against AIDS in Africa.
        We know that these challenges can be overcome, because history moves
    in the direction of justice. The evils of slavery were accepted and
    unchanged for centuries. Yet eventually, the human heart would not abide
    them. There is a voice of conscience and hope in every man and woman
    that will not be silenced, what Martin Luther King called ``a certain
    kind of fire that no water could put out.'' That flame could not be
    extinguished at the Birmingham jail. It

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    could not be stamped out at Robben Island prison. It was seen in the
    darkness here at Goree Island, where no chain could bind the soul. This
    untamed fire of justice continues to burn in the affairs of man, and it
    lights the way before us.
        May God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 11:47 a.m. In his remarks, he referred to
    President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal and his wife, Viviane.