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"Outside Interference" and South Miami
From: Columbia University
| By:
Donald Shriver Jr. |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The challenges that Cuban-Americans have made concerning American law and policy in the Elian Gonzalez case are similar to challenges made in Southern states with regard to "outside interference" before and during the civil-rights movement, according to Rev. Donald Shriver Jr. In this essay, Shriver considers how freedom and citizens' rights relate to the intricately overlapping layers of American law. |
 uring the spring of 2000, Cuban-Americans in Miami reminded me of the time, 35 years ago, when many of my Southern white neighbors protested loudly against the "outside interference" of lawyers, federal courts and Yankee demonstrators seeking to enforce the civil rights of my African-American neighbors. |
It was as if we were fighting the Civil War all over again. "Law and order" was big in the news, but the question was: Whose law, whose order? Leaders in my native Virginia talked of "interposition," i.e., state defiance of federal law. Arkansas and Alabama governors took up the same chorus, and for a while it all sounded as if Southern whites were finally winning the Civil War. |
Gary Wills has said that the essence of the winning cause of that war comes down to the fact that, prior to 1860, one often said, "The United States are ..." After 1865, one said, "The United States is ..." |
In a North Carolina town where I once lived, its last surviving veteran of the Civil War died in 1940. His obituary quoted him as saying, "I'm glad that the North won the war, because it saved our Union." It was quite a concession on his part: that the "Lost Cause" was well lost. Not only was slavery well lost, but so was the local right to secede from a national law that we don't like. |
Foreign visitors often have trouble understanding the subtle connections of law in this country. We have local law, state law and federal law--separate, overlapping, always there both to protect our freedom and also to bind us legally to each other across the spectrum of town, city, state and nation. On November 8, 2000, when we read the election returns, we will be observing what it means to pay due attention to the local, state and national connections that give scope and limit to the American version of political freedom. |
This was the image of law that, in the 1960s, some of my white neighbors were resisting as they complained of "outside interference." In sermons and other public talks, I had to say that from time to time we all need a little outside interference--reminders that we belong to a larger community of citizens than the ones we see every day on our Main Streets. The authority of local and state law is part of the American vision of a free society, but "liberty and justice for all" in this nation sometimes requires a national law that trumps local law. One of these days we Americans will have to concede that international law must sometimes trump national law, too. |
I do not question the right of Cuban-Americans to protest the laws and regulations of the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) and the foreign policies of the US government. But the right to ignore national law and regulations is not the freedom they opted for when they fled Communist Cuba for the United States. For the changing of law, as in the civil-rights movement, they have rights of civil disobedience--with the proviso that they are ready to go to jail for that cause. But the right to declare themselves an island of law unto themselves is not an American right. |
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