SIUC Professor Jonathan Bean speaks about civil rights Tuesday night at the Granada Theater. Professor Bean addressed issues from early government racism to affirmative action. Kenny Thompson/The Bulletin

The second of this semester’s three Lectures on Liberty occurred last Tuesday at the Granada Theater. Professor of history at Southern Illinois University Jonathon Bean gave his presentation titled, “God Almighty Made but One Race, Separating Race and State,” based on his latest book, “Race and Liberty in America: the Essential Reader.”

“It’s the first book to tell the story of classical liberalism, to bring it together, and yet people like Frederick Douglas and Booker T. Washington and the NAACP, they all breathe classical liberalism,” Bean said.

In his presentation, Bean showed a slideshow, gave a history of civil rights leaders and explained the ideas of classical liberalism. Bean said classical liberals believe in individual freedom, individual liberty and limited government.

“Classical liberalism is liberalism as it should be,” he said.

Bean explained in his presentation that he wrote two other books over the history of government that resulted in him having to testify before the Supreme Court because he exposed that “affirmative action creates racial discrimination.” He said what he discovered in writing those books inspired him to write “Race and Liberty.”

“Programs designed to help disadvantaged minorities ended up hurting them in the worst way and I began to see that there were connections between what our government does today for the common good and what it did and said 100 years ago, 200 years ago,” Bean said.

Bean said that many of the civil rights leaders he talked about in the lecture and in his book are often forgotten about because they “don’t fit.”

“They’re not ‘big government’ liberals and they’re not ‘big government’ conservatives and so how do we put these people in a box?” Bean said.

Associate professor of history Gregory Schneider is teaching the course, Liberty and the American Tradition, at Emporia State which is in conjunction with the lecture series. He said it’s important for students to be exposed to classical liberal thought and to have a chance to see if some of those ideas appeal to them.

“This is not meant to, in the course especially, proselytize or to push my agenda on them, but it’s meant to expose these ideas to them to see if they make sense for them and make sense in their own lives when it comes to issues of liberty,” Schneider said.

Schneider also said the lecture, being on civil rights, was timely with Black History month. He said people tend to think of civil rights as being tied in with government, but Bean explained that the government gets in the way more than  it helps.

“It’s government that actually interferes with that rather than helps, so it’s a different kind of approach towards understanding the development of equality of civil rights under the guise of the ideas of liberty and the American founding,” Schneider said.
Abbie Morrison, junior elementary education major, said she enjoyed that Bean brought up figures that are sometimes overlooked in the fight against racism. She also said she agreed with his ideas.

“I agree with it because it’s something we’re discussing a lot more in our teaching classes is that, you know, things are changing so much that we’re not going to have a race, and so it kind of was an issue that I see needs to be dropped,” Morrison said.

Bean said he’s answered questions from all over the country, but he loves talking to students because that’s what he does for a living. He said he wrote the book with the hope that teachers might use it in their classrooms because everything else out there is “same old, same old.”  He said with teaching you have to love what you study and convey that love to students.

“You have to have a compulsion to be a good teacher, to try to be a good teacher and to take a subject, history, that so many students found boring in high school and make it interesting and that’s my job. And it’s fun… and it beats working in a factory,” Bean said.
Lectures on Liberty are free and open to the public. The next lecture will be April 8 at 7 p.m. at the Granada Theatre. The speaker will be Benjamin Powell, professor of economics at Suffolk University.

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