ASLAH 2025: Was Racial Slavery Illegal Under English Law?

In this lecture created for the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASLAH) conference in 2025, Larry Kenneth Alexander, Founder and President of the Ida B. Wells Center on American Exceptionalism and Restorative Justice, joined by Dr. Walter Greason of Macalester College, interrogates a question long obscured in U.S. historiography: Was racial slavery ever legal under English law?

Drawing on the Magna Carta, English common law, the English Bill of Rights (1689), the American Colonies Act (1766), and Lord Mansfield’s Somerset decision (1772), Alexander demonstrates that racial slavery in colonial America was not sanctioned by English law but was instead an extralegal system built on corruption, graft, and power.

This forensic recovery of history exposes the paradox at America’s founding—while the Patriots declared liberty, they upheld a system already abolished under English law, denying 500,000 Afro-Englishmen their birthright freedoms

Transcript:

Was Racial Slavery Illegal Under English Law?

Hello. I am Larry Kenneth Alexander, the Founder and President of the Wells Center on American Exceptionalism and Restorative Justice.
I have the honor of being allowed to present two presentations at the 110th Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History … September 24 through 28, 2025, in Atlanta Georgia.

My first presentation will be on September 24, and the second one, on September 25, 2025. In both instances, I am joined by Dr. Walter Greason, the Dewitt Wallace Professor of History at Macalester College in Saint Paul Minnesota.

Here, I am addressing the question, “Was Racial Slavery Illegal Under English Law?”

An academic lecture on English law, colonial America and the Founding Paradox.

We … at the Wells Center, a public policy institute using forensic principles and methodologies want to recover Black America’s history accurately. Forensic historical recovery is a specialized approach to revisiting and reinterpreting the past that borrows methods and standards from forensic investigation. And in doing so use our recovery of that history to set the direction of Afrofuturism.
A forensic historical recovery approach asks: … is this narrative supported by law and evidence at the time? Such is the nature of my interrogation of the question …. was racial slavery illegal under English law. We at Wells Center believe that the evidence, when tested under forensic scrutiny, compels a revision and correction: as racial slavery in the American colonies was indeed illegal under English law.

This slide provides a brief bio on the two of us.

Moving on…

The story Americans are taught about our origins is cast as a heroic tale of freedom. … It is the story of a people who, feeling oppressed by imperial overreach, declared independence in 1776 in the name of liberty, the Magna Carta, and the English rule of law. … Yet beneath this inspiring narrative lies a deeper truth that, if acknowledged, might have reshaped the nation’s course: at the very moment independence was proclaimed, some 500,000 Afro-Englishmen—legally free under English law—were denied fundamental due process and thrust into bondage. … For them, the Revolution did not bring liberty but cemented decades of slavery, exploitation, and systemic discrimination—a legacy that continues to reverberate 250 years later.

The orthodox account of American history holds that racial slavery in the thirteen British colonies was a lawful institution. … According to this narrative, colonial legislatures enacted valid slave laws and Negro codes, approved by the imperial government, and racial slavery was an institution lawfully inherited from British rule. … Yet closer research of colonial America’s history and a review of the English constitutional framework of parliamentary sovereignty— the Magna Carta (1215), English common law, the supervening English Bill of Rights (1689), and later Parliament’s American Colonies Act (1766) and the Somerset decision in 1772— reveals this orthodoxy to be a legal fiction and ahistorical.

Racial slavery was extralegal. … Colonial American assemblies lacked the authority to legislate on matters of British sovereignty without Parliament’s assent. At no point did the English Parliament enact a statute in the American colonies that authorized racial slavery. … Further, colonial America’s racial slave laws were repugnant to English law and were abolished ten years before the United States declared independence on the Fourth of July 1776. … In short, this imperial governmental legislative sweep of colonial America’s laws in 1766 extinguished the supposed legality of racial slavery in the American colonies under English law “in all cases whatsoever”.

This presentation examines England’s constitutional underpinnings of parliamentary sovereignty, the defined limits of colonial legislative authority, the rise of extralegal colonial American slave laws and Negro codes, and then the supervening imperial governmental laws, in particular, the English Bill of Rights (1689), Parliament’s American Colonies Act (1766) and the Somerset decision in 1772, three years before the American Revolution began in 1775.

Racial slavery was an extralegal regime, abolished by the British imperial government. … It was fraudulently reintroduced in the United States as a colonial inheritance, and has been sustained by systemic corruption, violation of international norms, and an ideology of racial superiority. … This thesis exposes the paradox at the heart of America’s founding: while Patriots denounced imperial tyranny in the name of the rule of law, they simultaneously were profiting and upholding a corrupt colonial governmental scheme itself a flagrant violation of English constitutional principles and Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence and English law, which grievously our U.S. Congress imported into the United States, fearing possible disunification of the Republic by America’s slaveholding states.

In 1611, in the Case of Proclamations, Sir Edward Coke of the Court of the King’s Bench confronted King James I’s claim of “divine right of Kings” and the notion that royal proclamations could restrict new building construction in London and restrict the manufacture of new starches, made from wheat and certain new inventions, he deemed harmful or wasteful.

The legal question was: could the King, by his royal prerogative, enforce these proclamations as if they were law, even though had not been enacted by Parliament? … Justice Coke rejected King James I’s claim outright; he found: “The King hath no prerogative but that which the law of the land allows him.”

This judicial ruling was historic and decisive. … It subordinated the British Crown to law and confirmed Parliament as the supreme legislative authority in the Kingdom. … No British monarch, and indeed no lesser colonial American legislative assembly, could invent new laws outside this framework.

Importantly, this judicial determination by England’s Court of the King’s Bench in 1611 represented the controlling constitutional acknowledgment of Parliament’s supreme legislative power in the Kingdom. … Further, in the classic treatise Commentaries of the Laws of England authored by Sir William Blackstone wrote, “if Britain colonized an uninhabited or infidel territory, then English law automatically applied in this territory from the moment of colonization.” …

Under English common law, foreigners had legal rights. … As slavery was not authorized on British soil, such was the reason why the first 19 kidnapped Africans who arrived in the colony of Virginia in 1619 were indentured servants, not slaves. … Indentured servitude was deadly and challenging work, and many people died well before their terms of indenture were to expire. … But indentured servitude was temporary, with a beginning and an end. … Afterwards, Africans, no different from European immigrants became British subjects when they completed their term of indenture.

Furthermore, Virginia’s colonial charter and subsequent colonial American charters, granted by the British monarch, compelled adherence to English law and as well, the colonial charter defined the legal status of imported Africans, their right to British ethnicity after indentured servitude ended, and their children’s birthright to British subjecthood, if born in the American colonies. … Moreover, all these rights were consistent with controlling English law.

The controlling English precedent and the British common law tradition that a government official’s actions only have the force of law when the person acts within the rule of law nullified the validity of colonial American slave laws, as an English government official acts without the imprimatur of any law, they do so by the sheer force of personal will and power.

Furthermore, colonial American charters reinforced this legislative limitation on authority by creating a bicameral legislative structure…. Colonial American assemblies could propose ordinances, but final assent rested with the Crown and its Parliament. … They were never coequal legislatures.

The political turmoil of seventeenth-century England deepened the stakes when King Charles I ascended the throne in 1625, championing the “divine right of kings,” and Parliament resisted. … A civil war broke out in 1642, and by 1649, King Charles was executed for tyranny. Parliamentary sovereignty triumphed.

And yet, across the Atlantic, colonial American elites seized the moment to create a de facto slavery regime without Parliament’s consent. … The earliest statutory recognition of slavery in the American colonies was found in the Massachusetts’ Body of Liberties of 1641. … Article 91 permitted “bond-slavery” in narrowly drawn circumstances: for lawful captives in just wars, or for strangers who willingly sold themselves or were sold to the colonists. … Although framed in biblical and contractual terms, this enactment established an extralegal foundation for the enslavement of both Native Americans and Africans in New England. … Yet it did not create a system of perpetual, hereditary, racial slavery.

Virginia’s laws two decades later marked a decisive turn. … In 1661, the Virginia General Assembly passed a statute explicitly recognizing slavery as a legal condition, authorizing the lifetime servitude of non-Christian servants. … The following year, in 1662, the Assembly enacted the doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem, declaring that “all children born in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother.” … This statute represented a radical departure from English common law, where a child’s status followed that of the father (partus sequitur patrem). … By anchoring bondage in maternal descent, Virginia created the first statutory regime of hereditary racial slavery in English America.

Other colonies soon followed. Maryland’s 1664 law enslaved Englishwomen who married Black men, undermining the rights of marriage and inheritance. … South Carolina’s Negro Act of 1691 restricted literacy, movement, and manumission, criminalizing the basic incidents of liberty. … By 1705, Virginia’s comprehensive slave code declared people of African descent to be “real estate” for purposes of sale, inheritance, and debt, collapsing personhood into property.

Yet none of these colonial enactments bore the sanction of Parliament. … They were local statutes, grounded in colonial assemblies whose legislative power was constitutionally inferior to Parliament. … The irony is stark. … At the historic moment Parliament was executing a king and abolishing the monarchy for impinging upon Parliament’s supreme lawful authority in the Kingdom, colonial American assemblies were themselves impinging upon Parliament’s constitutional authority by imposing a regime of racial slavery in the British American colonies.

Over time, the colony of Virginia pretended to expand these race-based laws by punishing interracial marriage, indenturing mixed-race children, and stripping free Black colonials of legal rights. … But these were acts of local fiat, not of lawful authority. … Legally, they had no more lawful validity than a royal proclamation would have had, as England’s Court of the King’s Bench had already determined that Parliament possessed supreme legislative authority in the Kingdom in 1611.

Thus, one might ask the question, if racial slavery in the American colonies was legally void for constitutional reasons as only Parliament had approval authority in the Kingdom and for judicial reasons, then why did it persist? The answer is found in politics, not law.

In 1675, economic resentment, political exclusion, and frontier insecurity exploded into Bacon’s Rebellion. Nathaniel Bacon, a wealthy outsider, rallied poor whites, indentured servants, and enslaved Africans into a coalition against Governor William Berkeley’s elite regime. … For a moment, racial lines collapsed in favor of class solidarity.

Although the rebellion was suppressed, it had a profound effect and legacy, as Virginia’s planter class and slaveholders were terrified of such solidarity, and they hardened racial categories. … Poor whites were elevated, all Black colonials were degraded, and class unity was shattered. … Extralegal laws were rewritten to make race the dividing status line and black colonials were placed below the rule of English law. … Thus, Virginia’s elite created the narrative that being black equated to being a slave, and the rule of law did not protect them. … Such actions caused the creation of the so-called “white race,” the ideology of white supremacy, and white privilege.
The creation of this caste system in the American colonies was a turning point, as the laboring white colonials had previously shown little interest in a “white identity.” … However, white colonials embraced this caste system as they were given white privilege. … Furthermore, Theodore W. Allen, in his two-volume study, The Invention of the White Race, revealed that the word “white” was not used in any official colonial American records until 1691.

This caste system contributed to racial slavery’s acceptance within the American colonies and facilitated its introduction into the United States after the American Revolution, as colonial America’s society was based upon European values and for the most part, colonial whites were of the European peasant class and traditionally, darker-skinned people were universally identified as being laborers and people who worked outside in the elements. … With the rise of the Afro-Englishmen population in colonial America, those biases and beliefs were seamlessly adopted to support this racialized caste hierarchy that became entrenched throughout colonial America’s social structures and institutions.

What began as a rebellion against class oppression in 1676 became the reason for white supremacy dogma and systemic racial repression in the American colonies….  The unity of the oppressed—poor whites and Black laborers—was totally dismantled. … In its place, a new system emerged, one that entrenched racial divisions and set the stage for centuries of inequality. … Thus, over time, Virginia’s policy of racial division and the narrative of white identity grew to influence social, political, and labor systems throughout Atlantic World societies.

Nonetheless, colonial American racial laws and their facile legitimacy evaporated once placed against the backdrop of supervening English legislation and Parliament’s exercise of its supreme legislative authority in 1689, with the English Bill of Rights (1 W. & M. sess. 2 c. 2), as it exposed the fragility of colonial America’s racial slave laws and Negro codes.
The English Bill of Rights of 1689 was a supervening imperial governmental law that nullified colonial America’s racial slave laws and Negro codes. It codified habeas corpus and declared that the suspension or dispensing of English laws without Parliament’s approval was unlawful throughout the kingdom. Moreover, habeas corpus ensured that no person could be detained without lawful cause shown before a court of record. … A black person claimed as property at birth was a precise class of Englishmen entitled to demand release under habeas corpus, exposing the conflict between colonial America’s racial slave laws and English constitutional guarantees. … Furthermore, the English Bill of Rights established that colonial American legislatures could not extinguish or undermine liberty or derogate fundamental due process rights of people in the realm without parliamentary authorization. … The habeas corpus provision, by its very logic, rendered racial slavery in the American colonies unsustainable within English dominions absent explicit statutory authorization, which none had.

The American Colonies Act (1766) went further as tensions between the British imperial government and the British American colonies escalated, as the imperial government once again asserted its supreme legislative authority. … This act, also known as the Declaratory Act, proclaimed parliamentary sovereignty and that it “had, hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America … and it declared that Parliament had full power “in all cases whatsoever” to bind the American colonies and that any colonial law repugnant to this sovereignty was “utterly null and void.”
This sweeping language extinguished any residual claim that colonial assemblies possessed coequal legislative power. … Furthermore, it legislatively abolished all colonial enactments “repugnant” to Parliamentary sovereignty, rendering them “utterly null and void.” … By this standard, colonial America’s so-called racial slave laws and Negro codes, devised by colonial American assemblies, were stripped of every pretense of legality, as a matter of English law. … And due to English constitutional doctrine, as such colonial enactments had no legal force, the status of Black Englishmen in the American colonies reverted to the status quo ante, and the protections owed to them under English law.

In one stroke, Parliament abolished racial slave laws and Negro codes and deemed them “utterly null and void” in “all cases whatsoever,” which left no subject matter exempt: taxation, trade, political governance, and by logical extension, any colonial enactments on slavery. … This Act of Parliament in 1766 reaffirmed the rule of English law and Parliament’s supremacy when it declared all colonial American laws “repugnant” to Parliament’s supreme legislative authority were “utterly null and void.” … This sweeping British imperial fiat extinguished any lawful claim that racial slavery continued to be legal under English law.

This chain of supervening imperial law was judicially confirmed in the case of James Somerset v. Charles Stewart in 1772. James Somerset, a black individual enslaved in Virginia and brought to England, escaped and was recaptured. … His allies and supporters petitioned for habeas corpus.

Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, ruled: slavery is “so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law.” … Somerset was discharged because Parliament had never enacted such a law, slavery was unsupported in England; colonial enactments stood as being repugnant to English law and deemed void once tested against the legislative supremacy of Parliament and the Bill of Rights.

Somerset did not innovate. … It restated constitutional principles entrenched since 1215 and reaffirmed in 1611 and 1766: only Parliament could authorize a regime of slavery in the Kingdom, and since it never did, racial slavery lacked legal foundation under English law throughout the Kingdom and its dominions.

Four years later, the American Patriots declared independence in July 1776, and out of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, three-quarters of these white men had enslaved black people at some point. … Moreover, the Declaration of Independence’s preamble proclaimed that: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and in this cohort of 56, 25 of them who signed the Declaration were practicing English lawyers or were trained as lawyers and understood Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence and English law.
In its eighteenth-century Anglo-American context, the phrase “all men are created equal” echoed the established legal rights of Englishmen — the inheritance of Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, and the codification of habeas corpus as a fundamental safeguard of liberty. … When the Declaration asserted that “these truths were self-evident,” it invoked what was understood as the birthright of English subjecthood: a status rooted in the rule of law and guaranteed by centuries of constitutional development. … By that same measure, the 500,000 Afro-Englishmen living in the American colonies were, as a matter of law, equally entitled to these protections, however violently denied in practice.

Further, in its list of grievances, the Declaration accused England’s King George III of tyranny, charging him with having “abolished our most valuable laws.” Among those “laws” were the colonial slave laws and Negro codes, all of which had no constitutional underpinning and which Parliament had legislatively abolished in 1766.

Here lies the paradox: while proclaiming liberty, the Founders were also defending the extralegal colonial slave laws and Negro codes, which were constitutionally foul and had been both legislatively and judicially struck down by the British imperial government. … Yet, they accused the King of tyranny for abolishing racial slavery, which was the product of colonial governmental corruption and graft.
The Declaration’s assertion of equality, when situated within the framework of controlling English law, admitted of no exception: liberty was the common birthright of all subjects. … Any colonial effort to exclude Black Englishmen was a legal fiction without foundation, for racial slavery originated extralegally and had been rendered void by Parliament’s sovereign authority and the common law tradition before the American Revolution.

No Founding Father embodied the paradox of racial slavery more deeply than Thomas Jefferson. … Publicly, he proclaimed ownership of enslaved persons and defended the plantation system that sustained his wealth and political stature. Privately, his life revealed the irreconcilable tension between his professed allegiance to the rule of law—anchored in Magna Carta and the English constitutional tradition—and the legal principles he chose to disregard. … Jefferson fathered multiple children with Sally Hemings, his mixed-race, teenage sister-in-law, whose very existence laid bare the fragility and odious character of colonial America’s racial slavery’s foundations.
Hemings was born in Virginia in 1773, after Lord Mansfield’s landmark ruling in Somerset v. Stewart (1772), which confirmed that racial slavery was unsupported by English common law and could only exist by virtue of explicit statutory authority, which did not exist. … Because Parliament abolished repugnant and extralegal racial slave laws because they conflicted with the English Bill of Rights, Hemings, as an English subject born after Somerset, was legally free. … Her enslavement, which Jefferson knew was not lawful underscores both the extralegal nature of hereditary racial slavery in the American colonies and Jefferson’s personal complicity in perpetuating a system that lacked a lawful foundation. … Jefferson’s public writings, such as his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), reveal a man deeply conflicted about slavery’s morality, yet unwilling to relinquish its privileges. In this contradiction—between revolutionary declarations of universal equality, the settled principles of English law, and his own household practices—Jefferson personified the unresolved hypocrisy at the heart of America’s founding.

In his Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774), Jefferson denounced the authority of the imperial government as tyranny. … Yet he must have known that Parliament possessed supreme legislative authority throughout the kingdom, and that colonial assemblies had never been granted plenary power to establish hereditary bondage. … Indeed, in the Declaration of Independence itself, the Founders repeatedly charged that the imperial government had withheld “its Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good,” and in addition, complained that the imperial government had “abolished our most valuable Laws.”
During the Revolution, Jefferson lamented that Congress had “mangled” his draft of the Declaration. … He acknowledged, in part, the difficulty of constructing a virtuous democratic republic while still tethered to English legal traditions, and he resented the suppression of his sharper critique of prominent Englishmen and the imperial government for their role in advancing the Atlantic slave trade. … In his view, the rebellion thereby forfeited its philosophical compass. … Jefferson’s frustration only deepened when the imperial government, through wartime proclamations, extended liberty to all Black colonials enslaved in America, underscoring the moral and political contradictions of the revolutionary cause.

The paradox of America’s Revolution sharpened for Jefferson in June 1779, when the British imperial government issued the Phillipsburg Proclamation. … Issued by Sir Henry Clinton, Commander-in-Chief of British forces, under the plenary authority of the Crown, it declared that all enslaved persons of rebel masters who reached British lines were immediately free. … Unlike earlier proclamations, such as Lord Dunmore’s of 1775, the Phillipsburg decree extended to all enslaved Black colonials, regardless of military service.

This was a direct exercise of imperial plenary authority during the war. It effectively emancipated hundreds of thousands of Afro-Englishmen as a matter of English law. … In so doing, it exposed the Revolution’s most profound contradiction. … While the Patriots claimed to fight tyranny in the name of liberty, the very government they resisted granted liberty to those they enslaved.

When the civil war concluded, Congress ratified the Treaty of Paris (1783), conceding that Britain had exercised plenary authority during the Revolution. … By that concession, Congress retrospectively acknowledged the full constitutional weight of the Phillipsburg Proclamation. … Legally, therefore, Afro-Englishmen in the American colonies had been fully emancipated under English law in June 1779.
Yet the new Republic refused to accord fundamental due process of English law to these 500,000 Afro-Englishmen. Instead, America enslaved those whom the rule of law deemed free and the imperial government had declared free. … This was not only a betrayal of English constitutional law but also a violation of treaty obligations and international norms.

In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), written after the Treaty of Paris was ratified by the U.S. Congress in January 1784, Jefferson confronted the corrosive effects of racial slavery. … He acknowledged its dubious origins and its destructive influence on both enslaved and enslavers:

“There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. … The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. … Our children see this and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal.”
Jefferson conceded that slavery debased both the oppressed and oppressor, cultivating tyranny in society itself. He feared this cycle of moral corruption would define future generations:

“The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.”
And he trembled for the nation’s fate:

“Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever. … The almighty has no attribute which can take sides with us in such a contest.”

Jefferson thus recognized slavery’s corrosive effects, even as his own complicity perpetuated them. He personified the contradictions of a nation proclaiming liberty while perpetuating racial slavery and the enslavement of Revolutionary war-era black colonials.

The question with which we began — Was racial slavery illegal under English law? — yields a decisive answer. By every constitutional measure, it was illegal. The Magna Carta (1215) enshrined due process of law in the Kingdom for everyone. … The English Bill of Rights (1689) reaffirmed Parliament’s supreme legislative authority in the kingdom and codified habeas corpus protections for all Englishmen. The American Colonies Act (1766) reasserted Parliament’s legislative supremacy in the Kingdom over the American colonies and abolished their racial slave laws and Negro codes because they conflicted with Parliament’s English Bill of Rights. … In 1772, Lord Mansfield’s Somerset decision determined racial slavery in the Kingdom was unconstitutional, as it required positive law to be authorized, which was a legislative power that only Parliament possessed and had not exercised, and the court ordered Somerset to be discharged.

Racial slavery in the American colonies was an extralegal system, enforced not by law but by governmental corruption and power. … Racial slavery was already legislatively abolished when the 13 British colonies declared independence in July 1776, and the Founders knew this was the case as they complained in the Declaration’s grievance section about the American Colonies Act. … And yet, America was founded upon this legal fiction and enslaved and exploited 500,000 Afro-Englishmen after the American Revolution ended.

Jefferson, the author of liberty’s creed, simultaneously knew of racial slavery’s illegitimacy and its abolition; yet furthered its perpetuation. … He claimed to tremble for his country and feared that God’s justice would not forever remain asleep. … His fear of its consequences for this nation was prophetic, for the failure of this nation to grant fundamental due process to Revolutionary War-era black colonials have echoed across the centuries: liberty proclaimed while black bondage endured; equality asserted, yet racial inequality under U.S. law remains its enduring, systemic hallmark.

The work of history is not only to uncover contradictions, but to allow for reckoning with the legacies they leave behind. … That is why institutions like the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History are indispensable. … They insist that African American history is not a marginal footnote, but the central thread of the American story. … They remind us that legal fictions carry real consequences, and that when the law betrays its first principles, the wound is not temporary—it becomes an enduring sore etched into the life of a nation.

Frederick Douglass’s warning in 1852 remains a cautionary warning still: that the Fourth of July is a day of mourning for those excluded from its promise. … To mourn is not to despair; it is to refuse false consolation and to seek truth. In mourning, we can rediscover the origins of the Republic. … In rediscovering, we demand that the law be reclaimed for justice rather than subjugation.
If America is to endure another 250 years, it will not be by clinging to the fictions of the past but by confronting them. … Only by acknowledging that racial slavery was abolished and was not lawfully inherited from British rule — that it was a betrayal of both English law and America’s professed ideals — can we begin to build a Republic that lives up to its founding promise.
The task before us is therefore clear: to preserve our struggles, to confront injustice, and to reimagine the history of America, not as a fictional story …. but as a living reality.

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