America turns 250 this week. In Washington, Secretary Hegseth is still erasing the patriots who don’t fit an old racist frame. We all deserve better. We always have.
Every year, we remember the courage of Paul Revere. As we should.
Yet, as we mark our nation’s first quarter-millennium, it is high time to reckon with the damage Revere did, too. His cowardly racism haunts us still. He drew some of America’s sons into the American Revolution. He whited others out.
Revere carved the Boston Massacre into metal and printed it everywhere. His image showed redcoats firing into a crowd of colonists, men falling dead in the street. It lit the fire for revolution.
It also left many men out, including the first to die that day. He was the wrong color for Revere’s politics.
His name was Crispus Attucks. He was a sailor. His people were African and Native American. He was shot dead, front and center.
Still, look at Revere’s picture. You will not find Attucks. The crowd is white. All white. Revere thought it was propaganda for the moment. In the process, he made a meme that undermines the nation he served to this very day.
His whitewash of American patriots has lingered in the nation’s imagination ever since.
More than 80 years later, abolitionists tried to fix his lie. A new picture put Attucks back — at the center this time, club in hand, the first to fall. But look closely. He is the only Black man in it. One.
That unsettles me. Defending the soldiers in court, the future president John Adams described the crowd that pelted them with snowballs: sailors, Irish immigrants, “negroes and mulattoes.”
Yet Revere’s image so dominated memory that the men fixing the lie showed only one Black face.
That is how deep the whitewash runs.
For me, this is all family. On my father’s side, my people have been white New Englanders since 1624. One of nine who fought the Brits in Massachusetts was a 16-year-old fifer at Lexington, beside his father.
They all knew Black patriots were there from the first morning.
Prince Estabrook was there at Lexington on April 19, 1775. He had been a slave. He stood with his neighbors and was shot by British fire. Before Congress declared independence, before Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal, Black men had already bled and died for this country.
Salem Poor was there at Bunker Hill. He bought his freedom, then fought so bravely that 14 white officers petitioned to honor him.
Peter Salem was there, too. Some said he fired the shot that killed a British commander. James Armistead, enslaved in Virginia, became a spy. He fed true secrets to Lafayette, false ones to the British. His spying helped trap the Brits at Yorktown.
There were more. Barzillai Lew sounded the fife through the smoke. Jude Hall fought from Bunker Hill to Monmouth. The First Rhode Island Regiment, many of whose members were Black, held the line near Newport, covering a retreat that could have been slaughter. It was never all white. The men who risked all knew it.
Changing the picture
On my mother’s side, we descend from Jefferson’s cousin and mentor, Richard Bland. Jefferson wrote the heart of it: All men are created equal.
Still, a racist veneer was laid over those words — the same impulse that scrubbed Attucks from the picture shrank “all men” to white men.
A century later, a man born into slavery scraped that veneer away.
Most know Frederick Douglass for the question he hurled in 1852, when millions were still in chains: What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July?
That is the speech we teach, but Douglass gave another that I wish we taught beside it.
In 1869, the nation debated whether to bar Chinese immigrants. In Boston, Douglass said no. He called for a “composite nation” — one people made of all peoples.
Douglass did not call it a dream. He called it our nation’s mission and destiny. America’s “one grand end,” he said, was to become “the most perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family that the world has ever seen.”
Douglass was not inventing something new. He handed Jefferson’s words back to our nation with their full meaning.
In a democracy, rights are earned by the responsibilities we carry — and these men carried the heaviest. They risked everything for a country that often denied their freedom. Still, no one holds a stronger claim to its promise.
Who we picture fighting for freedom shapes who we believe deserves it. Paint Black patriots out of the Revolution, and you shrink the nation’s idea of itself. The racist purge
What should alarm every American: The whitewashing of 1776 is not just ancient art. It is government policy now.
Last year, the Pentagon ordered a purge of everything it had labeled “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” A keyword scrub swept its sites — and came for our heroes.
Down came Jackie Robinson, court-martialed for refusing the back of an Army bus before he broke baseball’s color line. On Robinson’s vanished page, the web address was stamped with three letters: D-E-I. Down came the Tuskegee Airmen — the Red Tails, the first Black pilots in our military, who fought Hitler abroad and Jim Crow at home. Down came the Navajo Code Talkers, whose unbreakable code — from a language the government once punished their children for speaking — helped win the Pacific.
The scrub was as careless as it was cruel. It flagged the Enola Gay — the plane that bombed Hiroshima — because the word “gay” was in its name. It flagged an Army engineer for being named Gay. So much for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s tough talk. His big idea was a word hunt that couldn’t tell a warplane from a man’s last name.
However, the heroes it buried were no accident. A government looked at Black valor and Native genius, and filed it under politics. Then it hit delete.
This is family for me, too. My grandfather’s first cousin, Howard Lee Baugh, was a Tuskegee Airman, one of two in our family. He flew more than 130 missions, shot down Nazi fighters, and won some of our highest medals.
There is a word for men like Baugh: hero. There is a word for those who would erase him: coward.
Black veterans were as heroic at home as abroad. Many came home to lynch mobs.
They responded by building the NAACP. Charles Hamilton Houston, a World War I officer, forged its legal machine. Medgar Evers, who landed at Normandy, led it in Mississippi and was assassinated for it. A Korean War Marine named Bill Tatum rebuilt this very paper to serve the movement.
The late Congressmember John Lewis had a name for what they made: “Good Trouble.” He made it on a bridge in Selma, his skull cracked open by state troopers, so the Revolution’s promise might reach people like him. He belongs in the same line as Salem Poor and the First Rhode Island: He was a patriot.
This Fourth of July, let’s remember who Paul Revere rode to warn, and reckon with who he left out when he drew. Let’s pick up the pencil. Let’s get in some good trouble. Let’s draw the picture again — this time, with every American patriot in it.
Patriotism and courage never came from one branch of the American family. They always flowed through all of us.
Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former president and CEO of the NAACP.
