Reverend Al Sharpton has claimed that America’s 250th anniversary is “not our celebration,” calling it “crazy” for Black Americans to wear birthday hats at someone else’s party. This assertion was made at the National Action Network’s 35th Anniversary Convention this month.
Sharpton is wrong, and the history he invokes 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 detonated it. From that moment forward, every American who held another in bondage stood in direct defiance of the nation’s stated founding principle. That tension could not hold and eventually exploded.
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 signed federal legislation ending the slave trade.
Even the Founders, too weak to live up to their own ideals, knew what they were doing was wrong. Jefferson wrote 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 that cost over 600,000 men to settle the discussion around slavery — a debate 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. Frederick Douglass wielded it as a sword against slavery. Martin Luther King, Jr. 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 Honorable Michael Warren is an Oakland County Circuit Court judge who has served on the bench since 2002. He has taught constitutional law, served on the Michigan State Board of Education, and is a Hall of Fame inductee of the International Association of Top Professionals. He is the co-founder of Patriot Week and the author of The Revolutionary Words That Forged America: The Definitive Guide to the Declaration of Independence.
