Remarks by

Sir Arthur Foulkes at the Majority Rule Service at Mount Pleasant Green

Baptist Church

MASTERS of literature and poetry as well as holy scribes have left us a vast treasury of advice as to the importance of remembrance and memorialisation.

So once again we are here to remember and give thanks for that momentous event 49 years ago when we not only turned a page in our history but opened the most important chapter since Emancipation.

One cynic, writing about a service of remembrance in America, dismissed it as a useless exercise. He said it made people feel good about fulfilling their obligation to remember and then forgetting about it for the rest of the year.

But others not only urged us to remember but gave us reasons why we should remember and what we should do beyond merely remembering.

Marcus Garvey warned that “a people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.”

Rudyard Kipling called on the “Lord God of Hosts to be with us yet, Lest we forget, lest we forget.”

John McCrae was a young soldier who was killed on the battle field of Flanders in World War I. But before he died, he challenged those left behind with these terrifying words: “If ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep.”

But my favourite comes from the pen of one whose great grandmother, Hester Argo, came to the Bahamas from Haiti in 1802 with three children, whose grandfather was Stephen Dillet, and whose mother was Helen Louise Dillett of Bain Town.

I speak, of course, of James Weldon Johnson and his classic anthem “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.”

This, as you know, is a magnificent hymn of lamentation and celebration, commemoration and exhortation.

It celebrates “the rising sun of our new day begun.” It laments “the stony road we trod and the bitter chastening rod.”

It commemorates arrival at “the place for which our fathers sighed.”

Then it exhorts us, with the help of God, to stay on the right path:

“Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,

“Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee.”

So, lest we forget, and having at last officially provided for it, we have come to celebrate that day and to remember the opening of a bright new chapter of our history.

We have come to give thanks and also to renew our commitment to the highest ideals of the struggle which led to January 10, 1967.

So let me briefly mention again those ideals, that legacy, those gifts of freedom and equality, and the wide open doors of opportunity and promise.

Please reflect with me how well we have protected and built upon that place for which our fathers sighed, or to what extent we have allowed the wine of the world to lead us astray.

The struggle that led to that day was to remove the last psychological shackles from the minds of many; to shatter false notions of superiority or inferiority; to guarantee equality for all our citizens; to fulfil of the promise of universal access to education; to create a society with opportunity for all; to unleash the suppressed but powerful entrepreneurial instincts of a people; to free Bahamians from the fear of one another based on differences of colour or ethnic origin;

to nationalise and share our rich and diverse cultural heritage; and to establish a new kind of political culture in which no Bahamian would ever again be made to suffer for exercising his or her right to free association.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge lamented, as did so many before and after him, how prone we humans are to ignore the lessons of history.

“But passion and party blind our eyes,” he said, “and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!”

I believe it is not too late for us to remove the lantern of history from the stern of our national ship and place it at the bow, so that it can illuminate our course into the future, so that it will constantly shine on those high ideals which gave birth to this day.

We owe as much to those who make great sacrifices and then fall asleep like the soldier in Flanders.

But more importantly, we owe it to future generations of Bahamians who will, in their time, look back and see what kind of history, what kind of example, what kind of ideals we will have left for them.

God bless The Bahamas and all of his children all over the world.