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Rev. Gilbert H. Caldwell is a retired minister and a civil-rights activist who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He is a contributor to DiversityInc.

In the Week in Review section of the Sunday, Jan. 13, 2008. New York Times, the front-page story is titled "Rights vs. Rights: An Improbable Collision Course." Under the two large pictures of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass is this caption: "Pioneers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass worked together on abolition, but then had a bitter split over who should be first to get the right to vote--women or blacks."

Stanton condemned the 15th Amendment, which gave Black men the right to vote but left out women of all races, and is quoted in the Times as saying: "This would establish an aristocracy of sex on the continent," alluding to "lower orders" like Irish, Blacks, Germans, Chinese. The Times story then quotes her as saying: "Shall American statesmen so amend their constitutions as to make their wives and mothers the political inferiors of unlettered and unwashed, ditch-diggers, bootblacks, butchers and barbers, fresh from the slave plantations of the South?"

Frederick Douglass spoke these words of response to Stanton that describe the pain, anger and what some would say is "Black irrationality" on race matters. I believe his words are at the root of the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaign debate on race and conversation about race. The words of Douglass also address something that is in the DNA of generation after generation after generation of many of us who are Black.

"When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are dragged from their houses and hung from lampposts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed out upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and rage at every turn; when they are in danger of  having their homes burnt down ... then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to their own."

Years ago as I lived with my grandfather who was born into slavery, I heard from his lips stories like these that as I heard them were in such great contrast to my grandfather's human gentleness. In so many Black homes, the awfulness that Frederick Douglass describes may be unspoken or avoided or denied but nevertheless is passed on from generation to generation. Some black persons do all they can to avoid, downplay or suppress the reality of the truth that was spoken by Douglass. Yet we have seen that the current "use of the noose" in Jena, La., and elsewhere to seek to intimidate Blacks, and the words spoken by a female golf TV commentator about "lynching" Tiger Woods as a way to curb his superiority in golf, have a resonance within some of us in the Black community that so many do not understand.

Using the phrase "fairy tale" to describe some of the campaign commentary of Barack Obama or to suggest that Martin Luther King Jr. "needed" the presidential power of Lyndon Johnson to accomplish what he accomplished dredges up the memories of slavery and segregation and lynchings and white power for so many. The loud cries of "inexperienced" to describe Sen. Obama's unreadiness to be president seem to minimize the experience of Black persons in America who have had to adjust to the inequalities of their experience in America, in the past and in the present.

Few of us who are Black want some "free pass," a blank check or to avoid scrutiny or criticism because we are Black. But is it too much to ask that the nation that we love and serve, and those who are its leaders or would-be leaders, not forget our history, which is also the history of those who act as though it is not? More than ever, we must heed those words of George Santayana: "Those who do not remember their history are bound to repeat it" (paraphrase). The year 2008 offers opportunities for us to do this as never before. Let us begin!

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