--- title: You Can't Tell the Story of 1776 Without Talking About Race description: We must admit just how thoroughly the Founding Fathers thought about, talked about, and wrote about race. canonical: https://time.com/6077468/united-states-1776-racism-slavery/ author: TIME article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2021-07-04T11:00:43.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T08:03:45.644Z article:section: Ideas og:title: You Can't Tell the Story of 1776 Without Talking About Race and Slavery og:description: "You only have to look at the very moment of Revolution to see how deeply race was embedded in the patriot cause." og:url: https://time.com/6077468/united-states-1776-racism-slavery/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt7e19b54870ab9875/698a1ac822fb85a020e2c4e7/1776-racism.jpeg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1024 og:image:height: 576 og:image:alt: Declaration of Independence og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: You Can't Tell the Story of 1776 Without Talking About Race and Slavery twitter:description: "You only have to look at the very moment of Revolution to see how deeply race was embedded in the patriot cause." twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt7e19b54870ab9875/698a1ac822fb85a020e2c4e7/1776-racism.jpeg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # You Can't Tell the Story of 1776 Without Talking About Race and Slavery > Sponsored content. 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It explains how TIME's journalism is made, from the first pitch through the editorial decisions behind a finished story or cover. #### How can I read about how TIME chooses its covers? Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ## Video: The History You Didn't Learn: Black Women and the Right to Vote [Watch (HLS stream): The History You Didn't Learn: Black Women and the Right to Vote](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/quG5ZZp3.m3u8) (9:13)  _Published 2020-12-08. The History You Didn't Learn is a series that sheds light on past events that may have been omitted, misleading, or just downright wrong in our history education in school._ by [Robert G. Parkinson](https://time.com/author/robert-g-parkinson/) ## Robert G. Parkinson Jul 4, 2021 11:00 AM UTC  A painting by John Trumbull, 'Signing the Declaration of Independence, 28th June 1776' commissioned 1817, showing Thomas Jefferson and the drafting committee presenting the document to John Hancock. A painting by John Trumbull, 'Signing the Declaration of Independence, 28th June 1776' commissioned 1817, showing Thomas Jefferson and the drafting committee presenting the document to John Hancock. Culture Club/Getty Images by [Robert G. Parkinson](https://time.com/author/robert-g-parkinson/) ## Robert G. Parkinson Jul 4, 2021 11:00 AM UTC Slavery and arguments about race were not only at the heart of the American founding; it was what united the states in the first place. We have been reluctant to admit just how thoroughly the Founding Fathers thought about, talked about, and wrote about race at the moment of American independence. Part of the reason why we haven’t fully realized this is because of John Adams. More than forty years after 1776, an 83-year-old John Adams wanted Americans to know just how astounding it was that America declared independence. Getting all thirteen colonies to reach this same, momentous decision, [Adams remembered](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/ows/seminars/revolution/Adams-Niles.pdf), was “certainly a very difficult enterprise” and “perhaps a singular example in the history of mankind.” Colonists really didn’t know or particularly like one another. They fought with each other all the time. But something phenomenal happened in 1776\. “Thirteen clocks were made to strike together—a perfection of mechanism which no artist had ever before effected.” Adams was, of course, bragging, subtly suggesting that the work he, Jefferson, Franklin, and the Continental Congress did was pretty much a miracle. This magical way of thinking is compelling. It created an attractive, exceptional origin story for the United States. But it covered up the work that Adams and his colleagues undertook at the time. That work was about publicizing stories to make Americans afraid of British-sponsored slave “insurrections” and Native “massacres.” He was hiding just how important race was to the founding. Recently, a [controversy over “critical race theory”](https://time.com/6075193/critical-race-theory-debate/) has ignited public debate about the centrality of race to American history. As a part of that debate, which has been ongoing since the publication of the [_1619 Project_](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html), the nation’s founding has come under the most scrutiny. How much did 1776 have to do with race and slavery? The answer is: you can’t tell the story without it. We have given the founding fathers passes when it comes to race. Although we have sometimes condemned an individual founder like Jefferson as a hypocrite, we have explained it away, either by citing the language in the opening paragraphs of the Declaration, or the emancipation efforts of some northern states, or by saying, well, it _was_ the eighteenth century, what can you expect? Yet you only have to look at the very moment of Revolution to see how deeply race was embedded in the patriot cause. Once the shooting started, patriot leaders started talking about race in very different ways than they had before. As soon as the news of Lexington and Concord spread throughout North America, colonists began to think, talk, and worry _a lot_ about what role enslaved people might play in this new world of war with Great Britain. For the next fifteen months, between April 1775 and July 1776, they would read about British agents trying to incite slave rebellions all over the South. Patriot leaders broadcast news of royal officials throughout America plotting with slaves to put down the rebellion. In November 1775, Virginia Governor Lord Dunmore famously issued an emancipation proclamation, but he was not the only royal governor accused of embracing such tactics. Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, and their colleagues worked diligently in those fifteen months to alert as many colonists as they could about such British “treachery.” One of those British officials who had been chased from Charleston, South Carolina wrote that “massacres and instigated insurrections were Words in the mouth of every child.” The patriots’ efforts to get stories about “instigated insurrections” into the mouths of American children culminated in the Declaration of Independence. In fact, it comes at the climax of the document. The Continental Congress accused King George of twenty-seven crimes. These were the “facts to be submitted to a candid world” that led the colonies to the necessity of declaring independence. The very last one was about enslaved and Native peoples potentially joining the King to destroy American liberty. Jefferson had written a moving passage that referred to the African slave trade as an “assemblage of horrors” and a “cruel war against human nature itself.” Tragically, Congress cut nearly the whole thing—but not all of it. They kept the bit that was in the mouth of every American child, referring to slaves with the albeit veiled with common 18th century way of referring to slaves as “domestics.” The final grievance against King George, the ultimate deal-breaker, reads: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” After leveling that charge, the Declaration pivoted to say what American independence would look like. Because patriots had rejected these efforts to recruit enslaved and Native fighters, Americans were now to act as free and independent states and “do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.” This talk that was intended to generate racial fear was a key factor in the march toward independence. That the Continental Congress felt like Jefferson’s antislavery sentiments were too controversial, _but_ the accusation of “instigated insurrections” was not, suggests just how successful their campaign had been. Patriot leaders found one thing that white colonists shared: racism. The founders embraced and mobilized colonial prejudices about potentially dangerous African Americans and used those fears to unite the colonists in one “common cause.” For too long we have taken an elderly John Adams at his word about what brought the thirteen colonies together. He had forgotten—purposefully—how four decades earlier he had mobilized American prejudices about Black people (what today we would call racism) to get the colonies to come together as one union. That effort made America independent, but it also buried race deep in the cornerstone of the American republic that was born on July 4, 1776. ## Transcript Kind: captions Language: en-US It's really important that we tell the truth about who contributed to the country that we live in today. That telling only a part of our history telling only a part of our narrative makes it seem as if there are only one group of people. There's only one type of person. We all know that that's not true. When students learn about women's suffrage in school, they often learn about Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the so called mothers of the movement. And they are taught that it all started with a meeting in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. Oftentimes, the story of the Seneca Falls meeting is told as a kind of origin story. As the beginning of a movement for women's rights and ultimately, a movement for women's suffrage. And yet, when we realize the meeting is some 300 people, principally white, middle class women in a relatively remote upstate New York village, that is a hint that we probably need to look at some other places to get a fuller story. For Africa American women who had been organizing inside churches and other places since the 20s and 30s, this was not a particularly important moment, nor was it a meeting they would have attended. Nor were the demands that they made particularly germane to the lives of women living under the twin oppressive forces of racism and sexism. Black women are excluded at Seneca Falls, because they're not really invited. Two years later, a much bigger national convention on women's rights takes place. The 1850 meeting in Worcester, Massachusetts... Stanton and Anthony aren't even there. It was the first National Women's Rights meeting. So in some ways, that's really cohering activism that's taking place around the country in a way that Seneca Falls was just a local impromptu convention. One of the women who spoke there was famed abolitionist Sojourner Truth. Sojourner Truth will emerge later in the woman's movement as an important speaker on women's rights. She will also emerge as an abolitionist. By 1850, Sojourner Truth is very much a presence in women's rights circles really shaping the debates, but she didn't begin at Seneca Falls at all. So, with so much activity happening and women's rights in the mid-19th century, why did Seneca Falls, a small meeting with only white woman attending become one of the most talked about in history? Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was at the Seneca Falls meeting and was one of the organizers...and Susan Anthony...well, these two, along with some allies, begin to write the history of women's suffrage. And when they do, not surprisingly, perhaps, they privilege their own experiences and they settle on Seneca Falls as their origin story. Stanton and Anthony are dealing with a world where emancipation is the new reality and many people are saying to women, "Black men's right to vote must happen now," for reasons of free people's safety. And Stanton and Anthony will say "No," "women's suffrage should come first." And they are unusual in the Women's Rights Coalition that they demand this. They're staunchly opposed to Black men voting before white women... In unspeakably racist terms. And "Our movement..." they say repeatedly, "is the most important movement for human rights ever inaugurated." And they're undermining, really, the memory of abolition and the memory of emancipation in that process. It's no surprise then, that in history written by primarily white women, there are many Black voting rights activists we don't learn about. I think the world of Ida B. Wells and her activism... She's a Black woman who owned two newspapers, and she was an anti-lynching activist. And she was a founder of the Alpha Suffrage Club, which is Chicago's first black suffrage organization. While they fought and advocated for the right to vote for all women, they were mistreated within the larger suffrage movement because of their race. The Suffrage March in 1913, when Ida B. Wells showed up with the Illinois delegation and Alice Paul, who was a popular suffragette at the time, instructed them to walk to the back of the crowd. And while many of the Black women who showed up that day did... Ida B. Wells refused. The women who pushed the story of Seneca Falls died before the 19th Amendment was passed in 1920. But, the legacy of excluding Black woman persisted. "Susan B. Anthony and her followers have won, for women, the right to vote." It's easy to think of the story of women's suffrage as a kind of fully emancipatory and celebratory story that's, you know, just necessarily progressive. And in the following November, the ladies appeared at the polls on Election Day by hundreds of thousands. "The emancipation of womanhood in the United States was now complete." The 19th Amendment does not invest anybody with the right to vote. And we don't spend nearly enough time thinking about the language of the amendment, which is really key, saying you may not discriminate in voting on the basis of sex, it does not say women have a right to vote, which actually does not exist. For many white women clearing the obstacle of sex was sufficient to get them voting access. When the 19th amendment is adopted, the open secret is that too many millions of African American women in this country will not be able to vote because the amendment doesn't do anything to override the segregationist laws, the Jim Crow laws in the South, like poll taxes and literacy tests that are going to be imposed on black women, such that they won't be able to vote even after the 19th Amendment. We don't realize the ways in which the white suffrage movement threw women of color under the bus, allowed their continued disenfranchisement to go ahead, allowed their brutalization of their bodies to go ahead, and say nothing. We lose track of the fact that lots of other women are not emancipated in this story. That those women's rights are sacrificed. After 1920, African American women have to look up from the 19th Amendment to not only recognize that they are still disenfranchised, they have to look up to answer the question, "So, how are we going to win a right to vote?" That is the moment for the building of a new movement for voting rights. One that will take Black women and men until 1965, in passage of the Voting Rights Act. So, you don't win the right to vote and then that's just it. Throughout the course of history, for every expansion of voting rights, we have a backlash that seeks to make it more difficult for people to vote. That seeks to shrink the electorate and shrink the number of people that participate in our democracy. One recent and significant backlash happened in 2013 when the Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder removed some of the protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Even as we celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment, activists like Nsé Ufot remind us that voting rights remain threatened in many places. "Georgians have an opportunity to save our democracy." The State of Georgia has closed over 10% of their polling locations. Voting rights advocates have witnessed nearly 2 million people purged from Georgia's voter pool. I'm urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully. Black voters are subject to intimidation. New Americans are subject to intimidation. The 2020 election is the most recent example of the organizing power of Black women, as Ufot and others are being credited with turning Georgia blue for the first time in 28 years. I think that it's harmful that we only learn about white suffragists because it doesn't tell the full story of how we won. And if we're going to be able to fight future oppression, knowing the real story about how our ancestors looked oppression in the face and then defeated it helps us as we build toward the communities that we want to live in. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"OpinionNewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/6077468/united-states-1776-racism-slavery/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/6077468/united-states-1776-racism-slavery/"},"headline":"You Can't Tell the Story of 1776 Without Talking About Race and Slavery","datePublished":"2021-07-04T11:00:43.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T08:03:45.644Z","description":"We must admit just how thoroughly the Founding Fathers thought about, talked about, and wrote about race.","url":"https://time.com/6077468/united-states-1776-racism-slavery/","keywords":["Books","Explainer"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt7e19b54870ab9875/698a1ac822fb85a020e2c4e7/1776-racism.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Robert G. 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