The Fine Print

​First off:

A few weeks after monster truck rallies and UFC fights turned the White House lawn into a caricature, the United States Supreme Court expanded the President’s power to turn away non-white immigrants and fire independent federal regulators for political reasons. (At least it had the decency to uphold birthright citizenship.)

The cynical, unserious spectacle belies the cold, calculated dismantling of America’s democratic systems. Sadly, that too often has been our country’s reality beneath the veneer of liberty and opportunity.

No matter how much this administration and conservative state governments don’t want us to learn this, America has been flawed from its very inception—an experiment based on a contradictory, even hypocritical, premise of equality and justice. 

But our long, slow work over 250 years continues to remind America of what it can be when it focuses not on re-enacting the past but embracing the future.

Even Thomas Jefferson, the man who wrote of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” while enslaving people on his Virginia plantation, once said, “laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed…new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times.”

Like any experiment or scientific concept, we must always be willing to revise and re-evaluate, to improve our understanding of the world around us so that we keep progressing toward the truth. In this case, we’re building constantly toward, among other things, realizing the “self-evident” truth that all people are created equal and endowed with the “inalienable rights” Jefferson spoke of.

The last 250 years of American history show us where we’ve succeed and failed in that goal. The next 250 will reveal if we learned anything.

Celebrating all of America at 250
By Khari Thompson

There will be fireworks. There will be speeches. There will be a lot of red, white, and blue. And throughout the country, people will deliver remarks about the miracle of American democracy—about the Founders, the framers, the visionaries who built something unprecedented out of sheer conviction and moral courage. 

The version of the United States of America’s birth that will dominate the official 250th anniversary celebrations this weekend is a familiar one: a story of great men making great decisions, of battles won and documents signed, of sacrifice in service to ideals that, the story insists, have always been on the verge of being fully realized. It's an optimistic story, and it photographs beautifully. 

It just happens to leave out most of the people who actually built the country.

Enslaved Black people who worked the land, raised the children, and constructed the buildings, including the White House itself, while being legally classified as property. 

Indigenous nations whose innovations in agriculture, medicine, and constitutional governance inspired the America we know today, only for them to be systematically dispossessed, led along trails of tears, and pushed out of the lands on which their ancestors lived for generations and onto the margins of history. 

Chinese laborers who helped build the transcontinental railroad while federal law was being written to exclude them from citizenship and future immigration to the country.  

Women of every background shunted to the side, told for generations that democracy was a gift reserved for someone else, as they served as the backbone of American homes and societies. 

The everyday resisters. The organizers. The agitators. The people who fought and lost so that their descendants or someone in a far distant future they couldn’t see might go further than they did.

That's the history we want to tell.

Everyone250's monument marker unveiling at 15 Beacon Street, the site of major protests aimed at desegregating Boston Public Schools. (Photo: Embrace)

Featuring collaborations with over 100 partners across Boston's arts and cultural landscape, Everyone250 seeks to be a testament to, well, everyone—especially the stories we overlook when we talk about who shapes our country, our cities, and our communities.

The E250 historical markers unveiled at sites like Twelfth Baptist Church or at 15 Beacon Street, where Ruth Batson and thousands of organizers fought segregation in Boston’s public schools, serve as physical reminders of people and places that make Boston (and America) great. 

But it’s about more than simply putting history in bronze. It’s about engaging with one another through shared history.

We are the Jewish community gathering at the Vilna Shul. We are the Indigenous community at NAICOB. We are those parents and students who fought Boston school segregation and won. We are the Puerto Rican community at Plaza Betances. Celebrating these histories and cultures alongside our already well-documented narratives only adds more wonder to Boston’s—and our country’s—powerful revolutionary story.

At a moment when debates about who counts as a "real" American have moved from the fringes into federal policy, when curricula are being scrubbed, DEI offices shuttered, and diversity itself rebranded as a threat, Everyone250 is doing the counter-archival work of insisting that everyone belongs as part of this 250th anniversary—and for the 250 years to follow. 

If the Founding Fathers deserve their place in American memory, so do the people who fought to make their proclamation "all men are created equal" come true, even when the Founders themselves didn’t believe in that promise.

A country confident in its founding ideals doesn't need to edit its history to protect them. It can hold the full story—the grace and the cruelty, the sacrifice abroad and the resistance at home—and find in that complexity something more durable than nostalgia.

That's the America worth celebrating at 250—the real thing, not the myth.

It might not be perfect. But it can still be beautiful.

Everyone250 Historical Markers