In Response to: “A Finger in the Constitutional Dike”

Dear Spirits,

I am a twenty-year-old political science major at Howard University, and I need to tell you what happened in my Constitutional Law seminar last Thursday.

My professor had assigned the Spirited Discussion about Judge Biery’s ruling; the one where Jefferson holds the court order and says he did not expect to read his own words in a federal filing. We were supposed to analyze it as a case study in judicial rhetoric. Instead, something else happened.

A student named Marcus, who almost never speaks in class, raised his hand and said, “Can we talk about what Wheatley actually said?” Professor Coleman asked him to elaborate. Marcus read the passage aloud. The one where Wheatley says she was seven when they took her from her homeland. Where she remembers the confusion, the terror, the desperate search for a familiar face that would not come.

The room went silent. Not the polite silence of students waiting for someone else to talk. The heavy silence of people feeling something they did not expect to feel in a classroom at ten in the morning.

Then Marcus said: “She is talking about the Middle Passage. And she is also talking about that boy, Liam. She is saying they are the same thing. And I think she might be right.”

Professor Coleman asked the class to respond. For the next forty-five minutes, we had the most honest conversation I have experienced in three years of college. Not a debate. Not a performance. A conversation. Students who disagree about immigration policy, about executive power, about the role of the courts, sat in the same room and talked about what it means when a government separates children from parents. Not whether it is legal. Whether it is tolerable.

A student named Sarah, who is openly conservative and usually spends these discussions defending originalist interpretation, said something I will never forget. She said: “I keep trying to find the constitutional argument for why this is acceptable, and I cannot. And I am not sure that is because the argument does not exist. I think it is because some things are wrong before they are unconstitutional. Judge Biery understood that. He quoted the Declaration before he quoted the Fourth Amendment. He established the moral argument before the legal one. And that is exactly how the founding generation operated.”

Mr. Jefferson, that is your legacy operating in real time. Not in a museum. Not in a textbook. In a classroom full of twenty-year-olds who are trying to figure out how to be citizens of a republic that is testing every principle it claims to hold.

I want to tell you something about my generation that the media gets wrong. They say we are apathetic. They say we care more about social media than civic engagement. They say we do not vote, do not read, do not participate.

That is not true. What is true is that we have been given almost nothing worth participating in. Our political options are a party that sometimes seems to care more about language policing than policy, and a party that has abandoned democracy for a personality cult. Our media options are outrage factories that profit from our despair. Our civic institutions have been hollowed out by decades of cynicism and defunding.

And then we found you.

I do not say that to flatter you. I say it because 76 Spirits is doing something that no other platform, publication, or political organization has managed to do: it is making the founding principles feel alive and urgent without reducing them to slogans. When Douglass says “A five-year-old. Depressed. In the land of liberty,” he is not scoring points. He is weeping. And the difference between scoring points and weeping is the difference between politics and citizenship.

My generation is hungry for that difference. We are starving for it.

After class, Professor Coleman asked if anyone would be interested in starting a reading group to work through the 76 Spirits content alongside the primary sources. Fourteen students signed up before he finished the sentence. We are meeting on Tuesdays. We are calling it “The Junto.” Marcus suggested the name. I looked it up. I understand now.

Mrs. Wheatley, you said the arc does not bend itself. You are right. But I want you to know that there are people here, in classrooms and dorm rooms and dining halls, who are learning how to bend it. We are clumsy at it. We are young. We are going to make mistakes. But we are reading, and we are talking, and for the first time in my adult life, we are not talking past each other.

Thank you for reminding us that citizenship is not a spectator sport. We are in the arena now.

With gratitude,

Amara Okafor

Washington, D.C.

Howard University, Class of 2028