EDITORIAL: As America celebrates 250, we share the gift of carrying our nation forward

The American Revolution began April 19, 1775, with the "shot heard around the world" in the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

More than a year after colonists took up arms to separate themselves from the British Empire, they gave their reasons in a document whose defiant message of liberation went global.

If the Declaration of Independence is a freedom song, a hymn to liberty, it was written for a small choir and first sung on July 4, 1776. Yet its most powerful lyric - "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights" - and the radical idea that government derives its consent from the people were such astonishing affirmations of equality and representation that they resonated across centuries, countries and cultures to become a universal anthem for independence and human rights.

That the declaration's theme would be so resounding, and its reach so long and encompassing, would have been inconceivable when the Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia in May 1775 to coordinate war efforts and begin establishing a government.

And given the Founding Fathers' knowledge of the fragility of democracies, they would probably be stunned that the nation they conceived and the democracy formalized in 1787 with the Constitution has endured for so long.

That the United States is celebrating 250 years as a democracy speaks to the genius of its architects, and the resiliency and imagination of succeeding generations of Americans to strengthen and secure it.

These are contentious times, but there is so much to celebrate about our nation, which remains a shining city upon a hill and was built on a foundation that is as unshakeable as it is inspirational. We are a vast and diverse nation, containing contradictions and multitudes. We share a land of sparkling, diamond deserts, waving wheat fields and purple mountain majesties.

Because we are a thoroughfare of freedom, our expectations for our nation, as well as the world's expectations for us, are unparalleled. We have sent humans to the moon, inspired other democracies, fueled medical developments and invented baseball.

We continue to push the edges of exploration and innovation - dreaming of Mars, grappling with artificial intelligence, redefining communication and interconnection, always pushing forward and shaping the future. We drive monster trucks and redefine fashion. Our voices are as diverse as our history is rich. Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Muhammad Ali, Barbara Jordan, Antonin Scalia, Susan B. Anthony, Dolores Huerta, Willie Nelson have all sung the American song.

Our founders, 250 years ago, could not have envisioned the bright, complex tapestry that our nation has become. But they set the foundation for this moment.

It is a tense and precarious moment, reminding us of the work necessary to sustain democracy and the ideals of our nation. It is not a time to be complacent, and we face civic tests that many of us have never imagined.

While we have no shortage of readers who take inspiration from President Donald Trump, who see our current president as returning America to something lost, we can respect that view while also disagreeing with it.

We see a chief executive who has denied unfavorable election outcomes or pursued ways to make it more difficult to vote, and who has wielded the levers of power for self-interest, be it in policies or foreign gifts. We say this not to politicize or divide our nation on this holiday, but to acknowledge the reality of the present moment and the responsibility we share to find a way to carry our nation forward.

Expanding democracy

We have likened the Declaration of Independence to a song, but in 1776, "all men are created equal" wasn't an invitation for everyone to sing. That lyric, so to speak, didn't include white men without property.

That lyric didn't include women. From Boston, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John Adams, "Remember the ladies and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors."

The ladies were forgotten.

The lyric didn't include the Indigenous people to whom this land originally belonged.

And that lyric didn't include Black people.

Just as the history of the United States can't be told by excluding race, the story of the Declaration of Independence can't avoid slavery, so glaring is the paradox and hypocrisy.

At the time the declaration was signed, 20% of the population in the 13 Colonies were enslaved. The great majority of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence owned Black men, women and children as property.

Thomas Jefferson, the document's chief author, not only owned more than 600 slaves but had fathered several children with one of them, Sally Hemings.

The colonists were fond of using the metaphors of slavery when complaining about the unfair economic policies of the British Empire, but they owned actual slaves. In Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence listing the colonists' grievances against King George III, the longest one was an antislavery clause accusing the king of waging "cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him."

This passage was removed because of objections of Georgia and South Carolina, as well as Northern merchants profiting from slavery. The words "slave" or "slavery" never appear in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, but it is a dark shadow over both founding documents.

It's understandable that in 1852, when asked to give a Fourth of July speech in Rochester, N.Y., writer, abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass, once a runaway slave, said: "What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery."

Yet Douglass, like so many others, understood the language of Declaration of Independence to be aspirational, and he interpreted "all men" to mean all people. No one was to be excluded because of gender and race.

Such is the power and transcendent intent of the Declaration of Independence's language - that marginalized and oppressed people throughout the world read it and draw inspiration, demanding equality and to be treated with dignity and justice, demanding a say in how they are governed and a place in governing.

The Second Continental Congress that produced the Declaration of Independence and Constitution was made up of brilliant men capable of imagining an ingenious, if imperfect, form of government, but they couldn't imagine the richness and talent of the voices they were excluding.

Nevertheless, through suffering and struggle, resistance and revolution, tenacity and talent, those voices forced their way on stage to expand the democratic chorus that is America.

Over generations, it was left to the abolitionists, women's suffragists, Indigenous people, immigrants, the Civil Rights Movement, farmworkers, LGBTQ+ people and the disabled community to make real the promise of inalienable rights for all.

Maintaining progress

Democracy in the United States has always been a work in progress as we try to live up to the ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Expansion of rights has been painfully slow, coming at great costs, suffering and even bloodshed.

We've fought two world wars and numerous other foreign battles, but our most enduring, difficult and contentious fights - over freedom, equality, who is entitled to what rights, as well as who is an American and who gets to be an American - have been among ourselves.

We have been an imperfect nation, as has been every nation, yet it is the United States, more than any other nation, that is synonymous with freedom. We are a nation of immigrants because America isn't just a destination but an idea.

None of us aligned the stars or our bloodlines in our favor so that we would be born in the United States of America. But whatever divine or nondivine powers one believes put us here, life could have been less fortunate.

We could have just as easily been the Haitian or Syrian immigrant for whom an unfortunate U.S. Supreme Court decision has ended temporary protected status and could lead to their deportation. We could be the asylum-seeker stranded outside the U.S.-Mexico border.

Progress is not inevitable. It can be reversed. The United States didn't become a full, multiracial democracy until passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but the Supreme Court has eviscerated that law in recent years, weakening the electoral impact of Black and Latino voters.

And in the White House, Trump has lobbed relentless attacks on voting access and election integrity, planting seeds of doubt that erode faith in our democracy. The insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, was a nadir in our 250 years as a nation. But it neither defines our full history, nor does it necessarily preordain a diminished or authoritarian future.

It is a credit to our Founding Fathers that our democracy and institutions remain strong. Elections continue. So do protests. While we have many concerns about money in politics, a loss of trust in institutions, an erosion of our democracy through the proliferation of conspiracy theories and the planting of political seeds of doubt, we are also imbued with American optimism.

We can meet this moment as a nation and emerge from it stronger, embracing a future that is beyond our imagination.

Political scientists have sounded the alarm about the health of our democracy, intimating that at 250 years, American democracy may be living on borrowed time. But past is also prologue, and a more positive argument is that each generation has found ways to reimagine our democracy and breathe new life into it. We've done this in every critical time in our history, and we will do it again.

We can disagree without being divisive. Being the United States doesn't mean unanimity. Far from it. We aren't called to be united in opinion on political issues. We benefit from substantive debate. But we should be united in our commitment to the very American ideals that all men and women are equal and are endowed with inalienable rights.

That is the foundation of our nation. It has fueled 250 years of uneven progress, but progress, nonetheless.

The protection of the rights of all people, of everyone's right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, is what binds us. We are not Democrats. We are not Republicans. We are neither "us" nor "them." We are the multitudes and contradictions. We are all Americans, and we share the responsibility to carry the traditions of our great and wondrous nation forward.

This editorial is a collaboration between the San Antonio Express-News and Austin American-Statesman editorial boards.

Copyright 2026 Tribune Content Agency. All Rights Reserved.

This story was originally published July 4, 2026 at 11:05 AM.