Remembering the Revolution: Lessons for Today

In a state where towns revisit old stories and cities reel from new ones, America’s 250th asks what it really means to be free.

By Ben Jealous — 

In Minnesota this winter, amid the steady stream of grim headlines out of Minneapolis, one story barely made it beyond Duluth’s city limits. The Duluth News Tribune and other regional outlets are inviting residents to dig into the city’s archives, retell old stories, and share plans for America’s upcoming 250th anniversary. Town halls are discussing parades. Local museums are planning exhibits. Families are marking the milestone in small, thoughtful ways.

Amid the snow and long nights, there is a quiet insistence on remembering, on telling the stories that matter. And yet, not far away, the news tells of lives ended, of authority deployed without accountability, of neighbors afraid to act. The contrast is sharp. It is both a blessing and a wound.

This year, as America approaches its 250th anniversary, the circumstances that led our ancestors to rebel feel more familiar than they should. Standing armies enforcing laws without consent. Violence meted out without accountability. Ordinary people afraid to act. And yet, like the colonists in Boston, we are reminded that liberty is not inherited; it is earned, defended, and demanded.

In Minneapolis, the killings of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti by federal immigration agents have underscored that lesson in the harshest terms. Their deaths remind us that no one is immune to injustice when authority acts without accountability. Some administration officials have publicly suggested that federal agents enjoy sweeping immunity from local oversight — claims that legal experts dispute — but the rhetoric underscores how far we’ve drifted from the principle that no authority should be above the law.

I watch my children, and the people I love, grow more fearful with each news cycle. I watch neighbors endure quietly, afraid to speak out. Their courage is tested not in the abstract, but in daily life — just as it was for my ancestors under British rule. They endured fear. They felt the weight of authority without accountability. And yet they stood, risking life and limb, to insist that liberty was not a privilege of the powerful, but a right of all.

I carry their legacy with me. I am a descendant of seven members of the Massachusetts line of the Continental Army, enslaved people who supported the Revolution, and two Black Reconstruction‑era statesmen in Virginia who helped rebuild the nation after the Civil War. I am also the child of parents who were active in the civil rights movement — a multiracial family that taught me early: freedom is never given. It must be defended.

As we did 50 years ago, we will honor this 250th anniversary by telling stories to our children, much like communities in Duluth are doing now. That year, 1976, marked the bicentennial of the Revolution and the centennial of the end of Reconstruction. It was my grandmothers who told most of the stories — one White, one Black — each with her own focus. My White grandmother kept the Revolution close to her heart. My Black grandmother told stories of the Civil War and the era of Reconstruction.

They shared these histories not as trivia, but as instruction: to teach, to inspire, and to hold firm to the principles that guided our ancestors, white and Black alike. In their different stories, the same thread ran through both: the American principles that led our ancestors to throw off kings also made it possible to throw off slave owners. Liberty, they showed us, was never limited to one race, one time, or one struggle.

Our nation’s story is one of struggle and perseverance. For people across races, regions, and walks of life, liberty has always been contested. The ideals of the Revolution were aspirational from the start, limited by the exclusions of the time, and extended only through centuries of struggle: abolition, civil rights, voting rights, labor rights, and the ongoing fight for accountability and justice for all.

As cities plan parades, concerts, and tall ship flotillas for the 250th, we should ask who will be invited to the stage and whose stories will be told. Celebrations of liberty mean little if they erase the struggles that made it possible or ignore freedoms still denied today.

The deaths in Minnesota are not merely local tragedies; they are a call to the conscience of every American. They remind us that the revolution — the effort to define freedom as something real and universal — is not over. It didn’t end on a battlefield, and it doesn’t stop with another fireworks display.

So when we tell the stories this year, let’s do it as my grandmothers did. Let us tell history to the children as instruction for the America we must all build together again.

Ben Jealous is a former national president of the NAACP and a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania.