[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 39, Number 28 (Monday, July 14, 2003)]
[Pages 889-891]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
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 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

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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 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

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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 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.