Opinion | America Made Lady Liberty a Hypocrite

There were people right here in America, black ones, yearning to be free, and the federal government did very little to help facilitate that freedom.

This week, when talking about the Trump administration’s new rule, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, the acting director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, altered the statue’s poem: “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet, and who will not become a public charge.”

He made the television rounds that night and was repeatedly asked about the poem and his revision. During one appearance he said the poem referred to “people coming from Europe, where they had class-based societies where people were considered wretched if they weren’t in the right class.”

One point he got wrong: Many of the people coming from Europe were indeed peasants. But I believe he is right to say that the spirit of the beaconing is to people from Europe. And I believe that it was racist then, as it is now.

It is poetically telling and meaningful that the statue stands with her back to America and her face toward Europe.

And the federal government has never shied away from giving these white peasants support. It only chafes at giving things to nonwhite people.

This is why Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. could say in his “The Other America” speech at Stanford University in 1967:

In 1863 the Negro was freed from the bondage of physical slavery. But at the same time, the nation refused to give him land to make that freedom meaningful. And at that same period America was giving millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest, which meant that America was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor that would make it possible to grow and develop, and refused to give that economic floor to its black peasants, so to speak.

In response to Cuccinelli’s words, presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren tweeted:

“‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’ Our values are etched in stone on the Statue of Liberty. They will not be replaced. And I will fight for those values and for our immigrant communities.”