I just returned from leading a group to visit the Legacy Sites in Montgomery, Ala.
Each morning and evening, I offered a meditation to ground us for what we were about to see and process. One of the hymns we sang was “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” and one of its verses begins, “Pardon for sin and a peace that endureth.”
That line is written about God’s pardon of humanity’s sin. But I found myself asking a harder question while we stood in the Legacy Museum, one of four spaces that together make up the Legacy Sites: What happens when the sin continues after the pardon?
Ginny Brown Daniel
What happens when the power to pardon, the very power meant to release captives and restore what is broken, gets used instead to protect the oppressors and perpetuate their sin?
What happens when a nation keeps repeating its oldest sin because the humans entrusted with the power to forgive keep aiming that power at the wrong people?
I could not stop thinking about this hymn when I learned that after the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson, an enslaver from Tennessee, pardoned nearly 15,000 Confederate officials who applied for clemency.
People like Clement Clay, a former U.S. senator who served the Confederate Secret Service and walked free from prison in April 1866.
People like John Singleton Mosby, the Confederate colonel known as the Gray Ghost, who had warrants out for his arrest and still returned to ordinary civilian life.
People like Jefferson Davis himself, president of the Confederacy, granted a pardon in 1868 under what became known as the Christmas Amnesty.
Reconstruction did not stand a chance.
What would have happened if these men had faced trial and prison for what they did?
Maybe Johnson and his advisers told themselves they were being practical. Let these officials go back to their lives, and the chaos of a collapsed slave economy would settle on its own. Preserve the peace, they might have said, rather than pursue the harder work of justice.
“Black Americans paid for that mercy with decades of racial terror and violence.”
But the racist infection did not leave our nation’s body. It stayed. It spread through the soul of this nation for the century that followed, and Black Americans paid for that mercy with decades of racial terror and violence.
And now, 161 years later, we are repeating the sin.
Our current president has pardoned people convicted of crimes tied to the January 6 insurrection.
Jared Wise, a former FBI agent who was caught on video screaming, “Kill ’em” at police officers defending the Capitol, received a pardon on the president’s first day back in office.
He now serves as a senior adviser in the Department of Justice, working inside the very institution meant to hold him accountable.
Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys leader convicted of seditious conspiracy, walked free that same day and returned to lead that organization.
Members of Congress are still asking, and still waiting to find out, how many more pardoned insurrectionists have found their way into positions of federal power.
Racial terror and violence continue, too, this time carried out through ICE agents descending on immigrant families in communities large and small across our nation.
Our silence functions as its own kind of pardon. Our voice is the power we hold, and that voice can either work toward justice or let these criminals go on perpetuating our national sin while we look away.
Our faith communities stay quiet.
Our businesses bow to this administration.
Our colleges and universities dismantle themselves brick by brick in obedience to a white supremacist president and the governors who follow his lead.
We keep pardoning white supremacy and asking where our peace has gone.
“We keep pardoning white supremacy and asking where our peace has gone.”
We will keep asking that question until we name white supremacy as the sin it is, confess it, hold its offenders accountable, and build the kind of justice that actually endures.
How many more cycles of racial terror will we live through before we stop pardoning our oppressors and start liberating the oppressed?
Democracy will only become real for us when we finally live out its principles in full.
Until then, let us protect the most vulnerable among us.
Let us speak truth to the powerful cowards.
Let us break our complicit silence by naming these pardons for what they are: a sin that endureth.
Ginny Brown Daniel is an ordained minister, writer, and keynote speaker based in Texas. She writes and speaks at the intersection of faith, politics, and public life. Learn more at her website.