“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” Frederick Douglass famously asked in Rochester on July 5, 1852. Throughout the antebellum period, many Black Americans postponed their Independence Day celebrations by a day to protest the nation’s refusal to live up to the Declaration’s ideals. For an enslaved person, or one who, like Douglass, had been born in bondage before finding his way to a tenuous form of freedom in the North, the national holiday exposed “the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”

Douglass told the assembled notables: “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”

Yet Douglass did not reject the Revolution. The founders’ ideals were “saving principles,” he said, and enslaved people, not slaveholders, were their truest custodians. Historians have often called the Civil War a “second American Revolution.” By ending slavery in the United States, it continued, even if it did not complete, the unfinished business of the first. 

“It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens…”  —SUSAN B. ANTHONY, suffragist, in an 1873 speech after she  was arrested and fined for voting in a presidential election

In July 1848, at the women’s-rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, Elizabeth Cady Stanton read aloud a text announcing the principles of the movement. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” it began, “that all men and women are created equal.”

King George III was long gone; man, qua man, had taken his place as the tyrant that needed to be overthrown.“He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead,” the document charged. “He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.”

With this “Declaration of Sentiments,” Stanton and her Seneca Falls collaborators were staking their claim to the legacy of the Revolution. If consent of the governed mattered, women’s exclusion from political life was another form of tyranny.

The authors of the Declaration of Independence had never intended to include women as political actors. John Adams dismissed his wife Abigail’s admonition that the founders should “remember the ladies” in their construction of the new government. Yet the ideas unleashed by the Revolution encouraged people to rethink who could participate in political life.

New Jersey’s 1776 state Constitution defined voters as “all inhabitants” meeting certain property and residency qualifications, without explicitly limiting the franchise to men. That created an opening for propertied widows and unmarried women to vote—and as many as 10 percent of them did in some elections, according to Richards. In the 1790s, New Jersey’s Legislature specified “he or she” as eligible voters. The state’s experiment in expanded suffrage was rescinded in 1807, but it offered a hint of how revolutionary ideals might be used to broaden rights beyond white men.

Far from just a stagnant artifact of a long-ago fight over empire and home rule, early women’s-rights crusaders saw the Declaration of Independence as a living document—and the Revolution as an ongoing campaign. 

“The Nation had for its cornerstone a strike.”  —EUGENE V. DEBS, labor leader, in an 1888 editorial about a  railroad strike outside Chicago

On March 6, 1895, Eugene Debs addressed a crowd at the opera house in Fargo, North Dakota. A year earlier, he had organized a strike by Pullman railway workers that ended with a federal injunction, dozens of workers killed by the authorities, and Debs’s arrest. Shortly after speaking in Fargo, he would begin his six-month sentence in an Illinois jail.

The Pullman walk-off was strictly in the American tradition, Debs argued. What was the nation’s hallowed Revolution but “one continuous succession of strikes for liberty and independence”? Strikes, boycotts, even the destruction of private property—these were the tactics of 1776. “A good many people say, ‘We must maintain law and order,’” Debs noted. “Well, suppose Washington and Jefferson and Franklin and Paine had been for law and order. They trampled the law under foot with impunity in as holy a cause as ever prompted men to action in this world.”

Debs emerged from jail an outspoken socialist. “Manifestly,” he assured his supporters gathered outside, “the Spirit of ’76 still lives. The fires of liberty and noble aspirations are not yet extinguished.” He deemed socialism a form of Americanism, a tradition of rowdy crowd action by the oppressed that dated back to the nation’s founding.

Early-20th-century socialists and communists in the United States saw the Revolution as both a significant advance and woefully incomplete. A generation after Debs, the Communist Party leader Earl Browder—whose ancestors had fought in the Revolution—argued that the real legacy of 1776 belonged to working people, not capitalists and the ruling class. The next revolt, led by the proletariat, would democratize the workplace and bring industry under popular control.

It often consoled Debs that the patriots of 1776 were themselves dismissed as demagogues and troublemakers—“anarchists, nihilists, rebels, and traitors”—only to be celebrated later as near-demigods whose struggles had benefited future generations. He believed workers needed to band together just as the nation’s original revolutionaries had, and even use some of the same methods and tools. “I like the Fourth of July,” Debs said in 1901. “It breathes a spirit of revolution.” 

“America has defaulted on this promissory note.” —THE REV. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., at the Lincoln  Memorial in 1963

Leaders of the 20th-century civil-rights movement consistently framed their struggle as an effort to complete, rather than overturn, the American Revolution. The nation had already pledged itself, at least rhetorically, to universal liberty. The task, at long last, was to enforce those guarantees, to turn the 18th-century aspirations of the Declaration of Independence into 20th-century realities.

In 1963, imprisoned in Birmingham, Alabama, Martin Luther King Jr. noted that the Boston Tea Party “represented a massive act of civil disobedience.” How could the same people who celebrated it condemn Black citizens for refusing to ride on segregated buses? Nonviolent resistance was no more radical than the colonial boycotts of British goods.

King’s most famous formulation came at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” he declared from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, “they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir…. America has defaulted on this promissory note.”

King wasn’t the only speaker that day to invoke the unfinished work of the founding. “I appeal to all of you to get into this great revolution that is sweeping this nation,” John Lewis exhorted the vast assembly. “Get in and stay in the streets of every city, every village and hamlet of this nation, until true freedom comes, until the Revolution of 1776 is complete.” 

“These 13 little scrawny states…tired of being exploited and oppressed and degraded, told that big British Empire, ‘Liberty or death.’ And here you have 22 million Afro-American Black people today catching more hell than Patrick Henry ever saw.” —MALCOLM X, “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech, 1964

In 1973, when the Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton appeared on William F. Buckley Jr.’s Firing Line program, he stopped the blustery host in his tracks with a question. “During the Revolution of 1776,” Newton asked, “which side would you have been on?”

It is often mistakenly assumed that Black nationalists rejected America’s founding outright. In fact, many saw themselves as its most logically consistent interpreters.

To Malcolm X, for instance, the American Revolution was not a polite, feel-good constitutional dispute. It was a violent anti-colonial war. He celebrated the Revolution as a popular insurgency against tyranny, even though it was largely fought by and for white men. Invoking George Washington and Patrick Henry in 1964, Malcolm said, “You taught me to look upon them as patriots and heroes.” If white Americans could celebrate armed resistance to tyranny every Fourth of July, they could not condemn the right of Black people to likewise organize in self-defense.

What Malcolm was calling for, writes the scholar Davis W. Houck in his contribution to a fascinating new volume, Used, Abused, and Sidelined: Debating the Declaration, was “revolution on American soil with Black-owned munitions—justified by American documents.”

Just as the American revolutionaries drew on English ideas about liberty and revolution in justifying their uprising against English rule, Black nationalists appealed to the American Revolution itself to legitimize their fight against the racist government it had created.

The Black Panther Party’s 10-point program of 1966, “What We Want, What We Believe,” demanded reparations for slavery, an end to police brutality, and a guaranteed income for all people. But with the last item on the list came a surprise: the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence, reproduced in full, asserting the right of an oppressed people to “alter or to abolish” an unjust government and set up a new one in its place. 

“Coming out in a picket line in 1965 was downright revolutionary.” —BARBARA GITTINGS, activist, in the 2001 documentary  Gay Pioneers

nOn July 4, 1965, 39 activists with the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO) picketed in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were drawn up. One organizer, Franklin Kameny, had lost his job as an Army astronomer during the Lavender Scare of the 1950s.

It was the first of five so-called Annual Reminders, each held on the Fourth of July. The point was to show the country that the rights outlined in the documents drawn up in that building were not being guaranteed to all. Picketers carried signs reading “Homosexuals Ask for the Right to the Pursuit of Happiness” and “Homosexuals Are American Citizens Also.” One simply said, “Equality.”

The protesters kept to a strict dress code—the men wore suits and ties, the women dresses—to present the movement as respectable, wholesomely American. “We didn’t want people to gawk at us,” Kameny later recalled. “We wanted them to gawk at the message on our signs and in our leaflets.”

As the historian Marc Stein has written, “Demonstrating on the nation’s birthday in the ‘birthplace of the nation’ strategically identified lesbians and gay men with the highest ideals of the United States.” One advocate suggested at the time that the “dignified protest…might well have been applauded by our Founding Fathers, who were intent on making America safe for the differences.”

The last Annual Reminder came just days after the 1969 Stonewall uprising, when activists in New York City organized to protest police repression. Some who had participated in the Stonewall action chartered a bus to Philadelphia but found the orderly attitude and dress code stifling. It was time for more fiercely confrontational tactics than picketing. The following year, organizers moved the action up by a week and held it in New York, without any of the Annual Reminder’s restrictions. The 1970 event was called Christopher Street Liberation Day—eventually, it became better known as Pride. 

“Liberty Square is the twenty-first-century Liberty Tree.” —THE OCCUPIED WALL STREET JOURNAL, October 8, 2011

On September 17, 2011, the Occupy Wall Street encampment began in Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, reclaimed as Liberty Square. In the immediate vicinity was the New York Stock Exchange, the headquarters of US capitalism. Yet the park is also part of the city’s oldest neighborhood, where in spring 1774, protesters amassed at the docks, stormed a ship, and threw 18 chests of tea into the harbor. Revolutionary meetings were held at nearby Fraunces Tavern. And on July 9, 1776, Continental Army officers read the Declaration of Independence aloud to their assembled regiments on the city’s Common (now City Hall Park) before members of the Sons of Liberty went to Bowling Green and toppled a gilded statue of King George III while a British fleet hovered in the harbor.

An article in the second issue of The Occupied Wall Street Journal made the connection clear: “Under the Liberty Tree that stood in Boston Common, early in the first American Revolution, any and all could come to air their grievances and hammer out solutions collectively, and it was there the promise of American democracy first took root. We are reclaiming a democratic practice in Liberty Square.”

Just as the American colonists united in resistance to the perceived despotism of George III, Occupy triggered a wave of protests against widening economic inequality, tax cuts for the rich, and bailouts for corporations.

The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014 added an analysis of the racial nature of exploitation and oppression to Occupy’s focus on corporate avarice. The murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, provoked an uprising in the city and brought new attention to the predatory nature of American policing. Americans are often taught to see the American Revolution as a tax revolt, Chris Hayes noted in his 2017 book A Colony in a Nation, which was excerpted in these pages. “But dig a little deeper into the history,” he wrote, “and it turns out the spark of the revolution was not so much taxation as the enforcement of a particular tax regime—in other words, policing.”

Hayes showed how the black-market economy of many US cities bore similarities to the illicit smuggling that some of the country’s founders, such as John Hancock, had participated in before the colonial revolt. British efforts to crack down on that smuggling touched off the early protests that would grow into the Revolution. Similarly, the police in Ferguson had been revealed as nakedly corrupt and careless about Black lives. The uprising that followed Brown’s killing turned the old order upside down, at least for a time. “I’ve never been anywhere in the United States that felt as revolutionary as those days of unrest there,” Hayes wrote about Ferguson.

The fires of liberty were not yet extinguished, as Debs had put it. And even if those in power keep trying to snuff them out, we have seen in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis—indeed, all over the country—that those revolutionary fires are still burning brightly, whether it’s solitary small-town No Kings marchers holding signs at intersections or big-city neighbors helping one another hide from the would-be monarch’s masked hooligans. As the antislavery activist David Walker implored in 1829, “See your Declaration, Americans!!!” We must understand our own language. And act accordingly.