Frederick Douglass claimed the Declaration of Independence for black Americans in 1852. Martin Luther King, Jr. did it again in 1963. Now, Reverend Al Sharpton wants to give it back.
At the National Action Network’s 35th Anniversary Convention this month, Sharpton proclaimed that America’s 250th anniversary “is not our celebration.” He called it “crazy” for black Americans to wear a birthday hat at someone else’s party. He is wrong, and the history he is invoking actually proves it.
The Declaration of Independence is not a monument to what America was. It is a promise about what America must become.
On July 3, 1776, slavery was ubiquitous and unquestioned. Slaveholding was as old as civilization itself. No government on earth was organized around the belief that all men were created equal. Theocracies, monarchies, and feudal regimes were the sum and substance of the world’s political order.
On July 4, 1776, that changed forever.
The Declaration did not resolve the contradiction of slavery. But it detonated it. From that moment forward, every American who held another in bondage was standing in direct defiance of the nation’s stated founding principle. That tension could not hold. And it didn’t.
What Sharpton omits is telling. Among the 28 grievances in the Declaration, the very first targeted the slave trade. Virginia, yes, slaveholding Virginia, had attempted to severely limit the slave trade through taxation. The king vetoed it. Jefferson called that out by name. Jefferson also drafted the provisions of the Northwest Ordinance that permanently banned slavery across more than five future states, and he signed the federal law that finally ended the slave trade. History is more complicated than the caricatures some prefer.
Even the Founders, too weak to live up to their own ideals, knew what they were doing was wrong. Jefferson wrote that he shuddered at the thought of a just God bringing retribution on the nation. Washington emancipated his slaves upon his death. The founding generation set a fuse. The Civil War was the explosion. Over 600,000 men died to settle the discussion around slavery. That would not have been possible without Independence Day.
Sharpton is not wrong to name the hypocrisy of the founders. But he is completely wrong about what July Fourth means. The suffragettes rewrote the Declaration to include themselves. Frederick Douglass wielded it as a sword against slavery. King stood on it at the Lincoln Memorial. The civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and nearly every subsequent push for equality in American history have returned to that founding document as their source and authority.
The Declaration of Independence is not a monument to what America was. It is a promise about what America must become. For those whose ancestors were enslaved and oppressed, it is not someone else’s birthday. It is the origin of their liberation.
The 250th anniversary is almost upon us. All Americans, especially those whose families fought hardest and waited longest to claim its promise, should mark it well.
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