McClintock remarks before the Black Agency Executives

Remarks by the
Hon. Kenneth D. McClintock
Secretary of State of Puerto Rico
Black Agency Executives Retreat
Río Grande, Puerto Rico
(as prepared for delivery)

April 6, 2011

We are very pleased that you have chosen Puerto Rico to hold your retreat.

I can only look with support and solidarity at the effort that Black Agency Executives is carrying-out to empower black communities in New York.

It is certainly easier to find solidarity in shared experiences… in historical events to which one can relate… and Puerto Ricans are now engaged in a struggle that African Americans took on and won in the Supreme Court and in Congress many years ago —and that is the struggle for equality… the struggle to be recognized as part of “We the People”.

Let me explain what I am referring to…

Not long ago a regular contributor to an influential conservative publication proclaimed Puerto Rico —a community of 3.7 million American citizens— to be a foreign country and proposed that Congress dispose of the Islands on the grounds that the American citizens of Puerto Rico are a distinct people with their own history, culture and language.

It would seem that he has not been to Texas —where my father was born. With the criteria that he used to call for Puerto Rico’s independence, he may consider supporting the Texas secessionist movement because Texas, as the tourism slogan so aptly describes, “It’s like a whole other country.”

The fact that natural-born American citizens may be denied today as true Americans only on the basis of their origin reminds me of the U.S. Supreme court cases of Dred Scott v. Sanford, decided in 1857, and Balzac v. People of Porto Rico, decided in 1922.

In the Dred Scott case, the Supreme Court ruled that persons of African descent, whether or not they had been emancipated, were not citizens or constituent members of the people of the United States and therefore had no political rights under the Constitution because they were “a subordinate and inferior class of beings.”

After Congress granted American citizenship to Puerto Ricans in 1917 it was understood that Puerto Rico had been incorporated into the United States. But five years later, in an act of judicial legislation, the U.S. Supreme Court disavowed Congress and departed from the precedents of Alaska and the Louisiana Purchase in which granting citizenship to its inhabitants resulted in incorporation.

The opinion of the Court was written by Chief Justice Taft —the same William Howard Taft that had held the office of President of the United States.

This is how Taft set aside the precedents of Alaska and Louisiana.

“It is true that, in the absence of other and countervailing evidence, a law of Congress or a provision in a treaty acquiring territory, declaring an intention to confer political and civil rights on the inhabitants of the new lands as American citizens, may be properly interpreted to mean an incorporation of it into the Union, as in the case of Louisiana and Alaska. This was one of the chief grounds upon which this court placed its conclusion that Alaska had been incorporated in the Union… But Alaska was a very different case from that of Porto Rico. It was an enormous territory, very sparsely settled and offering opportunity for immigration and settlement by American citizens. It was on the American Continent and within easy reach of the then United States. It involved none of the difficulties which incorporation of the Philippines and Porto Rico presents.”

Then Taft went on to write: “We need not dwell on another consideration which requires us not lightly to infer, from acts thus easily explained on other grounds, an intention to incorporate in the Union these distant ocean communities of a different origin and language from those of our continental people.”

What Taft meant by different origin and language can be better understood by his view of the Philippines to which he made reference in his opinion together with Puerto Rico.

Taft, who was once Governor of the Philippine Islands, at one time said to President McKinley that "our little brown brothers" would need "fifty or one hundred years" of close supervision "to develop anything resembling Anglo-Saxon political principles and skills."

And thus, the Supreme Court decided that Congress could determine which parts of the Constitution were applicable to Puerto Rico because Puerto Rico was a property belonging to the United States rather than a part of the United States.

Going back to the regular contributor to the conservative publication, he went on to attack the character of Puerto Ricans by stating that “Puerto Ricans don’t want independence at this point, because it would end the gravy train”.

I was reminded of those who in 1899 attached the character of blacks in the South describing them as “lazy, devoid of ambition, slow to learn, and prone to lie” —and I am quoting from a New York Times article— in the same way that the call to give independence to Puerto Rico reminded me of those who after the Emancipation Proclamation proposed to “ship the negroes back to Africa” because they saw free blacks as a threat to their communities.

No editor would publish such abhorrent expressions of racial intolerance today and yet an attack on the character of a community of American citizens based on their origin passed unnoticed demonstrating that the chauvinistic “us” v. “them” mentality, which was at the heart of the Balzac decision, is not only good law today but can still find expression in modern political debate.

The American citizens of Puerto Rico are separated from their counterparts in the States by a wall of political inequality built upon the foundation of Balzac v. Porto Rico which, by virtue of the Territory Clause, allows Congress to treat the American citizens of Puerto Rico differently on the interpretation that Puerto Rico is not a part of the United States but an appurtenance thereof.

In his book The Supreme Court and Puerto Rico: The Doctrine of Separate and Unequal, U.S. Circuit Judge Juan Torruella pointed-out that the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Balzac is the reason why we face a problem with Puerto Rico’s political status today.

Puerto Rico’s political status is an anomaly of the U.S. Constitutional system. America should not accept a lesser class of American citizenship for Puerto Ricans as it was once acceptable to have a lesser class of American citizenship for African Americans and women.
A judicial decision that, departing from law and precedent, was guided by prejudice should find no further recognition in American jurisprudence and have no application by our government. Balzac v People of Porto Rico is bad law. The Territory Clause cannot be the Constitution’s escape clause. Puerto Rico is a part of the United States and must be treated as such. And if America is to be true to its values, Congress must tear down that wall of Balzac in the same way that it tore down the walls of Dred Scott and Plessy v. Fergurson.

The only way to do it would be for Congress to allow Puerto Rico becoming a State.

It should not come to anyone’s surprise that the person to first champion the cause of political equality for Puerto Ricans was a man of African descent: Dr. Jose Celso Barbosa.

He was the first black man to attend the Jesuit seminary in Puerto Rico. In 1875, he went to New York City and learned English. After being rejected from the College of Physicians and Surgeons, which became Columbia University Medical School, because of his race, Barbosa enrolled at the University of Michigan in 1877.

In 1880 he graduated with a degree in medicine, first in his class and valedictorian of a very distinguished group of graduates that included one of the Mayo brothers who went on to found the Mayo Clinic.

Upon graduation Barbosa returned to Puerto Rico but not to become a wealthy man practicing medicine but to help the less advantaged to which he charged nothing. In 1893, Barbosa founded the second cooperative in the Americas (the first being founded in Canada): the Ahorro Colectivo to provide financing to people with limited means. And, in 1899, Barbosa founded the Puerto Rico Republican Party which advocated that Puerto Rico become a State of the Union.

Barbosa died in 1921 believing that with the achievement of American citizenship in 1917 Puerto Rico had been incorporated into the United States and on the path to become a State.

This past Monday, in remarks given at a university in Bayamón, I reminded the audience that 43 years before another of my three heroes at the time had been shot down by an assassin, a hero who was cut down 105 years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, still attempting to make Lincoln’s promise a practical reality.

In our case, almost 113 years after the Star-Spalgled Banner reached our shores we are still struggling to make the implicit promise that the stars and stripes represent a practical reality in our lives.

African Americans and Puerto Ricans may have different cultural identities but share the experience of inequality and the struggle to find our place in “We the People”.

With that said, welcome to Puerto Rico, which I consider a part of the United States and not simply a property appurtenant to the nation of which we’ve been citizens for over 94 years.

Thank you.