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frederick douglass
This Juneteenth, America Must Choose to Live Up to Its Founding Documents
When we limit conversations about our complex past, we not only lose historical accuracy but also our capacity for growth and the honest reckoning that could finally help us fulfill our founding promises.
Jun 19, 2025
In 1796, 22-year-old Ona Marie Judge became one of America's most wanted fugitives. Born into slavery and held by President George Washington, Judge escaped from Philadelphia and fled north to New Hampshire. Washington immediately began hunting her, placing newspaper advertisements offering rewards for her return. For over 50 years, she would live as a fugitive, knowing that bounty hunters could appear at any moment to drag her back into bondage. Her story of survival reveals tensions that we're still grappling with today.
Judge's escape revealed the America we rarely acknowledge in our founding stories. As efforts to silence discussions of race and history spread nationwide—from federal agencies barring recognition of Black History Month to more than 44 states, including my home state of New Hampshire, limiting how schools can discuss racism—her story demands our attention.
Judge's escape laid bare the America we rarely acknowledge in our founding mythology.
The paradoxes Judge witnessed still define us. Washington was not the infallible moral leader of our imagination, but a flesh-and-blood man who owned other human beings and spent years trying to recapture the woman who dared seek freedom. New Hampshire was not removed from slavery's horrors—Portsmouth had been a major slave trading port since the 1600s.
Judge's escape laid bare the America we rarely acknowledge in our founding mythology. These tensions were the defining forces that shaped America's first century and continue to do so today. Judge's story illuminates how deeply slavery was woven into the fabric of the entire nation, connecting Black and white lives in ways our history books have long worked to hide. Understanding her experience becomes essential to understanding ourselves, especially as movements to obscure these complexities grow stronger.
The Pattern of Progress and Backlash
This current backlash against Black history education shouldn't surprise us—it follows a persistent American pattern. Every period of racial progress has triggered fierce resistance designed to roll back gains and rewrite the past. After Reconstruction brought Black political participation and civil rights, the country allowed Jim Crow laws to flourish and KKK terror to reign while Confederate monuments were erected across the South to rewrite the Civil War as a noble struggle rather than a fight to preserve slavery. The rise of the war on drugs and mass incarceration of Black Americans followed the 1960s civil rights laws. The election of the first Black president, Barack Obama, triggered the Tea Party movement and birtherism campaigns designed to delegitimize his presidency.
Today's attacks on how we discuss race and history represent the latest iteration of this cycle. When we limit conversations about our complex past, we not only lose historical accuracy but also our capacity for growth and the honest reckoning that could finally help us fulfill our founding promises.
Why Local Stories Matter
This ongoing struggle is why the work happening in New Hampshire—a politically purple state where Black residents make up just 2% of the population—offers constructive lessons for the rest of the nation. If honest conversations about Black history can flourish here, they can do so anywhere; however, success requires understanding what we like to use as a guideline: the rule of thirds. One third will support, one third will be persuaded, and one third will oppose. The progress is determined by the persuadable middle. We've seen how we can make real change by reaching that crucial middle group in New Hampshire.
Look no further than our annual July 4 readings of Frederick Douglass' "What to the Slave Is Your Fouth of July" speech, which has grown from one participating town to 22, with communities reading simultaneously across the state. From synagogues to rural town halls, people gather simply to hear Douglass' words—no discussion required, no positions demanded. This creates space for reflection and connection without the political battles that often shut down conversation before it begins.
Judge's legacy calls us to specific action: Resist erasure wherever we encounter it—in our children's schools, local libraries, state legislatures, and national debates.
Building unexpected alliances has proven equally powerful. Working with the Daughters of the American Revolution to install historical markers honoring Black Revolutionary War heroes demonstrates that historical truth enriches rather than threatens our understanding of patriotism. We've now placed nearly 40 markers throughout the state, each one making visible stories that were always there but rarely acknowledged.
This success stems from focusing on education and storytelling rather than confrontation, allowing facts and local narratives to speak for themselves. New Hampshire residents hunger for authentic stories about their own communities, even when those stories complicate their narratives about the past.
From resistance to Reckoning
The power of personal narrative will be on full display this Juneteenth, as Portsmouth hosts an unprecedented gathering where direct descendants of America's founding fathers and the people they enslaved come together to explore our intertwined histories. Shannon LaNier, the ninth-generation descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, will join Laurel Guild Yancey, descendant of Portsmouth's Prince Whipple, a Black man who fought in the Revolutionary War while enslaved by Declaration of Independence signer William Whipple. In a profound twist of history, the Whipple family would later become the very people who provided sanctuary to Ona Judge when she sought refuge in Portsmouth—the same family line that had owned Prince Whipple would become her protectors, demonstrating how the arc of justice sometimes bends through the most unexpected transformations.
When descendants sit together sharing these narratives, they reveal how the stories of America's founding fathers and the people they enslaved have been inseparably linked across generations. These family histories, passed down through centuries, offer living proof that our nation's racial past isn't separate and distinct, but intimately woven together from the very beginning. Their gathering in Judge's adopted hometown creates a bridge across time, connecting her story of resistance to our current moment of choice.
After all, her choice to flee slavery, knowing the dangers ahead, required extraordinary courage. She lived in poverty, often depending on charity, and had outlived her three children and husband when she died in 1848. Yet she chose uncertainty over oppression, a fugitive's life over bondage, never abandoning her claim to freedom despite facing consequences far more severe than anything we encounter today.
The free Black families in Portsmouth who risked everything to shelter her further demonstrate that resistance has always been collective work, requiring people to see their own freedom as incomplete while others remained in chains. Their courage offers a template for our current moment, when we need that same spirit of collective action.
Judge's legacy calls us to specific action: Resist erasure wherever we encounter it—in our children's schools, local libraries, state legislatures, and national debates. Speak up when school boards attempt to ban books that tell the full story of American history. Engage with the persuadable middle in our communities, attend town halls, and vote for leaders who understand that historical truth strengthens, rather than weakens, our democracy. Most importantly, discover the complete stories of all who have lived in your community—Indigenous peoples, Black families, immigrants, and others whose experiences have been overlooked—and support those working to bring these histories to light.
This Juneteenth, as conversations unfold in the place where Judge found refuge, her story asks us to choose: Will we allow fear to silence these essential truths, or will we find the courage to engage in the honest reckoning needed to fulfill the promises of equality our founding documents made to all Americans?
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No Time to Hide: We Need You!
We offer this comic-strip recalling the revolutionary promise proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. Do not underestimate the power of that promise.
Nov 27, 2024
Yes. We lost. And yes, as Thomas Paine pronounced in late 1776 in The Crisis, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Nonetheless, as we argue here, this is not a time to despair and hide away. For as Paine went on to write in that pamphlet: “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.” Words that encouraged Americans to sustain the Revolution and, yes, go on to win battles and ultimately, victory.
We offer this comic-strip recalling the revolutionary promise proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence—and regularly reaffirmed by our greatest leaders—to remind us all that we, native-born and newly-arrived alike, are the children and grandchildren of generations of progressives and radicals who, in the course of almost 250 years, made that promise their own and fought to realize it.
Do not underestimate the power of that promise. And surely, you feel it too.
Consider the testimony of the great self-emancipated black abolitionist Frederick Douglass in his speech in Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? Douglass lambasted the country and his fellow Americans: “There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.” And yet, in the end, even he did not surrender to despair: “Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery... I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age.”
So, yes, we lost. But the struggle continues. And in that spirit, we want you to know that when Martin Luther King, Jr. would find himself growing despondent about the state of America and the forces opposing the civil rights struggle, he would recall Thomas Paine’s revolutionary words from Common Sense: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
In the weeks and months ahead, we plan to create a continuing series of comics reminding us of who we are and what that demands—and, hopefully, encouraging us all to pursue progressive and radical-democratic action.
This is not a time to seek a solitary life, but to act in solidarity.
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A Juneteenth Reflection on America’s Unfinished Business
This year, as we celebrate the end of chattel slavery in the United States, we must remember the work that Frederick Douglass called upon us all to do remains unfinished.
Jun 18, 2024
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” asked Frederick Douglass in his Fourth of July Oration in 1852. “I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty” of America.
Douglass’s speech remains among the most powerful and poignant in United States history more than a century and a half later. With the Civil War nearly a decade away, and the system of chattel slavery still going strong throughout the South and powering the economy throughout the country, Douglass pointed with undeniable clarity at the “venomous creature [that] is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic.”
As we celebrate Juneteenth in 2024, the work that Douglass called upon us all to do remains unfinished. The Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Reconstruction Amendments formally put an end to the widespread practice of enslavement of Black people in this country. But the work of reconstructing our society and creating the truly equitable and free society promised in our founding documents has a long way to go.
Today we have the job of coming to grips with our history and charting a new path for those who come after us.
That is why on this Juneteenth, we should all ask: What, to us, is Juneteenth? For all of us, and especially for the Black community, it is a day of joyful celebration, marking the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, as it has been for a century and a half. It marks the end of that “venomous creature” in the republic. To be sure, each one of us should celebrate that important day in 1865, as the Black community did so memorably in Texas that year.
But on Juneteenth, we should also remember that while the snake may have been slain, too much of its venom remains in our system. The venom still takes the form of racism, racial inequity, and the enduring power of white supremacy.
What, to each of us today, is Juneteenth? For those of us in the white community of the United States, I see it as a call to action to do our part to continue the work of reconstruction. We can and should imagine a truly equitable, multiracial America—one we have never before encountered but one which remains a real possibility. There is a fierce pushback against this work today, but this is a pushback we must resist as we continue the unfinished work of Reconstruction.
Like many white Americans whose families have been in the United States for a long time, and in fact came to these shores before the nation even existed, my family has both been involved in the business of enslaving others and has fought for the end of slavery. As Douglass pointed out in his soaring Fourth of July oration, ancestors of mine have done terrible things to others in the name of Christianity, in pursuit of money, and out of ignorance and hate. Others have valiantly fought against friends and families to create a better, fairer society.
Today we have the job of coming to grips with our history and charting a new path for those who come after us. That is why white people must join with others in the work of making our communities and institutions more diverse. Those of us who identify as white and male have a particular obligation to reflect on Juneteenth and consider how we can use what we have to be part of overcoming in the name of a brighter, more sustainable future. We have power to wield, and should wield it, in making our economies more equitable and inclusive.
In Chicago, where I live, there is a fact that I cannot shake. I can’t get it out of my head that a baby born in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Englewood is expected to live 30 years less than a baby born on the same day in the predominantly white, and more wealthy, neighborhood of Streeterville downtown. That is a difference of six miles—and 30 years.
The promise of abolition, a healed and equal society, has not yet been realized. And we can only get there by working together with friends, community, and in solidarity.
This disparity of life expectancy is a combination of a multitude of factors of which racial identity is one, but it boils down to this: a Black baby born in one part of our nation’s third largest city is less likely to enjoy as long and healthy a life as a white baby born a few miles away. There is no way to imagine that this marks an equal society. Health disparities such as this one affect Native American communities and Latin communities across America, too.
Alongside health, consider gaps in education, earnings, and wealth between racial groups in the United States, in state after state. These, in the words of Douglass, remain among our “national inconsistencies.” Black Americans consistently enjoy fewer of the fruits of the republic than those of other racial and ethnic groups. To achieve true racial healing in America, to get the venom truly out of our system, requires us to keep at the work of racial equity.
The promise of abolition, a healed and equal society, has not yet been realized. And we can only get there by working together with friends, community, and in solidarity. At the MacArthur Foundation, we put this approach into practice each day as we collectively strive to lead with a commitment to justice. The progress we have made in the past, and any progress in the future, requires collaboration between people from all kinds of backgrounds.
Juneteenth is a call to do better as a nation, to create an America in which every child born today—no matter their race, their ethnicity, their gender, their neighborhood—has an equal chance to thrive. We remain a long way from that reality. No matter our race, we should do our part on the unfinished work of creating a free and equal society.
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