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Two hundred and fifty years ago, victory in the American Revolution empowered its founding fathers to consider a glorious ‘revolutionary idea’: a democracy of inclusiveness and diversity for all. Yet, America’s revolution never meant to include the enslaved, who lived in small, dark squares of windowless slave houses.
At Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s Constitutional Convention of 1787, compromises perpetuated America’s ‘slave society’ based on free labour, benefiting its citizenry to the detriment of America’s slave row. For the next seventy-eight years, ‘America’s democracy’ permitted this vile system of slavery to continue. However, slave revolutions, revolutionary voices, and prayers persisted. As the smoke cleared from the battlefields of the American Civil War, Juneteenth (June 19, 1865) granted America a full Independence Day.
The question remains to this very day whether the formerly enslaved and their descendants will ever fully receive the rights, reparations, and benefits of full citizenship in our American democracy. Revolutionary voices must continue to set an example for the entire world of the revolutionary idea that is democracy.
The next 250 years will answer this question as America approaches its 500th anniversary.
