Governors Island’s legacy of tolerance with liberty as its partner constitutes American freedom. Its restitution to primary American history reveals the nation’s oldest National Symbol as a crucial pillar of democracy. With the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, Governors Island composes a National Heritage Triangle of quintessential American symbols.
New York’s legal and political tradition of tolerance, the basis for its characteristic cultural diversity and pluralism, had its beginnings on Governors Island in New York harbor.
That tolerance is central to the contemporary Western conception of personal freedom which can be defined in terms of the twin credos of tolerance and liberty. Its origins as an ethical force in the Western Hemisphere and as a legal and political imperative can be traced to the year 1624, in what is now the State of New York.
Tolerance is an active dynamic entailing reciprocity and reciprocal respect. Always bilaterally demanding, it forges “American” freedom by relentlessly transforming plurality into constructive pluralism as a never-finished product of American culture. In the face of intolerance, tolerance is neither uncritical acceptance, appeasement or submission, nor laxity, sloth or indifference.
Tolerance defines and gives meaning to an otherwise undemanding “generic” or “static” freedom. Without conscious vigilance and broad awareness of that vital, fundamental notion of tolerance, there will be times when there will be no freedom in the sense that Americans recognize that term today.
Left unnurtured and unprotected, simple liberty invites and facilitates the "friends" of intolerance and extremism—complacency, carelessness, apathy, passivity and insipidness—opening the door to insidious assaults on civil liberties.
A proposed Tolerance Park will restore Governors Island to its rightful historical importance and extol America’s vital role in advancing liberty in the world through the moral force of tolerance. It will be the place where 350 years of contrasts will visually dissolve harmoniously into a new and unique village, just as divergences and boundaries melt away through the ethical force of tolerance into common humanity.