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The Celebration of the Nation’s Birth Is Still a Sham

If America must observe its 250th anniversary, let it be by taking stock of Reconstruction’s unfinished mission.

Sic semper tyrannis: The Declaration’s catalog of grievances against King George III sound like Donald Trump’s to-do list.

In the summer of 1776, the representatives of 13 former colonies assembled in Philadelphia and formally announced that they were not the unruly subjects of the British crown: They were Americans, and they were committed, ostensibly, to self-rule.

The people who signed the Declaration of Independence made a grand gesture toward democracy. They proclaimed in that founding document that “all men are created equal,” that governments exist to secure the “unalienable rights” of those men, and that the only legitimate source from which governments can derive their powers is the “consent of the governed.” It is little wonder that the Declaration has endured for centuries as a touchstone for freedom movements around the world.

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How I Became an American Rep. Pramila Jayapal

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How America Became the Progenitor of Environmentalism Bill McKibben

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At home, however, the Declaration’s drafters immediately dishonored their own liberatory demands. The government they formed was “defective from the start,” as Justice Thurgood Marshall put it in a 1987 speech commemorating the 200th anniversary of the Constitution. The men who signed and ratified the Declaration of Independence spoke eloquently about liberty and justice while simultaneously committing crimes against humanity—namely, the genocide and dispossession of Indigenous people and the enslavement of Black people. With the opening words of the Constitution, they purported to speak for “we the people,” yet they closed their constitutive process to all but those few white men who owned property. (By one scholar’s count, “the people” who voted in support of the Constitution represented only 2.5 percent of the population.)

Since the nation’s inception, the bigotry and violence on which the country was forged have facilitated the exclusion of much of the country from democracy’s substantive guarantees. And for just as long, many of the people pushed to the margins of American society have regarded the idea of celebrating the nation’s birth—which is to say, the government’s formal memorialization of promises that remain unfulfilled—as a cruel joke.

“Your celebration is a sham,” said Frederick Douglass in his famous speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” Douglass told a roomful of abolitionists in Rochester, New York, that the United States had betrayed the ideals of the Declaration by giving white America “independence” while Black America was still governed by racial tyranny. “Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today?” he asked.

More ironic still, Douglass expressed relief in that speech that the year was only 1852, noting that, at 76 years old, America was still a young nation. Now America is 250, and it continues to struggle with many of the same ills. Two and a half centuries after establishing a government by and for “we the people,” the country is still fighting over who gets to be considered part of “we.” As illustrated through the relentless persecution of people presumed to be immigrants, transgender people, and other vulnerable communities, the current government is actively working to limit “the people” entitled to........

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