America, still becoming

As the nation marks its 250th anniversary, Langston Hughes reminds us that America's greatest promise has always been the one we are still striving to fulfill.

A fireworks display during a recent July 4th celebration in Harrisburg. Photo credit: Michael Anderson.

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

I remember first reading Langston Hughes' poem Let America Be America Again in school. This week, though, I've found myself returning to it as the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding. Its opening verses feel every bit as relevant today as they did when Hughes wrote them nearly 90 years ago.

For many people, America has indeed been a shining city on a hill — a nation founded on representative government that has long championed democratic ideals while helping confront some of the greatest threats to freedom during the 20th century.

That legacy is worth celebrating, as are the generations of Americans who sacrificed to preserve it — from the patriots of the American Revolution to the men and women of the Greatest Generation who fought during World War II, and the generations of service members and veterans who have defended our freedoms ever since.

For millions, America has been a place where liberty, hard work and opportunity made it possible to build better lives and pursue extraordinary dreams.

For many others, however, America has never fully lived up to its founding ideals.

The promise that “all men are created equal” and endowed with the rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” has too often remained more aspirational than real. Entire generations of Americans were denied those promises because of race, gender, religion, poverty or circumstance.

More than 170 years ago, abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass posed a question that still echoes today in his famous 1852 speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”:

“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth 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.”

Douglass exposed the gap between America’s ideals and its reality. More than 80 years later, Hughes challenged the nation to close it.

Together, their words remind us that America’s story has always contained both promise and contradiction.

It is a story that is at once inspiring and heartbreaking, defined by soaring achievements and painful failures, by ideals boldly proclaimed and too often imperfectly realized. America has become a beacon of hope for millions around the world, yet too many of its own citizens have been denied the full measure of the liberty, justice and opportunity it promises.

Perhaps America is less like a shining city on a hill than a kaleidoscope. Each of us views the nation through the lens of our own experiences, our own triumphs and our own hardships. No two Americans see America in exactly the same way.

That complexity is woven throughout our history.

America has produced heroes such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr. — individuals who, in different ways, challenged the nation to become a better version of itself.

Yet it has also produced figures such as Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, whose brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 helped galvanize the modern Civil Rights Movement, and Dylann Roof, whose racist massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015 served as a painful reminder that hatred and extremism still endure.

America has been capable of tremendous good and unspeakable evil. Yet the nation itself is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. It is ultimately shaped by the choices of its people and by whether each generation moves closer to — or farther from — the ideals it claims to cherish.

That is why Hughes’ poem remains so powerful nearly a century after it was written. It is not simply a lament about the America that was. It is a hopeful vision of the America that still could be.

As people gather this Independence Day to celebrate our nation’s birth and mark America’s 250th anniversary, I hope we also reflect honestly on our shared history.

We should celebrate monumental achievements such as the abolition of slavery, the victories of the Civil Rights Movement, America's role in helping defeat fascism during World War II, the moon landing, and breakthroughs in science and medicine.

We should also honor the generations of service members and veterans whose courage and sacrifice have defended the freedoms we cherish, along with the countless acts of compassion and selflessness that have strengthened our communities.

At the same time, we can honestly acknowledge the failures of slavery, segregation, racial violence, discrimination, political division, injustice and the many times America has fallen short of its promise of liberty and justice for all.

Our history is unfinished. Our democracy is unfinished. The work of building a nation that truly lives up to its founding ideals belongs to each of us.

Perhaps that is Hughes' greatest message: America has never been a finished project. It has always been an aspiration, always just beyond our fingertips — a beautiful promise each generation is called to fulfill.

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!