This piece is part of “America in the balance: the fight for our history and future,” a special series from MS NOW that explores where we are as a nation as we commemorate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Hagiography about the founding fathers is being imposed on us. But I refuse to let others choose my heroes and historical narratives for me. As a Civil Rights baby who sat on my mother’s lap as she was arrested for demanding to be served at a segregated lunch counter, I reserve my praise for radicals who challenged the pro-slavery culture that pervaded America from the 1600s at least through the Civil War.
That George Washington was a brave national hero to whom all Americans owe an enormous debt of gratitude is undeniable. It’s also undeniable that Washington was unwilling to extricate himself from slavery or publicly oppose the practice during his lifetime. President Donald Trump has attempted to hide that part of Washington’s story. In January, the National Park Service removed from the President’s House in Philadelphia 34 educational panels that told the story of nine people whom the first president and his wife, Martha, enslaved there. One of those nine, Ona Judge (or Oney), escaped, and Washington spent the final three years of his life trying and failing to capture and re-enslave her. Despite a federal court order that the 34 panels be reinstalled, the Trump administration has not fully complied.
I reserve my praise for radicals who challenged the pro-slavery culture that pervaded America.
Unlike Washington or Thomas Jefferson, the founders I claim meet a high standard: They believed in freedom for all and were willing to construct a multiracial democracy to guarantee it. My founders aren’t defined by the office they held, their wealth, military achievement or celebrity. What unites them is that they rejected the despotism inherent in slavery. The ones who were white were willing to give up the benefits of supremacy. And they resisted, in public, with their words and actions, often at great personal risk. It is important at this moment that we remember them — if only to rebuke the idea that opposing slavery was not an option at our nation’s founding.
If I were to ask you to name the most vocal opponent to slavery at 1787’s Constitutional Convention, you’d probably say, “Ben Franklin?”
You’d be wrong. Yes, Franklin eventually stopped buying human beings and expressed strong misgivings about the harshness of slavery (and the idleness in white people he said it caused). At the end of his life, he led the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society and petitioned Congress for the gradual abolition of slavery. But the fiercest opponent to slavery at the convention was Gouverneur Morris, the New York aristocrat who wrote the “We the People” preamble to the Constitution and the document’s final draft.
Morris, who paid wages to everyone who worked for him at his 1,900-acre estate, challenged the future Empire State to gradually abolish slavery. At the Constitutional Convention. Morris said he “never would concur in upholding domestic slavery,” that it was a “nefarious institution” and “the curse of heaven on the states where it prevailed.” He castigated delegates from Georgia and South Carolina who demanded three-fifths representation for enslaved people. “Are they men?” he asked. “Then make them citizens, and let them vote.”
A tiny band of other founding radicals also raised their voices. Dr. Benjamin Rush, three years before he signed the Declaration of Independence, published a full-throated pamphlet opposing slavery as contrary to Christianity and natural rights and professed his belief in the equality of “Whites and Negroes.” He was a leader in the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, though his abolitionist reputation is stained by the fact that he secretly enslaved his cook, William Grubber, and refused to free him until he was fully compensated. The Marquis de Lafayette entreated George Washington to teach the world how to gradually abolish slavery by converting his slaves to tenant farmers. Lafayette, who never enslaved people, would follow through alone on the experiment in the French colony of Cayenne.
Elizabeth Freeman, a Black woman, should be considered a founding mother because she brought the first case to challenge the constitutionality of slavery in Massachusetts and won — a victory not only for herself. Her case helped bring about judicial abolition for all enslaved people in her state by 1783 – four years before the Constitutional Convention. Actual reconstruction of America as the land of the free, for all, began because an illiterate enslaved woman demanded what she was entitled to.
I valorize Frederick Douglass, whose 1852 oration “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” called out the hypocrisy of a slaveholding country declaring that “all men are created equal.”
Phillis Wheatley, the first Black American to publish a book of poetry, resisted her own enslavement and advocated for abolition by writing herself into the political narrative. She became a celebrity — arguably the most famous African in America and Europe in her time, so much so that Franklin and Washington both invited her to meet with them.
Benjamin Lay, a white man who had personally experienced discrimination as a hunchbacked dwarf, wrote one of the first books in human history to call for the immediate, uncompensated abolition of slavery — in 1738. (Franklin anonymously printed that polemic). Lay, a Quaker, refused to use any product made with slave labor, and he berated Quaker enslavers, inspiring later generations of Quaker radicals to take the lead in advocating for abolition.
There are numerous other unsung revolutionary abolitionists who contributed to America’s freedom story, as did the “second founders,” as one historian has called them. Among them, I valorize the self-emancipated Frederick Douglass, whose 1852 oration “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” called out the hypocrisy of a slaveholding country declaring that “all men are created equal.” And Congress’ Radical Republicans, such as Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, who championed the 13th and 14th Amendments that finally extended our nation’s founding ideals to Black Americans — and other nonwhite, non-Anglo-Saxon, non-Protestant or non-wealthy people.
Another second founder is John Mercer Langston, the first dean of Howard Law School, who co-authored the Civil Rights Bill of 1875 with Sumner. Had a hostile Supreme Court not struck the bill down with reasoning that defied the original intent of the second founders, white people would have been forced to begin practicing pluralism in integrated trains, restaurants, hotels and other public accommodations a century earlier.
Had that Supreme Court not given license to Jim Crow in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, my mother would not have had to part with 4-month-old me in 1962 and spend time in jail for protesting Alabama’s apartheid. Perhaps my father wouldn’t have needed to found an independent political party that helped return Black Alabamians to public office for the first time since Reconstruction.
I came of age watching West Alabama sharecroppers insist that popular sovereignty include them. They taught me that perfecting democracy requires citizens agitating for the freedoms and the government they deserve.
Uncritically celebrating the traditional founding fathers and ignoring their tolerance of slavery renders the revolutionary founders who opposed slavery invisible.
Uncritically celebrating the traditional founding fathers and ignoring their tolerance of slavery renders the revolutionary founders who opposed slavery invisible and dishonors the generations who were still fighting for their freedom almost two centuries later.
Freedom to explore and understand historic truth is necessary to make course corrections and work toward our highest ideals. An America that encourages such exploration in celebrating its 250th birthday would be exceptional and a beacon to the world. But a government that blindly idolizes the past and discourages honest reckoning with history betrays our founding value of liberty for all.
I take heart in the motley allies who fought during Reconstruction to build the first interracial democracy in human history and fought to resurrect it with the Civil Rights revolution. And each generation has to fight to keep it.
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